Guild Wars 1

[Average Manatee]

Yes, and it recharged whenever you killed a boss.

W/Mos should instead be taking a hard res that didn't need to be recharged. Usually Rebirth since that'd teleport the character to the warrior's position, allowing the party to recover from wipes where the enemies decide to camp your corpse.

 

[luj1]

At least in EotN they introduced resurrection scrolls to help in some of those situations.

Consumables brought in with EOTN were decline. Trivialized all endgame content and brought in the speedrunners which make non-stop apologia for botting, deflating the price of practically everything except for a select handful of very expensive items.
Bad planning/execution should be punished.

Whole EotN was decline.

It was the worst Gw 1 expansion.

 

[fork]

Yep, it was the beginning of the end and a preview of what was to come with GW2.
Damn, I miss Prophecies so much.

 

[KörangarTheMighty]

Whole EotN was decline.

Nah. The dungeons were fun and to this day are what I partake in most upon returning, offering enough of an endgame challenge without breaking the time bank. The new weapon and armor skins were excellent as well. New party members were all enjoyable, except angsty Gwen maybe. The Great Destroyer was a letdown as a final boss, should have been the sleeping dragon calling itself the Great Destroyer to subvert expectations.

As far as campaigns go, it was very consistent in its 7/10-ness. Better than mid and late Prophecies, better than early and late Nightfall, worse than early Prophecies and mid Nightfall, worse than all of Factions.

 

[what am i doing]

Wasn't there a one use (per mission /instance) resurrection signet? I think the resident tank Wammo usually picked that to revive the healer monk (me) if everyone else wiped. Not always worth it, but could be a lifesaver. Then again I never really used henchmen, played last when it was at its peak.

Generally speaking it would be better to put hard resses on a few other characters and not have the Monks take res skills at all. Monk's skill bar was always at a premium. Whatever slot you want to put a res skill on, the Monk is sacrificing something important. Maybe hex removal. Maybe condition removal. Maybe Aegis. Maybe a secondary point-protection skill. Etc. Whereas you take your typical damage dealer's bar, they probably have a core set of maybe four skills (on ele this might be dual attune plus a couple main damage spells they cycle through) and the rest is free real estate; they can easily fit a res somewhere there, often a hard res since most builds aren't secondary dependent. Better to let your Monks have full skill bars and not wipe in the first place than cripple them with a lost slot on the bar and make the use of res skills more likely to be needed.

 

[Average Manatee]

PvE skills kind of ruined player skill bars. Each class basically starts with only 5 skills to choose now rather than 8, since nearly every build is better off taking 3 overpowered PvE skills.

 

[Kev Inkline]

It should have been a pvp game only. Fekking pve plebs.

 

[Kev Inkline]

Yes, it's true pvers were always the low-skilled scum in GW1, any pvp guild of its worth would casually run any challenge and place #1, but why bother, it's like playing a one-armed bandit or whatever skinner-box of your liking.

 

[what am i doing]

It should have been a pvp game only. Fekking pve plebs.

Like it or not, you generally need people to be somewhat invested in a game's lore / setting in order to build up a community. There are exceptions to this, mostly from the early days when there just wasn't much competition (I think this is why John Carmack had that delusion that story doesn't really matter - he released shooters in an age where there were hardly any shooters competing with him, in large part because he was creating the genre, so people played them because, well, if you wanted to play a shooter that's what there was. As the industry grew and his games faced more actual competition, their success steadily declined because as it turns out, he was full of shit and gameplay alone does not carry a game, so he scurried off to facebook with his tail between his legs), but for the most part you need some kind of lore and setting to draw people in and get them interested enough that they stick around and continue to play the game on its own merits. The easiest way to do this is with a PvE campaign. That's why every RTS game has a campaign even though their campaigns generally suck. The developers understand that you need to create some kind of attachment to the game's world and story to get players to hang around long enough to learn the PvP gameplay and begin to enjoy it.

It's true that the decision to focus more and more on PvE was to the game's detriment; GW shone first and foremost as a PvP game, and PvP has a kind of natural longevity that PvE does not (ie, you can have a PvP-oriented game continue to last for a long time without significant content updates, and content updates can generally be smaller and lower on manpower; the same is not true for PvE). Had they maintained the focus on PvP and worked on making it more accessible (cheap or free PvP-only accounts, more low-end / semi-PvP arenas in the AB style to draw new players in and let them get their feet wet, etc) they might not have run into the sort of burn-out that forced them into abandoning GW and making a sequel. But at the same time if GW was PvP only and had only the barest scraps of backstory I don't think it would have taken off at all.

 

[Kev Inkline]

I must say I really appreciate your long and considerate answer, and I agree 100% I think on every point you made. I was just too lazy to be capable of producing anything of the same quality and hence resorted to silly semi-trolling.

 

[Average Manatee]

I'm not sure why they decided to focus more on PvE. It seemed like PvE was plenty popular without titles and PvE skills and all that stuff. I'm guessing there was probably some bean counter somewhere who decided "we need to make more money selling cosmetics, and the way to do that is to keep people playing longer, so add more things to grind for". I've never heard any evidence supporting this though.

That said, the original concept of GW1's release schedule including new campaigns every 6 months with new classes and tons of new skills was absolutely insane and couldn't have continued much longer than it did.

 

[Val the Moofia Boss]

I'm surprised at how visually imaginative Factions was compared to the other campaigns. You had zombie plague ridden Kowloon Walled City, a petrified forest, and a sea that was turned into jade with monsters frozen inside. Cool high fantasy stuff and seeing more of it was a big motivator for me to continue the story. But then you go to the other campaigns and it's just generic plains and deserts and snowy mountains, stuff you've seen countless times before. No idea why they didn't continue creating more awesome settings.

 

[luj1]

I'm surprised at how visually imaginative Factions was compared to the other campaigns. You had zombie plague ridden Kowloon Walled City, a petrified forest, and a sea that was turned into jade with monsters frozen inside. Cool high fantasy stuff and seeing more of it was a big motivator for me to continue the story. But then you go to the other campaigns and it's just generic plains and deserts and snowy mountains, stuff you've seen countless times before. No idea why they didn't continue creating more awesome settings.

My favorite expansion.

 

[Kev Inkline]

I'm not sure why they decided to focus more on PvE. It seemed like PvE was plenty popular without titles and PvE skills and all that stuff. I'm guessing there was probably some bean counter somewhere who decided "we need to make more money selling cosmetics, and the way to do that is to keep people playing longer, so add more things to grind for". I've never heard any evidence supporting this though.

That said, the original concept of GW1's release schedule including new campaigns every 6 months with new classes and tons of new skills was absolutely insane and couldn't have continued much longer than it did.

I played the game since it was released the first 18 months or so (racked up 2500h in that span of time), more than half of it on pvp and some pve fooling around. They quite didn't have means to monetize content as there was no subscription, and pvpers quite didn't care for the cosmetics. So as far as I recall, they followed the money and changed the emphasis onto the pve world.

 

[Zurbo]

Whole EotN was decline.

It was the worst Gw 1 expansion.

Why exactly?
Besides the fact, that plot was a cliche "gather some allies and defeat the big bad" and that many enemies were just reskins of the old ones.

 

[KörangarTheMighty]

Why exactly?
Besides the fact, that plot was a cliche "gather some allies and defeat the big bad" and that many enemies were just reskins of the old ones.

The usual gripes are that there weren't any new classes and only an extra 10 skills added per class. PVE skills and consumables were decline etc.

Personally, I don't put EOTN in the same class as Nightfall or Factions. Each of those were standalone campaigns, not expansions. EOTN is the only expansion pack and its purpose was to add PVE endgame to Prophecies, which it sorely lacked for years.
EOTN's story leaving aside the sidequests, can be finished in less than a day if you no-life it. The campaigns all take 2-4 days, thereabouts. Apples to oranges.

 

[Dr1f7]

mmo pvpers are a bunch of soys anyway fuck em

 

[Black]

I'm surprised at how visually imaginative Factions was compared to the other campaigns. You had zombie plague ridden Kowloon Walled City, a petrified forest, and a sea that was turned into jade with monsters frozen inside. Cool high fantasy stuff and seeing more of it was a big motivator for me to continue the story. But then you go to the other campaigns and it's just generic plains and deserts and snowy mountains, stuff you've seen countless times before. No idea why they didn't continue creating more awesome settings.

 

[Val the Moofia Boss]

Yeah. I'm still befuddled as to why the GW2 devs went with that ugly radioactive green goo aesthetic rather than just retaining the GW1 coloration people liked.

 

[what am i doing]

Every single GW2 screenshot I see looks like a visual downgrade. It also felt like a visual downgrade when I tried the beta. Like, there might be some fancy new shaders or something, I dunno, but even putting aside issues of visual design / art direction, GW2 looks like the lighting isn't right. Characters look plastic and at the same time, often oddly flat / low detail. It's like they took GW and were like "oh, we can use this shader to make them shiny! it's more advanced so it's better, right?" and the result is bad. It's kind of hard to describe. But compare GW2 to GW1:

GW2 characters, anet

They all have that kind of semi-reflective metallic/plastic look, even if their clothing doesn't appear intended to be metallic (ie, leftmost character).

Compare with GW1 where cloth clothing actually looks like cloth ie there's no shiny reflective shit except for the metallic gold trim on Kwayama's clothing and his iridescent cape (which doesn't show well here, but you can see it if you go ingame and move around) where it makes sense; otherwise the effects of lighting on characters are (realistically) very muted and you only really notice illumination on character model if you watch your character closely while spinning around.

GW1, monk ancient

I don't have any good gif recording software but the metallic effect on armour that's actually metal (eg, Warrior Elite Kurzick) is very subtle and doesn't really show in a stationary screenshot, it's not a massive glare of light.

GW1, warrior elite kurzick

Yeah, the graphics are not as fancy, but in my opinion they look much better ie not plastic.

 

[KörangarTheMighty]

I don't have any good gif recording software but the metallic effect on armour that's actually metal (eg, Warrior Elite Kurzick) is very subtle and doesn't really show in a stationary screenshot, it's not a massive glare of light.

A satin polish rather than a mirror polish, but its more the result of low texture quality and basic reflection effects, rather than intent I think.

As an aside, I have Elite Kurzick Warrior Armor too, but like much of the other armor in GW1, I've always felt somewhat dissatisfied with it. The breastplate is entirely too busy, but I like the amber beaded arms/ lower legs as well as the helmet. Funny enough, I think the non-elite variant is just straight up better looking excluding the helmet. Just unfortunate that you can't really mix and match because of the emphasis on the silver parts on the elite helm rather than the black.

Spoiler

My choice of armor in GW2 was the Dark Templar set (Dyed different than below). I actually like the mirror polish on that one.

Spoiler

 

[SerratedBiz]

I use Elite Kurzick on my Warrior too

And that's the best looking Monk set on that screenshot above, I used it on my Mo as well

GW1

 

[Darth Roxor]

Imagine using kurdick wammo armour with elite templar around.

Best coloured red so your gauntlets can look like you're tearing dudes apart bare-handed.

 

[fork]

Necro fow armor > *

 

[Black]

Here's one cool build I discovered lately- https://gwpvx.fandom.com/wiki/Build:Me/R_Simple_Energy_Surge
I swapped Cry of Pain for Cry of Frustration and added Mistrust.
It's very brutal, I think you get more Esurges this way than with Arcane Echo + Esurge and Serpent's Quickness is very easy to maintain with Dwarven Stability. It doesn't have the downtime when AE runs out.
SQ + Fast casting lets you almost spam esurges, mistrusts and cofs but like most pve mesmer builds it needs a BIP battery to remain effective. Combined with a 40/40 set you can cast all your stuff quickly and often.