Idea for a new Core Tyria mastery.

Let me start things off by saying that there are people who absolutely love doing world completion. Those people grind hours upon hours on their alts to get that percentage meter to 100%, and they genuinely enjoy it. Or maybe they don't, but like crafting legendaries so they have no choice if they want their Gifts. However, I think it's safe to say that these people are in the very little minority.

Now let's talk about the majority. Judging by my own experiences, my friends, my guildies and thousands of forum/reddit posts I've browsed through, most players seem to have 1-2 world completions on average. And most people seem to agree that world completion is quite tedious, some even say it's outright horrible. And those same people also seem to agree on one last thing: the reason for the tediousness are Renown Hearts. Now, what can we do about it?

Don't get me wrong; I like hearts. They are good content. I like doing little chores that fill up a meter, and eventually get a pop-up chest and some rewards. It's nice, simple and relaxing. However, it stops being nice as soon as you've completed a few, open up your map, and see there's still 290 hearts to go. And after those few you have done, you'll start to notice that the actual chores don't have much variety; it's always the same kill/fetch/press f. These little things are what have stopped me and many others (again, I believe I'm speaking for a majority here) from doing world completion more than once, if at all. Besides the hearts, I really like world completion. I enjoy exploring the game's beautiful environments, catching PoIs and vistas, and doing the occasional hero challenge. Now that feels like true exploring. But after you've grinded through 300+ mostly repetitive, boring and unrewarding hearts, you're going to think twice if you want to start from the scratch on another character.

So, our problem in a nutshell is that we've got a beautiful world out there, but exploring it is not enough. We need to complete over 300 hearts that don't offer us much content- or reward-wise, but instead forces us to run around for hours killing minor mobs and spamming F, eyes locked in that tiny golden meter that fills up painfully slowly, just for the sake. Personally, I feel like exploring all PoI's, vistas, waypoints and hero challenges is time-consuming enough even without hearts, and the whole heart system could go out of the window. Or simply deleting half of them would already be a big improvement, since most of them are repetitive anyway. But I feel like this would be quite a drastic solution to most of the playerbase, so it got me thinking: what if there was a simple mastery that could be unlocked after your first WC, that would allow you to complete hearts, say 50% faster?

World completion is a lenghty and time-consuming project, and completing the hearts is about 50-60% of that entire goal (and I believe most will agree with me when I say they are also the most boring part of world completion). Masteries are account-wide, so after your first initial WC, you'd have it unlocked for your alts to complete their completion runs a little faster. Call it "Renowned Explorer" or whatever, and with the mastery unlocked, you make 50% faster progress on renown hearts. And there you have it: hearts are now faster to complete, tediousness goes down, happiness goes up, no harm done. Yes, you get your gifts a little faster, but it's not like this would make them FAST to obtain. It's still going to be more than enough hours of grind, but much less painful. After all, hearts are grindy, time-consuming, unrewarding, and repetitive, so why not make them a little less horrible?

There's been a lot of criticism on the repeatable hearts of LS3 & PoF. I feel like Anet got these right though; instead of 10+, we have only a handful on each map. And these hearts actually offer something useful in return, unlike the Core Tyria hearts. I agree with most that the vendors should be left accessible after the first completion, but that's another subject.

Anyway, that's my rant. I'd like to hear your opinions; do you think the hearts should be toned down, some of them removed, or are you happy with them the way they are?

One of these days someone will come to these boards and request something because they want it, without feeling the need to claim to speak for a majority of players.

Some day.

Still, I could get behind this idea.

Oh, I can play with this...

• Asuran Negotiator - 635,000 Exp Required - 1 Mastery Point - Learn to haggle with Asuran gatekeepers. Waypoints cost 30% less.
• Scholar of World Geography - 1,905,000 Exp Required - 3 Mastery points - Map Fog is removed when you enter a map, showing the location of all POI, Waypoints, Renown Hearts, Mastery Points and Vista.
• Grand Adventurer - 2,540,000 - 6 Mastery Points - Shows the location of all active events on the main map.
• Renown Explorer - 4,445,000 - 9 Mastery points - Hearts are completed 40% faster.

Total Experience Needed: 9,525,000Mastery Points Needed: 19

how to ruin exploration 2.0

TBH I mostly want this for LWS3 and PoF hearts. But having a mastery that makes you complete hearts faster would be great.

I don't agree with @Chickenooble.5014 idea at all though. Removing fog and automatically unlocking PoIs just from entering a map? That's absurd.

It could be as simple as a 3 tier mastery

• Each action contributes 10% more to a heart completion
• Each action contributes 25% more to a heart completion
• Each action contributes 50% more to a heart completion (total, not cumulative)

I agree, Hearts can get very annoying due to how long it takes to complete most of them.

@Chickenooble.5014 said:Oh, I can play with this...

• Asuran Negotiator - 635,000 Exp Required - 1 Mastery Point - Learn to haggle with Asuran gatekeepers. Waypoints cost 30% less.
• Scholar of World Geography - 1,905,000 Exp Required - 3 Mastery points - Map Fog is removed when you enter a map, showing the location of all POI, Waypoints, Renown Hearts, Mastery Points and Vista.
• Grand Adventurer - 2,540,000 - 6 Mastery Points - Shows the location of all active events on the main map.

I like ideas 1 and 3.

• Renown Explorer - 4,445,000 - 9 Mastery points - POI are automatically discovered in each map; Hearts are completed 40% faster.

The Hearts related idea is okay. It's a nice, not-too-drastic QoL improvement. But PoI autodiscover is too much imo. Together with Mastery no. 2 it would kill the exploration. It's also a slap in the face to those ppl who spent their time running around for hours trying to find and unlock every single PoI.

My 2c: Showing the location of all active events on the map should be baseline. Often, we get a message that there's an event nearby but with no indication where.

@Shirlias.8104 said:how to ruin exploration 2.0

If you were commenting to my post, hearts hardly count as exploration. You don't explore anything; you grind unrewarding content for hours. Most of them are copies of each other with a few more unique ones here and there. Getting rid of half of these wouldn't hurt anyone, and world completion would turn into a much less tedious task. One solution would be to keep them there, but instead of completing all of them, you had to complete X amount of hearts to get map completion. Say, a zone has 13 hearts, and you need to complete 8 to get 100%. You could pick from any of them, as long as 8 are completed. But adding a new mastery sounds like a smoother process.

Also, I never claimed to speak for the majority. I simply said that I believe I do, and also mentioned the sources from where my beliefs are coming from.

I'm 400% against this.Only because I've completed Core map 4 times (PoF 2 times so far and HoT 3 1/2 times so far).I'm one of the minority here that like going through map completion (minus HoT) and rather not have this.Can't say it's optional either because this would just lock me away from spirit shards once again if I don't complete it.

So no. No. And... oh yeah... no.You know which hearts are annoying to do? The PoF ones. The Core ones go by really fast already. The PoF ones takes a long time to finish and the problem is they keep restarting daily.The core don't have this issue except like what... a hand ful of them? 4 or so? I know one bad one is that stealth one in Ascalon that I can't remember as it takes a while to do.Or the one in Harathi highlands with the targets. Like yeah it's easy but it takes too long at time.Majority of hearts go by quickly.

@Ashen.2907 said:One of these days someone will come to these boards and request something because they want it, without feeling the need to claim to speak for a majority of players.

Everyone agrees with the sentiment ;)

If this was ever introduced, I personally think the mastery line should be gated behind having atleast 1 character with 100% map completion.And possibly have the "tiers" of the mastery line be for:

• Vanilla
• Hot and LS maps
• Pof and LS maps

And only a flat % increase to heart progression rate that you need to be able to toggle on or off.

That being said, this kind of feature is at the very bottom of things I'd like to see added/changed, so wont bother me the slightest bit if it never happened.

The POI thing that I proposed was just something to make the final tier more appealing. In actuality, I didn't care much for it in my initial suggestion and wouldn't care if everyone said it should not be there. Edited my initial suggestion.

IMO, the idea behind the Hearts was never to do them, rather to keep people in place long enough for them to see an event in the area the Hearts are in. Which would be why, in the great majority of maps, doing nearby dynamic events help with Heart completition.

Looking from AreaNet's point of view: without something to make people remain in a given place for a while, how would players find dynamic events in an area? One strategy would be to have an event happening there all the time, which is something HoT does well but that wouldn't work all the time. Another strategy is to have something like Hearts. Those allow ArenaNet to craft events that begin without a previous event in the same area, knowing more people would find them other than those who happen to be passing nearby at the time.

Allowing people to see all events happening in the area from the map would be another way of achieving something similar, which is why I think there are technical limitations preventing ArenaNet from doing so (otherwise it would be baseline for everyone). It would be something great to have, if it's possible within GW2's engine.

I mean I'm pretty sure they admitted at one point that this is why hearts were introduced in the first place, because their dynamic event systems weren't as good at launch as they had hoped it would be, and hearts filled in the gap while you, unknowingly, waited for a dynamic event to start.

@Erasculio.2914 said:IMO, the idea behind the Hearts was never to do them, rather to keep people in place long enough for them to see an event in the area the Hearts are in. Which would be why, in the great majority of maps, doing nearby dynamic events help with Heart completition.

Looking from AreaNet's point of view: without something to make people remain in a given place for a while, how would players find dynamic events in an area? One strategy would be to have an event happening there all the time, which is something HoT does well but that wouldn't work all the time. Another strategy is to have something like Hearts. Those allow ArenaNet to craft events that begin without a previous event in the same area, knowing more people would find them other than those who happen to be passing nearby at the time.

Allowing people to see all events happening in the area from the map would be another way of achieving something similar, which is why I think there are technical limitations preventing ArenaNet from doing so (otherwise it would be baseline for everyone). It would be something great to have, if it's possible within GW2's engine.

@OriOri.8724 said:I mean I'm pretty sure they admitted at one point that this is why hearts were introduced in the first place, because their dynamic event systems weren't as good at launch as they had hoped it would be, and hearts filled in the gap while you, unknowingly, waited for a dynamic event to start.

The problem is most cases (I can't say all as I'm not in all of your heads... or am I?!), people WAIT for those events because it makes the hearts easier and less annoying.Like while now I use the Wiki for the ingredients for that one heart on the southeast part of the map of Bloodtide (the one with the Norn/Sylvari couple guarding the little area from Risen)... me and many others would just wait for the Risen invasion before to get the heart done in a less annoying way.Same can be said I've seen for certain ones even in PoF like the one where you have to either clean the coffins (I don't know why they're called caskets... they're not caskets... it's like... nevermind... forgot not everyone is into the dead as me............. actually seeing they're kind of egyptian related shouldn't it be a sarcopha... NEVERMIND!) I've seen people usually wait for the trial as they usually get the hearts done faster that way as well.

Some hearts just seem more tedious than others, but some have little tricks to go by quickly.