Guild Wars 1

[Average Manatee]

https://wiki.guildwars.com/wiki/Game_updates/20050601

Improved Henchmen in missions beyond Iron Mines of Moladune. They now have three pieces of armor infused instead of one.

At this time IIRC the mission only infused one piece of armor rather than everything you were wearing. Most players who said they were infused only had 1 or 2 armor pieces infused. So yeah, this improvement happened 6 months after release so they started being infused much earlier.

And yes I found it easier to hench than to play with the average player. Keep in mind that average player was using w/mo with mending and resurrect in order to rescue the party from wipes.

 

[fork]

That's fake news, the Mesmer henchie definitely had an interrupt before Factions even.

Except nope. Not Dunham. Maybe the Factions-exclusive mesmer henches did, but Dunham did not.

Also, oh boy, Aidan the meme king https://wiki.guildwars.com/index.php?title=Aidan&oldid=933428

Now I remember why he was the meme king. Because he didn't even have an elite skill in Nightfall. Instead he had Heket's Rampage that he kept cancelling with power shot

See edit above.

 

[fork]

What do ectos cost nowadays btw. buying from a vendor?
Is it still 105 (120?) ectos per armor set?

 

[what am i doing]

Sorry folks, but you're dead wrong. Before the henches, especially Prophecies henches, got a yuge AI update derived from heroes, together with build revamps, they were absolutely dreadful and worse than any pug. You could use them reliably only for regular quests and exploration, but taking them into missions was asking for trouble. I'm not even sure if the Prophecies henches originally had 8 skills in the endgame parts...

I started playing GW shortly after the release of Factions, and henches were already a meme back then, I particularly remember Aidan being the meme king. IIRC he had two skills that were mutually exclusive which he kept using all the time.

On the one hand, it's true that henchmen had terrible builds and the game was quite difficult with them. On the other hand, you never had retard stuff like a warrior foregoing all damage because he thinks this is WoW and his job is to be a "tank" (and then the mobs ignore him because unlike Blizzard, ArenaNet devs aren't retards so the AI is usually smart enough to target squishy enemies and not lock onto the hardest-to-kill target), or the PUG pulling too many enemies, or nobody taking a res because they think that's monk's job even though monk's skill bar space is the most valuable in a team, or players with shit e-management demanding engagement with the next group of enemies before their energy is recovered, etc. At least with henchmen, you could in most cases get by through careful pulling. Not always - some mission objectives didn't permit it - but the results were generally consistent.

Whereas with a PUG sometimes you get a great team that steamrolls the mission, sometimes you get a pack of incompetent retards, most of the time you get a mix of good players and idiots and then the idiots manage to trash the run for everyone. I guess the silver lining of the game being almost dead these days is that when you do get a PUG it's full of experienced players who don't do retarded stuff anywhere near as often.

 

[fork]

One of the most fabulous aspects about this game is the variability of viable builds (both individually as well as a group). And then you still had to execute it just as well. And Jeremy Soule.
Man, top 10 goat definitely. How much fun it was!

 

[Mexi]

I played GW around release. Weirdly bought the game while I was browsing around Walmart as a kid, and the box art sealed it.

Henchmen were dreadful. I think around that really black place with that small city is where they start becoming useless. I wish I could remember the name, but it's been so long since I've played it. In the desert, there was zero way you could get through it with henchmen back then.

 

[MadMaxHellfire]

i finished all the pve content (bar fissure and that other place) with henchies :V with all the classes.

 

[fork]

Pretty sure you didn't finish FOW or UW with henchies.
nice edit, cunt.

 

[Black]

(bar fissure and that other place)

DEAF CUNT

 

[MadMaxHellfire]

well, he has a title, he must act accordingly.

 

[fork]

well, he has a title, he must act accordingly.

Yeah, you lying fuck edited it in.

 

[MadMaxHellfire]

when a person different from yourself reads a message, any edit is followed by "edited by x y ago" in the lower right corner of the post. where is it, you dick eating cocksucker?
you know what, this is not worth it. off to ignore, there's already a lot of people in there.

 

[fork]

when a person different from yourself reads a message, any edit is followed by "edited by x y ago" in the lower right corner of the post. where is it, you dick eating cocksucker?

Not in the first five minutes.
Now fuck off, subhuman.

i finished all the pve content (bar fissure and that other place) with henchies :V with all the classes.

"That other place", huh?
Doesn't even know what UW is, lol.

 

[KörangarTheMighty]

What do ectos cost nowadays btw. buying from a vendor?

Anywhere from like 9 - 12k depending on the day.

 

[fork]

That's expensive.
I remember 6 to 7k.

 

[MadMaxHellfire]

i thought, "maybe i've been too harsh and hasty".

Not in the first five minutes.

• Yesterday at 6:11 PM

i finished all the pve content (bar fissure and that other place) with henchies :V with all the classes.

• Yesterday at 7:45 PM

You are ignoring content by this member.
Pretty sure you didn't finish FOW or UW with henchies.
nice edit, cunt.


please, go be retarded somewhere else. possibly in a coffin.

 

[fork]

Fuck off, cretin. You forgot about fow and uw and/or simply lied out of your ass, and can't admit it.
You are beyond pathetic.

 

[SerratedBiz]

Mesmer henchie was for hexes, not for interrupts. Aidan, the Ranger henchie, has an interrupt on a 10sec cd and the only bad part about it is that you can't choose what he's going to interrupt, but otherwise it was a relible way to get an interrupt in as he would never miss or mistime it (unlike players, whose timing and decision making used to suck way more in those days). Devona, the Warrior henchie, also came with a couple of knockdown skills which are oftentimes better than interrupts as they could cancel skills that others couldn't.

Henchmen were certainly worse than a human player but they were by no means useless, and anyone claiming otherwise probably had little experience playing Prophecies (ie, when Prophecies was the current content). Elementalists in particular were way more common until the update in which they made monsters run out of static AOEs, as you could tank them under nukes otherwise. Monks, on the other hand, were not particularly good at healing but they were often used as Monks were a relative scarcity.

I started playing GW shortly after the release of Factions

Is this the GW version of posting your join date? Noob.

 

[Lacrymas]

This should get a revival. It's unironically the best PvP-focused MMO, if not outright the best MMO ever made.

 

[Lacrymas]

So, I've been playing a Mesmer/Necro in Pre-Searing just for fun but I kinda like it and am thinking of creating a perma pre char at one point. I even got a black dye to drop, lol. I'd continue this char in pre but it's already scuffed because I didn't follow procedure as I wasn't thinking of making it perma pre.

 

[Black]

The fact that there exists a kind of "pre-Searing community" will always be odd to me.

 

[Lacrymas]

The fact that there exists a kind of "pre-Searing community" will always be odd to me.

I thought so as well before actually trying it and seeing the appeal. It's essentially an RPG snowglobe. It has its own meta, its own economy (I sold that black dye for 25k gold before leaving for the rest of the game), its own challenges, its own unique items (charr bags and recycling kits), its own quests and even its own achievements (Legendary Defender of Ascalon). The only thing it doesn't have is PvP (sadly. It would've been very fun). There is no reason the devs can't make the Ascalon Academy available for pre-Searing characters. If they are worried it might push away new players, just limit it to lvl 10+ characters. You have to go out of your way to get to lvl 10 and beyond in pre-Searing.

 

[Average Manatee]

Yeah its kind of unique in that it's essentially designed for single characters in a game world whose mechanics are designed for 6-8 man parties everywhere. It's also incredibly cozy. I did do LDoA on my mesmer back when it meant death leveling.

 

[Lacrymas]

From what I've seen, the Northlands aren't necessarily designed for solo players. You can do it solo now, but it depends too much on the fire imp summon you get from purchasing Eye of the North. Even then, you still have to be careful with positioning, pulling and abuse LoS before outleveling the charr there. This is infinitely more important if going for the survivor titles. That's one of the reasons pre-Searing actually has a community. It wouldn't have been possible if there weren't some kind of challenging and worthwhile content to do. Before having experienced this myself, I thought pre-Searing is comically overrated and its popularity befuddled me, but now I think it's one of the best designed tutorial areas in gaming period. It's a bit too big geographically for its own good, but once you start doing charr runs you don't notice that at all. And all of this basically happened unintentionally, which is also stunning, but this just speaks to how intelligently designed Guild Wars 1 actually is. The underlying systems are so good that a few higher level enemies with valuable drop tables placed in the tutorial facilitate an entire community and playstyle. Guild Wars 2 could never.

Btw, if anyone is thinking of booting this game back up but is hesitant due to a lack of playerbase, don't be. There are a lot of people playing and you can do all available content with a few exceptions (Codex and Random Arenas are essentially dead, but Fort Aspenwood has replaced RAs). Just make sure to change the district to America in the hubs because that's where all the players are.

 

[KörangarTheMighty]

Unfortunately the dailies took the achievement out of that achievement. Getting to level 10 is the only thing that matters, the rest is just grinding Hamnet bandits for 23? hours until LDoA. The survivor titles have been pussified as well, to where instead of a death instantly disqualifying the character forever, it now just resets the progress bar to zero xp. I'd still rate pre-searing high up there for tutorial areas though, except perhaps for the lack of a need to create builds on the typical questline. The Northlands were underutilized and would have been better had there been a need to go out there more often, forcing the player to engage with building before getting to post-searing.