We caught up with Jon Peters and Kristen Bornemann of ArenaNet to ask some more Heart of Thorns questions.

The masteries seen in the demo are just the tip of what masteries will be available at launch, and the team will have more surprises for players. We wanted to know if all those consumables, like Tomes of Knowledge and Writs of Experience, would help players unlock all of these masteries faster. The short answer is that they won't. The experience bar is going away and is being replaced by the mastery training bar. This training bar is in no way tied to experience, but fills up by going out and doing stuff in the world. So any item that gives you experience won't help you train masteries.

With the expansion being a box price, it is likely there will be players that don't get the expansion day one. They confirmed that even if you don't buy the expansion your experience bar will go away. Kristen added that you will still be able to gain the Old Tyrian mastery points, but you won't be able to use or train masteries until you get the expansion.

With the experience bar and the ability to continually level up to gain more skill points going away, we inquired if there was going to be any changes to items that require skill points to purchase. Jon didn't go into detail, but said that there will be a lot of stuff that will change because of the expansion – but some of those changes might be as simple as changing the messaging of how things are acquired.

As to how skill points, skill and traits are acquired, Jon wanted to affirm that it won't fall into a "do this specific task to get a specific thing." He brought up the current method for unlocking traits and said that it just didn't work. He added that they would have changed the traits back earlier if we hadn't already been changing it by doing this expansion.

Diving into the Personal Story that comes with HoT, Jon told us that there was not going to be any hard-gating for the story. There aren't any additional levels coming in HoT, so it won't be like the original personal story where you had to reach a certain level to unlock the next story. They told us that the personal story in HoT will be a lot more like how story was in the living world than the original personal story. Jon mentioned how Canach was in the personal story instance that you see in the demo (and can watch in The Scrying Pool). He said that this is the first instance of the personal story, but not the first bits of the story. There will be open world stuff to the HoT story, similar to the latest living world, but the open world stuff may be more complicated than just walking up to a random NPC.

During our ArenaNet visit interview, we found out that you will be able to replay story steps in HoT. We wondered if this is going to be like Living World Season 2 where there were achievements to get when repeating an episode. Jon said the expansion is also a lot like the living world in that regard. He said that the story instances themselves are actually a lot like the missions in GW1. They are contained, there are choices you make within them and there are bonus objectives to complete.

Now for the Lightning Round!

• Content not dependent on expansion features will still come out when they are ready (such as the upcoming camera changes)
• There will be patches between now and the expansion, though what that is Jon and Kristen didn't know for sure
• Colin said that Super Adventure Box will return, and Jon has his own suspicions on when it may come out, but didn't elaborate further
• ArenaNet has no problem with players using Tomes of Knowledge to create an instant level 80 Revenant if they choose to do so
• Stronghold depends a lot on players in terms of it being in the same or different queues as well as its inclusion in future tournaments
• Reward team is working really hard on HoT. We asked about greater than 20 slot bags, but they didn't know what the reward team is deciding to do for HoT.
• For China, ArenaNet has strived for normal patches to come out at or near the same time in China. They will strive to do the same for HoT, but shipping a boxed expansion has a lot more to consider over normal patches.
• We asked about Dungeons and Fractals, and Jon answered simply that they will be revealing what the super cryptic Challenging Group Content text means in the future

To wrap up the interview we were curious about what HoT means for the future. A lot of the features ArenaNet has commented as being foundational features that can be built upon in the future, so we were curious if this meant future expansions would come out quicker than the time between launch and HoT. Luckily, Ann was able to throw a cripple out on Jon before he could retreat! All joking aside, Kristen said that they are focused on making HoT the best possible expansion for now. Jon added that they like to give people stuff and one of the goals of HoT is to make it easier to give people the stuffs. Jon added that they do want to be careful, however. In GW1 they went for the quantity over quality and it caused them to end up with a bunch of systems and problems that they couldn't go back on.

We want to thank Jon and Kristen for taking the time to answer our questions. To learn more about Heart of Thorns, make sure you check out our previous two interviews as well as our demo impressions.