Many players find the Heart of Thorns expansion bewildering. Intricate, layered maps and tough enemies make it very challenging to find a safe path through the region. Masteries can help enormously with both these problems, but the ol’ “chicken and the egg” riddle comes to mind: how do you survive long enough to earn those masteries?
Most of this article will try to answer that question, but first let’s look at why masteries help.
Masteries make it far easier to get around the Heart of Maguuma. You can glide over chasms, stealth past enemies, catapult to difficult-to-reach places and even teleport across the map. They are very useful—and fun!
There are many more masteries beyond these basics. For a more in-depth look, see the Guide to Heart of Thorns Masteries article in this issue.
While it’s true you should focus on getting those four masteries first, there’s a catch. How can you earn the experience to unlock those helpful masteries without first having the masteries?
The too-simple answer is “just play Heart of Thorns.” Complete events, kill enemies, explore, do adventures, harvest, do the story, etc. While that’s certainly where the XP comes from, there are some tactics that will help you get XP faster, and with less frustration.
The masteries you earn in HoT are shared by all your characters. For your first character to set foot into HoT, choose one that excels in survivability, DPS and mobility. Later, when you’ve unlocked some “getting around” masteries, you’ll find HoT is much more enjoyable on your less durable characters.
There are two broad categories of Experience boosts in open world content: Experience Per Kill boosts and Experience From All Sources boosts.
“All sources” XP boosts are particularly powerful for Heart of Thorns content. In addition to experience from kills, you also get xp from events, map completion, exploration, harvesting, some achievements, and finishing story chapters.
All sources experience boosts come from only three sources:
Use all three together and you’ll get up to 70% more experience for everything you do in Heart of Thorns. This provides a very noticeable increase to your mastery XP progress!
There are several types of HoT “bouncy chests” that reward XP, and the “all experience” boosts affect them! The XP is awarded as the bouncy chest is cleared, not when you open the chest from your inventory.
These are the common HoT bouncy chests and the base XP they contain:
With max “all XP” boosts of +70%, each hero challenge daily chest is worth nearly 60k experience! At that rate, just 9 hero challenges would fill the XP bar for a tier one mastery.
You’ll get plenty of opportunity to kill mobs in HoT, and fortunately the “experience from kills” boost is pretty common. You’ll get it from:
Another way to get more experience from kills is to target enemies that don’t get killed often, since these offer bonus XP.
Fighting in a group to advance the zone meta event is a great way to get experience from both events and kills, and earn the mastery points you’ll need to complete your mastery unlocks. It’s also a great way to get loot and help with harder fights.
Unfortunately the metaserver system can make it quite challenging to find an active map, since players are often shunted to empty maps. The workaround is to use Looking for Group tool (LFG) to find and taxi to an active map.
You’ll also need to know when to look for a group. Just like the Vinewrath in the Silverwastes, you might choose to taxi in a bit before the main event. Alternatively, just like the Silverwastes, you might prefer to get more XP and currency by working on the smaller events leading up to the final fight.
Unlike the Silverwastes, however, Heart of Thorns maps run their meta on a two hour cycle. There are several apps and web pages that show an HoT event timer, but one of the easiest to remember is on the official wiki. In fact, you can open it from in-game using the following command:
The timer apps do a nice job of showing you what is happening now, but they don’t show you when players tend to put up taxis. I’ve added blue arrows to the HoT Meta Clock illustration article showing the typical times to taxi for the “main event”.
Here are some LFG tips to catch the main event in each map:
In my experience, this is the most reliable way to get into an organized Dragon’s Stand map that will complete the meta successfully. If you decide to use LFG instead, try to get into a map as close to the reset time as possible.
If you are looking for folks to help with map completion or achievements, open your own group in LFG and taxi people to your map. Alternatively, use /map chat to group up immediately following the meta on a busy map.
Enemies are quite a bit harder in Heart of Thorns than in the parts of Tyria we’ve enjoyed for the first three years of the game. To survive (and thrive!) you’ll need exotic gear or better, a good build and a few tricks up your sleeve.
For builds, I often run one designed for sPVP. These tend to offer a little more survivability than dungeon builds, but still have enough DPS to let you progress at a comfortable pace.
For skills, I recommend you consider:
A venerable gem of military wisdom helps here too: know your enemy. Some of the most deadly new enemies are easily countered when you learn their tells.
More than anything else, I recommend patience and a sense of fun. Heart of Thorns is a huge region, with plenty of places to get lost (and plenty of ways to be defeated). If you find HoT intimidating, try going ‘bite-sized.’ Every map is organized by outposts (or lanes), so one good way to really learn a map is to master each outpost before moving on.
Personally, I find Heart of Thorns a beautiful, rewarding, and engaging place to spend my time. As you unlock masteries, learn your way around and develop ways to fight the new enemies, you may start to agree!