Each Guild Wars campaign has a title for various 100%s. Completing the campaign nets you a Hall of Monuments trophy but no title. Completing all campaign missions with all bonuses is the Protector title, then Guardian if you do so in hard mode. Kill every monster in every zone in hard mode to get Vanquisher, and uncover the entire map to get Cartographer. Capturing every elite skill is another.
Then there are meta-titles. There are titles for getting all the Vanquisher titles, all the Cartography, all the elite skills, and for combined Protector and Guardian. The real meta-title is “Kind of a Big Deal” through “God Walking Amongst Mere Mortals,” based on your number of maxed titles. Maxed titles plug into the Honor monument, points for your Guild Wars 2 rewards. All of these are good and fine, to the extent that they are sane.
Add Eye of the North to that. Do you need to conquer this new campaign in all ways to complete the meta-titles? What happens if you already have one? And how do dungeons factor in? The developers handled all that with a combined Master of the North title. Missions, dungeons, vanquishing, and cartography add points.
This is poor because of the effort to reward ratio for Eye of the North versus other campaigns. I can take Factions to 100% complete and get six Honor statues in the Hall of Monuments (plus progress on meta-titles), or I can do the same in Eye of the North (with dungeons instead of skill-capping) and get one. Eye of the North has multiple reputation titles, but those are less readily available for the Hall of Monuments than the Factions or Nightfall titles. On the other hand, Eye of the North is rather shorter than, say, Prophecies’ 25 missions and 54 zones.
It is good content, which is intrinsically rewarding, but the extrinsic rewards for 100% completion are lacking relative to the base campaigns. Most of the extrinsic rewards come from the new PvE skills, which make it easier to gain those base campaign rewards.
: Zubon
If you complete all the content in Eye of the North, you will pretty much max out the reputation titles as well in the process. All of the missions and dungeons add a decent chunk to one reputation title on the first completion (in both normal and hard mode), and you’ll have 4 books to hand in after completing both normal and hard mode content.
The cartography component of Master of the North is much more lenient than the other cartography titles, and you can skip vanquishing a couple of zones if you do all the dungeons.
So it’s still 5 statues for EotN, but you’ll end up earning most of them at roughly the same time, and perhaps individual objectives are less clearly defined with all progress being lumped together.
Also the Master of the North title isn’t as demanding as the combined titles for the other campaigns. They built in some extra points so you don’t have to map the whole thing or you can even skip an entire HM dungeon if you want. It might be bigger than any one title, but I’d say that it comes in under two like vanquish and guardian in Prophecies. Then the four books and reputation title progress help off set the extra work.
Although the most efficient route does lead to maxing those five titles at roughly the same time, it is nice that you get a slight power boost to your PvE skills (and title effects) each time you rank up a reputation title. The EotN reputation titles along with the Sunspear title are part of a small group of titles where it feels worthwhile to work on them even if you never finish them.
Speaking of sane titles, the cartographer title is crazy. Sure there are mods that make is doable, but I feel like I have missed a lot exploring because my camera was pointed at some mountain while trying to scrape the edges of the map.
While we are making comparisons, we should compare obtaining those six statues in factions to obtaining them in prophecies. If you compare getting all five EotN titles to getting six statues in prophecies, I think it makes the EotN ones seem easy. Add to that the in-game rewards for EotN (which are much better then the other campaigns), and you have a strong case for spending time there.
It would have been nice to see a statue associated with completing the EotN story. However, if you are playing for HoM points completing EotN once is vital for tapestries.