Guild Chat - Episode 17
Guild Chat - Episode 17
- Title
- @TwitchCon, Masteries
- Host
- Rubi Bayer
- Guests
- Mike Zadorojny
Byron Miller
Crystal Reid - Date
- October 5, 2015
- Official video
- YouTube
The 17th episode of Guild Chat aired on October 5, 2015.
Transcription[edit]
Rubi Bayer: The masteries in Heart of Thorns, and we're going to kind of get into that today. Which one of you wants to give an outline of what masteries are for and how they are our PvE endgame?
Mike Zadorojny: Yeah, I mean, that's the start of it. Masteries is for us, it allows us to add more character progression that isn't about, like, new stats and new levels. It's about going and exploring and unlocking new things for your character to do or gain access to in the expansion. From things like being able to glide into locations you couldn't get to before as just kinda the basic example. And this is just the beginning in terms of what we want to do and where we want to take masteries. So there's seven new lines that we're introducing with Heart of Thorns. But you're gonna start seeing more of these show up as we do more and more patches moving forward.
Rubi: Yeah, these are literally opening up the game to you in the realm of space, in the realm of things to do. They get you more places. Do you guys want to kind of go back and forth and give an overview of what the seven mastery lines are?
Byron Miller: Sure, so some of the things you've seen already today, is gliding. We make a lot of use in gliding in the adventures.
Crystal Reid: Do you know where we also made use of gliding, Byron?
Byron: Where else do you use gliding, Crystal?
Crystal: We used it in the raids.
Byron: Oh my goodness!
Rubi: I'm so glad I have you two on at the same time.
Crystal: Excellent, and we're on the same side so it worked out.
Rubi: Maybe I should get between you and-
Crystal: You didn't- No, it's fine.
Rubi: Okay.
Byron: We also have-
Crystal: We're doing this. Okay, so I'll talk a little bit about gliding and how it relates to raids. So you've probably seen the raids trailer, and if you haven't, it's on YouTube somewhere. And in that trailer-
[Byron starts laughing]
Rubi: The Guild Wars 2 channel.
Crystal: Stop laughing, this is serious. And in that trailer, there's a point where you're fighting this huge "tongue boss", thank you Colin. [Rubi laughing] And spoilers, that creature's name is Gorseval the Multifarious. And that's his name, right? And so there's a point in that encounter where when you're fighting him, there's these walls that keep you surrounded and trapped on this platform, and he's gonna get a giant nuke-type ability, right? And the goal of the team is to split in two, part of the group goes off and breaks down one of the walls, other group stays and fights the boss for a little, and then when you're ready, everyone runs to the edge and glides off. Gliding is something you're gonna get just as soon as you get into Heart of Thorns or into the jungle map. So it's something you're gonna have before you even get into the raids. And ways that the masteries will assist you are some of the gliding traits you can unlock will allow you to glide faster. So those things will help you in that encounter because it will allow you to get back to the platform faster and get back to the action of the encounter.
Rubi: Yeah, we're gonna show these off in more detail as other episodes come up over today and tomorrow, so we'll go into that quite a lot more.
Byron: We also have a mastery line for each of our, some of our, the new races that are coming in. We have the Itzel, they have a whole line sort of learning about the culture of these frogs that you find in the jungle. They're sort of a smallish, shifty, stringy ones, a tree frog type.
Crystal: They're up to no good.
Rubi: Best description.
Byron: They are always up to no good. You can see it in their eyes, in this place. And so you can learn about their language, you can learn about their culture, you can become accepted by them. They'll offer challenges up when you get farther down these mastery lines. They'll say, "Listen, we got a big buff dude back in the back here, and since you're cool with us now and you think you're all that, you can fight him and, you know, maybe if you win we'll give you something?" Something like that.
Rubi: I need you to write more dialogue in our game.
Byron: Okay, sure. [chuckles]
Crystal: You're super cool, Byron.
Byron: All right, well you know.
[Rubi laughing]
Byron: So I mean there's stuff like that, and there's one of those for the Itzel, there's one for the Nuhoch, and there's one for the Exalted. And along those tiers, you'll see, we see in the adventures one, we saw the Exalted Markings. Similarly, there's, you know, you have to earn their trust and you're sort of doing that by participating in some of the places in the map where they have a strong presence. You're helping like liberate some of their outposts or some of their, in the case of the Itzel, the "Jakas" I believe is what they call their enclaves. And so as you do that, as you become more and more sort of engaged with the, with these groups, you began, it's almost like a reputation system.
Mike: Yeah, kind of. And basically what this is gonna allow you to do is it's gonna unlock modes of travel and ways to actually get to portions of the map that either you couldn't get to before, or it will give you more fast travel options within the map.
Byron: Yeah.
Mike: And that's really gonna come into play as you start playing in more of the, or the map-wide events that are kinda tying everything together. And just, it really gives you more control of your space, more control of your character and just more ways to play the game.
Rubi: We have a couple of mastery lines in Core Tyria as well. You and I are going to talk about one with the legendary journey in an upcoming TwitchCon Guild Chat episode. And we also have Pact Commander Mastery, which Josh Diaz and I went through a few months ago. Gosh! It feels like a few months. We keep talking about this, the time is like, stretching out, recently. So all right well those are kind of the seven lines that we're starting out with. And this is once you get to level 80.
Mike: We missed one.
Rubi: Which one?
Mike: The fractal.
Rubi: Go for it. See, I wasn't gonna spoil the surprise.
Mike: There is one more Pact, or Core Tyria line-
Rubi: I can't wait to see what he says.
Mike: For the fractals, that will actually kinda unlock some additional rewards. It will also give you some kinda cool defensive things that you're going through and kinda helping out. That's gonna play much more as we get into, with the new- the rework that we did for the fractals by increasing the level up to level 100, a bunch of these masteries are gonna come into play in terms of just giving you bonus chances in order to survive and make it through the difficulty that we've kinda put in there. So I don't want to spoil too much on that yet because there's some really cool aspects of that that it ties into. But it is one of those things where we wanted to build the fractal mastery in such a way that it actually augmented your play. It didn't hinder it, but it just, it rewarded you for all the cool things that you're doing while you're inside there.
Rubi: I was like, "Go ahead, say more, say more!" But that's your call, so I'm just being a bad influence at this point. All right, so once you hit level 80, you stop seeing your XP bar and this is now your mastery- I tried so hard to say fractal mastery just now. This is now your mastery advancement. And do you guys want to talk a little bit about where you go to unlock them and how you unlock different ones? Or did I just scare you and ask you something you didn't know?
Byron: Oh, no!
Rubi: Okay.
Byron: So, the mastery points come from a number of different locations. Some of them are encounters that you find in specific locations in the maps. A number of them actually come from adventures. So as you get the silver and the gold tier, each one of those is worth a mastery point each. And so participating and completing them actually unlocks progress into your mastery lines as well.
Rubi: And you can start earning some of these now in the current game. That's something that Josh and I had talked about back in that previous episode. You can start working on these points. A lot of you might already have things done that will unlock these points for you and they'll be awarded retroactively- that's hard! They'll be awarded retroactively after Heart of Thorns is live. So you will have a little backlog of points to get started with.
Mike: The good thing to remember about this is that this is basically an account-based system too. So as you're unlocking more and more for your character, it's also going to be applied to other characters on your account as well.
Byron: Yeah.
Rubi: Yeah. All right, so- Oh! Go ahead.
Crystal: I feel like I should've watched that stream.
Rubi: Thanks, man. Josh was great! You need to go back and watch that on YouTube. He was awesome. Well, I'll tell you what, now that, as long as you're in a talking mood, we're not done with masteries, we're not gonna just drop these original mastery lines and walk away. We're going to keep introducing new mastery abilities as we go forward in Heart of Thorns. And I know you had told me a little bit about when new raid wings come out.
Crystal: Yeah, so when the first raid comes out, we will be introducing a new mastery line that goes along with it. And how you unlock it is you'll need to go in and you'll need to kill a raid boss. It can be any boss, and that will unlock the line for you to start leveling up.
Rubi: Nice.
Crystal: Huh?
Rubi: Nice.
Crystal: Yes.
Rubi: I like choices.
Crystal: Yes! Everyone loves choices.
Rubi: This one sucks, I don't want to do this boss, I'll pick another one.
Crystal: Exactly! We can't do this boss, we'll pick another one when the next release comes out. So once you have that unlocked you'll be able to level them up in raids and in the open world, but leveling them up in raids will be by far the best way. Raids will give you a significant chunk of experience for defeating each of the bosses, which will go towards your masteries. So you could level them in the open world but the raids are by far the best place to do that. Likewise, once you're done with your raid masteries, if there's any lingering open world ones, you could do those there as well. Or I should say, the jungle ones specifically.
Mike: So you're leading me up to ask this question: What's to prevent me from just playing the raid over and over again and only using that to farm for my own masteries?
Crystal: I'm so glad you asked that question, Mike Z. So what would prevent you from doing that is the bosses are on weekly lockout timers, or at least the loot is on a weekly lockout timer, so you'll only be able to get these experience rewards from the bosses once per week. And that should prevent this little plan of yours you've got going on.
Rubi: This is just because of you.
Crystal: Thanks, Mike.
Rubi: Awesome.
Mike: This is why we can't have nice things.
Crystal: You specifically.
Rubi: You are why we can't have nice things. All right, so same question for you on the adventures.
Byron: Well so, specifically with regards to new lines, I think that as we progress our Living World, as we progress you know, over our content over the next couple of years, and so forth, we will be introducing these new things. Hopefully, we'll be building more adventures and we'll be able to make use of these new mastery lines that let's say, a Living World team puts in or a raid team puts in. And I would love to see actually sort of a synthesis both of the raid masteries and the open world, and vice versa but I don't know, I don't know.
Crystal: Get away from my masteries.
Byron: All right, I won't touch them.
Crystal: So hardcore.
Byron: Okay, so hardcore.
Crystal: No, they're not.
Rubi: We could just like, go get something to drink and let these two do this for a while, that would be fantastic.
[panel chuckling]
Crystal: That would be really dangerous, to let us banter for the remainder of this session.
Rubi: I would enjoy it quite a lot. So until the punching started, and then you know, it's a problem.
Byron: We would never resort to physical violence.
Crystal: Yes. Not before Mike broke us up.
Rubi: Thank you, thank you. See, you are why we can sometimes have nice things. All right, so I have a question for each of you. We have these mastery lines at launch, what are you gonna go for first? Choose now!
Mike: Well the easiest answer is gliding 'cause that's the first one that unlocks.
Rubi: Nope, you can't pick gliding, sorry. Which one that is not gliding?
Mike: Well, I'm just gonna say that gliding is gonna be important to master all the way up and can-
Rubi: Gliding is super important but let's assume you already have gliding.
Mike: I'm just saying-
Rubi: Oh my gosh.
Mike: Like, you want to completely fill out your gliding mastery because it might come into play in some of the later maps that we haven't really talked about yet. And it's gonna be important for some of the encounters in there, that-
Crystal: Spoilers!
Mike: Exactly, but without that I've gotta go fractals. I love the fractals so much.
Byron: You could talk all you want about gliding, you can talk all you want about fractals, but if I don't level up the Pact Commander autoloot-
Mike: Oh, that's true!
Byron: I swear to you, that is the first one.
Rubi: Oh my gosh, the loot vacuum!
Byron: I never want to hit the F key again when there's sparklies. I never want to do that, and I'm not going to.
Mike: Like, running faster in towns, or the mentorship and stuff like that.
Byron: Yeah.
Mike: Oh, so good.
Rubi: Your whole group runs faster in towns, so you'll be like, super popular. So if you did not see our rundown of the Pact Commander Mastery line, once you've completely mastered that and filled it all out, you're pretty much a loot vacuum. You don't have to, it just all goes into your inventory. And it's amazing.
Byron: It is, really. I mean like, when we do our testing, when we play our content like, I don't have to, I mean like, it's running a branch, but whatever. I mean like, I still don't have to worry about hitting F, making sure I got all the loot, checking my inventory, it's just there! And I don't have to think about it, and I've been waiting for something like that for so long!
Rubi: And also to help people, right? That's also why you want the Commander mastery line.
Byron: Yeah! Is there like a teaching thing?
Rubi: Oh my gosh...
Byron: Mike, I'll- You can be my- I'll mentor you.
Mike: I think it's gonna go the other way around, buddy.
Byron: I don't know about that.
Rubi: Oh my gosh. All right, so Pact Commander for you?
Byron: Oh yeah.
Rubi: Crystal? Can you say?
Crystal: I mean, I forgot about Pact Commander, and now I'm all like-
Byron: It's mine!
Crystal: I wanna be a vacuum! I mean, if I'm gonna min-max, I'm probably gonna go for... What line has the Adrenal Mushrooms?
Byron: I believe that's Itzel, the Itzel line?
Rubi: Itzel.
Crystal: Yeah, I'm gonna be BFF with all those Itzel, learn how to-
Rubi: To use the jumping mushrooms?
Crystal: No, the Adrenal Mushrooms are the ones that make you go faster.
Rubi: Oh, that's right! The speed boost. I love it. All right, so do I have to pick?
Byron: Yeah, you have to pick.
Crystal: Yes.
Rubi: All at once?
Byron: Rubi!
Mike: By the way, it can't be gliding.
Crystal: Or Pact Commander.
Rubi: Why not? Who said that? That's a stupid rule.
Byron: Rubi, when Heart of Thorns comes out and the masteries are unlocked, which one are you gonna unlock first?
Rubi: That is an excellent question.
Byron: I know.
Rubi: And now I'm panicking a little bit because I don't have the answer. I'm looking, and I'm like, oh gosh, um, I really like the Pact Commander line, but I also really like precursor crafting. I win.
Byron: Yeah, precursor crafting.
Rubi: All right, we are going to- We should talk about precursor crafting more in a later episode.
Mike: Yes, I believe we have something scheduled.
Rubi: Yes we do, so we're gonna do that and I will leave you with that teaser. All right, thank you guys very much.
Byron: Yeah, thank you, Rubi.
Crystal: Thanks for having us, Rubi.
Rubi: Thank you guys, thanks. Bye.
