Buying mastery points.

It should be possible to use Spirit shards for buying mastery points, and toggle between mastery XP or shards after 80. Nobody thinks it's a big deal when Proof of Heroics are spent on hero points... Missing out on other things they can be spent on is enough sacrifice. The price probably has to be higher than 1:1 to reflect how hard they are to get though.

My main reason for wanting this is that XP stops dead unless you chase MP, which was really annoying for me when I was wasting it. I doubt it's just me.

This sounds like an awful idea. What are you mastering, then?

Sure, if it's gonna be 1K Shards for each mastery point.Otherwise it's fine as it is. Though I don't even have maxed MPs (I despise open-world) it's fine.

I’ve got about 7 thousand Spirit Shards. The top person in gw2efficiency has over 61 thousand. 50% of listed players have 800 or fewer. How many Spirit Shards per Mastery point are you suggesting that wouldn’t be too much for the players with less than 1000 and way to easy for people with thousands?

What? Hero points are different to mastery points. You don't even have to do it ever again, while you have to do HPs on each character

This doesn't make any sense. Especially considering there are over two dozen mastery points more than you'll even need

@GreyWolf.8670 said:This sounds like an awful idea. What are you mastering, then?

If you're getting XP, you're increasing your mastery of something, and it's something you want to do, rather than something you don't.

@Just a flesh wound.3589 said:I’ve got about 7 thousand Spirit Shards. The top person in gw2efficiency has over 61 thousand. 50% of listed players have 800 or fewer. How many Spirit Shards per Mastery point are you suggesting that wouldn’t be too much for the players with less than 1000 and way to easy for people with thousands?

People like you get all MP anyway, and it seems obvious that if people have so many spirit shards, there should be something useful to spend them on.

To figure out what to charge, find out the average time to get a mastery point vs the average time to get a level, then maybe double it as the price of convenience.

I rathsr have something usefull to spend spirit shards on. I'm a fairly lazy person and even i have an excesive amount of mastery points.

And i like there's some progression in the game that requires even a small amount of effort

There already is something useful to spend spirit shards on: https://gw2efficiency.com/currencies/spirit-shards

@"Ayrilana.1396" said:There already is something useful to spend spirit shards on: https://gw2efficiency.com/currencies/spirit-shards

Something *awfully inconvenient and annoying

@derd.6413 said:I rathsr have something usefull to spend spirit shards on. I'm a fairly lazy person and even i have an excesive amount of mastery points.

And i like there's some progression in the game that requires even a small amount of effort

Go do raids then? I have extra MP in Core & PoF, and about 40 to get in HoT which are essentially worthless with the new expansion, were only a timesink before it came out, and even at the time, some of the higher tiers had little value.

@Faffin.6741 said:

@Just a flesh wound.3589 said:I’ve got about 7 thousand Spirit Shards. The top person in gw2efficiency has over

61 thousand

. 50% of listed players have 800 or fewer. How many Spirit Shards per Mastery point are you suggesting that wouldn’t be too much for the players with less than 1000 and way to easy for people with thousands?

No I don’t have all the Mastery points, I’m nowhere near having all and never will have all. But thanks for the vote of confidence no matter how wrong it is. I have a lot of Spirit Shards because I’ve played a lot of hours before there were Masteries (about 4000 Spirit Shard), I do the daily each day (3 Spirit Shards) and I’ve gotten the rest from drops or from Tomes of Knowledge, of which I currently have about 500 sitting in my bank (I didn’t count those but those give a Spirit Shard also if used on a level 80 and many people have hundreds).

You seem to have suggested this because one person reported trouble getting Mastery points in one section of the game. That’s hardly a reason to redo a core mechanic of progression and change it into something completely trivial to get.

Tyria mastery points aside, they are all quite easy to get and theres more points then masteries to spend on.

To the op, dont give up, theres more than enough mastery points.

Mastery points were intended to get you to play the content, rather than simply grinding to the level cap and complaining about it, which was the problem back in 2012. Considering their purpose, it's unlikely that they'd add an alternative like this, especially one that could be banked ahead of time. If they were just going to have you level for it, they'd simply drop the mastery point requirements, increase the needed experience and treat mastery points as 100k XP boosts. Keeping their purpose however, if they were going to do something, it'd probably be a type of daily to keep you coming back over several days per point.

I don't have all the HoT mastery points, therefore I refuse to spend any time in HoT. I'd rather earn spirit shards in core and PoF.

The surplus spirit shard problem can't to the solution to EVERY shortage of something else...... Its this thought process that lead to the current karma prices for collections.

But the bigger flaw with this whole idea is how Mastery points are directly tied to the game's achievement system, and only meant to be done once. POF is also incredibly generous with Mastery points, and only has one instance where you have to side track from your current story location to chase down an extra MP. Aside from that, you get everything you need to complete the story. The Jackal is completely optional to this, and only needed if you are going for further Achievements or Collections.

Proof of Heroics only came about because of the Especs. Reaching level 80 gives you enough Hero points to unlock all your Core Spec; but Especs were originally intended to be unlocked via PvE only. This created a real problem for WvW players, with how server coverage and score ranking demands a substantial amount of time commitment that is mutually exclusive to being able to PvE activities. Because Especs are part of WvW's meta simply by being available there, WvW and PvP players needed something to make sure those specs are unlocked on day 1, so no server would have too huge an advantage over the others due to build dynamics. Proof of Heroics fills that gap.... but only because the Devs were refusing to come up with a bespoke build system for WvW like they did with PvP. And the benefits of WvW being able to benefit PvE, while welcomed, is entirely incidental.

Getting back to the original topic, this proposed solution with Spirit shards is the same trap we fell into with Ascended gear. By thinking you kill 2 birds with one stone (a surplus of something with a shortage of something) when it keeps getting applied to things people want, it eventually becomes 2 shortages, and only really benefits people who were there early enough to amass a surplus in the first place. Ask any New player what they're biggest shortage is, and its mostly things veteran players from before POF have been sitting on for upwards of a year.

There was another conversation about spirit shards; and one thing I was considering bringing up was revamping the mess with spirit shard acquisition, the Exp roll overs and the MP roadblock created with incomplete masteries, and making a full pass over Spirit shard cost in crafting to be less sporadic, all with the intent of retooling Shards and the shard acquisition process to add the role of "material conversion" to its existing role as High End Crafting Catalysts. This cleans up Spirit shards across the board, by allowing players to target it more specifically when needed, and lowering the passive accumulation rate so the surplus doesn't amass as quickly. The last question that needs to be raised is the material conversion process itself, and how the rate should be controlled. Personally I'm considering using the Exp bar to feed the conversion to avoid intermediate currency .... but the UI and merchant tables needed to support that is on the redonkulous side. A crafting table styled I/O slot would be easier, but it would also mean it would have to be designed more carefully to not "over-convert" amounts if the player forgets about it. Another option is modeling it after the Horodic Cube where you input a base material and catalysts, and the Exp Bar is used to progress it..... but it likely be single threaded to avoid having to track too many processes at once, making your ability to back out early in the process difficult, as is processing multiple items of the same type. A lot of issues come up because of how active processes need player monitoring, but passive processes generate too much excess if the player ignores it for too long.

@Blocki.4931 said:

@"Ayrilana.1396" said:There already is something useful to spend spirit shards on:

https://gw2efficiency.com/currencies/spirit-shards

Hardly. It doesn’t take much to place a few buy orders, convert materials, and then list them. If that requires too much effort then I guess you can continue to accumulate spirit shards.

@Ayrilana.1396 said:

@Blocki.4931 said:

@Ayrilana.1396 said:There already is something useful to spend spirit shards on:

https://gw2efficiency.com/currencies/spirit-shards

If you enjoy buying hundreds of stacks and clicking a thousand time just to get them all through the process of forging, then clicking another couple of hundred times to sell stuff just to spend around 200 shards then you're very welcome to continue doing so.

It IS annoying, because it involves a lot of "work" for little payoff, period. It's monotone and using the forge in general is annoying

@Faffin.6741 said:It should be possible to use Spirit shards for buying mastery points, and toggle between mastery XP or shards after 80. Nobody thinks it's a big deal when Proof of Heroics are spent on hero points... Missing out on other things they can be spent on is enough sacrifice. The price probably has to be higher than 1:1 to reflect how hard they are to get though.

My main reason for wanting this is that XP stops dead unless you chase MP, which was really annoying for me when I was wasting it. I doubt it's just me.

No

earn them like everyone else... its easy like sunday morning.

@Blocki.4931 said:

@Ayrilana.1396 said:

@Blocki.4931 said:

@Ayrilana.1396 said:There already is something useful to spend spirit shards on:

https://gw2efficiency.com/currencies/spirit-shards

So getting extra gold shouldn’t require work? Seriously? Not everything is going to be handed to you.

It does not require a lot of work. You place the buy orders which shouldn’t take more than a few minutes. You’ll average about 250 forges every 20 minutes. It’ll take another couple minutes to list them all.

The fact is that there are already a ton of uses for spirit shards. Just because you want some one-click option to convert them all to gold doesn’t change that. Neither should there be an option to use them to purchase mastery points.

@Blocki.4931 said:What? Hero points are different to mastery points. You don't even have to do it ever again, while you have to do HPs on each characterThis doesn't make any sense. Especially considering there are over two dozen mastery points more than you'll even need

The reason there are vastly more mastery points than requires is to accomodate player taste. You don't have to do them all. In fact, other than massochists completionists like me, you probably shouldn't do them all. Do the ones that are tied to content you like; enjoy story mode challenges? Do the story masteries. Don't like that? Do open world ones instead.

This would add another path, but I think it is counter to the design that ANet have for masteries where they are both optional, and filled with a great range of choice about how to obtain them already.

There's a big difference between buying HP and buying MP. MPs come from specific achievements, as opposed to HPs. When buying a HP in WvW, a random HP challenge is completed. For MPs - should a random MP-giving achievement be completed?

ANet went through considerable trouble to divorce the post-L80 gain of XP from character and account progression. Unless there's a very compelling reason to revisit that decision, I doubt very much if they will spend any time considering how to rebalance mastery acquisition via spirit shards.

Additionally, I don't think the OP has made a good case for the idea that there's anything wrong with the current system. It's a one-time acquisition problem. After the initial 'hump' for the first masteries, XP flows freely and mastery points include trivial as well as easily-obtained ones.

I think we'd get more traction by asking ANet for a new Central Tyria mastery line. If it required 15 additional points and they added 30 "easier than current" unlocks, I think people would find it much less tedious. (What sort of masteries? I'd like to see fall damage reduction moved out of traits. A month ago, I would have also suggested swim speed.)