I don’t know i’ve got to level 8 mastery and it haven’t felt like a grind for me for even 1 hour. I’m slowly progressing in the story, then just exploring the beautiful map, killing some stuff that appears in front of me and doing an event or 2 and suddenly i’m done with my mastery track. Then i go do some hero challenges on my characters to work towards my Elite Specs for awhile and realize, that i have another mastery and continue my story. I don’t really think the game is designed to be grindy, it’s just that people want to grind to get faster through the whole experience, which i think is rather their problem than the actual games. It’s just the mentality of min maxing everything that is ruining people’s gameplay experiences i think. I’ve been enjoying this expansion alot and playing for hours and there’s still tons of stuff to do.
Good job arenanet, it’s nice that you took out a 4 level mastery gate from the story, which is kinda making there to be a too big of a gap between story mission to maybe make the player forget what happened before and force them to play the episodes again, so that was a nice design choice on your behalf