Guild Wars 2

I have played Heart of Thorns for a good 30 hours since launch and I think that has been long enough for me to come up with an opinion on many aspects of the expansion pack.

I’m going to begin by mentioning that I almost exclusively only play WvW and occasionally some PvP. I have always found PvE to be repetitive and somewhat dull and I prefer the competitive aspects That PvP/WvW have to offer. I mention this as I expect my views on the new PvE content will be manipulated by the type of player I am.

That being said, I must admit that I have (for the most part) really been enjoying the new content HoT has brought with it, both in PvE and WvW. The new Desert Borderlands are a welcome change to the old maps and I look forward to seeing more and more of them in the future. The removal of guard stacks has made roaming in WvW fairer and I think that the change, although not necessary, was a good thing to do.

The new PvE zones are where I have spent most of my time since Friday, and they have really surprised me. I think the vertical design is very well done (but can be slightly annoying) and the different ways of getting from place to place (Gliding, Jump-y Mushrooms etc. etc.) make for an enjoyable experience when navigating the new zones. There are also various events in the new zones and I believe they all have a different meta-event. Playing these events wasn’t too dissimilar from doing events in the normal zones so I found them to quickly become slightly dull and repetitive, but by no means were they bad. The story missions were challenging enough for them to be fun, but there wasn’t as many as I expected. Each chapter of the story has it’s own set of achievements so they have some sort of re-playability and some additional targets to aim for. So in terms of content, I think Anet did a very good job all around with HoT, aside from Stronghold, which I don’t like. But that’s just personal preference, nothing particularly bad about it.

The new mastery system added with HoT allows players to have additional goals after they’ve reached level 80 which I think is nice. Although the mastery ranks are very slow to obtain, they are account wide so you’ll only have to get them once.

Now, this is the BIG problem I have with HoT, and I expect most of you saw this coming, but I really don’t like the Hero-Points-for-elite-specialisation system. The elite specialisations are largely what made me buy Heart of Thorns, and in my time playing since the launch, I’ve managed to obtain ~160 Hero Points. That’s 30 hours for 160 Hero Points. And I’m fully aware that people have managed to get far more than that, but I’ve been playing the game to have fun, not to grind these points. The fastest way (and only viable way as far as I know) to get Hero Points is to complete Hero Challenges in the new zones. Each challenge gives 10 points, there are 40 challenges, 400 Points. Hearing this had slightly salvaged the system for me, but then I tried to do some of these Hero Challenges. I managed to do quite a few of the challenges before I began to see more and more of them were restricted by specific masteries or required additional players to complete them. Requiring max/high level masteries to do the challenges really put me off since the only way to get these is to grind events for hours on end. To some people, doing these events doesn’t feel like a grind to all, but to me it sure does. Needing extra players isn’t too much of a problem right now since the maps are highly active, but give it a few weeks and less and less people will be helping with the challenges on map chat.

Let’s say you’ve done the grind and have all the necessary masteries, which is already going to have taken you an absurd amount of time, you still have to go through all your alts, run them to the new zones (assuming they don’t have map completion) and do all 40 hero challenges several times. This is not an enjoyable experience and it’s not what I paid £35 for. As someone mentioned previously in this thread, needing to grind endlessly for Hero Points to get elite specialisations has nothing to do with character development. It’s essentially a new class. I think that restricting this content was the wrong thing to do and it needs to be re-evaluated.

tl;dr: Heart of Thorns = good. Hero Points = bad.