Guild Wars 2: Heart of Thorns Flythrough Video, Mastery System Explained

ArenaNet has published a couple of lengthy blog posts to explain the new Mastery system and the area design philosophy for the Heart of Maguuma. Both the Mastery system and the new area are going to be introduced in the upcoming Heart of Thorns expansion for Guild Wars 2.

Before delving into the write-ups though, here’s a video showcasing the lush jungles of Maguuma:

Here’s a bit on the Mastery system, which will allow a player to continue progression beyond level 80 and acquire new abilities for their entire account:

The ability to train Masteries is unlocked at level 80 for all players that own Heart of Thorns. When this ability is unlocked, your character’s experience bar will change to become a Mastery training bar while in PvE zones. This bar will track your progress on training the Mastery track you currently have selected, showing both the abilities you are training toward and those already earned from the track. To see all your Mastery tracks, spend Mastery points, and change which Mastery you are currently training, click the Mastery training bar to bring up the Mastery tray. Because the Mastery training bar completely replaces the experience bar, players who’ve reached level 80 will no longer gain levels but will instead train Masteries. This means characters that have reached level 80 will no longer gain skill points through leveling. Skill points will be added as rewards across high-level content to offset this change.

To train a specific Mastery track, you must first unlock it by spending Mastery points. Mastery points are awarded for completing various pieces of game content. Things like completing a chapter in your personal story, completing certain achievements, reaching hard-to-find locations, overcoming challenging encounters, excelling at adventures found within the Heart of Maguuma, or earning 100% completion for a map will award Mastery points. Each Mastery point can be earned once per account, so while Mastery points allow you to unlock Mastery tracks, they are also an indicator of how much of the game you’ve experienced. In fact, once you have unlocked the ability to train Masteries, your nameplate will display the number of Mastery points you have gained rather than your level. Mastery points can be gained at any level but cannot be spent until level 80.

Once you’ve unlocked a Mastery track tier with Mastery points, you can begin training that Mastery. Mastery tracks are trained by gaining experience while the Mastery track is slotted on the Mastery training bar. Higher tiers in Mastery tracks require progressively more Mastery points and more experience to fully train.

And a bit on what ArenaNet hopes to accomplish with the new area:

The Living World set the stage for Guild Wars 2: Heart of Thornsâ„¢ in more ways than one. While the story that played out over the course of seasons 1 and 2 set up the awakening of Mordremoth and the story the expansion will tell, the types of maps we added and the stories we told within them have also brought us to where we are with the Heart of Maguuma and the kind of experience the deep jungle will deliver.

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In the deep jungles of Maguuma, you’ll run into similar stories of an even larger scale that occur in secondary phases. For example, the first map you’ll enter in Guild Wars 2: Heart of Thorns will tell the story of some of the survivors of the catastrophic Pact Fleet expedition into the jungle. Through the course of each day, the beleaguered Pact members will try to build up defenses and secure their positions so they have a chance of surviving the night the deadly second phase of this map, when the Mordrem come out in overwhelming numbers.

In the Heart of Maguuma, there are even bigger threats and more epic battles waiting for you. You’ll find maps with a greater replay value and depth of content than anything we’ve put into Guild Wars 2 before, maps that provide a unique experience and multiple layers of gameplay. Rather than a more traditional strategy of rapidly expanding land mass with limited content to fill it, Guild Wars 2: Heart of Thorns will focus less on total land mass in the expansion and will instead focus on depth of content within that gameplay space. Each map will be rich in content, rich in 3-D play space, and very deep in replay value to ultimately provide more gameplay value to our players and not leave an empty wasteland of rarely played content behind.

Finally, it’s worth noting that the developers are planning to stream tomorrow on the game’s official Twitch channel. The stream will showcase the first glimpses of live gameplay for the expansion, and will begin at 8PM GMT/9PM CET/12AM PST/3AM EST:

First Live Gameplay
Players interested in seeing the first live gameplay of Guild Wars 2: Heart of Thorns should tune in to the official Guild Wars 2 livestream show, ‘˜Points of Interest’, this Friday, February 6 from 21:00 CET (20:00 GMT) on www.twitch.tv/guildwars2. Join host Rubi Bayer and expansion content designers Anthony Ordon and Steve Hwang as they journey into the Heart of Maguuma and discuss the new mastery system. Popular streamers Richie ‘˜Bog Otter’ Procopio and Aurora Peachy will also be livestreaming their own special Guild Wars 2 programming before and after ‘˜Points of Interest’, with the pre-show starting at 20:00 CET (19:00 GMT) on the Guild Wars 2 Twitch channel.