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Above: Watch the Heart of Thorns Launch Trailer.

Jungle Reaver

“ Gone are the awkward cutscenes where speaking characters faced off as though they were about to brawl in Street Fighter.

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The Heart of Thorns expansion itself is a little like that. It's great fun in the right circumstances, but when those circumstances shift a tad from the ideal, it falls a little flat on its face, with increasingly empty zones and the illusion of open-ended horizontal progression.

Above: Everything you need to know about Heart of Thorns.

“ It's an ambitious design, although it doesn't take long to feel the ways in which it clashes with existing methods of navigation.

You Can Run, But You Can't Glide (At First)

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“ There’s no indication that you need certain masteries to advance into particular story missions.

Second-Class Citizens

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“ Two weeks on, there were never enough people playing it for me to truly see it in action.

Thankfully, there are new methods of navigating these expanses, and that's where the Mastery system comes in. It replaces the traditional leveling bar with one that focuses on leveling select skills such as hang-gliding, mushroom-jumping, and learning the languages of Maguuma's homegrown races, which provides a reason to revisit areas later. Jumping on mushrooms and talking with frogs is cool and all, but it's the glider that's king in this regard. It's a smart way of introducing an airborne mode of travel that avoids the content-skipping traps of flying mounts. You have to be smart about where you use your glider, and thus, it mixes strategy with convenience.The trouble with Masteries is that it's sometimes frustrating to scrounge up the XP needed to fully unlock them. The new zones don't have any traditional quests; instead, you get the lion's share of Mastery XP from the numerous dynamic event chains unfolding throughout each region. These are tough events, full of charging and swarming enemies that often make soloing impossible, which wasn't a problem just a few days ago when Heart of Thorns was brand new and groups were plentiful. Just two weeks in, though, I already often find myself on maps with virtually nothing going on. I'm alone with these swarms. Sometimes a notice pops up saying that I'm invited to join a more populated map (with an XP boost, to boot), but oddly enough, it's occasionally almost as unpopulated.I don't think it's an issue of interest in the expansion; it likely has more to do with something off about the way the game decides when it needs more instances of a map. After all, it's always possible to find busy groups through the Group Finder (who've probably filled their map instance to the brim), but if the other maps are looking like this so soon after launch, I worry about what they'll look like in a few weeks. It's especially alarming in light of the fact that this is what passes for new group PvE content in the absence of any new five-man dungeons (although new 10-man raids will be out later this year).One easy way of lessening that pain, I found, was to juggle the Mastery leveling between my Warrior and Ranger characters. One great thing about Mastery points is that they're account-wide, which makes leveling alts far less painful. Leveling alts is particularly appealing in Heart of Thorns actually, since each class comes with new "elite specializations" that unlock new weapons and alternative playstyles. The catch? They can only be unlocked by completing all the base class's skills with hero points. The novelty of their designs usually make them worth trying out like in the case of the Guardian's metamorphosis into a longbow-wielding Dragonhunter with traps that are arguably more effective than a Ranger's. However, it fails spectacularly in the case of the Warrior's humdrum Berserker specialization, which seems merely useful for an occasional damage boost at best.But if you want an entirely new start with a class? That's where the versatile new Revenant comes in, which draws on the powers of four legends from Tyria's past in order to switch between a focus on tanking, healing, or damage dealing within seconds. It's a flashy class, full of animations like slamming down a hammer to pave a stone road, but I also discovered with my couple of hours with it at around level 35 (after a boost) that it didn't feel terribly different from other classes. I liked this, to my surprise. It means the class is just another strong alternative rather than the hot thing of the hour that quickly oversaturates the population.Despite my reservations, I've had a lot of fun with Heart of Thorns and I'll continue to. It's an ambitious expansion that takes some risks at a time when the genre needs them most, and if ArenaNet's past content schedule serves as any indication, it's likely to continue to grow and expand, much like the jungle it depicts.