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Now that the hype train has come and gone, I was able to spend some time with the new content. Halloween events are turning out to be a flop because of a bug that doesn't let you progress masteries. Capturing the guild hall was fun. I believe our chapter did it the fastest so far of any. The leaders seemed to know what causes fails, and previous runs took up to an hour. Outside of that I can't say much about our empty hall. Verdant Brink instantly becomes a dull map appearance-wise when you hit the next area with the Exalted... wow what a beautiful map and its even optimized better than VB. The story missions so far are the best GW2 has to offer. I guess you could say GW2's personal story is kinda like Destiny's campaign except to makes sense and ends conclusively... its just a after thought of the the whole game. There are a lot of reasons for this I wont get into, but The Living World pulled it all together with better supporting characters that uplifted the older ones. While the original PS has cheesy stale cut scenes for dialog sessions, the LWS2 was more open world, sacrificing your character's voice making you more of a Link (Zelda) type character. Heart of Thorns brings back your character's voice, and has amazing voice work. It leaves it all in the open world, even going as far as having your character's head turn in the direction of who they are addressing and vice versa. Cut scenes are used for action show pieces like they properly should and they are well done. So far I've only encountered one frustrating mission that was sorta bugged... it was because they were trying something new, and it just didn't quite work out. A lot of rage within the community has occurred over the Elite Spec unlock requirements, but after doing some map exploration I find those feelings to be misplaced. While the maps are indeed big, gliding makes everything faster. Without renowned hearts these zones are easy to complete in theory. I secured all the way points in VB in under 30 min and unfogged most of the next map in 10 min. The hero points necessary to fully unlock Specs are behind a wall of masteries. You just can't get to certain parts of the map where hero challenges are without the correct mastery lines. So yes... unlocking your first elite spec is going to take some work and some grind. Masteries unlock account wide, so you will be able to quickly farm the hero points with your alts once you get them all on your main. Although, there are a lot of hero points that have champion level enemies to defeat, they do throw you a bone in some cases. I soloed a champion golem that constantly spawned small hero-trons that I could easily kill in down state to rally. With hero challenges giving 10 point credits, I can't really complain at the difficulty... there are some traditional commune points as well so its not all bad. That brings me to the difficulty.... man, I am glad this shit is hard. Reaper is a monster elite spec, and in old content everything is just laughable. I can stack 25 might on myself as easy as spamming auto attack, so I'm def about to throw down some gold on Strength Runes. Anet found a happy medium between BWE1 and BWE2... enemies hit as hard as BWE1 but have lower HP like BWE2. With such a power house of a class, I'm glad I can really test it out on some worthy content. My only gripe is Necro CC heal needs to be restored to how it was... everyone has monster heal now, so there is no reason to cap CC anymore. I really need to test out my Dragonhunter though. I've been loving it in older content, and I used it in the guild hall cap... the bow was improved a lot and it makes me happy. I thought I wouldn't spend any time with DH TBH, but after using it for a good 5-7 hours, I'm glad my first character is still enjoyable to play in a new way. If they got rid of the rooting LB presents for DH it would be perfect. So yeah... I'm really happy with my purchase and I had no doubt that I would be. Its sad to see people in Lion's Arch talk shit about HoT because of its price, claiming there is not a lot of content. There is a ton of content, and they gave a solid chunk of it away for free to people that didn't buy the xpac as in the old map rewards, PvP and WvW changes. People can talk shit about a lot of games I've liked over the years, but I take offense when its GW2. The developers aren't perfect, and they do make mistakes and bad choices at times... but they actually care, and they spend time with the community on the subreddit and in game. They care about their game, and their players too... it shows.