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Heart of Thorns thoughts continued
Jul. 31st, 2016 01:29 pmYou know, what I really dislike about HoT is that it isn't fun to solo anymore.
When I started playing GW2, I played with my sister (who doesn't have HoT yet). And that was fun, but I also did tons of content by myself (since I'm way more of an altaholic than she is), and that was still a lot of fun for me for a while: I leveled up three characters to 80 through PvE and had another character to around level 40; I had fun with the Living World content and farming/collecting skins for Fashion Wars 2.
But HoT isn't fun to solo.
In large part, it's because most hero points after Verdant Brink aren't soloable, and even for the metas that I enjoy, like the Octovine in Auric Basin, the feeling that I have to farm them in order to get enough map currencies for what I want is so exhausting that I don't have a lot of interest. Grinding for Mastery EXP is a pain in the neck, as I've mentioned before as well.
The thing is, grinding/farming is fine when you're doing it with people, because you're at least chatting with others while doing a mindless task. (Which is, incidentally, while I could never play grind-heavy MMOs for long, because I never had friends to play with and eventually they would get too tedious.) But considering how much grinding/farming is necessary in HoT—for the Masteries, for the collections—doing all of that solo is a huge pain.
Update: I finally got around to trying out the Tempest. I don't know if it's because I lacked all the traits or had the wrong build, but I found playing a Tempest not terribly much fun. It's not like the Reaper, which is flat-out superior to vanilla Necro, or Chronomancer, which fills in a gap in regular Mesmer gameplay (AoE with Wells and more support options). Maybe I just never realized how much I relied on the Arcane trait line and felt really hobbled without it. Anyway...regular Elementalist is still fun enough for me.
On a more positive note, many (or at least a bunch of) people have complained about the HoT maps running on a time schedule. However...I actually like that they're on a schedule. I can basically look at the time and go into a map to do the meta if I don't want to do all the prep events (which I usually don't want to do unless I need the achievements). I liked the Silverwastes, but the Silverwastes are definitely Taxi Wars 2 if you don't want to do all the fort events. So far, I've found that the Octovine is definitely doable if you show up 10-15 minutes before the boss. Possibly Verdant Brink and Tangled Depths require Taxi Wars for successful metas, but I haven't paid too much attention to the meta there.
When I started playing GW2, I played with my sister (who doesn't have HoT yet). And that was fun, but I also did tons of content by myself (since I'm way more of an altaholic than she is), and that was still a lot of fun for me for a while: I leveled up three characters to 80 through PvE and had another character to around level 40; I had fun with the Living World content and farming/collecting skins for Fashion Wars 2.
But HoT isn't fun to solo.
In large part, it's because most hero points after Verdant Brink aren't soloable, and even for the metas that I enjoy, like the Octovine in Auric Basin, the feeling that I have to farm them in order to get enough map currencies for what I want is so exhausting that I don't have a lot of interest. Grinding for Mastery EXP is a pain in the neck, as I've mentioned before as well.
The thing is, grinding/farming is fine when you're doing it with people, because you're at least chatting with others while doing a mindless task. (Which is, incidentally, while I could never play grind-heavy MMOs for long, because I never had friends to play with and eventually they would get too tedious.) But considering how much grinding/farming is necessary in HoT—for the Masteries, for the collections—doing all of that solo is a huge pain.
Update: I finally got around to trying out the Tempest. I don't know if it's because I lacked all the traits or had the wrong build, but I found playing a Tempest not terribly much fun. It's not like the Reaper, which is flat-out superior to vanilla Necro, or Chronomancer, which fills in a gap in regular Mesmer gameplay (AoE with Wells and more support options). Maybe I just never realized how much I relied on the Arcane trait line and felt really hobbled without it. Anyway...regular Elementalist is still fun enough for me.
On a more positive note, many (or at least a bunch of) people have complained about the HoT maps running on a time schedule. However...I actually like that they're on a schedule. I can basically look at the time and go into a map to do the meta if I don't want to do all the prep events (which I usually don't want to do unless I need the achievements). I liked the Silverwastes, but the Silverwastes are definitely Taxi Wars 2 if you don't want to do all the fort events. So far, I've found that the Octovine is definitely doable if you show up 10-15 minutes before the boss. Possibly Verdant Brink and Tangled Depths require Taxi Wars for successful metas, but I haven't paid too much attention to the meta there.
