Heart progress is ridiculously slow

[Grimegg.1297]

7 hours ago, Epsilon Indi.2031 said:

Tell me you haven't done core map completion without telling me you haven't done core map completion.  Or you're casually forgetting the heart tasks in PoF, Season 3, and Season 4.  There were a lot of stinkers in there that take FAR longer than several minutes. JS hearts progress at a rate of 20% per adventure + progress made via participation in the event in and of itself. The only difference is there aren't 40 different methods to gain the heart tokens to skip them.

All in all, if I was able to figure out how to get ~20 caches found and complete all 3 heart tasks in ~1h30min, then this is basically a skill issue.

Alright, since this have gone into insulting me territory ("you don't know the older content, you have skill issues"), I'll arguement myself one last time so perhaps you can see why I thought you are not reading (to which I apologize to you about due to you clearly taking offense, but I genuinly thought you just glanced at the text and replied slectively only to what you wanted, and I have my arguements below):

I am saying - "This is slow, sloggish, tedious and not fun".
You are saying - "It's doable! Here's how..."

Nowhere in my complaints have I said it's not doable. I am well aware you can do this in 1-2h casually. I mean, who cant? None of the tasks are difficult or complex to do.
Issue is that they are so slow, boring and not fun that I don't enjoy doing them at all.
I choose not to do some of the progress options (e.g. - killing moas/bees/wolves in the first heart of Janthir Syntri gives only 0.5% each and with no events happening during meta - I don't want to do that) because it's not fun.
The reason this merged thread exists is because it's not fun for many, not just for me.

I am, as you probably also are, a longtime player. Playing since 2012 I have 11 wold explorers, have done all maps multiple times throughout the years, all open world content there is, and this is the first time it's gone this bad with hearts.

Give me an example of a heart in any other older content that have the following combination:

1. As slow a progression as the hearts in Janthir Syntri regardless of method used.
2. As few options to progress it considering the slow progression.
3. Have achievements that require you to do the heart 23 times in 23 different days to get all the achievements (or anywhere near close to this).

And no, picking only 1 or 2 out of the 3 above criteria does not count.

The combination of all of these 3 issues are what makes these hearts awful. Yes they are doable, but they are not fun. Doable does not equal enjoyable. Since you are okay doing 3 hearts for 1h30m doesn't mean everyone else should be.

I am cofidently sure that:

• If we only had to do the hearts once and any additonal time would be just to get something off the vendor (like previous Living Season and expansion hearts), but no achievement was tied to repeating the heart many times in many different days specifically - nobody would really care.
• If the heart was really quick to do like the ones in Lowland Shore - again, barely anyone would care.
• If they were exceptionally designed and a very unique experience to where it feels fresh and very enjoyable - perhaps slow and bound to repetition achievements would have been okay. That is not the case here however since we have probably 400-500 hearts in the game in total and majority of them are relatively fast or don't have to be repeated for achievements (not all - majority of them).

Quite frankly my biggest concern is if Anet decides to use this sort of hearts as template for future maps would be awful. So I hope this map is the last one to have these sort of issues and it won't standartize hearts criteria in the future.
If we don't voice concerns ever, what is there to stop them from thinking that next time they can put 10 hearts each taking 40mins to do and require to be done 60 times each on different day once per account. Sounds ridiculous, no? Well Janthir Syntri hearts would've sounded ridiculous to me back during Vanilla GW2 but here we are.

I hope you get my point now. I don't wish to cause conflict, so again - I apologize since you took offense.

[Hotride.2187]

Did hearts again, its better now.

Still pretty lame to wait for events in Janthir Syntri, but you have to wait for fewer events now. That works for me.

[corwin.3495]

Well, I did them again and here I am, 30 minutes in "Support the Kodan camp" and I AM AT 90% of the heart. Did 3 events. I give them the freaking vegetable, the bar barely moves, I give them meat, it barely moves. The whole event gets completed and I get like 20-30% of the heart???

edit: Finally! Needed to do 4 events and give 35 minutes of my life for ONE HEART. Nice design!

Just for fun let's compare the core Tyria map completition to this ONE HEART in Syntri. I can complete 1-2 WHOLE maps in core Tyria in 30 minutes. Disgusting. 

Edited September 11 by corwin.3495

[Tula.6021]

41 minutes ago, corwin.3495 said:

Did 3 events. I give them the freaking vegetable, the bar barely moves, I give them meat, it barely moves.

But somebody here said not to finish the meat/veggie event but to farm the animals that spawn for them, they give progress too.

[Gaiawolf.8261]

35 minutes ago, corwin.3495 said:

Well, I did them again and here I am, 30 minutes in "Support the Kodan camp" and I AM AT 90% of the heart. Did 3 events. I give them the freaking vegetable, the bar barely moves, I give them meat, it barely moves. The whole event gets completed and I get like 20-30% of the heart???

edit: Finally! Needed to do 4 events and give 35 minutes of my life for ONE HEART. Nice design!

Just for fun let's compare the core Tyria map completition to this ONE HEART in Syntri. I can complete 1-3 WHOLE maps in core Tyria in 30 minutes. Disgusting. 

Sounds like you're not taking your time to enjoy those older maps anymore. That's a shame. Oh well.

Maps are destinations, not instanced speed runs. I have no problem with them taking time to complete. They should! But the experience should also be immersive and enjoyable. I hope they add more interest and content to Syntri, not decrease the pace or difficulty.

[Gaiawolf.8261]

1 minute ago, Tula.6021 said:

But somebody here said not to finish the meat/veggie event but to farm the animals that spawn for them, they give progress too.

Hmm, that sounds anti-intuitive and against the spirit of the event. See my above comment.

[Tula.6021]

2 minutes ago, Gaiawolf.8261 said:

Hmm, that sounds anti-intuitive and against the spirit of the event

Sure, but one does what he has to do to get over a nasty obstacle faster.

We play the game, we don't create it.

[Gaiawolf.8261]

15 minutes ago, Tula.6021 said:

Sure, but one does what he has to do to get over a nasty obstacle faster.

We play the game, we don't create it.

Sure, it's a critique of the encounter's design as much as anything else.

[corwin.3495]

1 hour ago, Tula.6021 said:

But somebody here said not to finish the meat/veggie event but to farm the animals that spawn for them, they give progress too.

Okay, thank you. I didn't read all 7 pages xD Still a shame it goes down to that...

1 hour ago, Gaiawolf.8261 said:

Sounds like you're not taking your time to enjoy those older maps anymore. That's a shame. Oh well.

Maps are destinations, not instanced speed runs. I have no problem with them taking time to complete. They should! But the experience should also be immersive and enjoyable. I hope they add more interest and content to Syntri, not decrease the pace or difficulty.

Some of us don't have that much free time. I did it because they mentioned in the patch notes is better now and because it was a daily, I'll just go and do the one in the crystal desert in 3-5 minutes next time or spam the zip line for 2 minutes in Kaineng.
Saying that, good for you if you have 30 minutes of your life to do one heart! 🙂 cheers. 

Edited September 11 by corwin.3495

[Luthan.5236]

It almost seemed like the south east events are spawning less often. (I think they "fixed" something where they were supposed to have started too often before the patch.) Mobs added? I see only Moa with yellow names that progress the bar super slow. So ... for south east not really an improvement in Janthir Syntri. Others felt the same so far.

You need to be lucky with the south east one - to have many not completed events up. Starting there. Do all events that are up. Then move to north east (always tons of events) and do 1-2 events - this will finish north east. Then check south east again. Then the south west (there also a bit wait time but if the collection event 1/2 with the plants starts you can progress a lot) and then south east again. That way you won't just wait idle at south east for super long.

Edit: Imo the camp defense (searching for threats and mobs spawn when inspecting stuff) and the one near the garden ... should give a bit more on completion. Since they take a bit longer to re-spawn and are not generic as compared to the foraging ones. And please let the plants run around less - annoying if there is not a huge group going for the achievements (keeping NPC alive and/or at high health) and makes them harder to kill fast. 😄

Edited September 11 by Luthan.5236

[Gaiawolf.8261]

1 hour ago, corwin.3495 said:

Okay, thank you. I didn't read all 7 pages xD Still a shame it goes down to that...

Some of us don't have that much free time. I did it because they mentioned in the patch notes is better now and because it was a daily, I'll just go and do the one in the crystal desert in 3-5 minutes next time or spam the zip line for 2 minutes in Kaineng.
Saying that, good for you if you have 30 minutes of your life to do one heart! 🙂 cheers. 

My bad. I thought you said you could do 1-2 entire maps in 30 minutes, not just a heart or 2. Some easier, faster hearts for maps with several hearts is fine, but completing every objective in an entire zone/region of the open world in under 30 minutes is meager map design.

[Agrotera.1254]

I am going to try and write this in a way that doesn't spoil anything. I was doing a heart in Janthir Syntri that you have to do for the story step. It was taking FOREVER!!  I would kill something and the bar would hardly move. Then the Meta started. The part near me was within the green circle that indicates where to do the heart for the story. I thought great, I can participate in the Meta and I am still in the right area for the heart. I was wrong. We did the Meta, we succeeded in killing the boss. Sure I got the chests and that was nice but the bar for the heart didn't budge. Not one little bit. I mean seriously, it could have at least given me a little credit for what was a very nasty fight especially given the fact that we succeeded. Nope, no credit. So there I was back to killing things and doing whatever I could to get that bar to move. I have to say, that was the most aggravated that I have been in this game in a very long time. Something needs to be done about that heart. It is completely unnecessary for it to take that long to complete.

[kharmin.7683]

Please use the forums search. Topic has already been discussed

 

[GeraldBC.4927]

I think I now have a better grasp on the idea behind the design and the design choices, which explains everything from the tedium when you try to do a heart without events all the way to why certain oversights were initially had (and still are in place in some cases). It just eludes you for the longest time because how much emphasis the new content superficially seems to place on hearts, with having a whole heart mastery achievement tab and all.

You see in the grand scheme of the expansion's design, the hearts themselves were never the point, the actual important thing were always the 'curious' currency items, the 'curious lowland honeycomb' and the 'curious mursaat currency', which you get by doing events. The hearts were only meant as a means to an end, namely to acquiring more of those currency items. You complete events near a heart or spend 4 heart tokens and suddenly as a bonus on top of the 2 you get from the event itself, you get 2 extra for completing the heart and can buy a third extra one for some karma. The idea is that it's supposed to reward cycling between different groups of events each day to get those 3 extra currency items per heart rather than just spamming the same events over and over again. Even if you just use heart tokens, you are still visiting all the heart vendors each time you do that. 

I also think that the frequency of events was tuned with much less traffic in mind, as in there's too little events around hearts NOW that those are the newest zones, but this will be less of an issue when another map releases and there's less in LS and JS.

Unfortunately, while there were definitive improvements, I have to say that there still are a lot of issues. A bunch of events give neither a heart token nor progress with any heart, especially around the bloodstone crater and the sulfurous area this has still not been fixed. If you visit the western heart at a bad time, there is nothing to do there. And I think at least one of the food gathering events in the central south, out of range for both southern hearts still doesn't give a heart token, there's probably more. 

In order to fix this, do I really need to take notes and write down the exact name and location of each event?

Edited Thursday at 03:17 PM by GeraldBC.4927

[Geoff Fey.1035]

6 hours ago, GeraldBC.4927 said:

In order to fix this, do I really need to take notes and write down the exact name and location of each event?

Luckily for us, there are users on the Official GW2 Wiki who will do this

In all honesty, it's likely an oversight or due to rushing Syntri. The far West, Blood Hill, and Sulphur areas all feel like they're missing something (meta, Hearts, World Bosses) and just sort of exist.

I agree with you that the Curious currencies seem to be the main focus.

Tinfoil Hat Time: It would be a shame if ANet made it that you needed 5x250 of each one for the new Legendaries, but not entirely unexpected. It promotes people playing the content and doing hearts for a long while; If you take the 15 from vendor -3 for cost of the opposing vendor, it would take roughly 100 days of just focusing on the Renown Hearts to get 1250 Curious Honeycombs/Mursaat Currency, not including if people are regularly doing events which cuts it down significantly. This lines up pretty close to the release of Update 1 from JW launch, so it's enough time for people to get there if they're regularly playing the content leading up to it.

[GeraldBC.4927]

36 minutes ago, Geoff Fey.1035 said:

In all honesty, it's likely an oversight or due to rushing Syntri. The far West, Blood Hill

Speaking of the bloodstone area, others have already added several times that all the bloodstone area events seem to not give tokens. 

What if at a previous point in development, there was a heart there, so they deliberately made all the events not give tokens (because they already give progress towards the heart), and then they removed the heart afterwards? That would explain a lot. 

39 minutes ago, Geoff Fey.1035 said:

Luckily for us, there are users on the Official GW2 Wiki who will do this

Oh, that's not what I meant. I meant having to note down which events specifically don't give tokens even though they're nowhere near a heart. We don't know what it all looks like on anet's internal software. It might be that they have no way to check whether an event is within a heart's range without actually going there ingame and seeing for themselves. 

[Geoff Fey.1035]

42 minutes ago, GeraldBC.4927 said:

Oh, that's not what I meant. I meant having to note down which events specifically don't give tokens even though they're nowhere near a heart. We don't know what it all looks like on anet's internal software. It might be that they have no way to check whether an event is within a heart's range without actually going there ingame and seeing for themselves. 

Sorry, I was teasing--I do agree with you that Syntri is just weird.

[Astralporing.1957]

On 9/11/2024 at 4:11 PM, Tula.6021 said:

But somebody here said not to finish the meat/veggie event but to farm the animals that spawn for them, they give progress too.

They give like 0.5% progress. Even if you spent the whole event just killing them, the event itself would still give more progress than those.

[Poormany.4507]

Just finished the first Janthir Syntri heart at the camp for the first time and honestly almost fell asleep + logged out doing it. There were so many players just running around aimlessly or camping waiting for events to spawn. The events themselves are extremely repetitive and boring and fill up the heart way, way too slowly. This has got to be the boringest heart in the game as it is. 

There doesn't seem to be anything other than events to fill the heart, despite the heart text implying there should be.: "Support the kodan camp by completing events and helping with camp tasks." There don't seem to be any "camp tasks" that aren't events from what I saw.

The hearts in Lowland Shore were fine, although the progress scaling is off in the Warclaw one (Why does poop duty give three-four times the participation as killing a titan?)

Edited 3 hours ago by Poormany.4507

[GeraldBC.4927]

18 minutes ago, Poormany.4507 said:

There doesn't seem to be anything other than events to fill the heart, despite the heart text implying there should be.: "Support the kodan camp by completing events and helping with camp tasks." There don't seem to be any "camp tasks" that aren't events from what I saw.

That is a good point. Strangely enough, there is an event in the heart's range that involves the exact task I thought would have best suited the heart itself. You get to pick up water, food and gear and there's a bunch of kodan hunters that each want one of those things,  so you have to distribute it. You know like that first heart in Crystal Oasis just outside Amnoon.