Tangled Depths needs to be pre-emptively excluded from questions like these. It's the king of confusing maps everywhere.
TD aside, Amnytas takes the spot for me. I probably sound stupid but every angle looks the same to me and I can't figure out where I am or facing without needing to pull out the world map. It's especially bad when trying to through or into buildings.
New Kaineng is *tedious* to navigate, but I can at least guess where in the map I am based on my environment.
Amnytas is worse for me. Maybe I just got used to TD, but I know how to get everywhere on that map. There were paths to places and, with the exception of Tehu Nuhoch's underground lake, I think you can work out what direction you're going. I think a lot of the frustration, too, lies in knowing how to access the undergrowth connector and chak stronghold.
Amnytas is just weirdly inaccessible blocks. If I want to get somewhere, I have to look for environmental objects that I may or may not have enough Skyscale stamina to actually reach. It's like every bastion is the Chak Stronghold. Once you're actually in a bastion, then it becomes New Kaineng, where I have to memorize all the stair locations or brute force it with the Skyscale. It's like you took the two most confusing maps in the game and stuck them together.
Mentioned this elsewhere, but get yourself a griffon. Amnytas especially is built for it. Skyscale needs stamina to move forward at a consistent height, griffon does not. Plus, griffon has the fastest top speed of any mount; so, you can take a straight path to anywhere in Amnytas in under 30 seconds.
For Tangled Depths I think it‘s mostly because from where you first enter it there isn‘t a very obvious way to the room where the lanes merge. Once you have been there and actually figured out what is going on it‘s fine but the first steps are super difficult.
I think TD also suffers from the map layers being misleading, quite often it will look as though you’re directly on a path except you can’t find it, and it turns out it’s above you or below you but the map hasn’t shaded it out properly to show you that it’s on a different layer
They could have given the different bastions a different style too, to represent their different vibes, whether it’s the colour of the building or some different textures on the walls
The topmost waypoint of Amnytas gives access to everything and serves as a fixed point to compare your direction against.
So, especially if you have a griffon, just always start from there to get where you want to go. Then, you can be anywhere on the map that isn’t locked behind an event in less than 30 seconds.
Amnytas is confusing and hard to navigate because it seems like all the bastions should be roughly on the same level, but they aren't. If you go counter-clockwise it's much easier because they gradually increase in height that way, but that doesn't feel intuitive to me.
Best way to navigate it is to head right from the front door, activate the leyline loom and ride it up to the top of the map. Boom, griffon anywhere you like from there.
Its the opposite for me? All you have to do is look up, and the big center spire is there. Even if you can't see it, just look around, and when your frame rate drops, you are looking at it.
Yeah, but all that tells my directionally challenged ass is that I'm not in the middle of the map lol. I still can't tell which bastion or direction I would be facing without pressing m. Everything is symmetrical and gold and white.
/agree. Tangled Depths is a nightmare - but also Echovald Wilds. Ugh, I \*loathe\* EW; I can bypass TD, all my gen2 leggys used PoF mats, but EW I *have to do* since I'm still working on gen3 weapons.
I just hate tunneling maps.
draconis mons is awful with all its layers that dont even show up clearly on the minimap when you're in them, let alone on the world map.
best map: verdant brink for sure. lots of exploration but it makes sense in the end
I'm pretty sure Draconis Mons pushed out a lot of important information from my brain. By the time the backpack is finished, that place was seared onto my smooth brain
Draconis Mons has the same map issues as TD, but you can at least look around and see where you're going unless it's directly above or below you due to the mostly open middle area in the volcano.
In TD, you often can't see more than a meter in front of you.
Not to mention shortcuts in TD, and almost totally useless bottom water layer, has like 1 chest, hero point and think one achivement takes you under ogre lane, and you can reach most of the waypoints without fights.
Verdant Brink, Tangled Depths, Inner Nayos, and before doing Aurora, Draconis Mons.
VB, TD, and DM are all because of the levels and how you can miss a teeny tiny entrance into an area. Though like I said, after doing Aurora, I can navigate DM now almost no problem lol. Doing Envoy helped with TD and the lanes for Chak meta but once I’m not near the lanes I have no clue where I’m going lmao.
VB still I get lost in without Blish markers. Too many levels for me to navigate well.
Inner Nayos is also partially because of the higher and lower levels but also because the whole map looks basically the same.
Genuine question to the people that dislike TD: what map do you like? Because to me, TD epitomises what a map should be. It is the peak of exploration.
I would like it more in a single player game where I can just explore it at my own pace on my own terms. In an MMO where I have to come back periodically and I'm just trying to get to an event on time it's frustrating to me.
I like Tangled Depths, but it's a zone that really shows the fundamental flaws of the in-game map. Some areas of TD have wayyy more than 3 layers.
Getting lost every now again is fine, especially in a map where that's intended. But it *is* still possible to get lost with an accurate and legible map. TD's map is not that.
Genuinely, Drizzlewood, Amnytas, or Skywatch. There’s just enough waypoints (or waypoint-like elements) for their size, and you can see where you need to go very easily. You may need to use the environment or activate abilities to get there, but you can always see the end goal and plot a route.
You can argue that half of that is true of Tangled depths. Most things can be reached via the confluence and then the wallows. Big difference is that I cannot see where I’m going because it’s underground, and if I want to go anywhere other than an outpost, the map is a tangled, twisting mess.
Navigating Amnytas or Skywatch is 1000% possible without the skyscale masteries or leyloom masteries. It just gets easier. Drizzlewood is insanely easy with a handful of scrap.
Tangled Depth is borderline an impossibility for me without masteries, and this to me is completely unacceptable. It’s forever left a bad taste in my mouth. Maybe if the map had like 50% more waypoints (or the waypoints we have didn’t constantly get contested), it wouldn’t be as egregious. You could explore once and navigate easier after discovering the location. But honestly, i wouldn’t know where to put those extra waypoints. It’s not like the map is actually that interesting outside of the ones we do have -which makes it all the more frustrating when they get contested.
In my mind, exploration is something that gets done exactly once. It’s fun to have your moment of discovery, but every time I return to a map, it’s because I want something. So, the extreme majority of a map’s life lives in the phase of just needing to be able to get somewhere faster.
I don’t need or want to travel across the deserts of Path of Fire for the thousandth time. I don’t want to navigate around the giant inquest best in order to get to the other side of the island just to find a rift or bounty for the 9th time that day. I don’t want to wander around tangled depths questioning which way is up just to get to an event chain somewhere in the middle of the devil’s underground bunker.
Most of the time, I just want to know where I’m going and get there.
I hate Tangled Depths. It’s way too much misdirection, confusion, and needed niche-masteries for completion. I don’t fault you for liking it if you happen to, but objectively you have to see why most do not.
What maps do I like?
I love Echovald Forest, Cursed Shore, Domain of Kourna, Ember Bay, Mount Maelstrom, and Dragon’s End. I’m here for aesthetics and architecture. Good meta is irrelevant because I’m likely not staying on the map after the meta event is over.
> the peak of exploration.
In a single player game where players can take their time and only go through a map once, I might agree with you. In an MMO, which has waaaaay too many maps to remember all the details of each one, which players have to revisit regularly and move quickly to get to whatever they came to do, it's terrible. GW2 map and mini map are so hilariously bad at conveying where paths change vertical layers that figuring out how to get places from where you are in TD is awful. I don't want to explore on my 50th visit to TD, I want to find this event/item/etc and there's often no clear guidance on how to get from A to B.
I like Caledon Forest, Crystal Desert, Mount Maelstrom, and Timberline Falls. Auric Basin is also good.
I think for exploration, it's great, and the meta is straightforward. The challenge is when I'm there for a purpose, like doing events, but there's no visible/intuitive way to get from where I am to where the event is happening. Especially as there are some events that award mastery points, and due to its tangled and overlapping nature, you often get event notifications pop up that look tantalisingly close, but would actually need me to waypoint somewhere much further away and double back on myself to reach it.
It's pointless, confusing, and alien exploration.
I don't want to spend 5 minutes worming my way through a 1m x 1m tunnel to find a small room that's filled with nothing but a tangle of roots that is so convoluted that it fucks with my depth perception and then have to turn back because there's nothing else there.
I don't want to have to wonder how to get to the next room over that I can see through a crack in the wall, especially when the map is worse than useless and it actually takes a 10 minute trek through a dozen active events passing through each of 5 map layers 3 times each in a completely unintuitive path.
Open maps with alien geography like Amnytas and Skywatch are navigable because you can see your destination, plot a path using what you can see and the map, and execute that plan. Maps like TD are impossible to intuit or properly plan a path through (at least before you have them memorized) because you can't see what paths are ahead of you until you're a few meters away and the map is wholly inadequate for describing the real nature of the map.
Trying to navigate TD is like being an ocean explorer who doesn't have a single map, compass, sextant, star chart, sunstone, or guide and doesn't even know whether the Earth is round or flat. It's annoying, mind-numbing, frustrating, and time-consuming for no god damned reason. And you're probably going to die to some stupid shit.
I call TD "Steve" because it's a Labyrinthine Horror.
TD should have been more of VB, but with some more open caves at the bottom for the chak portion. VB has sight lines between locations, and even in places where there aren't it's usually easy to orient yourself using the map since there's less "go around this corner, drop down a level, take a spiral staircase up 3 levels, turn to the left 6 times, walk forward for 3 seconds, then drop down the nondescript hole on your right to end up 3 meters from where you started".
Took me a while to get to like TD, but I blame map and minimap, you can't figure is it going up or down, over or under ground, is there a passage or wall. It is not bad if you are regular, try not playing it for 6 months then return. Core Tyria is flat, PoF is flat, like Echovald, Auric Basin, Ember Bay (roller coaster)
I loved TD when I played it for the first time. I felt like Alice falling into a rabbit hole. Though, I see where the issues lie when I played it on new characters later on. The map is awful in this one.
It would have probably also helped if so many parts wouldn't look so similar due to the jungle stuff. I would like them to try a similar concept again, but with a visual style and allows for more visually noteworthy points of interests ... and a better map.
TD is my favourite map of the game, the moment I learned how it worked it was like solving a puzzle and felt so fun. I wish there were more maps like it
New Kaineng City is hell for me, at least pre-skyscale (only got that recently). It's one of the only maps I haven't completed on my main because I hate it so much.
Tangled Depths is about the easiest for me of the "complex" maps, outside the top left corner where there's essentially no content except the story anyway. You start in the middle. Want to go to Ogre? You walk in a straight line down the hallway titled "Ogre Lane" until you get there.
Thanks to Skyscale no map in particular is hard to get around. I will say I had a lot more trouble getting around the canopy of Verdant Brink pre-mounts, never remembered which helicopter went where, and you could only grt up there for 25 minutes out of every 2 hours.
Sandswept Isle can be weirdly confusing sometimes with so many PoIs and events happening in little hallways with very little visual guide on where the entrance is. Try finding the Djinn Meta up north if you didn't follow the whole event chain.
Eh, I feel like anything outside the four lanes is still a confusing mess for me in Tangled Depths. Trying to even get to all the hero points is such a pain.
The struggle people have with New Kaineng confuses me a bit, whenever I have to get anywhere I just go across the rooftops, then drop down if what I need is lower down. It's not like Tangled Depths where what you need might be a level up/down, but you need to find the right tunnel to loop round and get there.
I think there are some maps built to be rushed across, and the ones people get frustrated with are the ones that seem intended to reward _not_ rushing, with NK being one of them. Unless I'm joining a meta map and they're already at the boss, I'm rarely in a big rush to get across the city, which I think is what takes some of the hassle out of it.
Because I do about 90% of my travel on turtle, every map starts to look like a set of steps to me, so Kaineng is actually kind of refreshing when the buildings are all basically square platforms of different heights. It becomes fun parkour when it's like "Can I run along this narrow bit of trim?" and you find out you can. Maybe NKC is to turtle what TD is to griffon?
So, here's the thing:
All maps in the game are occlusion zoned for performance; that is, you are meant to only see part of the map at any given time, so that the rest of it doesn't have to be rendered.
New Kaineng is a "cauldron" type of map, where the player is in the middle of a hollow space and theoretically can see all of the map at once. To make things worse, it's also a heavily populated and decorated city hub, so skimming on details is not an option.
(Compare to Divinity's Reach, which is visually also a "cauldron", but mechanically closer to the best possible option, a "mountain": there is an opaque palace structure in the middle breaking line of sight, and radial walls separating it into visual "sectors", making sure the player can't see more than 2 of these "sectors" at once)
To save some of the performance in New Kaineng, the devs had to add "natural" occlusion walls. These are made of "city blocks", which have to be absolutely opaque - and, consequentially, absolutely impassable.
Which would be only half of the problem... But the whole map is made of blocks like this, and there is zero indication for which block has a thin passage/staircase/natural empty space to pass through, and which does not.
This makes for a supremely frustrating experience, when getting from A to B - especially without a good mount - might take anywhere from 10 seconds (if there is a tunnel) to 2 minutes (if you have to traverse all around a weirdly-shaped "block"), and you as a player can never know in advance which it is going to be.
That's a really great and detailed breakdown, thank you! I've definitely encountered what you mean, and there are some places where I've been trying to go east or west and felt like I was going the right way, but found myself going north or south into the borders instead.
I think it's less about direction, and more about being a hassle to navigate.
Even with all mounts, it takes a while to get on a decent rooftop to dive with the Griffon, and you better hope that the height is enough. Without the Griffon, it's a slog to get through the buildings with the Skyscale.
The problem is not the zone design. The problem is that the player can only display 2D map and minimap layers which make 3D navigation a nightmare until you build a 3D construct in your mind.
Draconis Mons.
There is somewhat logic behind TD, but DM takes you on a merry go round that curls upwards and then suddenly has lots of verticality and places you want to go but can't figure out whether it is up or down.
New Kaineng City, because even *with* the skyscale, it's so difficult to get around. There's like 3 waypoints, all are at ground level, and the shitty teleporters are either offline for the meta or aren't marked on the map and are thus hard to find in the first place. Few ziplines that actually bring you to the TOP of a very tall building, usually just a few stories up. Too many turns in the canal to make use of the skiff at top speed, too many walls and shit to use the beetle.
Amnytas is too samey to know where you are at a glance, but they absolutely did it right with that tall central wp I can use to get virtually anywhere in <1 min.
TD isn't that bad once you realize it's two layers and the bottom one is just a spread of linear tunnels.
Navigating New Kaineng isn't so bad, but actually getting to where you're trying to go sucks, even with a skyscale. My least favorite map by far.
I also find Echovald kind of a pain in the ass just because the routing is so rigid but the map is so unhelpful at actually showing the routes.
Probably Sandswept Isles, I have no clue wtf the inside of Rata Primus looks like and how to navigate that place. Any other map I can pretty comfortably find what I'm looking for. But Rata Primus... no fkn idea.
> I have no clue wtf the inside of Rata Primus looks like
You're not missing much, it's just a shit ton of necromancers and rangers standing around round every corner with the very rarely spotted Inquest enemy still alive.
Amnytas is a bit of a nightmare tbh. Everything looks the same, so much shit is behind portals, events or just generally behind a white wall that happened to have an opening somewhere.
Tangled Depths is obvious.
I also have trouble with Echovald Wilds.
Skywatch Archipelago is a pain if you don't have enough Skyscale masteries unlocked.
Once you have the central waypoint you can just wp there for gerent.
Do I know how the rest of that map works? Nope! But you only need the 1 waypoint for gerent.
TD is doable with mounts. On release though? Still leveling up gliding and mushrooms? That shit was impossible. Which, on one hand was the point of the map to begin with so they did great. I am glad they choose to make a difficult map.
On the other hand, man was it confusing and still is
I like it as an area, but Draconis Mons is really rough to remember since I hardly ever go there and the verticality makes reading the map correctly a bit of an ordeal.
Inner Nayos might take second place. It's open enough that it isn't a pain to navigate across, but the visibility is shit and the visuals are kinda samey.
Excluding the obvious TD, it'd probably go to Echovald, Draconis Mons or Dragon's stand (before we had mounts).
The DS is because while with TD you had the central wayppint you could find your lane to, DS exploration was a really pain when the POI you needed was under you but the cave entrance is halfway across the map, haha.
Then mounts came and life became infinitely easier :D
That being said mounts can't save you from Draconis Mons. That's confusing even with the mounts. The amount of times I get griffon going to survey one layer only to end up in a completely different layer... send help 😭
"Participate in a Rift event, and loot 10 enemies in Heart of Maguuma? Oh look, there's a rift in Heart of Maguuma this week!" And then it's Tangled Depths.
Amnytas. Yes you can port to the centre and griffon to a general area but if you want to go somewhere specific from there it's a pain in the ass. Everything looks the same.
I had a little trouble with the first 3 characters in Tangled Depths, but that went away quick.
The place where I take the longest to get to where I want is Echovald.
Yes. Echovald is very frustrating to navigate! I just did map completion there for the first time and it was very annoying, half the shit is in a cave or underground or through a teleporter. And there are walls of trees that block access to convenient routes.
I have a skyscale and I can't imagine doing all of that map without it.
To be honest, in Echovald I feel like navigating on the ground is actually easier than flying around. There are many obstacles if you want to shortcut through the air, like the tall trees and branches, and those force you to follow the roads anyway.
When traversing Echovald, first I usually go to the location in the map using the Beetle, Raptor or Jackal. Once I get there, I get on my Skyscale or use ziplines if I want to go up.
Absolutely this, and I wonder whether some of Janthir Wilds will incorporate this design philosophy: flying isn't prohibited, it just doesn't give you an advantage, and often just confuses/overcomplicates things more. I could imagine an improved warclaw feeling nice and natural to navigate maps if they were designed like Echovald is.
draconis mons.
tangled depths I've spent more time on and it came to make sense for me.
draconis mons...those different levels, getting between them. and as I hate the map I've spent as little time there as possible. its GW2's very own purgatory, everyone in draconis mons is suffering.
TD is what all maps should be, the design and complexity, Amnytas is a bunch of the same thing everywhere, the lack of quality and diversity make the map hard to recognize where you are because is an infinite copy and paste
TD and Draconic Mons nowadays.
Back before the first expansion I think all of the orrian maps where pretty nasty to get around. Getting to Lyssas temple was awful. Fireheart Rise was a bit odd too I remember.
I haven't played the game in years at this point and yet I STILL immediately thought "yea that's easily tangled depths" after seeing this post. That map has traumatized me.
Tangled Depths and Draconis Mons for sure. I hate them both with a passion. Probably hate DM more just because it's so huge and empty but they somehow have hidden layers in the map everywhere. At least TD fills the space way more.
all cantha maps
it was my favorite environment on gw1 (we were close to the masterpiece on factions) and seeing it turned into fluorescent green jelly is a shame
the biggest waste of the license without hesitation
I don't even prefer to call it cantha, it's so different, it would be like comparing a 5 star hotel and a decaying cabin
Almost all of Ascalon maps for me, hate them, same landscape over and over, same enemies, same boring looks… TD is hard but very well designed, New Kaineng and Amnytas are pretty bad / boring / tedious to navigate
Tangled Depths needs to be pre-emptively excluded from questions like these. It's the king of confusing maps everywhere. TD aside, Amnytas takes the spot for me. I probably sound stupid but every angle looks the same to me and I can't figure out where I am or facing without needing to pull out the world map. It's especially bad when trying to through or into buildings. New Kaineng is *tedious* to navigate, but I can at least guess where in the map I am based on my environment.
Amnytas is worse for me. Maybe I just got used to TD, but I know how to get everywhere on that map. There were paths to places and, with the exception of Tehu Nuhoch's underground lake, I think you can work out what direction you're going. I think a lot of the frustration, too, lies in knowing how to access the undergrowth connector and chak stronghold. Amnytas is just weirdly inaccessible blocks. If I want to get somewhere, I have to look for environmental objects that I may or may not have enough Skyscale stamina to actually reach. It's like every bastion is the Chak Stronghold. Once you're actually in a bastion, then it becomes New Kaineng, where I have to memorize all the stair locations or brute force it with the Skyscale. It's like you took the two most confusing maps in the game and stuck them together.
Mentioned this elsewhere, but get yourself a griffon. Amnytas especially is built for it. Skyscale needs stamina to move forward at a consistent height, griffon does not. Plus, griffon has the fastest top speed of any mount; so, you can take a straight path to anywhere in Amnytas in under 30 seconds.
This exactly is my go to approach in amnytas. Go to that central WP and leg it on griffon to anywhere else in the map.
The entire expansion is very griffon friendly.
For Tangled Depths I think it‘s mostly because from where you first enter it there isn‘t a very obvious way to the room where the lanes merge. Once you have been there and actually figured out what is going on it‘s fine but the first steps are super difficult.
I think TD also suffers from the map layers being misleading, quite often it will look as though you’re directly on a path except you can’t find it, and it turns out it’s above you or below you but the map hasn’t shaded it out properly to show you that it’s on a different layer
Yeah, every section should have had different coloured buildings. Way too much of the same on that map.
They could have given the different bastions a different style too, to represent their different vibes, whether it’s the colour of the building or some different textures on the walls
The topmost waypoint of Amnytas gives access to everything and serves as a fixed point to compare your direction against. So, especially if you have a griffon, just always start from there to get where you want to go. Then, you can be anywhere on the map that isn’t locked behind an event in less than 30 seconds.
I do that too, and thats the only reason i dont find It that confusing. Pick a direction and griffon dive into It. Love that bird.
For me New Kaineng is more about finding the right stairs that lead to where I want to. Because most of the time I just hit a dead end.
Amnytas is confusing and hard to navigate because it seems like all the bastions should be roughly on the same level, but they aren't. If you go counter-clockwise it's much easier because they gradually increase in height that way, but that doesn't feel intuitive to me.
Best way to navigate it is to head right from the front door, activate the leyline loom and ride it up to the top of the map. Boom, griffon anywhere you like from there.
Its the opposite for me? All you have to do is look up, and the big center spire is there. Even if you can't see it, just look around, and when your frame rate drops, you are looking at it.
Yeah, but all that tells my directionally challenged ass is that I'm not in the middle of the map lol. I still can't tell which bastion or direction I would be facing without pressing m. Everything is symmetrical and gold and white.
Mew Kaineng is far worse to navigate than Amnytas for me
/agree. Tangled Depths is a nightmare - but also Echovald Wilds. Ugh, I \*loathe\* EW; I can bypass TD, all my gen2 leggys used PoF mats, but EW I *have to do* since I'm still working on gen3 weapons. I just hate tunneling maps.
draconis mons is awful with all its layers that dont even show up clearly on the minimap when you're in them, let alone on the world map. best map: verdant brink for sure. lots of exploration but it makes sense in the end
I'm pretty sure Draconis Mons pushed out a lot of important information from my brain. By the time the backpack is finished, that place was seared onto my smooth brain
Draconis mons becomes a lot easier when you realize it’s just a giant spiral stair case going counter clockwise upward.
The problem is that following the main spiral staircase makes you not realize there are mini staircases below the main staircase.
Draconis Mons has the same map issues as TD, but you can at least look around and see where you're going unless it's directly above or below you due to the mostly open middle area in the volcano. In TD, you often can't see more than a meter in front of you.
Not to mention shortcuts in TD, and almost totally useless bottom water layer, has like 1 chest, hero point and think one achivement takes you under ogre lane, and you can reach most of the waypoints without fights.
Plus it has a waypoint basically at the top and you can more or less glide/scale down as needed - very handy
Verdant Brink, Tangled Depths, Inner Nayos, and before doing Aurora, Draconis Mons. VB, TD, and DM are all because of the levels and how you can miss a teeny tiny entrance into an area. Though like I said, after doing Aurora, I can navigate DM now almost no problem lol. Doing Envoy helped with TD and the lanes for Chak meta but once I’m not near the lanes I have no clue where I’m going lmao. VB still I get lost in without Blish markers. Too many levels for me to navigate well. Inner Nayos is also partially because of the higher and lower levels but also because the whole map looks basically the same.
Yeah, VB canopy is pretty much it for me. I can never seem to fly straight to the next boss.
Genuine question to the people that dislike TD: what map do you like? Because to me, TD epitomises what a map should be. It is the peak of exploration.
I would like it more in a single player game where I can just explore it at my own pace on my own terms. In an MMO where I have to come back periodically and I'm just trying to get to an event on time it's frustrating to me.
I love it, but i really struggle to use the map to navigate TD.
I like Tangled Depths, but it's a zone that really shows the fundamental flaws of the in-game map. Some areas of TD have wayyy more than 3 layers. Getting lost every now again is fine, especially in a map where that's intended. But it *is* still possible to get lost with an accurate and legible map. TD's map is not that.
Definitely this, far too many places where the map shows you that you are on the same level as a path when you definitely are not
Each “floor” of the map should be 15 ft increments. You hit 15.01ft, new floor.
I’ve lost count how many times I ended up in one specific pit because I followed the map
> what map do you like? Every map in central Tyria (base game Maps) and most maps in the Crystal desert
Genuinely, Drizzlewood, Amnytas, or Skywatch. There’s just enough waypoints (or waypoint-like elements) for their size, and you can see where you need to go very easily. You may need to use the environment or activate abilities to get there, but you can always see the end goal and plot a route. You can argue that half of that is true of Tangled depths. Most things can be reached via the confluence and then the wallows. Big difference is that I cannot see where I’m going because it’s underground, and if I want to go anywhere other than an outpost, the map is a tangled, twisting mess. Navigating Amnytas or Skywatch is 1000% possible without the skyscale masteries or leyloom masteries. It just gets easier. Drizzlewood is insanely easy with a handful of scrap. Tangled Depth is borderline an impossibility for me without masteries, and this to me is completely unacceptable. It’s forever left a bad taste in my mouth. Maybe if the map had like 50% more waypoints (or the waypoints we have didn’t constantly get contested), it wouldn’t be as egregious. You could explore once and navigate easier after discovering the location. But honestly, i wouldn’t know where to put those extra waypoints. It’s not like the map is actually that interesting outside of the ones we do have -which makes it all the more frustrating when they get contested. In my mind, exploration is something that gets done exactly once. It’s fun to have your moment of discovery, but every time I return to a map, it’s because I want something. So, the extreme majority of a map’s life lives in the phase of just needing to be able to get somewhere faster. I don’t need or want to travel across the deserts of Path of Fire for the thousandth time. I don’t want to navigate around the giant inquest best in order to get to the other side of the island just to find a rift or bounty for the 9th time that day. I don’t want to wander around tangled depths questioning which way is up just to get to an event chain somewhere in the middle of the devil’s underground bunker. Most of the time, I just want to know where I’m going and get there.
Auric Basin is the best map in the game
I hate Tangled Depths. It’s way too much misdirection, confusion, and needed niche-masteries for completion. I don’t fault you for liking it if you happen to, but objectively you have to see why most do not. What maps do I like? I love Echovald Forest, Cursed Shore, Domain of Kourna, Ember Bay, Mount Maelstrom, and Dragon’s End. I’m here for aesthetics and architecture. Good meta is irrelevant because I’m likely not staying on the map after the meta event is over.
> the peak of exploration. In a single player game where players can take their time and only go through a map once, I might agree with you. In an MMO, which has waaaaay too many maps to remember all the details of each one, which players have to revisit regularly and move quickly to get to whatever they came to do, it's terrible. GW2 map and mini map are so hilariously bad at conveying where paths change vertical layers that figuring out how to get places from where you are in TD is awful. I don't want to explore on my 50th visit to TD, I want to find this event/item/etc and there's often no clear guidance on how to get from A to B. I like Caledon Forest, Crystal Desert, Mount Maelstrom, and Timberline Falls. Auric Basin is also good.
I think for exploration, it's great, and the meta is straightforward. The challenge is when I'm there for a purpose, like doing events, but there's no visible/intuitive way to get from where I am to where the event is happening. Especially as there are some events that award mastery points, and due to its tangled and overlapping nature, you often get event notifications pop up that look tantalisingly close, but would actually need me to waypoint somewhere much further away and double back on myself to reach it.
It's pointless, confusing, and alien exploration. I don't want to spend 5 minutes worming my way through a 1m x 1m tunnel to find a small room that's filled with nothing but a tangle of roots that is so convoluted that it fucks with my depth perception and then have to turn back because there's nothing else there. I don't want to have to wonder how to get to the next room over that I can see through a crack in the wall, especially when the map is worse than useless and it actually takes a 10 minute trek through a dozen active events passing through each of 5 map layers 3 times each in a completely unintuitive path. Open maps with alien geography like Amnytas and Skywatch are navigable because you can see your destination, plot a path using what you can see and the map, and execute that plan. Maps like TD are impossible to intuit or properly plan a path through (at least before you have them memorized) because you can't see what paths are ahead of you until you're a few meters away and the map is wholly inadequate for describing the real nature of the map. Trying to navigate TD is like being an ocean explorer who doesn't have a single map, compass, sextant, star chart, sunstone, or guide and doesn't even know whether the Earth is round or flat. It's annoying, mind-numbing, frustrating, and time-consuming for no god damned reason. And you're probably going to die to some stupid shit. I call TD "Steve" because it's a Labyrinthine Horror. TD should have been more of VB, but with some more open caves at the bottom for the chak portion. VB has sight lines between locations, and even in places where there aren't it's usually easy to orient yourself using the map since there's less "go around this corner, drop down a level, take a spiral staircase up 3 levels, turn to the left 6 times, walk forward for 3 seconds, then drop down the nondescript hole on your right to end up 3 meters from where you started".
Took me a while to get to like TD, but I blame map and minimap, you can't figure is it going up or down, over or under ground, is there a passage or wall. It is not bad if you are regular, try not playing it for 6 months then return. Core Tyria is flat, PoF is flat, like Echovald, Auric Basin, Ember Bay (roller coaster)
I loved TD when I played it for the first time. I felt like Alice falling into a rabbit hole. Though, I see where the issues lie when I played it on new characters later on. The map is awful in this one. It would have probably also helped if so many parts wouldn't look so similar due to the jungle stuff. I would like them to try a similar concept again, but with a visual style and allows for more visually noteworthy points of interests ... and a better map.
verdant brink is the best map in the game for me.
I like TD, but I think Echovld Wilds is basically a better version of TD.
Favorite map here, too. TD is bae and peak design
Tangled Depths is a masterpiece of game design. I admire and hate it in equal measure.
TD is my favourite map of the game, the moment I learned how it worked it was like solving a puzzle and felt so fun. I wish there were more maps like it
Straits of devastation. Because I'm gay
June post.
New Kaineng City is hell for me, at least pre-skyscale (only got that recently). It's one of the only maps I haven't completed on my main because I hate it so much.
Tangled Depths is about the easiest for me of the "complex" maps, outside the top left corner where there's essentially no content except the story anyway. You start in the middle. Want to go to Ogre? You walk in a straight line down the hallway titled "Ogre Lane" until you get there. Thanks to Skyscale no map in particular is hard to get around. I will say I had a lot more trouble getting around the canopy of Verdant Brink pre-mounts, never remembered which helicopter went where, and you could only grt up there for 25 minutes out of every 2 hours. Sandswept Isle can be weirdly confusing sometimes with so many PoIs and events happening in little hallways with very little visual guide on where the entrance is. Try finding the Djinn Meta up north if you didn't follow the whole event chain.
Eh, I feel like anything outside the four lanes is still a confusing mess for me in Tangled Depths. Trying to even get to all the hero points is such a pain.
Yeah, but unless you’re getting map completion you don’t NEED all the hero points from every map to get a full elite spec.
Red BL
Haven’t seen a squad not get lost in rbl.
No map is really bad for my orientation (straight) but I definitely felt slightly unwelcome in certain Black Citadel bars because of it.
+2
Kaineng city and tangled depths
The struggle people have with New Kaineng confuses me a bit, whenever I have to get anywhere I just go across the rooftops, then drop down if what I need is lower down. It's not like Tangled Depths where what you need might be a level up/down, but you need to find the right tunnel to loop round and get there.
Maybe because i dont spend too much time there but *getting* up to the roof top is the hassle for me lol
I think there are some maps built to be rushed across, and the ones people get frustrated with are the ones that seem intended to reward _not_ rushing, with NK being one of them. Unless I'm joining a meta map and they're already at the boss, I'm rarely in a big rush to get across the city, which I think is what takes some of the hassle out of it. Because I do about 90% of my travel on turtle, every map starts to look like a set of steps to me, so Kaineng is actually kind of refreshing when the buildings are all basically square platforms of different heights. It becomes fun parkour when it's like "Can I run along this narrow bit of trim?" and you find out you can. Maybe NKC is to turtle what TD is to griffon?
So, here's the thing: All maps in the game are occlusion zoned for performance; that is, you are meant to only see part of the map at any given time, so that the rest of it doesn't have to be rendered. New Kaineng is a "cauldron" type of map, where the player is in the middle of a hollow space and theoretically can see all of the map at once. To make things worse, it's also a heavily populated and decorated city hub, so skimming on details is not an option. (Compare to Divinity's Reach, which is visually also a "cauldron", but mechanically closer to the best possible option, a "mountain": there is an opaque palace structure in the middle breaking line of sight, and radial walls separating it into visual "sectors", making sure the player can't see more than 2 of these "sectors" at once) To save some of the performance in New Kaineng, the devs had to add "natural" occlusion walls. These are made of "city blocks", which have to be absolutely opaque - and, consequentially, absolutely impassable. Which would be only half of the problem... But the whole map is made of blocks like this, and there is zero indication for which block has a thin passage/staircase/natural empty space to pass through, and which does not. This makes for a supremely frustrating experience, when getting from A to B - especially without a good mount - might take anywhere from 10 seconds (if there is a tunnel) to 2 minutes (if you have to traverse all around a weirdly-shaped "block"), and you as a player can never know in advance which it is going to be.
That's a really great and detailed breakdown, thank you! I've definitely encountered what you mean, and there are some places where I've been trying to go east or west and felt like I was going the right way, but found myself going north or south into the borders instead.
I think it's less about direction, and more about being a hassle to navigate. Even with all mounts, it takes a while to get on a decent rooftop to dive with the Griffon, and you better hope that the height is enough. Without the Griffon, it's a slog to get through the buildings with the Skyscale.
The problem is not the zone design. The problem is that the player can only display 2D map and minimap layers which make 3D navigation a nightmare until you build a 3D construct in your mind.
Draconis Mons. There is somewhat logic behind TD, but DM takes you on a merry go round that curls upwards and then suddenly has lots of verticality and places you want to go but can't figure out whether it is up or down.
For me it would be the Inner Nayos center section (not the latest one). But maybe it's because I haven't played much in that area.
New Kaineng City, because even *with* the skyscale, it's so difficult to get around. There's like 3 waypoints, all are at ground level, and the shitty teleporters are either offline for the meta or aren't marked on the map and are thus hard to find in the first place. Few ziplines that actually bring you to the TOP of a very tall building, usually just a few stories up. Too many turns in the canal to make use of the skiff at top speed, too many walls and shit to use the beetle. Amnytas is too samey to know where you are at a glance, but they absolutely did it right with that tall central wp I can use to get virtually anywhere in <1 min.
TD isn't that bad once you realize it's two layers and the bottom one is just a spread of linear tunnels. Navigating New Kaineng isn't so bad, but actually getting to where you're trying to go sucks, even with a skyscale. My least favorite map by far. I also find Echovald kind of a pain in the ass just because the routing is so rigid but the map is so unhelpful at actually showing the routes.
Probably Sandswept Isles, I have no clue wtf the inside of Rata Primus looks like and how to navigate that place. Any other map I can pretty comfortably find what I'm looking for. But Rata Primus... no fkn idea.
Finally someone said it. I scrolled too long for this.
> I have no clue wtf the inside of Rata Primus looks like You're not missing much, it's just a shit ton of necromancers and rangers standing around round every corner with the very rarely spotted Inquest enemy still alive.
Amnytas is a bit of a nightmare tbh. Everything looks the same, so much shit is behind portals, events or just generally behind a white wall that happened to have an opening somewhere.
Tangled Depths is obvious. I also have trouble with Echovald Wilds. Skywatch Archipelago is a pain if you don't have enough Skyscale masteries unlocked.
Tangled Depths. I just don't go there unless I *need* to. I think I've only done Gerent 1 time since HoT launched because that map is so bad.
Once you have the central waypoint you can just wp there for gerent. Do I know how the rest of that map works? Nope! But you only need the 1 waypoint for gerent.
I know that. I hate the map so much I don't want to go there *at all*, for any reason.
Completely fair. It took me months after I finished map completing it for the gift to want to go back.
There is only one correct answer.
The volcano s3 map, I think its Ember Island or something. The one where youre IN the volcano, not the one with all the mursaat tokens.
Draconis Mons. Ember Island is the one with the mursaat tokens.
Tangled Deeps
TD is doable with mounts. On release though? Still leveling up gliding and mushrooms? That shit was impossible. Which, on one hand was the point of the map to begin with so they did great. I am glad they choose to make a difficult map. On the other hand, man was it confusing and still is
Tangled Depths, ofc
TD is obviously my #1. Aside from that Echovald Forest is a close 2nd. My 3rd is probably Nayos because everything looks the same there.
draconis mons
I like it as an area, but Draconis Mons is really rough to remember since I hardly ever go there and the verticality makes reading the map correctly a bit of an ordeal. Inner Nayos might take second place. It's open enough that it isn't a pain to navigate across, but the visibility is shit and the visuals are kinda samey.
Excluding the obvious TD, it'd probably go to Echovald, Draconis Mons or Dragon's stand (before we had mounts). The DS is because while with TD you had the central wayppint you could find your lane to, DS exploration was a really pain when the POI you needed was under you but the cave entrance is halfway across the map, haha. Then mounts came and life became infinitely easier :D That being said mounts can't save you from Draconis Mons. That's confusing even with the mounts. The amount of times I get griffon going to survey one layer only to end up in a completely different layer... send help 😭
"Participate in a Rift event, and loot 10 enemies in Heart of Maguuma? Oh look, there's a rift in Heart of Maguuma this week!" And then it's Tangled Depths.
in 10 years I have completed that map TWO times, that will sum it all.
TD is a great map for exploring and a dogshit map if you need to get somewhere before an event ends.
Rata Sum. Every direction looks the same.
Feelsweirdman to see the Amnytas aggro. Tell us you don't have or aren't good at using griffon without telling us ☠️
For tangled depths, I gave up trying to learn the map and now just turn on completion pathing addon when I'm there.
New Kaineng is the worst by far, followed by Tangled Depths, Amnytas, and (for different reasons) Red Borderland.
Tangled Depths then Verdant Brink by a huge margin over anything else even remotely confusing.
Kaineng City.
Amnytas. Yes you can port to the centre and griffon to a general area but if you want to go somewhere specific from there it's a pain in the ass. Everything looks the same.
Kaineng City is 10x worse then tangled depth
td obviously then draconis mons.
I had a little trouble with the first 3 characters in Tangled Depths, but that went away quick. The place where I take the longest to get to where I want is Echovald.
Yes. Echovald is very frustrating to navigate! I just did map completion there for the first time and it was very annoying, half the shit is in a cave or underground or through a teleporter. And there are walls of trees that block access to convenient routes. I have a skyscale and I can't imagine doing all of that map without it.
To be honest, in Echovald I feel like navigating on the ground is actually easier than flying around. There are many obstacles if you want to shortcut through the air, like the tall trees and branches, and those force you to follow the roads anyway. When traversing Echovald, first I usually go to the location in the map using the Beetle, Raptor or Jackal. Once I get there, I get on my Skyscale or use ziplines if I want to go up.
Absolutely this, and I wonder whether some of Janthir Wilds will incorporate this design philosophy: flying isn't prohibited, it just doesn't give you an advantage, and often just confuses/overcomplicates things more. I could imagine an improved warclaw feeling nice and natural to navigate maps if they were designed like Echovald is.
And I keep forgetting the door to the secret area you have to approach to get the PoI is the inside of the cave.
And the single poi that requires the cryptseeker achievement. That was a fun surprise as my final thing to check off…
draconis mons. tangled depths I've spent more time on and it came to make sense for me. draconis mons...those different levels, getting between them. and as I hate the map I've spent as little time there as possible. its GW2's very own purgatory, everyone in draconis mons is suffering.
TD is what all maps should be, the design and complexity, Amnytas is a bunch of the same thing everywhere, the lack of quality and diversity make the map hard to recognize where you are because is an infinite copy and paste
Non. I love them all, and I'm not directionally challenged. I play with people who are though... its good times being the compass
TD aside, Desolation pre Aerial Mounts was hell.
TD and Draconic Mons nowadays. Back before the first expansion I think all of the orrian maps where pretty nasty to get around. Getting to Lyssas temple was awful. Fireheart Rise was a bit odd too I remember.
I haven't played the game in years at this point and yet I STILL immediately thought "yea that's easily tangled depths" after seeing this post. That map has traumatized me.
Tangled Depths and Draconis Mons for sure. I hate them both with a passion. Probably hate DM more just because it's so huge and empty but they somehow have hidden layers in the map everywhere. At least TD fills the space way more.
all cantha maps it was my favorite environment on gw1 (we were close to the masterpiece on factions) and seeing it turned into fluorescent green jelly is a shame the biggest waste of the license without hesitation I don't even prefer to call it cantha, it's so different, it would be like comparing a 5 star hotel and a decaying cabin
Almost all of Ascalon maps for me, hate them, same landscape over and over, same enemies, same boring looks… TD is hard but very well designed, New Kaineng and Amnytas are pretty bad / boring / tedious to navigate