Guild Wars 2

5 years later, this quest is still bugged.

Is tied to the Personal Story. You’d think they’d have done something by now to smooth it out.

EDIT: Exit the game, reload, and slooooow damage. As in, practically auto-attack. Finally got me through on my 4th try.

Here’s a suggestion: Can you just unlock all the navigation base masteries by default?

Means we don’t have to follow the story, but we can explore and participate in events as we want. No XP bottlenecks to progress the story if we so choose.

It would return most of the game to the way it was, easy access and open world exploration. Definitely would resolve a lot of the disappointment many of us have with your approach to the new content.

I’d say just give everyone an elite spec to use with their favorite character too, but i know that’s a bridge too far for you….

Honestly, a 4 / 10. Badly tuned and explained progression in game, mob density is wonky, gated masteries required to further explore, weak storyline. Everything feels like a chore. Never looked at my experience bar once during the first three years, now I look at it every few minutes in disgust as I see how much more junk i have to wade through just to get to the next part.

Halo 5 tomorrow, Fallout 4 next month. Destiny is looking good again, there’s an expansion for the Witcher 3 and the re-release of Wasteland 2. Too many better choices, and another lesson learned: don’t pre-order, ever.

There’s a lot of people who are loving this expansion though; and their opinion is not wrong — you like what you like. I guess the mistake here is that Arenanet created an expansion that has been polarizing: bad prioritization or design for some people, perfect balance of wants and needs for others.

Swagger.1459:

Judging by today, I get the feeling these new zones will be southsun cove 2.0 soon enough… Only the die hard players trying to complete these reward tracks and gather hero points will occupy the zone in a month. Regardless of the hero point requirement for specializations, I think more and more players will drop like flies due to the grind, gates to achievements and group requirements throughout these zones. This will in turn lead to the following predictions…

Devs will drastically lower the required hero points for elite specs and make hero points account bound.

Champions guarding some hero points will be dropped down to elite so they can be soloed.

Zone event credit will be easier to achieve, and events and will be tuned down a lot.

Required mastery track xp will get lowered and have many unlock perks condensed.

The devs will design it so you can earned xp for any mastery track in any portion of the game.

Rewards will be greatly increased in an attempt to keep the zones populated.

Anyone else get the same impressions from today?

Completely, 100% agree with this prediction. Its still the launch week, and already events are a mess and hero points are unattainable with a high population.

Making the Story critical to getting abilities for Zone Exploration was bad enough, but then tying huge XP grinds to unlocking those masteries is a complete betrayal of the GW2 vision. In the base game, I gave up on the personal story early on since it was so boring a tedious.

Spent about 12 hours in the Verdant Basin chasing events, trying to unlock masteries, etc in the first 2 days. I’m now spending most of my time on Mad King events, which I’ve seen for the 3rd time, because they’re more fun.

3/10. Good audio and visuals. Linear story, gated by masteries XP; painful map navigation; events are worse than vanilla GW2 (require too many people; run too long; poor rewards; contested waypoints galore); guild reset and new mechanics are very unfriendly to casuals (rich get richer).

A lot of love and effort went into this expansion, I don’t criticize the quality. However, I do think they opted for a design philosophy that undermines the core values of the original Guild Wars 2 launch. Play your own way? Nope. No grinds? Nope. Encourage world exploration? Nope. Impact the world you play in? Nope.

I’d ask for a refund, but i pre-purchased the top tier package with gems and spent some of them.

I’ll probably come back and play off and on over the coming years, but I haven’t been this disappointed in a game purchase in many years. Serves me right for pre-purchasing.

the expansion comes with the base game for free now, so you may as well buy the HoT on a new account so you get both.

Or just keep playing with the account you have, and wait and see with HoT – you might save yourself some money. 1-80 will take awhile.