Guild Wars 2

I’m back on my engineer. After five or six hours and only getting enough HP to unlock the first minor I had to giggle. Especially on Revenant, whose Herald is the glue that keeps the class together to the point where no build does not have it.

On top of it first I need glidding, so I unlock it, then I need mushrooms, so I unlock it. I’m still working on updrafts when I discover an HP that apparently needs me to have unlocked the hyleks.

At this point I’m just, you know what? Back to the engineer. No rush, no need t ograb all the HP and ignore content since it does not need the elite spec. Later, once I have the masteries and have discovered how to reach the hard places I suppose I’ll get the Revenant.

Was this what I had planned? A big fat not. Sunk plenty of gold, spent a good chunk of the morning just getting the Revenant and transfering items back and forth and opening my one ascended weapon box then more gold to turn it into a berserker weapon.

P.S. Another two HPs that require the T4 Izuel mastery to not insta die to the poison clouds. Seriously? On the first map? So we ‘only’ need to do 40 HPs to ge the elite spec? By the time we have all the 40 HP we have plumbed HoT and have a few hundred hours under the belt already.

First of all sorry for my bad english. I am still learning (the spanish forums are very inactive).

Please Anet, reduce the hp for the elite spect….. I leveled my guardian and necro to 80 only to unlock the elite spect and I only have about 30-40 hp… after spent almost of them in the rest spects.

I have Hot but I can not play with the Dragon Hunter and the Reaper …. and this was my main reason to purchase this expansion.

As many players have said above…. this is very frustating.

Another slap in the face to people who play alts.

Yeah, no. Way too much grind for no reason other than to give the illusion of content – except you’ve walled the content behind grind to begin with.

Voting with my wallet, no cash for anet until this is changed.

I dreaded the fact that the hero challenges would be locked behind the masteries.

I bought the expansion mostly for the Elite specs because my old builds were getting redundant.

This is even worse for the Revenant, the class itself was ok but what really gave me the itch to play it was the Herald because i saw the potential to build a tank with it ( i love to play tank) .
Now i have to bother going through HoT with a class i wasnt excited at first to finally play the Rev i spent so much time perfecting during the beta weekends?

Hmm nope, this is artificial replay ability and what could have a been a very nice experience is now turning into a grind fest and a chore because the content you spent 50$ is now locked behind a huge 400 hp and insult to injury the core hero challenges are neer useless to get the elite specs.

Not asking for a legendary weapon or give everything for free but here were talking about a feature that was a a huge selling point and we actually paid for so have the decency to deliver it for crying out loud…

“Hey you want to play Hot? Yes? Then to enter the jungle its easy, you simply need to spend 25K bandit badges to have enter it, now enjoy grinding the Silver waste and eventually see you on the other side!”

This is how i feel about the elite spec, the hype train missed the station on that one ( said that to be polite because what i had in mind would probably ban me from the forum).

Just a flesh wound.3589:

binidj.5734:

Just a flesh wound.3589:

They said some time back that items that give experience can’t be used to progress Masteries. This means those writs can only be used on a char before level 80. After level 80 you can turn 20 of them into one tome and get a shard.

If we could buy HPs with shards that’d be helpful.

Unfortunately no. Not an option, at least currently..

Presumably it will never be an option since it would remove the finite commodity aspect which was the point of splitting them in the first place.

Unless they made a system similar to what they’re doing in WvW which let you buy locked points with shards, which would still be very strange, but would ultimately probably appease the masses.

The hype train is busy making it stops around the world collecting HP’s. We should see it in the next few weeks.

“Tickets please”

“How much?”

“400 Hero points”

…

;)

It is very frustraiting and disappointing for me, that you have to grind heavily for Hero Points in order to play “Elite spec” in PvE/WvW, and also that you can’t get Hero Points via sPvP.
E.g. I haven’t really found any of “classic” Necro specs suitable for me, but from BWE I liked Reaper a lot, so I’ve been waiting for HoT to play Reaper through the “old” Tyria and new content alike. Unfortunately it appeared that I can’t play the way I want right away and in order to do so I have to grind a lot so by the time I achieve this I berely will be motivated enough to play with it.
I’m perfectly fine with grinding skins, achievements, titles and all that kind of stuff as long as it tied to the gameplay in interesting, fun and rewarding way, but play the way I don’t like to grind the playstile I like is just too harsh for me.
I see no reason behind such implementation of “Elite” specs. After all, there’s nothing “Elite” about these specs. It’s just a different spec that can grant you a different playstyle.
I request to lower the amount of Hero Points needed to unlock Elite specs to some reasonable number.
Thank you.

Honestly, the 400 skill point cap for your elite spec isn’t too bad since each one is worth 10 points each and if you farmed the ones from tyria, you should have half way there. So at the start, before this expansion was released, things didn’t look too bad. I expected to spend a few days finding the hero points and getting my elite spec. However, once i found out that everything is basically locked behind mastery points, this suddenly became one of the biggest wastes of money i have ever spent. I’m impending grind just so that i can actually enjoy my class’s new profession is just crazy. Not to mention, these aren’t supposed to be the only elite specs introduced into the game. If this ends up being the normal trend for all elite specs, i’m going to have a very hard time actually sticking around to play GW2 and i’m already half considering uninstalling as is and just accepting that i blew $60 on content that i wont end up getting my moneys worth because by the time i unlock what i actually wanted to play, i’ll be so burnt out from grinding that i’ll just sit in a town and look at it for a few moments before logging off…..

Didn’t you know? You have to unlock all masterys to access all HP, then grind the HP, basically doing all the content in the game with your necromancer. That way you won’t get to experience a single new thing in the game with your reaper.

Anet designed this extremely poorly. Should simply be a series of quests per profession to do that is about the specizalation.

I HATE HATE HATE WvW but I’m forced to do that to unlock a Herald so I can actually enjoy the new content with a character I want to play

Kal Spiro.9745:

phys.7689:

Kal Spiro.9745:

Dynasty.5127:

Kal Spiro.9745:

Aidenwolf.5964:

Honestly I feel like this is BWE4. There’s no way if they tested this system in betas it wouldn’t have made it to the live game.

I have 8 level 80 characters (welcome my latest revenant) and I tried Druid on my 100% mapped ranger and only was able to unlock half of the spec, making it unplayable. Now I hate the design of the Druid, I think Anet screwed that one up. Since it’s such a chore to unlock it, I won’t bother with the spec.

Does this make sense to anyone? Show us something, let us try it, then release the game with us expecting to be adventuring on our new toys and then tell us we need to complete the content on our old specs to unlock the new one?

How it is unplayable, exactly? You get the heal, and I assume at least one of the skills, plus the staff. You get the specral mode just by fitting the trait line, what else do you need to be able to play it? Not to be able to play it fully, but to be able to play it at all?

Pretty sure it’s playable, you just want the whole thing.

You want to know what isn’t playable until it’s done? Herald, because at least for all the other classes you can fit other skills in until you can get the ones you want. Herald can’t do that at all, so until it’s complete the Glint line is only partially functional.

Many people tried pointing this out, you were to busy being ignorant to them to notice it seems.

No one pointed anything out, because until just today no one actually knew precisely how it would even work. My plan had been to unlock herald then put all my points into the skills, having a completely unfilled trait line isn’t ideal, but it’s not bad if I have the skills to go with it. Now that it’s clear how the system actually works it’s clear that Herald, exclusively, is not entirely functional until all 400 points are spent into it.

Only now, after the information is known to be true is it fair to make that claim. It was clear, though, that Herald was always going to be some amount of a problem because no Revenant could come into the game with any extra points.

This isn’t about Herald, this is about Druid, and all the other elites and anyone claiming that the elite is unplayable because they couldn’t completely fill it out immediately. That is entirely untrue.

Scrapper is tied heavily to skills daredevils dodges are gm traits.
Essentially if your traits mattered you are kitten , if your good utilities mattered you are kitten .

But that was the design intention. That you must heavily invest time in hot for progress.

The system would probably be ok if they didnt make masteries a progressive grind.

In other news does mastery earning feel slow and grindy after the first couple ones?

Daredevil and Scrapper are the only ones I have slotted right now, and it’s just what I expected. Not using staff and utilities on Daredevil, I’m doing it for the extra endurance. And yes I want the grand master, but it doesn’t ruin the character just because I don’t have it yet, it’ll just be that much better when I do. Still a fully functional thief. On Scrapper I’m just running the Hammer, which I have at one point into it. Still a fully functional engineer, though.

so your saying, that an extra endurance bar is the main point of DD?
you realize the acrobatic line essentially gives you more endurance via feline grace and endless stamina?

You basically are a kitten thief.

also, last i played engineer, the point was utilities and trait use.
using the same utilities basically makes you a gimpier version of an old engineer, cause you have key traits missing

Couple of points up front: I intend to play all of the content. On all of my alts. I don’t want everything handed to me on a silver platter. I don’t even object to the cost given the value of hero challenges in HOT. So all the tryhards and whiteknights above and just pound sand about that stuff.

I just want to know is why didn’t they simply cut the elite specialization into 2 lines – one line for traits and one line for skills? Maybe put the weapons/weapon skins etc on the traits line and the armor skins on the skills line. Two hundred points per line. That way veteran players who have ground through world completion can fully open either the skills or the traits and use them. Experiment with them as they go through the new content and the old content they revisit during their routines. Those points would be meaningfully spent and change the experience for the player. Every veteran player that dumps 200 points into an elite specialization now gets pretty much nothing for it. Maybe you can use the weapon (if you don’t really need the synergies between traits and/or skills to make the weapon worth using), or maybe one of the skills if it fills a niche in their current build, but no one in their right mind would purposely chose to try and use a truncated/kitten trait line that ends long before reaching Grandmaster.

Case that makes my point like a nail gun shot between the eyes: Daredevil (admittedly Herald is another good one). ANet “cleverly” locked the elite specialization mechanic into the three final Grandmaster Traits. The 1 extra dodge is a crappier version of an old pre-June nerf Acrobatics Adept trait Feline Grace and only the most ardent fanboys think that 1 extra dodge mostly useable at the start of the fight qualifies and acceptable elite specialization mechanic. Bet you can’t guess where those Grandmaster traits are in purchase order. So its pretty much ~375 points in at least before you would consider playing with the Daredevil elite.

I just don’t see what was gained by the structure they chose. Is it just an incentive to play the content? If so, first, are they that insecure about the quality of the content? Second, wouldn’t locking either the skills or the traits (depending on player choice) behind 200 additional hero points that had be ground through HOT provide the same incentive?

This just feels like another bad management / implementation decision. Which, on some level I’ve come to be resigned to enduring where ANet is concerned.

binidj.5734:

To everyone defending ANets ridiculous decision and telling the rest of us that we want to have everything on a plate and if this were any other game we’d have to grind ten more levels:

We would be ECSTATIC if all we had to do was play for ten levels, or even twenty, in fact pretty much any amount of levels. If we needed to gain levels to unlock eSpecs that would be the best thing ever (even if tomes didn’t count) because we could just play the game as you so sanctimoniously keep telling us.

I defy you to find one person on this thread who wouldn’t be happy to exchange levels for hero points. Just one. Go ahead.

You are wasting your time. Some White Knight is gonna just jump in here and say… Me ! :-)

Osu.6307:

Hilarious. Nobody would be QQing if they were actually leveling another 10 levels while they did the new pve content like in EVERY OTHER mmo. At least Anet’s way lets us keep our gear.

I would rather do that and have to farm new gear than have the current situation. That way I’d at least be able to just level up by playing the game normally.

I don’t think they thought about it enough, honestly. Having a character with 100% world should be enough to unlock every skill in the elite spec. Only roughly unlocks half of it, though. Bit disappointed.

This is just flat out annoying and pointless.

Spambot.3625:

Ansau.7326:

This hero point system is just absurd.
First, each elite specialization needs too much points to be unlocked, really 60 to just unlock it and 400 to get everything?
Second, it’s not account bound… What the heck were you thinking?
Third, to get hero points you just need to grind, yes grind map completions, grind EOTM zerg…

I’ve calculated that to unlock an entire elite specialization per character requires about 100 WvW levels and 2000 badges.

For people who has alts it’s just a suicide mission.

Anet and devs, you really need to tone down A LOT the hero points required.

no its actually good, you shouldnt be able to progress your character instantly but rather have to put work into it

what gw2 was lacking was character progression, this is one step into forward by anet, loving it

1. People already put work into progressing their characters, it was called map completion and both anet and you white knights are keen to devalue it.

2. Masteries were supposed to be the progression, not elite specs.

This hero point system is just absurd.
First, each elite specialization needs too much points to be unlocked, really 60 to just unlock it and 400 to get everything?
Second, it’s not account bound… What the heck were you thinking?
Third, to get hero points you just need to grind, yes grind map completions, grind EOTM zerg…

I’ve calculated that to unlock an entire elite specialization per character requires about 100 WvW levels and 2000 badges.

For people who has alts it’s just a suicide mission.

Anet and devs, you really need to tone down A LOT the hero points required.

I’m really confused why my level 80 w/ 100% GW2 map completion doesn’t have enough hero points to unlock everything.

Terrible design, and even worse implementation. All the open world pvers that think working for something means leaving the content (wvw, spvp, fractals, dungeons) that you enjoy doing in order to unlock something that should be baseline in the expansion is absolute nonsense. I don’t play a game to work hard, that’s what I have a job for, I play to have fun.

They took our excess Skill Points and gave us Spirit Shards.

Solution:
Let us turn in Spirit Shards for Hero Points. Done, easy.

So much for thinking this would be sensible and that the math would have made it possible… so much stuff is locked behind high-end masteries that it feels like I will never be Reaper/Harald/Druid by the end of the year… I think it is time to just play Halloween and forget the HoT area’s.

this is the poorest design I’ve ever encountered in an mmo. If the design intent was to annoy the crap out of players then mission accomplished.

I’ll finish my ranger because I’m halfway there, then do Revenant and I’ll leave the rest to sit there.

I will not invest anymore $ on gems/gold for the three other 80s I have until this is changed.

Omega Zoa.3859:

DeceiverX.8361:

Lazy? BS. How many hours a week do you work? I bought this game because it could still be fun with a packed schedule and not leave me in the dust as a consequence for my life taking priority and requiring most of my time and effort.

I work about 38-46 hours a week, will work more with Christmas coming up with peak. I never claimed you as a person are lazy I ment in game, the whole concept of unlocking perks for your class is too hard please give it to me on a silver plate is dumb..plus this is a free mmo..not like you are forced to squeeze in 40 hours of gameplay a week to get your months pay, slow and steady, what’s the rush?

I’d love ~40 hour work weeks again. To put it simply, my free time to play usually hovers about fifteen hours per week, which is often spent doing things like… laundry and cooking. Some weekends I get to indulge more, but unfortunately this isn’t common.

And that’s it; when I have the time to entertain myself and indulge in playing video games, I don’t want to have to work in the game to get to the fun parts. If I wanted to work to get to the “fun parts” of things, I’d just spend all of the rest of the time I have working to retire sooner. And even further, I do like to do other things with my free time than dedicate myself to a single online game.

And then, being an old person at the end of things doesn’t really sound like fun, either.

While yes, there should be a certain amount of “work” for things – accomplishments, titles, skins, and the likes – this game was designed around play-ability being number one and the achievements as mentioned above being nothing but achievements, which were intended to let some people go as far as they want to, and play the game in any way they wish to get to those goals in due time. I’d like to think of unlocking things being more appropriate to aesthetics and minor details rather than preventing access to an entire way of playing said content.

While I’d be okay with 400 HP to unlock the specializations account-wide, it’s just the need to put forth such an immense effort per character feels completely unnecessary and arbitrarily labor/time-intensive, not to mention account-based systems would scale better into the future with yet-released specializations. It’s not like the story progression gives any reason for the specializations to be unlocked, either. The gating is just arbitrary for people to be locked into playing the new content.

well looking at the interactive trailer… it says masteries is their new progression system, it seems they again did the same thing they did with the faq… making it sound like masteries are for progression and the elites are for getting a new playstyle.

also about working for (fully) unlocking the elites… thats not what people have problems with, its the way you HAVE to unlock them, you cant do it by exploring and mastering your class in the old world, you have to do jungle heropoints to get it done. and again, you cant chose in what order you want to progress, cant skipp runes/skins or whatever is mixed in there, what are they mixed in there for anyways?? you have a fixed path to unlocking your skills and masteries, and you cant chose one over the other.

I’ve decided that the anger I feel is not productive. I will play as and when I see fit, and that will certainly be less now. If I’m having fun and progressing, I’ll play a lot. If only one of those, I’ll play a little. If neither, I’ll leave completely. Raging (as I and many others have done) is probably futile. The almighty bottom line is all that matters to A-Net in the end, so I won’t be buying gems again until I’m happy.

Would like to point out that this thread is rapidly approaching the number of views that most patch note threads have, and that talking in chat so far has yielded around only one in five people actually knowing about this, with around 3 of 5 usually responding with “that’s stupid” or similar responses.

@Pope:

Whether or not people leave, I don’t know. But I mean grocery stores could decide to mark up prices by 500%. I mean, nobody needs luxuries/snack foods or pre-prepared meals, no? The money spent on doritos in the past could have gone towards more ingredients to make dinner with. It wouldn’t make their customers very happy if they did this, though, but people would still probably buy food for three meals a day to satisfy their hunger, when in reality they can sustain themselves just fine on only a few hundred calories per day.

And if they realize they’re hurting people? Well, you’re basically saying it wouldn’t be justified to reduce prices because people would complain that they “wasted money on overpriced food in the past.”

That’s effectively your analogy. Exaggerated, slightly. But ethics-wise, it’s pretty much identical. It’s not that the sky is falling; it’s that this is just blatantly screwing people over for no real reason and a portion of their customer base is upset about it.

In another context, why did “the 99%” get so upset? It’s not like “the 1%” are that rich. Maybe those scumbag wanting things on sliver platters should have just worked harder and dealt with their problems instead of whining about any potential legitimate inhibitions. Not that I agree with the mentality in full, but you get the point.

Or maybe you don’t.

I mean, child factory labor wasn’t holding back children from getting an education, right? I mean the world wasn’t suffering from it; the quality of cheap goods was at its best, and there were plenty of well-educated children in the world who grew up to be successful. Right?

</s></rant></dumbstruck>

So, I get that elites are supposed to be worked for, endgame content, progression for a char, yada, yada.

If we need to play through the jungle in order to fully use the elite spec, then once the jungle content is done and we’ve got the spec, what content exactly are we supposed to use the elite on? Seems like at this point, everything will have been done until the next expac content….

ArchonWing.9480:

One thing I don’t appreciate is some of the posters being accused of not wanting to “work” and “play the game”, especially when it’s defining “the game” as pve.

The game isn’t just about pve. Hey, let’s make it so that to unlock it, you have to do PvP, WvW, and PvE on every single character. What? You wanted stuff handed to you? Afraid of the challenge?

How many people were complaining about having to do WvW for map completion? And hell, I agreed with not forcing PvE’rs to WvW, because you know I had some degree of respect for their playstyle; unlike a lot of posts in this thread or forum that can’t even seem to think of anyone approaching the game differently. I mean, just look at how many random things people consider to be “exploits”. “Stacking in a dungeon is an exploit, because that’s not how I do it!”

I certainly didn’t appreciate pve elitists condescending to them, especially when the difference was the ability to follow a tag and blob down some enemy keep or pay gems to transfer to a stacked server. Sorry, I’m sure I’m not the only WvW’er that rolls their eyes when people tell their cute stories of getting to that Vista in Overlook. Give me a break. And hey, Anet saw the light there. And they thought of a WvW alternative too, so I’ll definitely credit them with that.

But it’s clear some elitists that think that grinding away in their form of progression is the only way worth playing in the game, and everyone else is entitled and spoiled when arguing that anyone who regularly plays WvW to be entitled to any degree is a horrific joke. Oh, and by the way, hopefully some of you discontent folks will raise a glass for this, but this aint just update content— we paid for this so it isn’t a charity case either.

And as I’ve said before, attacking someone personally, because they don’t want conform to your kitten gamer code is not really relevant to the discussion. I mean please, it’s not a high horse one is riding; we don’t have mounts in this game.

No, we are just entitled, spoiled, kitten brats (yes I did type kitten), that want everything handed to us on silver platters with silver spoons (why silver? Why not gold? Actually make that white gold for me please), while we sit on mounds of cash, never knowing a hardship, never worrying about anything except having to actually play a game.

If someone missed the sarcasm in the above, I’m sorry text doesn’t relay it well, but that is dripping with it so much, that someone on lsd could taste the sarcasm. It is probably bitter.

It’s been said countless times, but I’ll reiterate it: We do not expect, nor do we actually want, to be handed everything and not have to ‘play the game’. I too would say if you don’t want to play the game then why are you here (here as in the game, not the forum as this is obviously not playing gw2, just thought I should also state that). But, based on what Anet implied, many expected to be able to play HoT as the elite spec (and really, only having the minor trait is not what many would consider playing as the elite spec, and sure wasn’t the expectation, but apparently yes, that is what Anet considers it)

Whether you agree with the new legendaries requiring sPvP or not, I’d bet 99% see that as optional, not as a core part of HoT. Elite specs, on the other hand, were a big part of HoT. They were billed as a core part of it. Some people don’t seem to believe this… They should go back and watch the reveal of HoT. Reaper and Druid were made out to be a big deal.

One thing I don’t appreciate is some of the posters being accused of not wanting to “work” and “play the game”, especially when it’s defining “the game” as pve.

The game isn’t just about pve. Hey, let’s make it so that to unlock it, you have to do PvP, WvW, and PvE on every single character. What? You wanted stuff handed to you? Afraid of the challenge?

How many people were complaining about having to do WvW for map completion? And hell, I agreed with not forcing PvE’rs to WvW, because you know I had some degree of respect for their playstyle; unlike a lot of posts in this thread or forum that can’t even seem to think of anyone approaching the game differently. I mean, just look at how many random things people consider to be “exploits”. “Stacking in a dungeon is an exploit, because that’s not how I do it!” “Maize Balm farming is an exploit, remove it!”; hell I despise the later concept, but I don’t care enough to comment on it that much.

I certainly didn’t appreciate pve elitists condescending to them, especially when the difference was often the ability to follow a tag and blob down some enemy keep or pay gems to transfer to a stacked server. Sorry, I’m sure I’m not the only WvW’er that rolls their eyes when people tell their cute stories of getting to that Vista in Overlook being such a difficult odyssey. Give me a break. And hey, Anet saw the light there. And they thought of a WvW alternative too, so I’ll definitely credit them with that.

But it’s clear some elitists that think that grinding away in their form of progression is the only way worth playing in the game, and everyone else is entitled and spoiled when arguing that anyone who regularly plays WvW to be entitled to any degree is a horrific joke. Oh, and by the way, hopefully some of you discontent folks will raise a glass for this, but this aint just update content— we paid for this so it isn’t a charity case either.

And as I’ve said before, attacking someone personally, because they don’t want conform to your kitten gamer code is not really relevant to the discussion. I mean please, it’s not a high horse one is riding; we don’t have mounts in this game.