I am pretty new at guild wars, and I was having fun until I hit 80. Simply, as for navigation, Verdant Brink sucks! You have to have mastery points for gliding, mushrooms skills, etc, but you are not going to get very many if you are a solo player like myself. It is even tough to get around UNLESS you are moving around in a group.
And grind, grind, grind, over and over same events,= BORING. Seems like HoT is catered to big groups and told the single player to join a guild or Quit. Same thing WoW did, expanded to 40 and 80 man raids and said “forget the single person”
In my humble opinion, the first map getting into HOT should have been alittle harder then the 1-80 level maps but still give the single player places or areas to quest. Letting them still earn masteries more easily then current system so increase mobility BEFORE sending them into a triple level, twisty, winding, navigational nightmare.