Guild Wars 2 Heart of Thorns Review in Progress Part 2 .

As of tomorrow Heart of Thorns will have been out for three weeks, and by now even the most casual of players should have had time to experience some of the new content.

Although I only play a few hours a week, I have completed the first three instances in my HoT personal story, explored Verdant Brink and Auric Basin, and finally mastered using updrafts on my glider. I have the first four talents for my Scrapper, and have participated in many, many events. I feel I have a pretty good handle on HoT content now, even if I haven’t experienced everything personally yet.

I don’t like writing negative things about games because it isn’t very fun for me or for you. I like to like games, and I assume you’re reading this column because you enjoy Guild Wars 2! However, I have to be honest and share that while I am enjoying a great many things in this expansion, there is one thing that is starting to wear on me: the difficulty level.

 

The Casual Audience

As a super casual player, one of the things I enjoyed about Guild Wars 2 was that it wasn’t taxing to play. I could run around and explore things, or join big world boss events, or jump in an activity, or hang around Lion’s Arch and craft up a storm, and I could do all of these things with relative ease. Oh sure, I might run into a monster that killed me, or fall off a cliff and die, but death was rare and hardly a setback.

I mistakenly bumbled into Auric Basin on that first day of the expansion expecting a similar experience, and as we all know now instead the content has been tuned to be more unforgiving and the terrain is more confusing to navigate.

And that’s okay – ArenaNet wanted to create a different experience for players in these Heart of Thorns zones and it’s our job to pick ourselves up, dust off the dirt, and figure out how to change our strategy to get the job done. I understand why the content is different, and in turn I’ve gotten much better at using many different kits to maximize DPS in an encounter, dodging out of the way of damage, and using timing to heal myself more effectively.

And yet I still die. A lot. Like, a lot a lot. As someone who is relatively new to Guild Wars 2 but quite experienced with MMOs in general, I keep thinking to myself, “Is the game supposed to play this way?”

 

Where Am I.. Oops, I’m Dead

Now that I’ve seen Auric Basin, I am even more surprised that ANet chose to lead the expansion with Verdant Brink. It is an incredibly frustrating zone to navigate, particularly with low Mastery points.

Even with bouncing mushrooms, updrafts, and all waypoints unlocked, it is still surprisingly difficult to get to a specific point on the map. If the point is above me in altitude, I have no idea until I’m right in front of my target if there’s a handy updraft that will get me where I want to go. Based on the map, I have only a rough idea of when I will have to glide or whether I can get there at all without running out of glider endurance.

The result is that I end up winging my routes (no glider pun intended) and just jumping and running when it feels right. And if I die or end up too low to the churning roots, I have to waypoint back and start trying to find my way all over again only this time remembering to zag when I last zigged.

Gliding is awesome, and Verdant Brink has some remarkable scenery. It is an excellent zone if you just want to wander and explore, but terrible if you’re trying to get promptly to a specific location.

 

What Is That.. Oops, I’m Dead

Many of the events and hero point encounters in Heart of Thorns were designed to be accomplished by a group, but even with one they’re difficult. There are a number of Wyvern bosses that I’ve taken on a half dozen times at least but still haven’t see die, although I die a few times. (I still haven’t been able to find the Wyvern Patriarch spawn point, but I expect he’ll kill me too.)

Thank goodness for checkpoint death runs, or I would never complete a Personal Story instance. More than once I’ve taken a wrong turn and ended up in a tunnel being clubbed to death by sentient mushrooms, or had a sneaky Champion mob run over my head, or picked off by a pack of Pocket Raptors. Running to open new waypoints results in death roughly 50% of the time I attempt it. And man, it’s a good thing I can checkpoint zerg Personal Story fights or I’d never get through those!

All these deaths would be slightly more palatable if I had any idea of why I died, but the zerg-happy, effects-spamming design of major encounters, combined with the kit button mashing of good Engineer DPS, makes it extremely difficult to tell why I got “one shot”, what’s going on in the encounter, and how I can avoid it happening again.

In any other MMO, this is the point in the expansion where I’d be telling myself that it’s okay because I’m new and I’ll last a lot longer later when I have better gear, but in Guild Wars 2 there is no “gearing up” process. I’m already in Rares with a sprinkling of Exotics, so while there are some gear upgrades available it will make a negligible difference.

To be clear, I’m not saying that ArenaNet made a mistake when designing the difficulty level of the new Heart of Thorns content. They know their market and their players far better than I do. But from my perspective as someone who is relatively new to the game and enjoys open world content best of all, the repeated dying has become more than a little off-putting.

For now, here in Week 3 of the expansion, the difficulty level still seems a bit too high.