Following up on my GW2 leveling (while ignoring some of the pitfalls that longtime players have with the game), yes, it is possible to get to 80 in a reasonable amount of time via running around the game world unlocking waypoints, tagging points of interests, and vista viewing (majority of my maps only need me to complete the main events there to get 100% completion). I’ve found not all are marked on the map even when scouted (so every cave including diving under water, could yield something).
Level 80 itself then becomes its own starting point; it opens up the expansion content, Heart of Thorns (HoT) and Path of Fire (PoF) if one purchased each of them. Each expansion unlocks two abilities that are needed to clear content in their respective expansions; gliding in HoT and several different types of mounts in PoF. The core game was designed without either of these in mind; having them and some of their better abilities mastered, will trivialize some of the designed puzzle challenges (of accessing some points of interests, hero points, vistas).
I quickly did the first chapter of PoF in order to get my Raptor before switching to HoT to earn my “wings”. Each of these has multiple mastery steps to them which unlocks more capabilities. In the case of gliding, I had to train my basic gliding ability first to unlock gliding in order to continue with the next quest chain. And I have to play through HoT maps in order to earn experience necessary to unlock the next set of masteries for gliding (in this case, I’m working on getting the updraft ability) which is pretty much needed to get around the multiple elevations of the jungle map quickly without running constantly into the multitude of dead ends (whomever came up with the design for this area has some masochistic tendencies since the path you take is often the incorrect one due to differing verticality of the map).
As I am learning, level 80 mobs are incredibly annoying (especially Mordrem with their crowd control and AoE’s). As it is, mob aggro can be really twitchy where you can aggro others while in combat. This is fine with most pre-level 80 mobs because they don’t have as much abilities as level 80 ones. So accidentally aggravating a group of level 80 mobs can quickly overwhelm your character if it isn’t well geared (as I found several times). Likewise, this is where the word “guild” in Guild Wars becomes relevant since it is clear that while you can solo your way through these level 80 parts of the open world, you need to be far more careful (compared to if you were going through these areas in larger group of guild mates); more so when night falls and a lot more Mordrem are roaming about.
With the mounts from PoF, the base raptor is a really nice movement speed boost. There was a point while running around where I thought I needed a mount until I learned about some movement skill increase with my other stance (and thought I didn’t need one). As I’ve found, the base raptor is still way better because of the leap forward as well as allowing your mount to take all of the fall damage. Plus you can zoom through pre-level 80 mobs and quickly out distance their aggro. One of the masteries increases the distance of its leap (which is required for some PoF maps including getting to some locales where you need to leap a gap that is too wide for the base jump so that you can commune for an extra mastery point). Even the jump your character makes when dismounting was useful for getting up on top of a surface (to get to a vista) which I kept failing to make using the standard character jump.
There are two other required mounts (gotten from later chapters) with their own respective masteries; a hopper (which has a huge vertical jumping ability) and a stingray skimmer (which floats over the surface and is useful for quickly traveling across water and is also required for maps that have quicksand or sulfur/poison). Each has specific situational usage; most all of which are superceded with flying mounts. These flying mounts (griffon and skyscale) are like end game objectives though (and just experiencing the HoT maps, would make navigation a lot more tolerable and less frustrating).
There’s a lot of vistas, points of interests, hero/mastery point locations which will require having the masteries from these (non-flying) mounts unlocked (the final mastery of each mount allows using the capabilities of that mount on your others) while more of the level 80 challenge hero points are actually group events since they spawn a champion (yes, I tried one and wasn’t even making a dent in its health). The champion boss (Eye of Zhaitan) from the final chapter in the personal story (before the actual airship battle with Zhaitan) took me over 30 minutes to take down. I was like “you can’t be serious” when the health bar wasn’t going down (I thought maybe the flaming rocks were a mechanic but they didn’t make much of a dent either).
Digressing, once a mount and their respective masteries are unlocked, it’s available to all characters on your account. Unlike many other RPG’s where I tend to be an alt-aholic, I don’t think I will take to leveling alts (I mean I’ve tried some of the other classes at lower levels and didn’t find even the basic combat satisfying) in GW2. Overall, the combat is ok but it’s nowhere as visceral and satisfying as TERA’s IMHO.
I’ve gone through the lower level zones of the other races (unlocking waypoints, visiting points of interests, and hitting all the vistas) and since a character scales down to no more than 3 levels above that zone, means that it is not a one shot festival (having abilities and specializations unlocked does help though). The point is that while I do enjoy the exploration aspect, repeating what I’ve been doing again on another character is not as appealing the second time around because the puzzle to getting to some of those places and vistas has already been solved. I guess this is the downside of it being a designed mechanic (which accounts for a good portion of your XP) as opposed to free form exploration; where you are able to get to all of these race specific starter areas and having your characters power level adjusted accordingly (since you can go through those areas and still have challenging combat due to the level scaling).
On the flip side, I’m actually surprised there wasn’t negative reception to this because MapleStory 2 had a similar system (known as Fair Fight) where your damage would be scaled to that of the dungeon level or open world bosses to prevent higher level players from steam rolling them. Eventually, Nexon removed it after several months of continued negative feedback (top geared players felt it wasn’t even worth the time to constantly increase their gear score when there was this disparity at level cap where you could easily take down a max level boss, but struggled doing lower level ones due to Fair Fight).
I personally can see this system (level/power scaling) working well when implemented correctly. TERA used to have this “blast to the past” system for dungeons where higher level players would have their stats scaled down to that of the dungeon in order to help out lower level players. The difference. It wasn’t a complete replacement where it was active all the time. In GW2, I do get the rationale for this implementation given how exploration is a core part of the design; where players can go to another starter area for that exact purpose. The same conundrum exists though where once geared at level 80 where you can handle level 80 bosses easily, going back to a lower level area and finding a lower level boss taking way longer to kill due to the downscaling, can really come across as backwards. I suppose it’s not a issue for long time players given the amount of level 80 story content (with living seasons and the two expansions) along with the actual end game stuff (like fractals and raids).
While I haven’t even begun taking the steps towards better level 80 gear, that and end game content clearly aren’t guildless/solo player friendly; this makes sense because it isn’t called “Guild” Wars for no reason. Based on my original objectives, I’m fine with this. I still have 35% world completion remaining (but also know that the last 20% isn’t going to be easy since that is probably the level 80 zones) and two expansions to complete. Over this past month, it has definitely scratched the exploration itch I was having though.
