Countdown to Launch: Interactive Trailer

The launch of Guild Wars 2: Heart of Thorns™ is almost here! Share your excitement with your friends with our interactive trailer, which will let you explore the major features of the expansion from within the launch trailer itself.

Thank you for joining us on the journey to launch—we’ll see you in the jungle!

Watch the trailer here

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My brief interaction with it so far has been negative. The new Elite... pfft lets be real, sub classes are locked down HARD. Even with 100% map completion and a good chunk of hours on my main I really only had enough for a little under half the sub class. This is really annoying as I've been playing Ranger for 100s of hours now and instead of something new I get to waste most if not all the new expansion content to unlock the new sub class. Say I do that... ok Druid now fully unlocked, but it took the entire expansion to do it... now what? I have nothing to use it on.

That's not the only problem though. Everything is gated. You can't even advanced the story without grinding Events to unlock Masteries first. For example, after basically the first real story quest you can't start the second until you grind out events to unlock the basic glider skill... this doesn't take terribly long but still, you can not advance at all until you've done this. Which is silly. It's like this, "We know they will blow through this content like nothing so let's gate EVERYTHING so we can artificially increase the time it takes to do stuff which makes the expansion last longer."

The new zone so far has train syndrome too. Get on the train or you don't progress. Good luck making it across the map completing points without the train... it's doable but it's slow progress unless you really know what you are doing. I'm hoping this is temporary because it's a huge influx of people and will be toned down appropriately once it dies down but sheez. It's not at your own pace like the core game... it's follow the train or get rekted. Don't watch them Vista cutscenes either... the train doesn't wait for that or anything really, prepare to skip everything or lose the train.

Last thing I'd note is performance is very bad on my PC (dips under 30FPS even on the lowest settings) and my mouse is going crazy in the new expansion... it's wireless and acts like it's suffering extreme interference at times... this is very weird as when I close the game I don't experience this at all. I've had run in's with it in the past with GW2 but now it's to a whole new level.

That all said... it is launch and I'm definitely gonna give it a fair shot. Just early impressions for my play style are not good.

 

Things I definitely like:

Gliding! Pretty nice and the vertical exploration is all tied in together nicely.
Druid - Yes it royally sucks to only have it half unlocked but thanks to the stockpile of hero points I had half is better than nothing, it's a pretty fun class but a huge departure from Ranger.
Progression - I don't like how it's done (too many gates) but I like the idea... tons of stuff to work at all the time.
Action Cam - My favorite addition and it should be in the core game as well Takes some getting use to that's for sure but it's sooooooo good imo. Love it already.

Fully unlocking all the subclasses is gonna be annoying but they are definitely pretty cool. My longbow Guardian will have to wait a while though