I want to apologize to Guild Wars 2 for my post yesterday. This was a case of “it’s not you; it’s me” in all earnestness. I’ve just been really cranky as of late and my frustration with the rather steep on-ramp to Janthir Wilds re: what I was calling “busy-work” was an ill-placed manifestation of that crankiness. Despite my attitude towards the game yesterday I kept going back to the well. Several times I quit in frustration only to sit staring at the monitor. And then I’d re-launch the game. Eventually, I got in a groove…a pretty substantial groove, actually.

My first mistake was trying to rush things. I’ve never been a rusher, especially in MMOs knowing that blowing through content would only lead me to content I couldn’t do alone. With Janthir, I didn’t want to talk with the Kodan and I didn’t want to get the Mastery XP for the spear when I felt I should be getting XP for something I did want (homesteading). My mistake in all of this was thinking that there was something beyond what I was doing that was the actual point of the expansion. There really isn’t; it’s all just content.

Here’s some spoilers:

The story starts with a council, bringing together the major heads of Tyria to talk about the post Dragon world and the new threats. Hand-waving happens (I didn’t pay much attention to nor did I finish Secrets of the Obscure so I’m wicked fuzzy on the details at this point) and we are shipped off to Janthir Wilds which, like Cantha, is another historically closed-off section of the world. As the name implies, Janthir is very rustic: think natural beauty and untouched wilderness. Driving home that point, it’s main inhabitants are anthropomorphic bears called the Kodan. They are the ones we are leaving to meet in an effort to bring them into the Tyrian alliance, but we’re also going there to track down another character who apparently vanished into Janthir ages ago.

So the content starts with a lengthy yet interactive council discussion between half-a-dozen NPCs about boring matters of state. It then segues into a meet-and-greet with the Kodan who receive the Tyrian delegation well enough, but won’t commit to diplomacy until they’re convinced it’ll be worth it for them. So the next step is to integrate into Kodan society by doing the usual stuff we do in MMOs: tasks for those we want to accept us, and in this case the first major task is to learn how to use the Kodan’s favored weapon, the spear. To do this, we have to earn Mastery XP by doing other tasks, and then spend Mastery Points to unlock it.

Previous expansions using the Mastery system were, in my opinion, very drawn out. There’s usually three or four tracks we can choose, and each track has it’s own XP gain with several sub-levels that we unlock with Mastery Points when the XP gauge is filled. The first appearance of this system was in Heart of Thorns and I never capped any of the five tracks it offered. Path of Fire offered six tracks, mostly mount related and End of Dragons offered five. Secrets of the Obscure only offered four. Even though I’ve played each of these expansions, I’ve never completed a single track. I felt that Masteries were horrible for people with an inability to commit (*cough*), and the rate of progression between expansions was uneven at times. The Mastery Point system was also an artificial gate that occasionally made things worse, as needing to have “the key” to unlock a door I’d spent days trying to reach was quite a downer if I hadn’t spent actual time hunting Mastery Points as my main game-time objective.

This time, though, ANet has been pretty generous with the Mastery Points, at least in the early days of the content. I’ve spent the two needed to unlock the spear, and have nine more on deck. All of them have been of the “commune” type, which means I just have to roll up and click on the world item to gain a point. I’d like for this generosity to continue, but I know that the Mastery system is the post-level cap engagement mechanism so I am leaning more towards the belief that ANet is seeding the early game with Mastery points because of homesteading. As housing is a major draw for a lot of people, and since there are only four Homesteading sub-levels, I feel that the game is purposefully not making advancing in this track the usual chore.

Last night I decided to stop trying to force myself into what I thought the game wanted me to do — stick around Kodan-Town — and ventured out into the wilds themselves. Yes, I have no idea why I thought what I did; when would the game want me to go out and…you know…play the game if not “ASAP”? As a result I ran into a lot of events like pulling down trees with my new warclaw mount, gardening, and fighting off pests. Along the way I stopped and collected those Mastery points and in a relatively short amount of time I had filled up the XP bar and went back to unlock the spear and the opportunity to move ahead in the story. And to be honest, the spear as a weapon is not that bad!

The next step was to go and deal with some of the rifts, the new Veil-portals that were introduced in SotO. I was told by someone outside of the game that I would have to find and close somewhere around four of these — and these battles can get really deadly, really quick due to the high number of mobs — but I joined one in progress, and initiated one on my own and that was enough to complete that step of the quest. Once that was done, it was time to move into homesteading.

Things started off light with a 45 minute monologue by our point-bear in the Kodan, Stoic Alder. While he was talking I ran around and cleaned up the place. Then I had to go out and learn about homestead crafting. This is a track divorced of the usual crafting system, although it works exactly the same. Right now, I have to make a bed for myself, so I’m out looking for honey flowers which are a bit difficult to track down. I’ve only seen them in the bog areas, so I might have to go back there.

At this point, I’ve been around the Wilds a bit, have participated in world boss content (the Bog Witch, which was fun but also a PITA in the best ways), and have unlocked the content that drew me to the expansion (honestly, though, I would have bought the expansion even without homesteads), so I’m now ready to approach the content on even, calmer footing. So far I’m enjoying things much more than I did with SotO which required copious use of the skyscale — which I still don’t have for myself, but which also annoyed me when I had to use it in the previous expansion. My fear, of course, is that Janthir Wilds will suffer the same fate as every single other GW2 expansion, which is that I’ll bounce off at some point out of malaise or the lure of some other game. At least it’ll be there when I come back around some time later (I hope).