Guild Wars 2

Halp! I’m locked out of Guild Wars 2, also! Don’t make me rejoin the outside world, the sun burns my eyes after these past few days of my hermit style living! Hissssss

Read other posts I’ve made. I spent a great deal of time complaining about Heart of Thorns. At first, I was generally positive, but after the announcement of the 400 Hero Point tallgate, I went to the forums to voice my opinion.

An opinion, I reiterated a bunch of times…

Point being, despite the difficulty, despite the hero points requiring both a mastery check and a group to acquire, I am having the most fun I’ve had on Guild Wars 2 since the pre-release. This expansion reinvigorated my favorite MMO in a way that I hadn’t thought possible. The new Elite Specializations have breathed new life into my gameplay and I find myself getting distracted constantly to find some new adventure in Heart of Thorns.

I realize that many of you might agree or disagree, but I wanted my opinion to be put out there. This expansion is amazing. The mastery system is excellent, the new maps are confusing but lush and interesting, and the story has been improved beyond the level I would ever expect in an MMO.

Good job, Anet! I’m off now, to return to Maguuma. Hope everyone is enjoying this xpac as much as I am!

Two characters are maxed. No biggie. Once you unlock the masteriest, you can reach them on all your toons. Just bring friends or lfg for the champs. You’re not the only one trying to get the skill points. (I solo play, so if I’m able to find groups, I imagine most everyone else will be able to also).

There are still a few I need more masteries to unlock, but when I get them, characters w/o map completion will be able to max out as well.

I was a huge opponent of the 400 HP gate. Now it doesn’t seem so bad.

I agree that the grinding is unreal. But I disagree that this isn’t fun, for the most part. I love gliding. I love bouncing on mushrooms. I just wish I could do these things with the elite spec I’ve waited for months to get. I also wish that mastery points were the only gate and exp wouldn’t factor in … at all.

This would be nice. My wife and I have had similar experiences. While I do love exploring the new maps, it’d be nice to find out if something was blocked so we don’t waste time.

Look man, I don’t want everything just handed to me. But this system is bonkers. Masteries require both MP and a grindy “level-up”esque bar to unlock (for some reason). Players must do this so that they can search the map to grind up hero points so that they can unlock their elite specialization (in an order they don’t get to choose). The story is gated behind a 4 million experience mastery (80% of the total exp required to reach 1-80). One more note about that experience, people have said things like, “WoW raises the level cap, same thing bruh” but guild wars 2 basically doubled the level cap (worth of exp anyways). It’s an amazing amount of grinding.

I love the content, but enjoyment is locked behind a few tiers of mastery. I’m sure that once I’ve spent the ample amount of time, grinding to prepare, I will unlock the fun mode of guild wars 2.

This is what players are most upset about right now. Being made to wait is okay, being forced to grind for hours to unlock the ability to grind the next thing for hours (across all your alts, individually) to play the way you want to play is a poor design.

Blood Red Arachnid.2493:

On the zerker thing: You probably don’t need to re-gear. You need to re-think tactics. The enemies in HoT are built specifically to make face-tanking in zerker gear ineffective, so instead of just a pure DPS strat you should go with some self-preservation strats. Non-DPS utilities, non-DPS traits, etc.

Tactics, traits, and utilities play a much bigger portion than gear. Everything else I kind of agree with, though.

I’ll take a look at my traits and skills. It’s just a bummer because I’m so excited to have fun in Heart of Thorns, but having fun in heart of thorns requires a lot of grinding to unlock.

At times, 9/10 the new zones are super cool. But the fact that I am grinding so that I can grind something else, so that I can unlock my elite specialization/ story progression is inherently unfun. I just spent like an hour staring at my character select screen trying to decide who I want to grind with the most… 0/10

The new zones are beautiful. There’s a plethora of content that has been added and it looks meaningful, for the most part. Guild Wars 2 is finally encouraging players to step out of the zerker meta comfort zone. For the first time, it felt a bit punishing to play zerker in these new zones. Sure, the big numbers are fun but I die rather quickly.

This actually became a problem.

See, now I’m considering regearing to explore Maguuma. But it seems like a huge waste to gear up to be more capable… at grinding. Soon, I’ll have my elite spec then I’ll need to gear again. My old builds feel like they don’t work as well here but changing them costs gold. I am totally fine with changing my builds when I have my elite, but buying sets of gear with the express purpose of grinding the specialization so I can buy more gear seems really wrong.

This xpac has introduced unprecedented levels of grinding. I would still be fine with this if I could enjoy these new quests, events and such with the build I’ve been hyped to play with for so long.

Can I hop on a dragon hunter and play in Maguuma? Sure. But the content is hard and playing with an incomplete spec is a real handicap. Even this would be okay if I could level up my traits (like any other traitline) and then grab the skills next. I could play dragon hunter, for instance, without traps. It’s a small sacrifice to enjoy a full build. But I’m forced to grab them to reach the next traits in the traitline.

It’s just such a huge letdown. The grind has become unreal. It’s not a simple matter of running from Hero Point to Hero Point until I’m done. Most, if not all, are gated behind some mastery point requirement, (which require incredible investments of time to unlock).

So it seems that unlocking the entire specialization will take quite some time. I’m now forced to come to terms with the idea that I might have to buy gear/runes/sigils to make a “grind build” so that I can conquer the heart of thorns content until I finally (blessedly) reach the point where I can unlock the entirety of my Elite Specialization.

To preempt the large amount of people who say that it’s okay to play with just the beginnings of an elite specialization I say this:

Playing the elite spec before I’ve unlocked the necessary traits and skils, has actually ruined the experience for me to a large degree. I was playing my reaper. I love the greatsword, but when you play without the shouts, without the master traits, and grandmaster traits, it makes the build feel weak. This took a lot of fun out of the reaper class for me (which before was one of the most fun, in my opinion). I understand that the build isn’t complete, and it gets better. But it gets better very, very slowly. It takes so long to unlock the traits that I would rather not play the reaper spec and ruin it for myself until I can play with a respectable set up.

Starfall.6813:

sharkswithlazers.7632:

They directly said somewhere that players with map completion would be able to play their elite specs

People in this thread keep saying this.

Anyone have a link?

I’ve been looking ever since you asked. I honestly can’t find it. I remember reading someone say that players with map completion should be able to unlock everything no problem. Again, everything is subject to change, but it doesn’t make it less frustrating when they don’t just make a really large gate to elites, but also make the new content 10 times more efficient to getting there, thereby trivializing our hard work we put into preparing for the xpac.

GragorR.9768:

Ashen.2907:

Claiming some sort of bias against the game on the part of those two sites when they have both reviewed the game in the best possible terms seems odd to me.

You do raise a fine point, they have indeed praised gw2 at launch and given it a pretty good score, which makes me wonder why there isn’t any coverage or ’’hyping’’ being done now that HoT is launching in a few short hours. If you visit the PC part of both websites, in popular games coming soon, or on the entire main page there is not a trace of gw2 launching an expansion, which seems odd to me because there isn’t all that much going on in pc gaming these days.

Google “Heavensward IGN”, then google “Heart of Thorns IGN”. IGN reviewed heavensward and barely scrapped together a post about GW2. I’m not crying conspiracy, I’m also curious as to why I only ever find gw2 info when I intentionally look for it at dulfy, tentonhammer or the gw2 website.

Misguided.5139:

Subjective. I’ve been busting my butt for weeks. Made my first legendary. Trained three crafting professions to 500, made my first ascended weapons and armor. To me, it was worth every bit of effort.

This is true, I’ve done stuff that’ll benefit me too. But it’s also a bummer when I made 2 legendaries for characters I was personally excited about and now they’ll continue to just … chill in my character’s inventories while I grind… again.

PopeUrban.2578:

Your preparations provided half of your elite spec progression. How does that trivialize anything?

You finished half of your expansion character progression before the expansion released

Think about it.

Sure, half. But considering that I farmed 200+ skill points several times when I could have just farmed 20 skill points several times for the same benefit, they made our preparations dismally inefficient. I put in 10 times the effort for the 200 HP than I would have if I hadn’t prepared (at their bidding). Really, it’s more than 10 times. To my understanding, only 3 maps have 10+ hero challenges, those are all in Orr. If I wanted to complete bloodtide coast, it would only have ~ 8 hero challenges I think. That’s me, running/ swimming all over that map, and I still didn’t even get the same reward as a single hero challenge in Maguuma.

When I said “trivializing”, I mean that they took our efforts and minimalized them. They made it to where our efforts had awful returns. Sure I have half of what I need for the elite specs, but I earned that at >10 times the effort. To me, that’s trivializing my efforts.

Xbon.9086:

Seera.5916:

Arewn.2368:

You made hasty preparations based on early release, vague, non-finalized information.

Honestly, there really wasn’t much in the way of “preparation” that needed to be done for Heart of Thorns. It’s mostly busy-making.
You basically made up work for yourself to do, spent time doing that work, and then were disappointed that the work didn’t pay off as much as you wanted it to.

For example, “making 2 legendaries” has nothing to do with preparing for Heart of Thorns. And preparing mats for the new legendaries before we even knew what they were, let alone what they’ll be made of, is risky no matter how you look at it.

And the hero point situation was handled fairly appropriately. The priority should be on systems that will have you actually play the xpac, not cater to people who “prepared” prior to it’s release so that they can skip the xpac’s content. You aren’t being punished for preparing, you’re just not being explicitly rewarded for it. Which sounds right to me.

My advice would be to be careful of hypetrains, make informed decisions, and keep in mind that things which are in-development are very much subject to change.

I get where you’re coming from. There’s nothing wrong with being excited for the new content, and it’s natural to look for things to do while you wait. I just don’t think your expectation on how the developers should handle it are warranted.
I do however admit that not knowing the cost of elite specs for so long left us in a bit of an awkward situation.

Hearing the exact number of hero points 3 days before launch when the number required for 1 elite spec given what players were asking and talking about doing on launch day for weeks now is appropriate? When at this point even if ANet wanted to change it, they couldn’t change it in time for launch most likely? Not giving more details out on the system or even a simple explanation on the why they chose the numbers they chose is right? When neither of those options caters to the players who have an issue?

you can unlock your elite spec, that is the mechanic and weapon used for a mere 60 points, there was no lie in saying you could prepare that way.

I see a lot of people arguing this. But being able to unlock the spec vs having enough traits to make the spec viable are totally different issues. I dunno if you did the betas, but beta 1 and 2 were challenging already. I think it’d be far more challenging, maybe even frustrating if I had to do the same content with only 2 trait lines and a minor trait.

So, technically speaking, sure, you’re totally right! But realistically, no one will be satisfied if they can unlock a woefully incomplete version of the thing they dedicated hours to prepare for.

Preparing with hero points wasn’t a hasty action. They directly said somewhere that players with map completion would be able to play their elite specs (and no, not “play” but that we’d be able to unlock everything). This was all beta, no hard feelings if the plans change. But I’m certain that they could have given us some heads up, and not waited until 3 days out to drop that bomb on us.

I personally think that telling people that they can “play” with their elites is like telling someone they can “play” with a deflated basketball. It’s just a limp, flaccid version of the thing we want. Semantically they are the same thing, practically… not even close.

Xstein.2187:

Ya, I understand why you are upset, particularly with the hero points. However, its not really Anet’s fault and they shouldn’t/can’t be blamed. I think in any kinda situations like these, a little bit of patience is required.

“Sometimes things aren’t clear right away. That’s where you need to be patient and persevere and see where things lead.” – Mary Pierce

“The methods by which you’ll craft these legendary weapons are similar to the existing system, but we’ve refined it into more of a journey, similar to precursor crafting.”
https://www.guildwars2.com/en/news/a-legendary-journey/
March 26th, 2015

They told us fairly early that crafting the new legendary weapons would be slightly different than the old ones. You also didn’t know what they looked like. For all we new they could have looked terrible. Yet, you couldn’t blame them if this was the case either.
Same things with hero points. Am I a little upset that you can’t unlock everything right away? Ya, a little. However, I understand that they want to make the story and expansion a growing experience for all players (even if you have map completion), just like gw2 was a growing experience to unlock your core class traits as you leveled and gained hero points throughout the map.

Yeah I’m right about where you are. I’m bummed, but not furious. I’ll admit, building my gift of mastery was a bit dumb. I decided instead to just make my wife a bolt so she can have another legendary. What would have made this a 100 times better is if we had some communication before hand. I feel like telling the player base about the high gate between them and the elite specializations (the things that were by far the most popular aspect of the xpac) 3 days before the expansion was just poor decision making. They should have introduced them as something you’d work towards in your journey into the heart of Maguuma, but it came across as “this is what you’ll get if you purchase Heart of Thorns”.

I might be wrong, maybe I had the wrong impression. I knew there’d be some effort to unlock everything, but I’m just frankly daunted at the idea of earning several thousand HP to unlock the elites on all my alts.

Anyways bros and broettes, I’ll be seeing you in Heart of Thorns. I wish you all the best in unlocking your elites and enjoying the new experience. I’m off the forums for a bit, it’s dampening my hype too much. Take care everyone!

The one to Rule.2593:

Alright, well look…. I get the disappointment about not being able to have instant access to your elite spec, but at the same time i feel like it’s healthier to the game and adds more playtime. ( even if that playtime is an annoying grind) The fact that it was an elite spec meant it was going to take some effort though.

As for pre making legendaries, someone already said it above that it was your own fault so I will not beat a dead horse by repeating that, but I get the sense you know they are right. If you made two legendaries though, I don’t see why you are so disappointed, you have two legendaries! That’s a feat in and of itself!! Be proud of it, because either way, you’d still have to have spend just as long to get one of the new legendaries regardless.

Yeah sorry, I wasn’t clear. I made legendaries to prepare for the elite spec. My guardian has been holding Kudzu for months, my Engineer has a Juggernaut and my wife also made one, she made the flameseeker prophesies for her mesmer. Yeah I have the skin, but like… I was so hyped to equip it on the characters I made them for, but now I’ll need to wait longer.

Elden Arnaas.4870:

Ironic that someone who couldn’t be bothered to even read the first post made a reference about “blind eyes and deaf ears”.

lol

Zeppelin.6832:

How is it anyone’s fault but your own that you grinded before knowing the details?

This. You’re totally right, you know. It’s a bummer that I spent so much time for so little payoff, but I could swear I remember reading a dev say somewhere that if a toon has map completion, they should have enough for the elite spec.

The reality is that I just wanted to prepare for Heart of Thorns so I could do precisely this: I wanted to enjoy the content on my elite spec and avoid the grind to get my elite spec. I would rather grind now than tomorrow when Heart of Thorns is released and there’s so much good stuff I want to do.

Maybe it was hasty. In the end, I proved to be an idiot for putting so much effort in, before I knew the specifics. But really, Anet could have done a better job with transparency. If I had known that 400 gets me everything and each hero challenge is worth 10 points, I might have just waited. But it’s upsetting that they dropped the bomb on us so late. It halted my hype train.

Actually what I would want them to do is to remove the cooldown from traits that activate on weapon swap. For example: Quick Draw has a 9 second cooldown. So if I grabbed runes to reduce the weapon swap cd by 20%, I wouldn’t get to use Quick Draw every time I can swap weapons. Furthermore, sigils are the same way. Sigil of intelligence has a 9 second cd to. It makes characters like warriors and runes of the warrior pretty useless when trying to make builds. I think a weapon swap build could be pretty cool on some characters and not too strong.

Zypher.7609:

So instead of posting your thoughts in each different thread on the topic. You ended up posting them all in one thread, brilliant.

I posted this thread first, then lurked the forums for hours. Got sucked in, can’t escape. Send for help.

Solid Gold.9310:

I’ll be playing as me, YAY !

I wish I could play like solid gold… sounds so luxurious.

Ehra.5240:

IchbinVol.5407:

Now, the hero challenges of yore, will be replaced with the new content. Why scour Tyria, for 1pt each, when you can just power level, and go straight to Maguuma Jungle?

There was no reason to scour Tyria for hero points anyway since you just ended up with 200+ that sat in your menu unspent. I guess you could argue there’s a small amount of power creep happening here with regards to hero point acquisition for new characters being made from here on out, but since it’s such a minor thing I have a hard time really being bothered by it. The only real purpose most of your hero point completion served in Central Tyria was progress towards map completion, and they will continue to serve that purpose going forward.

Except that they encouraged us early on to do map completion so that we could start out with our elite specs. I realize that beta games are fluid, but I put in a lot of wasted effort.

People were even mad for months at the idea of Elite specs costing ~170-200 HP. Go back and read the forums. Many people threatened to quit if they had to grind that much up for all of their toons. Now, it’s actually double that.

I made like five characters to be themed for the elite specs. Their whole character design is bent towards the elite spec. If I can’t get that spec, and have to grind for many, many hours to obtain it all, it becomes very frustrating.

Hyper Cutter.9376:

You know, a lot of people did “earn it” via map complation, but people don’t apparently take that into account because… reasons?

Also sucks if you’re trying to be a daredevil, since your actual mechanic is locked behind grandmaster traits.

Daredevils have it the worst. And you’re totally right. If I put the effort into exploring the entire known world, I should have my elite. You can’t tell me that exploring four zones is worth more reward than exploring the known world.

Straylight.7529:

sharkswithlazers.7632:

Straylight.7529:

Random.4691:

Straylight.7529:

I’ll be playing as a reaper straight away. Can’t wait for it!

No unfortunately you will not be playing as a reaper straight away.

Why not? :P

Because Anet dissappoints. You need 400 Hero points to unlock everything. Admittedly that’s everything (armor and runes) but you won’t be able to spend your 200 from map completion to unlock reaper. It’s a bummer.

Are you sure? I have 200 unspent hero points. 60 will unlock the elite specialization. That leaves another 140 to spend. Will it give me all the traits and cosmetic items and make me the best possible reaper there is? No. Will it allow me to play as a functioning grandsword-wielding reaper with a couple of traits and utilities to boot? Yes!

ergo:

Random.4691:

No unfortunately you will not be playing as a reaper straight away.

FALSE information

sharkswithlazers.7632:

but you won’t be able to spend your 200 from map completion to unlock reaper

FALSE information

please see yourselves out.

thank you

I will see myself back in to tell you that most people aren’t satisfied that despite spending hours on map completion that hurray! they get to play with a half finished spec.

No, we don’t know exactly how much all of the reaper skills will cost. But if the betas were an indication, they wanted maguuma to be harder and more challenging than Tyria. Now we have people saying they want to run around with incomplete traitlines?

Could I run around with a greatsword? Yes. But I’d have to sacrifice a complete traitline for an either incomplete one (at best) or just the most basic access to the first minor talent, so that I can use a GS (at its worst). It’s frustrating that they’d encourage their player base to put in so much effort just to tell us that they’ve raised the bar and now we’ve only unlocked 1/2 of what people expected.

Many people are acting like those of us who are upset are being entitled and that we should have been prepared to play the content to enjoy the progression.

First off, this aspect wasn’t touted as progression. Mastery was. This was something everyone had anticipated on enjoying from the get go. This isn’t “skipping” content. Everyone here wants to play the new zones and quests with the elite spec we’ve waited months for. The sad part is that many players will have played through nearly all the novel content before they can get the elite spec. I had imagined that I’d be playing my reaper with my twilight or eternity at maguuma tomorrow night. Now I realize that I’ll be running around with that stupid dagger that has made necro so irrelevant for so long. My wife and I both made legendaries for these characters’ elite specs. We have been waiting to equip them. Alas, we will continue to wait because Anet drops a bomb on us last minute.

Secondly, we’ve a right to complain when they tell us, right before launch that the aspect that most players are most excited about has a huge amount of effort required to obtain.

Lastly, players were explicitly told that their efforts in map completion would pay off and that they’d have enough HP for elite specs. Now, right before launch, after many of us spent months gridning those stupid challenges across over a dozen characters, they tell us that our efforts were both A) not enough and absurdly inefficient because hero challenges in maguuma are worth ten times as much as they are in Tyria.

And yes, we should play the content yada yada yada. But don’t encourage your whole player base to prepare for something then pull the rug out from beneath them right before their efforts are about to pay off.

Shampanix.3928:

Seriously?…

Some of you behave like a little, spoiled child when mommy shows you bag of candies and says “go clean your room first to earn it” and you’re like “kitten no, mummy, gimme that noaw!” and then you go cry cus mommy won’t give it to you insta.

Yea, sure, let’s get all instant. Burn the expansion in one weekend and complain that you have nothing to do, “bad anet, I’m bored, no content, refund me”.

And where is the “earning” part of the game? Achieving something? Actually playing the game? Feel like you earned something, worked on getting it.

In most of mmos’ expansions you get new levels for your character and you have to gain experience for them. You have to hit those levels to unlock new skills. Here you do something like that by earning hp to unlock new stuff by just running around new maps. Problem?

And yes, if you feel so much urge to try elites – go to HotM and try it. Insta.

This solution is way more interesting than boring constant lvl cap rise each expansion like in other mmos. You work hard to gain that shiny end-game gear then you have to throw it away cus new lvls.

Like, really. If you do not enjoy playing the game, don’t. The way Anet made it is to get all the stuff while playing new content. Actually playing only a part of it – run through maps, have fun exploring a bit and gain those bunch of points. Especially that you unlock basic stuff by just using 60 points. And 1 challenge = 10 points in new maps.

How about Revenant you say – disadvantage cus new characters, blablabla. If you really need it so fast, you must have gathered tomes of knowledge and xp boosters. You’ll get enough hp to unlock most of stuff, then do 6 hero challenges in maguma (I bet one hour? Perhaps two?) and you get your elite.

Some say it’s more about a journey then a destination. I rly enjoy the idea of working for all of this stuff. It will provide hours of fun and won’t burn the expax so fast.

Incomplete product? Yeah, you pay once for – probably – 2 years of fun and constant patches that will evolve the game. I would agree to this argument on subscription-based game but here? Guys, you pay once and they for sure want to give you fun for all the time before next big expansion. They just can’t hop all of the stuff at once and expect you to play it for 2 years.

Just calm down ppl, no need for this ridiculous outrage.
Cheers

That analogy was a sure fire way to get people to both listen and respect your opinion. Insulting people who disagree with you is the most sound logic I can think of if you’re trying to make them respect what you have to say.

SamTheGuardian.2938:

And neither of you are considering the players who don’t have world competition on any character…. World complementation is optional sub system in the game. The assumption that everyone has it on at least one character is ridiculous. Some players went on to PvP or WvW after finishing the last dungeon and completing their personal story line and that was an acceptable thing to do and a very rational thing for a player without a lot of time in game to choose to do.

Had we known it’s importance months ago we might have chosen to spend some time on it, but they purposely waited until the week of release to drop this information.

In other shreds I said it’s horrible design. Actually it’s worse, it’s intentionally grind inducing, greed-driven design.

I actually disagree with you here. I have several pvp made toons with like 1% map completion (kitten me, right?) and knowing now that I need 400 mastery points to get them their elite specs completely takes away my motivation to map explore. Map exploring to prepare for HoT is like grinding for a legendary by farming ambient creatures. It’s stupid inefficient.

I’m just really hoping I enjoy Heart of Thorns. I have been so excited about it for a year now. But the last minute, they dumped the worst news on us. They had to know that this would be crushing to their playerbase. I’ve been reading posts for months of people begging to be able to just play the elite specs without having to invest time into earning them on each and every toon.

This is not “oh noes I’m level 1 now” this is like buying a diablo expansion and finding out that the new class has to be unlocked by hours of grinding. I knew that there would be some investment, but this 400 mastery points investment is huge. It really kittenes me off too, because I explored tyria on several toons to be ready for this xpac. That was soul crushingly dull to do again and again and I was glad to be done. Now I find out that not only do I need to do it again (many times over) but the mastery points from maguuma are 10 times more efficient than the way I did it. So I spent countless hours doing a really boring grind for almost no reason.

Dhampyr.2813:

Ill agree that it does not truly count as unlocked and most players wont play there elites until its fully unlocked. But it is unlocked, I’m willing to bet it will be in a more playable state if you did world completion. I’m glade some players get a head start

Don’t get me wrong, I’m glad I get a head start. But we were operating under the assumption that grinding out a few more world explorations meant we wouldn’t have to grind in HoT for our specs and that we could just start enjoying them. What irks me most though, as I’ve said, is really that we put in just like… a ton of effort for half of the reward we wanted. Then furthermore we find out that we could have put in a tenth of the effort in Maguuma because we grinded 200 discreet hero challenges rather than 20 maguuma hero challenges.

Straylight.7529:

Random.4691:

Straylight.7529:

I’ll be playing as a reaper straight away. Can’t wait for it!

No unfortunately you will not be playing as a reaper straight away.

Why not? :P

Because Anet dissappoints. You need 400 Hero points to unlock everything. Admittedly that’s everything (armor and runes) but you won’t be able to spend your 200 from map completion to unlock reaper. It’s a bummer.

Snowywonders, I was thinking that I might play my guardian. Check this out… I was going to play Greatsword; mace/torch. I figure it’ll be new and exciting, getting to play the build I’ve used for years now, to trudge through HoT like an addict looking for his next fix of Hero Challenges. It might mean that the content I was super excited about gets tossed aside, but hey, at least I get to try out my build I’ve had for years… again!

Well, we’ll see. I dunno man. You could be right. I hope you’re dead wrong, but… track records.

That’s next year, Monk Tank. And if I understand masteries right, they’re account bound. So you unlock the ability to travel and it’s a simple matter of just toon hopping and traipsing over to the next skill point.

Dhampyr.2813:

No they did say we can play it if we did world completion, but they didn’t say to what extent we could. They have now confirmed 60 points will unlock the elite. So while we can “play” the spec it wont be optimal.

Are you serious? Simply saying “I have the druid traitline unlocked, I can click it and see all the skills I don’t have” is not the same as “unlocking” an elite spec. That’s like handing me a deflated basketball. Thanks buddy. That’s pedantic semantics.

I don’t care that they changed their mind. It was still in development, but like, that’s almost certainly not what they had in mind. I’m just bummed that they waited up until the last moments before its release to bum everyone out with a really large amount of grind required before you can begin having fun with your classes you’ve been hyped about for a year now. I’m also bummed that more than just telling us that our map completion is now no longer enough, but that it was quite literally a waste of time because you could get those points in Maguuma ten times as fast…. that was just a poor decision.

I made a post about this too. If each challenge is ten times more efficient for hero points, why even bother? I could totally deal with 2 times, but 10 times? Seriously, if I wanted to get my mesmer 200 hero points to prepare for heart of thorns, I would put in a dozen or more hours to get that. Instead, I could put in a 2-4 hours and find 40 skill points in Maguuma for far less effort and time.

Swagger.1459:

sharkswithlazers.7632:

I have completed map completion. I’ll tell you, I wish I hadn’t. Each challenge is worth ten times the amount of hero points in maguuma. So my 200 hero points were grinded up the most inefficient way possible.

Sorry, how long did it take you?

I dunno how long it took me exactly with each toon. But I can tell you that if I wanted to grind hero points, running around queensdale trying to grab 10 hero points would take far longer than going to a single hero challenge in Maguuma. I’m still only “half” way there. I put half in quotes because I’d bet that getting 20 hero challenges in maguuma would be far less time consuming that 200 in tyria.

I have no idea how long it’ll take, true.

Mitch, they took 3 years because they had to change direction. Originally there wasn’t supposed to be xpacs for gw2. They wanted to accomplish all of that with Living Story. So it’s not exactly so simple as what you make it to be.

I can support horizontal progression, but why wait so long to tell us that magnitude of time it’s going to take to unlock the very thing that has kept the hype train going for months? We knew about the mastery system very early on. It was one of the first posts, if I remember correctly. But we were confronted with this news like… what, yesterday? Elite specializations are exciting, but are they so good that I’m willing to log on my guardian and grind 200-400 hero points, then log to my 2 eles, 2 rangers, 2 warriors, 2 mesmers, my engie, my thief, and my necro and do it again? Somewhere in the long time spent grinding I’d probably also want a revenant. Oh and maybe to enjoy the new raids… new wvw… new story. Those last bits are the parts I want to try the most, but what I’ll be spending my vast majority of time on is grinding all of my characters up to have elites… that’s not fun and it’s especially frustrating when they’ve been dangling these specs in front of us for months and they now feel even farther away than ever before.

Besides, didn’t they mention at some time that a character with map completion should have enough to play the elite spec? Maybe that was player talk but I was so sure it was a dev blog post that said it.

Seera, I agree with you. That’s why I’m frustrated. It was such a last minute let down. To find out that I didn’t have enough, was frustrating, but to know that if I want all the elites I’ll be spending weeks or months grinding is no fun at all. If they had announced it months ago, I would have still been bummed, but I would have just spent more time doing dungeons or something, knowing that grinding hero points in Tyria was a huge waste of time.

I hear your argument, but I don’t think grinding hero points “skips” content. That’s actually precisely what I want to avoid. I want to enjoy the Elite spec I’ve been hyped about for a year while enjoying the story and new maps etc. I put time in to achieve just that goal. Let’s face it, finding 20 hero challenges won’t take long and if I didn’t have to do that, I wouldn’t be “skipping” content.

That said, I realize I was hasty with the Gift of Mastery. I also realize that I should play the xpac to reap xpac rewards. It’s just I could swear I’ve read somewhere, (I’ll look it up when I’m not so tired) that people with map completion should have access to their elite specs from the get-go. I realize this was too early and that plans change. No biggie. I still am frustrated that I put in so much time because I wanted to have the aforementioned instant access to the elite specs just to find out that I only finished half of what I need in the most inefficient way possible.

Sorean.5379:

It works just like any other training line – except all the skills, traits, skins, abilities, etc. are all inside one full training line that costs 400 points to get everything in the entire line. It costs 60 points to unlock and be able to play as the elite specialization itself.

The way I see it,to play as the Specialization itself you only need 60 points.

The rest is used to unlock the armor skin,weapon skin and the runes.

If you want to play as a Dragonhunter for example,all you need is 60 points and you will already be able to wield a Longbow and your profession icon will change to the Dragonhunter one.

Pretty sure you’re wrong. 60 points unlocks the traitline. But it will take an unknown amount of points to unlock the traits and utility skills.

I should also add that I’ve seen several posts talking about people who saved up guild influence… and are once again trivialized in their effort. It’s pretty pointless to put in effort to prepare for this expansion. It’s just frustrating. Many of us were hoping to put in some effort now, and enjoy less time grinding in HoT and more time enjoying the things we love.

I agree. I haven’t gotten upset at many things for HoT, after all, it’s not even out yet. But I really wanted to experience a new zone with a new style of play together. But what irks me the most, is that my hours of time spent doing map completion was rendered absurdly inefficient. For every single challenge in Maguuma, I basically had to do 10 challenges in Tyria. Despite wanting to play the new elites in Tyria, I can’t find a single reason why I’d want to spend tomorrow grinding more skill points knowing that I’m putting in ten times the effort than I would if I waited until tomorrow.

I have completed map completion. I’ll tell you, I wish I hadn’t. Each challenge is worth ten times the amount of hero points in maguuma. So my 200 hero points were grinded up the most inefficient way possible.

I’m pretty upset about the 400 number too. They sprang it on us last second. The game comes out tomorrow and we just recently learned that despite all our preparations, we’re only half way to an elite spec? That’s frustrating. I have like 14 characters. I don’t want to grind 400 skill points on everyone so that I can unlock a single trait line. It’s actually prohibitive. I mean, I like the warrior’s berserker spec, but do I like it 400 hero points worth? lolno

When Elite specs were announced, I remember reading somewhere (it escapes me where) that if you completed map completion, that should be enough to ensure you can purchase the elite specialization upon release. People even complained about having to complete map completion on every character, describing the experience as awful and repetitive. I realize that everything’s fluid and that we never really had a set in stone number. I am miffed about the huge amount of hero points (that I will have to grind over a dozen times) that it takes to unlock the elite spec. but that is not what this thread is about.

There has been a pattern established that’s concerning, where players such as myself were “punished” for preparing for Heart of Thorns. I, like many, many others, have spent a great deal of time preparing for Heart of Thorns. Since the announcement, I made 2 legendaries and prepared the mats for one of the new legendaries. I completed map exploration on a few toons, and I thought I was ready for Maguuma. The problem is that for all of my preparation, I can look back today and say it wasn’t worth it.

Let me clarify. It has been said that each Hero Challenge in Maguuma will be worth 10 hero points. That means if I wanted to prepare my character for Heart of Thorns, any preparations I do now are absurdly inefficient. There are probably only a handful of maps that even have 10 Hero Challenges on them. Many have less than 10. Meaning for each Hero Challenge I might stumble across in Maguuma, I would have to explore an entire map’s worth (or more) in Tyria for the same reward.

Why is this a problem? Because it trivializes all the effort the many players like myself put into preparing for Heart of Thorns. How many hours did it take me to do map exploration? How many hours would it take me to get the same amount of Hero Points in Maguuma? I would wager it would be less than a tenth the effort and time. Maguuma has 4 maps with an unknown amount of Challenges all worth 10 points each. I don’t have to travel to the far corners of each map in Tyria to grab 10, they are all right there, bundled together.

So to break it down. Anet announced heart of thorns almost a year ago. I wanted my account to be ready to dive in and enjoy the experience. So I spent many hours of my time grinding away at map completion and grinding for legendary components. Mere days before Heart of Thorns was released, we are told that it will require 400 Hero Points to unlock everything with the Elite specializations. We are also told that we essentially wasted hours of time grinding those hero points the longest way possible because the new hero challenges are worth 10 times the amount as the old hero challenges. We are also told that these new legendaries will require mats previously nonexistant. While that one shouldn’t be such a shocker, we had no reason to believe that the recipe would be 100% different than the old recipe but would still require some of the base components. So when I made my Gift of Mastery, I might as well have deleted the components, because I can no longer use them.

I, fortunately, didn’t make the gift of fortune I have all the pieces for, but regardless, I basically lost 250 obsidian shards, map exploration, 500 wvw badges and 200 spirit shards. I decided to make my wife a Bolt, because I don’t want or need any of the current legendaries, I already have 9 of them. I might have been hasty, I’ll admit, but we had no info about how to make legendaries and there wasn’t any real reason to believe that Heart of Thorns would change the recipe that every legendary has used thus far. So all that effort I spent was trivialized in that endeavor too.

This post won’t change anything, Heart of Thorns airs tomorrow. But as a loyal player, I feel downright punished for spending 8 months riding the hype train, preparing my account for Heart of Thorns. I wouldn’t even be upset if Anet had made my time commitment worthwhile. If Hero Challenges didn’t give 10x the hero points, my hours of grinding Tyria would have been worthwhile. Also if my map completion gave me enough Hero Points to enjoy the new elite specialization, that would have been great. But instead, they made it to where my hours of map completing would only make up about half of the total I need. Not to worry, the other half would take less than a tenth the time. If that had been their plan, I wish they hadn’t encouraged us to spend such a large amount of time working the most inefficient way possible.

I mean sure, I have 200 hero points on a few toons, but that saves me, what, 20 skill points? I may have saved myself as much as an hour of my time? Anet has every right to demand and encourage us to play Heart of Thorns content to receive the Heart of Thorns elite specs, but this was just a huge disappointment. Had I known that this would be the case, I wouldn’t have pounded out so many hero challenges.

Just a flesh wound.3589:

There have been faces and hairstyles datamined so the chances are good.

You got a source for that? I can never find that info when I look.

I hope so. I always keep a makeover kit in the bank, waiting for the day I get new faces.

Sorean.5379:

You only need 60 points to play the Specialization,is that too much ?

You need 400. 60 merely unlocks the specialization, not the traits and whatnot.

Ayrilana.1396:

sharkswithlazers.7632:

Ayrilana.1396:

https://www.guildwars2.com/en/news/the-brand-new-fractals-of-the-mists-legendary-backpacks-ascended-salvaging-and-more/

Wow! I just read that. Sounds like a bunch of good changes. I would still like to see maybe a gold reward at the end of each fractal or maybe upon completing all four fractals. Something to guarantee that you didn’t just spend a rather large amount of time doing mostly nothing.

It’s only 1 fractal now. They’re likely adding better gold rewards.

That’s good. I’m rereading that post now. It seems like they are fixing nearly (or completely) everything I just complained about. I’m glad to see these changes. I really want to love fractals.

This is some cool data!