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Guild Wars 1

fork

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This thread hurts quite a bit. :(
I remember playing Necro MM in Prophecies before they limited the number of minions you could have at any one time. :(
 

fork

Guest
Nah, I'm done playing the game.
I 'lost' my old account and the time back then was too good to relive now, it would probably just make me even sadder.
 
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This thread hurts quite a bit. :(
I remember playing Necro MM in Prophecies before they limited the number of minions you could have at any one time. :(
Yeah, I remember doing Tomb runs. Bunch of rangers with pets who'd res them constantly to give you tons of corpses. You could easily get 20-30 minions.

Just add Livia, Olias and Master of Whispers to the party and roll with all different minion skills. You can still get a giant mob of them and it works pretty well.
It does, in fact it works too well and makes most areas a bit too easy (though I'd only do 2 MMs, otherwise the sacrifice cost of BotM gets out of control).

Still I feel like MMing got a bit too casual when they changed BotM to work on all minions regardless of distance. Used to be you could only heal them when they were adjacent to you. Can't remember if BotM used to work on adjacent minions, I recall going /mo and using Heal Area a lot. That might have just been to offset BotM's sac cost though.

Incidentally this reminds me of just how many weird and stupid builds there used to be. Almost everyone sucked and was just kind of coping with mediocre builds for the first year or so. I can't imagine how a game like this (or MMOs in general) would be nowadays with how online and documented everything is, with 99% of people running the same copy pasted builds everywhere within a day of every skill update.

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.

Take the Panic pill. Esurge is overrated for truly hard areas compared to shutdown, you have enough damage already without it.

Why lose Cry of Pain? Esurge does 99 damage in nearby, Cry of Pain does 100 (once you count degen) in the area (much bigger radius), and also interrupts. Even considering that with faster recharge you probably won't get the full 10s of the degen per cast, it's at least comparable. If you want CoF i'd swap it in somewhere else. Only reason I'd lose Cry of Pain is if you are somehow already stacking lots of degen on enemies to the point where it caps, or if you're playing with another player mesmer already using it (obviously heroes can't use it).

The video is more of a display of how easy Eternal Grove is with MMs. It's only a moderately hard mission when trying to split into groups with people not used to playing in 4s then some guys split up to kill turtles and blah blah blah it all goes to shit.
 
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Since we were talking armor, this is my Warrior's usual set.
Warrior.jpg
And my alternate:
Warrior-2.jpg
 

Black

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Take the Panic pill. Esurge is overrated for truly hard areas compared to shutdown, you have enough damage already without it.

Why lose Cry of Pain? Esurge does 99 damage in nearby, Cry of Pain does 100 (once you count degen) in the area (much bigger radius), and also interrupts. Even considering that with faster recharge you probably won't get the full 10s of the degen per cast, it's at least comparable. If you want CoF i'd swap it in somewhere else. Only reason I'd lose Cry of Pain is if you are somehow already stacking lots of degen on enemies to the point where it caps, or if you're playing with another player mesmer already using it (obviously heroes can't use it).
I have Picnic on one of my mes heroes and feel like adding more than one is redundant, I like running something that combines with Mind Wreck (and Aneurysm).
CoF over CoP for aoe interrupt, CoP has only single target interrupt. Most of the time CoP's degen won't even last its full length.
 

Mexi

Dumbfuck!
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Can't believe people are still playing this. Had so much fun playing with my Guilds on TeamSpeak. I liked the Warrior/Monks. I used to do those IWAY runs that people used to hate in PVP. Then I started using Mesmers because that was the only characters that got picked for PVP in the HoH if you weren't in a Guild.

Only MMO I owned and liked. The soundtrack is probably Soule's greatest work, imo. Stopped playing after the expansion pack with Assassins, I forgot it's name just now. I gave it to a friend and he was having a blast last I remember. Was around the time Oblivion came out and that took up all my time.
 
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I have Picnic on one of my mes heroes and feel like adding more than one is redundant, I like running something that combines with Mind Wreck (and Aneurysm).
CoF over CoP for aoe interrupt, CoP has only single target interrupt. Most of the time CoP's degen won't even last its full length.

Oh yeah, never need more than 1 person with panic. If you got other mesmers to cover it then its fine.

Personally I'd never run a skill that needs me to time an interrupt whilst I also have heroes with interrupt skills. Basically asking the AI to cuck you out of being able to use the skill effectively, but YMMV. Even when not using mesmer heroes I tend to have multiple heroes with Power Drain/Leech Signet just for energy management.

Either way, not using one of your PvE skill slots seems suboptimal. Maybe consider Technobabble or Tryptophan Signet depending on the threat in the area. Trptophan signet especially is heavily underrated I think, it's absurdly busted at shutting down HM paintrain melee enemies and is completely unremovable by anything. But this assumes the area is hard enough that you don't just want to load up on more damage.
 
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The dumbest, funnest, most unique and most irritating HA build will forever be EoE bombing. The allah ackbar memes write themselves.
 

Black

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Either way, not using one of your PvE skill slots seems suboptimal
It is, what I said is what I take for general romp and stomp. If I know I'm gonna be fighting lots of eles (drakes etc) I'm gonna take Technobabble and so on. That build has like 2 "disposable" skill slots if you need to put something in there.
And AI is fairly predictable so you can reliably interrupt yourself, if you have a group that hasn't aggroed yet you can cast Mind Wrack (or anything really) on the closest foe and immediately follow it with CoF since AI will try to cast right back at you.
Plus, heroes and henchies havae good reflexes but they can't prioritise, they'll interrupt Flare but let Savannah Heat go off.
 

Mexi

Dumbfuck!
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I joined a group doing EoE once. It's bullshit because they only allow you into PVP groups if you are rank 3+. So then noobs would just get together and do IWAY and EoE runs to get ranks. GWs PVP was fun as hell, but it was difficult to get into a group as a loner. My Guild didn't do PVPs. Either that or I left the Guild for some reason.
 

Zeriel

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Jun 17, 2012
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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:
5e1d1Winterstuff.jpg

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.


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.


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

It's the art style. GW1 is going for a realistic (ish) one, GW2 is full WoW cartooniness. Art style can have a very large effect on the final product, tech level doesn't really outweigh it until you are talking about decades worth of it. I still think Lineage 2 launch graphics look better than modern WoW, for instance.
 

Theodora

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Can't believe people are still playing this.
Why? Isn't it basically misleading to describe it as an MMO anyway? Compared to WoW, Everquest, FFXI et al. at least. Anything popular seems to endure as long as people can actually play it, which is the usual obstacle with many old MMOs (where if it is still available, it's often not the same game that people loved when they were younger).

Only MMO I owned and liked.
A lot of people seem to like it while never wanting to play subscription-based MMOs, but while that's definitely a reason many people avoid modern MMOs, it also lacks the motivating factors of most MMOs, i.e. the socially driven, transmog/fashion accessorised gameplay. I'm sure someone has elaborated on this better than I can, since I'm pretty new to GW1, but I just wonder if one would rush to call an RPG with always online features and multiplayer hubs built into the world an 'MMO' were it to be released today. Kinda the same way Path of Exile isn't really considered one by the typical definition.

(Maybe that the label stuck is more down to MMOs being a much more experimental genre when the original GW was released?)
 

luj1

You're all shills
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This game had some of the best looking weapon skins. Crystaline Sword, Celestial Axe, Chaos Axe.
 

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