My second playthrough of the first expansion. It's been years (maybe release date) since I fully played through the story.

The story is solid. I like how dark and realistic it's told. When you're playing story missions, I wish you could earn achievements right away, instead of requiring to play through it once first. It would save time.

The down side to this expansion and I knew it was coming...the zones. They're wonderfully designed. I love the lush environments and the enemies. They're tough and require you to understand your class better than the core game. You can earn a new subclass. I am having a blast as a Scrapper Engineer.

But I hate traveling in the zones. They're confusing. You will get lost and may need to search how to get to a certain location. Even with mounts, traveling in the three tier maps are awful.

Probably my favourite piece of content that was added into GW2.
-the zones are difficult
- the raids were added and they were pretty fucking cool at the time
- the story was decent,
- the difficulty spiked but ended up being pretty much perfect for the setting.

Guild Wars 2: Heart of Thorns is Guild at it's peak in terms of storytelling and event-based gameplay. HoT introduces Gliding, the Mastery System, Specializations (subclasses essentially) and a new style of world-boss type map events that scales entire sections of the area. Along with a story and new class that really does up the game's ante to a new level. This is my favorite section of Guild Wars 2.

Gameplay wise, the game is quite the same as the base, with the introduction of "Specializations" which are essentially prestige classes you unlock with the same points used in the base game. They are fun, new, unique, and make each class feel more usable in more contexts, giving a wider slew of gameplay styles for all characters who reach this point. The new HoT event system is somewhere between beat-em-up worldbosses and Raids, most of them being events that are multi-staged and diverse in their execution. A non-spoiler example would be one of the events where there is a location with a big bad you have to fight. Three separate groups must push through the jungle mobs and mini-bosses accomplishing tasks until they all reach the end (15-30 minutes) once there they then fight a boss who destroys their platforms and spawns blossoms you must destroy, all the while you must fight and kill the boss. It utilizes the new glider system and is an event that takes place multiple times a day on a predictable timer system. To be clear, that is also a vast oversimplification of one of the 15+ events of that nature in this area. It's the most fun I have in guild as it perfectly balances the gameplay of the map-wide events and fighting with the more loose class system.

Story in HoT is the best it is in Guild and I don't think it's close. With the introduction of HoT, a living-world series was introduced, essentially mini-dlcs that transition in and out of the DLC releases (or sometimes are their own DLC-sized expansions). These contextualize you're placement, but the downside is they are (mostly) required to understand the context of the DLCs. HoT in itself is a story that takes one of the most annoying characters from the main game and makes them more unique and purposeful, literally making a bad character good. It also has a lot of moment-to-moment payoff and references back to decisions made in the main game's story that makes it feel like a follow-up and less like "oh no, another person is trying to kill the world, ahhhh". It grounds itself well and makes you interested in the story it tells. I can't say much more to avoid the spoiling, but as a person who's played this game a cumulative 5000+ hours, this is my favorite part to replay with each new character.

TLDR: Overall, in my experience, this is peak Guild, while the following Living World season and DLCs hold their own, none of them have the stakes or tension that HoT lays out, as the scale is appropriate and not overblown to the point of absurdity, the characters are well thought out, the gameplay is engaging an fun, and the major issues of the DLC on release (traversal) were immediately solved with the following DLC, Path of Fire (although I have not changed my score to reflect that DLCs introduction. Now excuse me while I play it again.