The most recent expansion to Guild Wars 2 is out with End of Dragons and it introduced one of the best Quality of Life masteries seen in the game Jade Bots – except that unlike many of the other masteries introduced to GW2, they are very alt unfriendly.
Jade Bots are a type of cute little “jade mech” built out of Xunlai Jade found on and around the continent of Cantha. The dragonjade technology is very expensive, but it’s used throughout their society and it’s a fundamental part of the story.
They are connected to a Mastery line that allows players to slowly unlock their abilities. For example, they allow access to zip lines (a type of map traversal), personal waypoints, and at their maximum mastery level can assist with rallying a player when they’re downed.
Jade Bots can also be upgraded with different modules allowing them to scan corpses for trophies, recycle junk items, or boost damage for the siege turtle. It can also be upgraded with a module for skiff speed, gliding height rally recharge, and treasure hunting.
The biggest problem is that the bots are yet another single-character paper doll item that requires upgrades for every alt. This means that the more alts that a player has the more costly they are to upgrade to receive their effect.
Most MMORPG players are already used to this effect, having to gear up alts each time they make a new one and this means that the Jade Bots are yet another mechanic that needs to be geared up as a result.
New alts also cannot use their Jade Bot right away because it doesn’t come with its own power core. A tier one power core is available as a reward during the End of Dragons storyline, but after that additional cores must be crafted so that alts can use theirs.
To make new power cores, players need to buy a Research Kit x 250 from a merchant in the expansion and use that to salvage crafted items. It requires a Jeweler with 400 skill and 48 research notes. With 15 research notes, purchase the recipe for the Tier 1 Core (or whichever core is desired) from the Xunlai Jade Sales Associate. Following the recipe for the T1, it would cost 33 notes, two ectoplasms, five bronze ingots, five orichalcum ingots, and four pieces of pure jade mined from jadeite veins.
At this point, Jade Bots represent the first time a Mastery track is thoroughly alt-unfriendly. It actively punishes players who have more alts who want to have Jade Bot access at max on all of them, because each time they upgrade them, they’d have to purchase upgrades for them.
End of Dragons was released on February 28 and since that date, Jade Bot cores have been continuously going up in price. This is most likely because the utility of the bots is extremely high and the number of players who have alts that they want the convenience of using them.
Some players have even taken to placing extra cores and modules in their account bank so that they can move them easily between alts. They just pop them out of their Jade Bot and move them around. It’s a workaround for a system that either forces players to do this or spend extra time on every alt to build up those upgrades.
Every other Mastery across each expansion, including mounts, has been account-wide up until this point. Jade Bots, although an interesting utility, now creates frustration that may end up with players second-guessing why they put points into the mastery when their alts can barely use the bots in the first place.
ArenaNet should think about looking into their systems design for the Jade Bots because having made them character-only has deviated strikingly from the original mantra that gave access to these systems right out of the gate.
Image: ArenaNet
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