Guild Wars 2

hot feels soulless and cold. no charm. the ideas they had were bad ones. i say this not to be mean but im staring at a pig in hot and i’m all out lipstick.

I don’t understand most of your complains. i actually love HoT, and it doesnt feel that hard to play in the new maps.

Yesterday i went in VB with a friend only, and even though it felt more challenging than old zones, it wasn’t impossible to get access to the different part of the jungle, the monsters were not unkillable, it was fine.

The fact that i cant play with all the skills of my reaper directly isn’t a problem at all. you were not complaining at launch of gw2 that you couldn’t play with all the spells of your class directly. you had to lvl up to gain stuff, which is normal. I don’t understand why we should be given everything directly. besides, unlocking the firsts parts of the spec isn’t that hard, with just a few HP done in VB i can already have fun with the reaper shroud. I don’t care about having everything unlocked at start, because this is still an rpg and like in most rpg, you have to train and build slowly your character.

Anyway, there would always be haters for everygame at every launch, don’t listen to all these complaints Anet, i love the expnsion and will still be playing it in a few years for sure

Okami.4287:

The fact that i cant play with all the skills of my reaper directly isn’t a problem at all. you were not complaining at launch of gw2 that you couldn’t play with all the spells of your class directly. you had to lvl up to gain stuff, which is normal.

When you first start a character at level one you are playing in an area intended for level one characters against level one foes.

If you switch to an elite spec in HoT zones you are essentially playing a sub 80 character in post 80 content vs post 80 foes.

The new maps are so empty, labyrinth is empty (thanks to no exp nerf), dungeons are dead (thanks to exp and reward nerf), EotM is dead (thanks to exp and reward nerfs) the only thing alive is Cursed Shore exp train (in before nerf). I cannot play the new maps with guildies because they do not have the masteries i have.

That’s what a game company committing suicide looks like.

Avlaen.7241:

AWful map design coupled with needing masteries to navigate it. which also makes group play awful. oh i dont have bouncing mushrooms yet and you do welp i guess ill get left behind.

Or falling to your death to try and follow someone.

The maps awful for group play, yet everything is tuned for it its almost impossible to explore solo.
.

actually I’ve done tons of exploring in the new areas solo, while every once in awhile coming across other solos… it’s doable and pretty fun. I almost soloed a champ that disappeared when daytime came tho :p

Marioos.2835:

I hate the layer design of the maps. It is extremly unclear especially in zones when you have 4 !!!!! layers of map. You don’t get to actually see at which level of a map a hero point is, for example. Just a random “123423578612571237612 away”. Who designed this crap?

it tells you above or below, yknow ;p

HoT such a turn off for me. I feel very misled with the grind I have to do with 9 characters to use their elite spec. I’ve already leveled all 8 professions and used tomes for the 9th.

If I play some more it’ll be in WvW not that convoluted new zone.

What a disappointment…..

Okami.4287:

I don’t understand most of your complains. i actually love HoT, and it doesnt feel that hard to play in the new maps.

Yesterday i went in VB with a friend only, and even though it felt more challenging than old zones, it wasn’t impossible to get access to the different part of the jungle, the monsters were not unkillable, it was fine.

The fact that i cant play with all the skills of my reaper directly isn’t a problem at all. you were not complaining at launch of gw2 that you couldn’t play with all the spells of your class directly. you had to lvl up to gain stuff, which is normal. I don’t understand why we should be given everything directly. besides, unlocking the firsts parts of the spec isn’t that hard, with just a few HP done in VB i can already have fun with the reaper shroud. I don’t care about having everything unlocked at start, because this is still an rpg and like in most rpg, you have to train and build slowly your character.

Anyway, there would always be haters for everygame at every launch, don’t listen to all these complaints Anet, i love the expnsion and will still be playing it in a few years for sure

Yeah but but during the beginning of gw2. I didn’t have to find all the skills challenges just to unlock all the traits and skills on my char. I can just level enjoy the world and do the random challenges when I feel like it. The new system literally forces me to do the challenges for me to be able to complete my elite specialization. It is obnoxious. Compounded by the fact that the skill challenges are gated behind masteries makes it even more of a chore. I literally spent 30 mintues yesterday looking for the skill challenge only to fund it and some frog person tells me I can’t commune.

I don’t know about you but I never got a tutorial in the Core either.

Your 2-4 arguments are basically masteries and hero points split into 3. Actually your #1 is sort of implying you have no idea what to do about masteries either. So really, you’re bummed about masteries/hero points.

The platforming aspect drove me away. Adding it to mazes even worse. I enjoyed WvW but I’m done with it till the Map rotates back to Alpine.. and I’m dreading what kind of train wreck the “improvements” will be.

Finding out they “had” to murder Eir sealed the deal. GoT much?

I’ll never buy it.

Baldrick.8967:

Xavier.2176:

The grind. I hate how to progress you now need to farm masteries. Hours and hours worth of brainless farming. That’s awful and unskillful game design right there. Maybe they should have created more maps instead of forcing us to do boring events over and over again to proceed.

I blame the SW trains, by which metrics Anet came to the decision that players like hours and hours of mindless farming. So they added more, and this time made sure that everyone (except the holy spvp, heaven forbid the esports are affected), especially wvw players, now get to spend their leisure time in pve grinding out masteries so they can get out of pve and back to what they enjoy (that will mainly be EB now, new BL maps= ghost towns).

It is my understanding from reading the blogs that you can earn masteries within WvW. Specifically the ability to earn them within WvW was the reason that liquid world experience has been removed in favor of instantly consumed boosters.

At present I believe the situation is

• PvE, earn masteries within PvE
• WvW, earn masteries within WvW
• sPvP, have everything unlocked within HotM only, as per the usual method.

I am hoping that WvW and PvE hold to their usual method as well and anything unlocked in one applies to the other but have not verified this as yet.

I think HOT is more fun for people who started to play after the base game became free, because the old content isn’t stale for them. For veterans, for instance, it is boring to do the same stuff that we have been doing over the past three years for tyria masteries. HOT is focused on making F2P people to buy the xpac, while casting veteran players away.

The same thing could happen again in a few years if another xpac is released. The difference is, by that time, people who are happy with HOT now will be veterans and be cast away.

I’d like to add my bit here, it’s about this hand holding some of you keep mentioning.

Isn’t that what a community does for each other? Does a community not mean helping other members of their community?

I help run a local foodbank that helps people who are struggling in real life because I love the community where I live. We help each other.

It seems as if the gw2 community or a portion of it are more than happy to leave those who need help alone. How about instead of promoting your selfish natures, why don’t you remind them just how good our community is and offer to hold their hand as you say?

Or would that be asking too much from you as you have masteries to get?

best mmo expansion ive played since T2A UO.

you all cry way too much

if you need a tutorial then you really need to consider trying something else

Everything mentioned, but also the lack of useability from masteries.

Gliding is amazing, it’s fun and I enjoy that part immensely. But it’s only useable in the 4 small heart of thorns maps.

By the time we FINALLY get through the grind fest so we can even experience the story. I will be more than fed up grinding in the same 4 maps over and over for weeks.

and then what. All the masteries I’ve spent forever working on CAN’T be used in the rest of Tyria… After I finish the story, and get through the grindfest of getting my elite specialization, even with just one character. I’ll be sick of those 4 maps. And then it’s all for absolutely nothing?

I knew that, gliding and such wasn’t going to be doable in the rest of Tyria. But the fact that they made it such a grindfest to experience the new content… Is making me sick of it. And I can’t enjoy the masteries at all.

Yes there’s Tyria masteries, but they are a complete disappointment. Running speed in cities? That’s the best they could come up with? Really…

Specializations are locked behind too many Hero Points.

Hero Points are locked behind masteries.

Hero Points achieved by defeating champions that can one-shot you and you can’t kill solo.

Maps are frustrating to navigate, it’s hard to tell exactly were you’re going from your map (M). Sometimes you end up in a dead end, sometimes what you’re looking for is above you, sometimes below you, but you can’t tell exactly how to get there, sometimes what you’re looking for is locked behind a mastery thus wasting your trip.

It’s hard to tell what is where, where is what you need, how to get there, what you need, what you need to do to get exp.

Trash mobs that can one shot you.

Too many hard hitting veterans wandering together.

Too few waypoints. Too many contested waypoints.

The above 3 points make maps even harder and more tedious to navigate. Due to dying often and the scarcity of waypoints you find yourself running in the same area over and over.

Too many group events make leveling masteries slow and unconsistent. Too few exp gained even for basic or story mandatory masteries. No hearts to help you level up.

Due to the chaotic nature of maps, it’s hard to tell where you can find events or how to get to an event that is marked on your map.

Soloable events can fail because a nearby group event failed, but you discover it only at the end of the event, thus wasting your time for the whole duration of it.

Maps feel empty, thus getting your events done is hard. Maybe they aren’t actually empty and people are just elsewhere in the map.

I’m sure more will come to my mind, I’m finding hard to keep playing for more than 30 minutes session. I love Metroid, and it’s progression system. This expansion feels like Metroid, only with a map that doesn’t help you understand where to go, with enemies that can destroy you, with bosses that you can’t beat unless you happen to come by another couple of player which seems to be rare.

You unlocked morph ball! Now go kill 1000 more enemies to be able to use it to get where you need to without being able to know how to get there.

I am very much with the OP on this. I am an ‘older’ player with some health issues, so I am not as sharp as I once was reflex or concentration wise, so I was looking for an MMO that was a little more casual player friendly.

I leveled two characters to 80 while still free to play, and enjoyed the pace and content and general difficulty curve. The open play as you choose feeling of the game was refreshing and reeled me in. It never at any point felt ‘grindy’, there was always something interesting to do, and everything went towards my leveling goals.

By comparison, HoT feels like some sadistic alter ego of the friendly easy going game that drew me in and took my investment of time and money. The new maps are bewildering, disorienting and frustrating. The mobs are brutal, my feeling was not so much of being challenged ( ie lets see how I could have won this fight by doing things differently ) but more akin to being ganked in a pvp zone.

The mobs just zerg and zerg, spamming multiple AOE’s and CC’s at you until you die, and if you are anything like me you will die, over and over and over, until you port out to Lions Arch to ponder your options.

So TL;DR is, I personally feel a bit disenchanted, as this expansion is not a continuation of the game I was enjoying, it is something else entirely, and it’s not something I am enjoying.

There is a learning curve, but this is by far the best expansion I’ve seen in any game. It’s not even about the amazing new maps, it’s about how much good all the new systems do for the entire game.

Trancid.8514:

There is a learning curve, but this is by far the best expansion I’ve seen in any game. It’s not even about the amazing new maps, it’s about how much good all the new systems do for the entire game.

The entire game? The masteries only work in the new map areas. So, except for the elite specs, what good did it do for the entire game? Please, I really want to know your thoughts.

thats probably a personal thing – but i HATE nothing more in games and especially mmos than wayfinding – overly complicated maps with borders everywhere that have me look for the right way for hours – this drives me furious and its just a type of measure to make the game seem longer – but it makes the gameplay a chore for me… and to me this has nothing to do with exploring… and its especially frustrating that when you eventually made it to your location, just to find out you cant unlock it yet…

The way the maps work in gw2 is just not layed out for such a map with several floors – i absolutly dispise the maps… they are beautiful indeed – absolutly – but i cant stand that im running around for 10 hours looking for kitten i should be able to do in 2

Nothing, the expansion is blowing me away. Its pretty amazing stuff, especially the story.

Yes for me as well I highly agree with the OP of this post. First and formost I am a PvPer or in GW2’s case a WvWer. Basically this update was a hugekittenfrom A Net. Forcing me to play PvE and world explore which I absolutely have no interest in if I did I would have a legendary weapon or two by now. I sololy brought the HoT so I can play Reaper and Tempest in WvW. I honestly was about to drop another $135 on Gems in the Gem store to convert into gold from my kitten since I don’t like to grind unless I want to goof off. I’m sorry A Net you may have gotting my $50 from the expanision, but if this is the road you want to travel then me and you are going to have to go seperate ways till you once another readapt the play you way style you once had. Until then Farewell for I don’t Pay and play a game for the Devs enjoyment I do it for my enjoyment. 400 hero points to be mostly only earned in map completeion and the new PvE area is a complete and totaly turn off from this game. Going to say it once more you take my money but you will not make me slave in a game doing something I truly don’t like in a video game if that’s that case I’d get job and add even more income to what I already have.

Farewell A Net awesome game up until HoT

Majestic

So far:
1) Something about the new maps is literally giving me headaches.
2) Same issue that I had with core with the open world feeling like a bunch of stages for events rather than a real world that’s compelling to explore.
3) Granted I don’t actually have much interest in elite specs, but I’d like to unlock them at least, yet to do that, I need hero challenges, and I’m unable to solo these, compounded by…
4) The maps are dead. Not sure if its a legitimate lack of population or just megaservers overcompensating for what they assumed the load would be, but there are rarely more than a half-dozen players in the areas I’m in, and even that’s only if I waltz into one of the Verdant Brink meta-events.
5) Lack of nostalgia. Maguuma didn’t have a whole lot of that in the first place, and at least they did the Falls decently, but again, like the core game, I generally feel disconnected from the original series.
6) Elite specializations and masteries as a concept. As I’ve said during the betas, masteries should be more about side-stories, collections, and NPC-interaction to me, NOT filling an XP bar and clicking a button. Likewise, elite specializations should have been unlocked/advanced through Job quests.
7) No real possibility of enjoying the Guild Hall maps since I’m only ever going to have solo guilds (and had nowhere near enough influence to get the needed favour).

and

A) Not HoT-related itself, but Nightfury being priced completely out of my reach has killed my drive as well.

man this could been a lot smoother. sadly

Azure.8670:

best mmo expansion ive played since T2A UO.

you all cry way too much

if you need a tutorial then you really need to consider trying something else

Wow, that is a long break from gaming. Maybe you should check out some of the other stuff that released between 1998 and now. Might give you a different perspective.

Heart of Thorns is the best expansion ever, and the players love it.

Stelakh.2136:

Heart of Thorns is the best expansion ever, and the players love it.

Said no one ever.

Mostly just how alienating it can be to be a mostly solo player. I don’t shy away from group events and stuff if people was willing to help do them. But I don’t always play at peak times, so it can be a bit empty.

But even events that are not marked group can be a struggle to complete solo. Honestly just traveling the maps can be a nightmare alone.

Its sad, cause for the majority of everything I enjoy it. But in the long run its going to test my patience. I already find myself getting frustrated at small things in the HoT maps. Which is something I rarely ever feel towards a game.

Not sure if there is a legitimate problem with the servers or people are just spread out across maps. But it seems rare to run into any large group of people. Unless its a map meta event and its tagged you won’t see more than 2 or 3 people in the same area.

I played about three hours on release, realized I was just grinding events to get the exp, to get the mastery, to get the hero point, to actually be able to use the new skills, and then turned it off and haven’t logged in since. I think it was the realization that running around doing events grinding for exp was the extent of what I’d be doing in HoT that finally just lit a switch in my brain. That, or the completely sleazy slashing of dungeon and fractal rewards.

The fact that the new guild system and currency kills small guilds and another gold sink. Guess we’re staying with the old system.

GRIND.

(caps to reflect insane amount of it)

Glad I didn’t buy it yet. I’ll wait for it to be $10-20 or something (appropriate price).

VaLee.5102:

Stelakh.2136:

Heart of Thorns is the best expansion ever, and the players love it.

Said no one ever.

Well, someone has, I’m sure.

But that phrase is a reference to *_Star Trek Online_, (STO) which was never the best game on the face of the planet, but it was at least fun to play when playing with friends.

In the face of the players really despising the latest content in STO, “Delta Rising,” one of the devs actually said that. He said, “Delta Rising is the best expansion ever, and the players love it.” So it was a reference to STO, a bit of a joke, and swipe at HoT.

“Perfect World Entertainment” (a company name that should automatically get replaced with “kitten” because that company is the epitome of profanity) bought Cryptic, and turned the game into a max-gear grindfest that was directed solely at hardcore, high-end gamers who (and let’s be honest here) enjoy the kitten stroke of being able to say, “I can do millions of DPS in a video game,” as if that matters in the real world.

I’m too old for that kind of thing. I play games for enjoyment, not to feel great about myself because my character has better gear than yours. HoT feels specifically designed for exactly the kind of player I’m not.

Based on some of the comments in this thread alone, I’m not the only one who sees it that way.

Dear god, I miss the original Guild Wars. THAT was a fun game, and GW2 is a pale shadow of the original.

HoT isn’t even a pale shadow of the pale shadow.

I played through the story and went exploring in maps and have my elite spec fully unlocked, I would hardly say having full access after less than 2 days a “grind.” I was also just doing things I wanted to do and having fun – nothing repetative or dull.

The maps are massive and beautiful (if you get confused try opening your map and thinking), the story was fun (last boss was a little buggy) with awesome cutscene art, the Chronomancer is just amazing to play, the Mordrem Guard are some of the most interesting mobs to fight even in zerg content (I would port to interupt chain Snipers and angle them out of the main zerg – what other content have you needed to take that initiative before?), the meta event chains are fun and final encounters are vaired and engaging.

There is a lot of new content and I really don’t understand the complaints – they even removed the r4 mastery requirement for the story.

Gaile Gray.6029:

Guys,

Please read the topic of this thread. The subject is: “If you did not purchase HoT, are you still playing (or will you continue to play) GW2?” Not, “Why I didn’t buy” or “What I think about the pricing,” or other off-topic comments. That’s not what the OP asked, and let’s respect this thread for the actual question that he or she posed.

We have a lot of threads in which you may share your opinions on those other subjects. This thread is asking a simple question: _If you didn’t purchase HoT, will you continue to play the core game. It’s an interesting question, and it deserves “breathing space” without tangential commentary and oft-repeated input.

Please stay on topic.

Thank you.

Same statement but in regards to this thread.
Enjoying the expansion? Good for you. Go post your comment stating so in a thread praising the expansion.

This thread is specifically asking for people to list their reasons why they are driven away from the expansion, which many are posting as requested.

You are off-topic if you are stating that you are enjoying every second and are not being driven away at all.

Coulter.2315:

I played through the story and went exploring in maps and have my elite spec fully unlocked, I would hardly say having full access after less than 2 days a “grind.” I was also just doing things I wanted to do and having fun – nothing repetative or dull.

Awesome. Glad you’re enjoying it. I work, spend time doing other things, and come into the game to play casually.

I would say having full access after less than two days means you play rather a great deal more than I or someone like me does, and that for us, HoT falls utterly flat.