I got a solid start in Heart of Thorns this week. I started the main story and ventured through the first two zones: Verdant Brink and Auric Basin. Neither of which I’ve fully explored yet. The story picks up right where the Living World Season 2 leaves off, naturally. There’s enough of a recap where I would have probably figured out what was going on if I didn’t go through Season 2 but I’m sure glad I did.
The first thing I noticed about this expansion? It’s freaking hard! Well, harder than Central Tyria was, for sure, and a bit harder than Dry Top and the Silverwastes. I did a quick Google search to see if this was the case or I was rusty after picking the game back up after a couple months. Google confirmed that Heart of Thorns is, indeed, harder than the core story. Apparently, it used to be even harder too! But I don’t mind, it’s forcing me to pay attention to what each new enemy does. Thematically, it makes sense too because we’re dropped in behind enemy lines on their home turf.
The zones are beautiful. I have a so, so, many screenshots! I really dig the untamed forest vibe with the lush greens and the tree filtered sunlight….amazing. Plus we’ve got frogs everywhere. Big frogs. Small frogs. Tree Frogs!
I’ve always heard how wonderful HoT’s vertical maps are. I thought I had some idea of what a vertical map was. Let me tell you, Verdant Brink was rough before I unlocked the gliding mastery. One minute I’d be happily cruising down a hill on my raptor, the next minute I’d be falling off a cliff to my death. It certainly made those first few moments in the jungle memorable.
I like the way the mastery system is laid out here. In the base game, the masteries nice, ok Auto Looting is very nice, but they felt like something to passively unlock while I was doing other things: i.e the main story post 80 or the living world stuff.
Masteries in Heart of Thorns, at least so far, unlock more features for getting around. Gliding helps you get places you couldn’t before, learning how to use the bouncing mushrooms let’s you get places you couldn’t before, the Exalted lore helps you navigate the world. Actually, I’m not sure on that last one, it least let’s you use the teleports in Tarir, which saves a few staircases!
I’m looking forward to getting that next mastery unlock to explore more than. I feel more inclined to explore in this expansion. That could be because I ran through Central Tyria so many times before but, I’m taking my time here.
In addition to masteries, I also like that the story (again at least so far) is broken up into a few missions and then a pause to unlock a new mastery. This has given me a chance to get familiar with the maps, hone my skills against the enemy types in the jungle, and run around and participate in events. It’s has some nice pacing to it, I haven’t felt like I’ve been itching to get back to the story before I’ve unlocked the next mastery.
I had read that the Hero Points were geared more towards multiple people completing them than the hero points in Central Tyria. They do provide ten hero points instead of one which might explain that. I thought I would have a problem completing these, but every time I started one up, there was always one or two people who came along and helped out. I’m looking forward to unlocking the Dragonhunter Elite spec and playing around with that!
Many Welps 
I remember the difficulty spike of Heart of Thorns well, but also the beauty of the areas and what a step forward it felt for the game. Not that the ‘classic’ areas were any slouches, but still.
GW2 is still one I’d like to catch up on, someday… Perhaps. But I’m also in quite a weird space when it comes to thinking about MMOs and whether or not I have any interest in them any more full stop, so who knows!
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I loved Heart of Thorns. I wrote a whole blog post about how wrong people were when they said it was hard. I found it really comfortable right from the start.
And there is an explanation for that, as I found when I went through it again on a second character. How tough it feels depends to an enormous degree on what class you play. My first time through was with a heal-specced Ranger. Nothing really put him in any great danger, not even packs of raptors. Once the masteries were done to allow even basing gliding he was able to travel about with ease and safety.
Later I took my Elementalist through HoT and it was a very different story. Even so, I still wouldn’t call it “hard” by the standards of general MMO play – just harder than the general face-roll difficulty of GW2.
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