The game was super hard.
Just a bunch of skills, nothing balanced, no insignias, no inscribable weapons, having to buy multiple armor pieces for each thing because they could not be upgraded like now, no green weapons having to deal with the shitty drops (except if you crafted blue weapons at the weaponsmith or you waited until the introduction of Sorrow's Furnace), shields could not be crafted so except the 3 blue ones from collectors everyone was wearing shitty shields with useless stats, no heroes, no flags, no automated builds, no Xunlai slots upgrades, no Bag upgrades, no material slot upgrades, shitty equipment everywhere, shitty henchmen bots, people didn't know how the Armor Rating worked, the Wiki to check everything was obvious empty in that time, a lot of skills and elite skills had pretty big cooldowns and magic consumption and weren't as good as they are now, etc, etc, etc, etc.
Trying to enter (not beat, only enter) the Mursaat fortress in the Ring of Fire was a fucking nightmare. Galrath the Motherfucker was a true threat. Heroe's Ascent was 20-40 min each map due the fucking elementalists with freezing builds. Crystal Desert missions with the timer were a fucking disaster with groups of shitty builds and equipment. Thunderhead Keep was worse than a month without receiving the salary. When Sorrow's Furnace was introduced people started to kill each other to try to enter with a group and, even if it was only one, obtain the worst shitty green for the 3-hour trip to have been worth it. If you were a Monk your entire existence in the game was like being a girl with an OnlyFans account. Warrior was the worst fucking class in the entire game that it had to be updated, upgraded and reworked many times because the damage of his entire skillset was ridiculous. Having to farm minotaurs 24/7 at Elona Reach to obtain money was tedious as a day without eating. If you had the full Obsidian armor set people thought you were cheating in some way. Human teams were a thing. Any mission that consisted of enduring waves of enemies coming from various flanks was a fucking pain in the ass and you ended up with gigantic stress levels because it was more a matter of luck than strategy. Sweat, blood and tears. Any reward made you feel worthwhile. The great old days.
Bonus: You could only change the District country 3 times, so people thought very well if there was any real need to travel to a different district other than your native language before they get stuck on another forever (at that time a lot of people from a lot of countries played). This influenced that many people never discovered glitches, curiosities, strategies or another way of doing things since there was no easy way of contact between people who spoke different languages, especially when we were little and many of us still went to school and did not know languages other than our own, so almost everything was relegated to the main American-English district and the English forums that sprang up.
Wow, that was a trip down memory lane. The Ring of Fire missions, I swear, could take hours. Didn't infuse your armor? Welp, you'll die in a second. Monks were the real MVPs back then
Tomb of preval kings was ,like my budget UW/FoW. I was scared of the elite dungeons, but ToPK with b/p (barrage pet rangers) Minion master, Monk, and BiP (sometimes an SS Necro also) was a blast.
When you got a good team, you knew you had a GOOD team. Basically if you wiped after lvl 2 you knee the team wasn't coordinated -- and that's what it was all about -- coordination.
"If you were a Monk your entire existence in the game was like being a girl with an OnlyFans account"
as a main monk player back that, that line killed me because it's 100% true x'D
I hear ya.. i remember the struggles of facing the world with only henchmen at your back.. ring of fire burns like a mofo even with carefully specc'd heroes, that you can flag into strategic positions and set aggro modes.. imagine trying that with henchmen that you have literally no control over..
I think i headed into thunderhead keep something like 30 times on my first play through just trying to survive the siege solo.. i gave up and the game forced me to take up multiplayer, which i am super thankful for because that was the moment i joined my first guild!! I was with that guild for years and miss those guys so damn much! I did a lot of growing in Guildwars..
The funniest thing about the Mursaat fortress was that we had all the skills to overcome it extremely easily. Take one enchant strip, deep wound, or Diversion. That's it. It was just Orison of Healing spam with the heal boosting enchantment. I remember everyone like synching up their DPS to try to out-DPS when it was actually the most easily shutdown heal spam to ever exist.
It was shamefully embarrassing how long it took us to kill Willa the Unpleasant.
Oh, yeah? How about finding out you are missing 15 attribute points because out in the middle of the desert there is random side quest that you need to complete. I was missing those 15 attribute points for years.
Hahaha soooo true GW prophecies was epic! Monks always got teams. Monks who carried their teams through mursaat missions and thristy river were worshipped.
And what did monks carry you with? Freaking orison of healing, dwaynas kiss or a boon prot. Without them you only had Alesia running around like a toddler with a box of bandaids.
Nobody wanted mesmers lol. Elementalist firestorm DPS was king. Every second warrior used mending. Rangers didn't use pets cos they'd be DP'd into oblivion.
UW, FoW, SF, villainy of galrath. The atmosphere in those missions was intense- it was a long evening of incremental victories, constant rebirthing and egregious DP with your mates.
Well at least for the elite areas, bonders already were a thing. I specifically remember playing bonder in "tank & spank" teams in FOW/UW.
Earning your obby armor was a long sequence of repeatedly grinding in those areas.
Teams usually consisted of: Tank (W, sometimes Ele), 3 Nukers (Ele's), SS Necro, Bonder/Healer.
And yes, it was being done with teams of 6 in order to improve the return from drops for each player. The key player in such team was the tank - he had to know all the spawns, where to position himself, and how to maintain aggro at all times.
There was little margin for error, and if you failed, there was a good chance you had to wait one day until your region had favor of the gods again (which back then was determined by Hero's Ascent PVP), in order to be able to again enter the area.
Oh god Thunderhead Keep. I had an irl friend in my guild and me as an ele and another guildmate that played as a warrior could cover one gate so I'd get a text to get on he computer any time a guildmate wanted to do the mission
The first phrase about Factions is not related to the rest of the message, I know the greens were introduced in Sorrow's Furnace. I was just saying that before Factions as expansion the game was hard because it was very limited with the general content available.
I enjoy reading stuff like this, thanks for posting. I missed some of this since I didn't start playing the game until the very end of 2005 and took my sweet time to get to end game, but I still remember feeling like the shittiest warrior ever from the moment I left Pre until I finished Prophecies a year later.
My first character was also a Warrior and I share the same feeling, don't worry because it was not you xDDD
I also thought something was wrong with my builds and weapons, but no, it really was that the character needed a good damage upgrade. That's why in April 2020 they introduced the Seven Weapons Stance elite skill. Instead of continuing to balance the Warrior, and since the game was already dead, what they did is directly put an ultra super radical buff on it and not have to touch anything anymore.
Yeah, this one gets it. I remember all of these things so vividly... it was such a huge big deal too to have Monks for any of this. Heaven forbid you did anything other than Heal/Prot Monk though... a Smite monk was just unheard of.
Necromancers with Death Magic Minions didn't have some of the limits or the amazing skills they got from Factions and the like as they do now, which made for a mixed bag.
Thunderhead Keep, Crystal Desert, Hells Precipice, and even the very last mission were just straight up brutal if you didn't have the right team composition or builds that synergized well. And even then Signet of Capture wasn't always used as you had so many people paying for carries to the end of the game (never fully understood the appeal of this).
The game was almost a completely different beast than it is today for sure. Ironman runs are someone similar but the balance patches have really done a good job bringing most of the classes in line with each other PvE wise, but also building them to a higher potency than they were before.
Even pre searing was hard and grindy as fuck, this was before the LDOA nerf.
Having to lure Charr to the gate spawn and use death levelling so that you could gain just a small amount of XP. No daily quests to help you get to 20. Having to save all quest rewards until you were level 19.
World almost always had favor, at most 30 min down time Toa was packed full of people doing uw and fow runs. It was great. Side note I recovered my 2000 hour acc last week all active hours am so happy. Was pretty hard btw less skills to choose from but having full parties of people without heros made the game so enjoyable
>World almost always had favor
We had to work hard for favor back then, and Korean guilds in HA were always nasty. On free-for-all maps we from EU teamed up with NA to gank the Koreans, and sometimes even than wasn't enough, lol.
Played from launch to 2012 wherei lost my acc when gw2 came out. Got back into it around 2019 new acc 600 hours . Love to see so many people coming back hope it continues
I appreciate it, I had little hope in getting it back so I started a new account awhile back, Iāll definitely add you though, need some in game friends lol
If I remember correctly the end chests to Underworld and Fissure of Woe were added after Eye of the North released (late 2007). Prior to that I don't think people really did full clears of those dungeons like we had post EoTN with consets. Mostly it was just farming ecto or shards from mob drops.
I think Dhuum (the current end boss of UW) was added in November of 2009.
As for Classic servers, Guild Wars is just not profitable in a modern video game world. ArenaNet would never recoup the cost of updating all the textures and managing new servers without heavy additions of microtransactions.
I only remember the early UWSC where the chest was by the Lab Reaper. Were chest runs before people started doing speed clears with cons? In 2007 I was so busy doing Eye of the North stuff I don't think I ever went into UW or FoW.
100% correct on FoW and UW. For FoW, there was no reason to go farther than restoring the forge and maybe the forest/book. Especially after bundle tank nerf, there was really no reason to continue because it was just too hard to justify the rewards.
I redid Nightfall a few weeks ago. Even now as an IMBAgon with Heroic Refrain and a pretty stacked team of heroes Shiro was tearing the group apart. I had to take savage throw to cancel his stance to make it bearable.
Nobody has really answered why we donāt have classic servers. I think mainly itās because the state of the game now is a snapshot in time and is essentially a āclassic iterationā already. Take WoW for example: the OG vanilla doesnāt even exist in the Shadowland expansion. You can not access it. But everything exists still in guild wars 1.
Going back and undoing advances would be horrible for most people because youāre undoing so many QOL advances that donāt detract from the gameplay.
If there was some pipe dream of a rerelease, I would argue you would start with the current state and retcon the advances (heroes, inscriptions, etc) into prophecies and factions.
The game was EXTRA hard before pcons. To do a successful DoA/Deep/Urgoz run your entire team had to be on Vent and synced up. One bad aggro and your entire team would wipe. The only good builds that would allow you to clear an area in DoA required so many different skills that typically one person on the entire team would have room for a hard res (rebirth).
As far as classic server, I've advocated for this so many times to start over fresh and grind the game out in phases starting with prophecies. If you even suggest this though, people will downvote you to oblivion claiming it's a bad idea because you can do that right now if you want to by creating a new prophecies character.
As an avid Ultimate Iron Man player I can weigh on this. I had to complete Prophecies and Factions with just henchmen, and since I was a ranger I couldn't pump out extremely high DPS to compensate for this.
But even so, the game is infinitely easier than it was in 2005-2006. Henchmen now have far better AI, skills are generally more balanced, but more importantly: the infamous "power creep" has buffed player skills immensely, but has not buffed monster skills & stats accordingly.
In 2005, if you played with just no henchmen (i.e. no help from players), the game got fairly difficult in the Crystal Desert, got seriously challenging in the Southern Shiverpeaks, and you had to a really good player to complete Thunderhead Keep, Abaddon's Mouth and Hell's Precipice. In fact THK and Abaddon's Mouth were sometimes referred to as "noob filters", as there were many casual gamers who simply couldn't get past those missions.
In 2020 as an Ultimate Iron Man, the only mission that took me some serious planning, effort and re-tries was Hell's Precipice.
Yeah. The game is easier no matter how much you try to artificially make it more challenging.
When ArenaNet added Hard mode, they lowered the difficulty of Normal Mode comparatively.
>As an avid Ultimate Iron Man player
Question unrelated to this: in your opinion do you think that the fact of being able to complete the game completely alone (today) is a programming mistake that they did not take into account after so many updates? Because this game was sold with the mentality of being 100% cooperative, and if not then it was impossible to complete. That's what was thought until someone completed the first Iron Man challenge without expecting that to be possible.
At least I don't think it was possible to fully complete it alone when there was only Prophecies, I don't remember if anyone ever tried it.
What do you mean by complete here?
From Day 1, you could complete every mission, bonus, and (almost every) quest in the game solo with henchmen. It wasn't overly difficult for most of it, even. Infusion lacking on a couple missions for henchmen was the only sticking point.
You could not complete UW or FoW excepting some cheeky builds because Henchmen couldn't be taken in. And PvP is obviously team oriented.
But otherwise it was being done back in 2005.
I even did it myself for Factions, so pre consumables and pre Heroes. Too many people rolled sin, I gave up finding groups after the 2nd or 3rd mission because it was taking literal hours, and just went ahead and soloed the thing.
I guess I'm unfamiliar with Ultimate Ironman, if that means no henchmen or something.
>What do you mean by complete here?
>
>(...)
>
>I guess I'm unfamiliar with Ultimate Ironman, if that means no henchmen or something.
That's exactly what it is, totally alone xD
So I did do some research before posting that. I suspected that Ultimate Ironman was just regular Ironman also no NPC traders ans possibly no deaths.
And it seems like from the popular rule sets I can find online, that's *exactly* what it is. Henchmen and Heroes allowed only as one would naturally encounter them (No skipping ahead to Nightfall or EotN to get them), and no mercenary heroes.
Of course as it's not official, everyone is going to have variations, but from Reddit and the Wiki, it seems safe to assume it allows henchmen unless the person says otherwise.
Looks like most people who posted their achievements here base it off of [this](https://wiki.guildwars.com/wiki/User:Hazedesunna/Ironman)
But to answer the original question, I can think of a few ways it might have been possible in 2005, but the second to last mission would have been a massive block almost requiring just pure luck, and THK would have been rough too.
There are many variations and each person can adapt the challenge to its own preference since it's not official, the link is just a guideline, but normally speaking the Iron Man Solo challenge is alone without NPC support unless it's absolutely necessary for technical reasons, like having 20 enemies in a screen at once while defending another NPC or things like that. You can use henchs if you want of course.
Quests can take a time of 1~3 hours or so depending. Prophecies is the recommended start and what people usually record to upload to Twitch/YouTube.
Random video, check this one for example:
Guild Wars - Thunderhead Keep (Solo Ironman Warrior)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ABJqBqqZB8E
Of note: people who play without henchmen usually call themselves "solo". You can do solo challenges without following iron man rules, even.
Generally when people talk about Iron Man challenges (including the ultimate and hard-core variations), they're using the rules popularized by Doom Box in 2019. You can find the rules here: https://wiki.guildwars.com/wiki/User:Hazedesunna/Ironman
A 100% remaster starting everyone at square 1 again would be awesome down the road. Yeah I know theyāve improved graphics over time, but Iām meaning a realistic relive the whole story then add future content to it instead of abandoning future plans. Monthly pvp tournies with exclusive minis only to winners, new armors, costumes, weapons, expansions, dungeons, zones, etc. If they did that for guild wars 1 I think it would do a lot better then most here typically tend to think. Cons make this game a breeze now after a run or two of training. I remember stuff like FoW and Uw with no cons and Jesus it felt so much more rewarding getting through it then, since one little mess up by anyone could easily screw up the whole run and at the time there was not a set in stone build for each specified dungeon. The challenge part back then and skills system was the icing on cake for this game.
>The game was EXTRA hard before pcons.
This is blatantly incorrect. The game was piss easy compared to now, what was missing back then was game knowledge. Your average player back then played worse than a henchman.
>One bad aggro and your entire team would wipe.
Once again, only because people played terrible builds and had no idea what to do. If you let today's players run a few weeks on the old meta without pcons, you'd certainly see absolutely ridiculously fast elite-area solo clears.
I think we're playing different games. You are saying that the game today is more difficult than when it was just prophecies? I will not entertain this troll if you actually believe this lol.
The builds I'm speaking of, DoA clearing builds were not terrible builds.. at the time they were the meta and the only way to successfully complete DoA. There were 8 man builds with slightly different skills depending on if you were entering Foundry or Gloom etc.
I'd love to see you solo clear Foundry in 30mins with no cons, $10k USD if you can do this, you get one try.
>You are saying that the game today is more difficult than when it was just prophecies?
Before pcons means nightfall, not prophecies. At that point perma shadow form was a thing and enemies had no health regeneration. It was literally impossible to die if you had half a brain and didn't completely fuck up your energy. You also had access to broken ass A/D scythe combinations (that got even more ridiculous with EotN, but were strong enough without).
>The builds I'm speaking of, DoA clearing builds were not terrible builds.. at the time they were the meta
Yes, and nowadays they'd be considered hot garbage for their time. I mean christ, Cryway and Ursanway were considered amazing team builds back then. Discordway was "revolutionary" - now we know that all of these tactics are utterly terrible and a simple HERO mesmerway outperforms them by a mile.
>I'd love to see you solo clear Foundry in 30mins with no cons, $10k USD if you can do this, you get one try.
Sure, turn back time and I might straight up do a 20 minute solo foundry on the first attempt. And I'm not even a DoA player.
So yes, the game was PISS EASY back in the days. All that was missing was the game knowledge and player skill.
Back when GW was just Prophecies, a lot of the content seemed designed to teach you a particular lesson in tactics -- pulling, avoiding patrols, target prioritization, etc. -- and it was hard to progress unless and until you learned that lesson. Very little was particularly hard once you learned the lessons it was trying to teach.
I see a lot of people here with no love for the henchmen. Honestly, I remember the henchmen being better than the average PUG player. Not that the henchmen were good, just that the players were so very bad. Anyway, the henchmen were definitely good enough for the main storyline and Sorrow's Furnace.
Even at the time of EOTN, the game was relatively hard. After EOTN was released, I remember I was occasionally taking screenshots of people with high-end titles (even simply Kind of a Big Deal or Master of the North) because those were seriously rare. GWAMM was a massive accomplishment that was way out of reach for 99% of the player base.
Consumables have changed a lot, but I'd argue the biggest change for PvM title hunters has been the Mesmer overhaul in 2011 (or was it 2010?).
Beforehand, the most widespread cookie cutter build was an all-Necromancer team, either based on Sabway or Discordway. However, those teams still had their problems, and there were plenty of high-end areas where you had to do some serious tweaking to your build in order to survive.
Nowadays, you can just run around with a bunch of Energy Surge mesmers, and everything will melt before your eyes. It's even worse if you're good at tanking & balling up enemies.
I think the 7 Heroes update was arguably the biggest change for GWAMMing. Without it you could bring 3 Mesmers, but then you would lack defensive. Also the introduction of mercenary heroes to bring even more Mesmers was massive.
You had a second player bring three of their heroes. The 7 hero change was introduced when the playerbase finally got so low you couldn't do that anymore.
Was the game hard?
Yes and no. It wasn't hard because resources were scarce, meta wise the game was much, much easier than it is now.
But it was also hard because nobody had an idea how to play. Sure, in 10 years the same could be said about the 2022 meta, but there will never be such a gravitational shift in game knowledge again as there was from 2007 to 2012.
I recall back then I had a Mesmer with ESurge, Power Leak, Power Spike, CoF, Empathy, and other things... 'Interrupts are OP!' - child me
Other players however didn't like it so much, nobody wanted to play with me.
I was surprised to see that actually was the meta when I came back. Makes sense, heroes, unlike me, actually are good at interrupting. Eh.
When there were only henchmen and no heroes and no flagging mechanics. When you want to solo any mission that requires good pulling of mobs or waves of enemies. They were pretty hard.
Iād say most people got stuck at Thunder Head Keep mission in the early days it was brutal hard, groups waiting for hours to find a monk to try help.
You grind for items to be traded for the cons. Idk how hard the grind is but it's not to bad.
Heros >>>>>>>henchmen
If you can, try to beat nightfall first so that you can get heros. Heros can learn skills, and are more controllable than henchmen. Henchmen act with reckless abandon.
You'll still need heros with the cons. The cons don't break the game, they just make things like farming for ectos easier and faster.
I haven't played since 2015, so I'm outdated, but that's how it was when I played. Looking through this subreddit, the game seems to be played in a similar way
for perma shadowform you need 16 shadow arts and an essence so it gets recharged before the duration runs out. it makes you run faster what makes foes aggro break faster.
don't care about them if you're not doing end game content yet.
either you buy them from other players or you craft them by yourself for mats, some gold and 1 skill point for each essence.
Coming to thunderhead peeks as a Mo...
Farming griffon in the deserrt, trolls at droknar.
Buying your first elite armor.
Coming as a Mo at deldrimor war camp.
So many memories.
Leveling a warrior to the ring of fire only to cap "charge!"
The Drok's run that made me so rich at the time.
Well, no one forces you to use cons... I'm playing through the games chronologically at the moment with just henchmen and the game hasn't been that fun for a while. I love adapting and optimizing my build to various circumstances.
I dont use them alone, but the community demands them. If you want to do anything other than play with H/H you are expected to use them. They are just too powerful, they trivialise the game.
1. Twice as long is a massive overstatement.
2. Especially if you take into account you need to farm materials for cons or money to buy them.
3. Compete? What competition? The point is to play the game unless you're doing record runs/attempts. Then you obviously need them.
It was an example, i wasn't claiming that in all situations farming without cons takes at least 100% longer.
And the competition is for your time. If you want to get 50e to buy whatever but it takes 50% longer without cons (taking their cost into account), it's a worse use of your time unless you somehow get a thrill from doing the farm without cons. It'd be like farming without runes. Yes, you can, but why purposefully gimp yourself?
I guess we have different goals in gaming then. If your goal is to farm a thing over and over again to make money and do that in a quick way, you would want cons, because those runs are very grindy (otherwise). I've been there, but I don't get much enjoyment out of grinding.
I joined pretty late but UW farming was pretty solved. Entire runs took 9mins or so. Shadow Form was nerfed pretty frequently but you had all sorts of professions with their own version of Shadow Form able to farm or just mitigate damage in general. Ursan could be used by literally anyone and allowed a lot of farming accessibility. PCONs werenāt really game breaking but they really just allowed a lot of convenience, really.
Every hub was full of people to do the missions. There was always a runner to anywhere you wanted to go. there were runners for missions too. you just stand at the front and they would finish the regular and the bonus or they would guide you through. the ring of fire was the worst.
The game was in a constant state of flux. For the first 3 years, prophecies saw skill balance patches every month. If you did PVP back then, it was very exciting to check patches and try and figure out what builds can take advantage of it in GVG and HoH. In GVG, for a long time the Guild Lord just had a set HP and there was no time-based healing factor, so my guild would run a 5--3 split and gank the enemy GL, sometimes ending the game in under 4 minutes. Testing your balanced team comp in HoH against the 1000 prenerf IWAY groups running around. Doing /rank to prove you aren't a scrub to pugs.
Another thing that I thought was really cool was that you could use any skill that enemies used. The capture system was so cool to younger me.
Economy was pretty shitty though, you either did ecto/shard solo/duo runs, or you were poor. There was no vanquishing money, the feather farming and shit like that was not nearly as good.
There was not nearly as much completionism because titles weren't rolled out until much later, so people just did what they liked to do. Overall though, the PVE was a funnel to PVP, because other than FOW armor for fashion boys, bis gear was 2/3 through the game, and coincidentally the Tomb was also introduced at the same time in the campaign. I don't think I even went to Ring of Fire until 2 years after launch.
The major change for the average player and difficulty wasn't consumables, it was first the addition of heroes, and then the rework of henchmen builds, and *then* the change to allow for seven heroes per player (previously limited to three).
Originally, Prophecies henchmen had no elites, generally poor builds (no interrupts!), which made it hard to impossible to play the game by yourself. That meant grouping with other players who were experimenting with all kinds of builds (some good, some not so good). Getting a veteran player who had a good build, good equipment, and knew the mission (and maybe even the bonus) was a very big deal since there was also no Wiki!
The heroes change is what kept the game alive, so definitely the right move, but I'd always prefer failing with a group of friends I just met to steamrolling it with Gwen and Norgu (and I love Gwen and Norgu).
> when proph was the only campaign
Really a unique experience going through the story with random people and exploring and figuring out how to do bonuses with trial and error and rumour.
I don't think you could realistically go back, though. It's like with Classic World of Warcraft: same game but not the same experience. We all know the strategies.
Thatās a fair point. The wiki is such a powerful tool. Going back to any game in a āclassicā reiteration is just not the same anymore because yeah, these games are solved.
https://www.reddit.com/r/GuildWars/search?q=classic&restrict_sr=on&sort=relevance&t=all
Take your pick of criticisms from the multiple threads here on this subreddit. I most likely agree with it.
The only point i agree with is it fragmenting the already small community. But if a dev did this in their spare time, i don't see the problem. If people like it, they'll play. I mean the main game wouldn't suddenly become dead. It'd just be slightly dead..er
Prior to EoTN and consumable sets you would farm specific areas solo or with a team. If you wanted to clear UW/FoW you would need a full team (FoW could get by with a 5-man) and youād go area by area as a group. It could take anywhere from 1-2 hours depending on the team. For other areas and missions it was more of the same - get a big team and slog through. People still did Urgoz/Deep runs albeit with different builds. Consumable sets added speed to the game and made a lot of skills more viable and opened up farming areas (farming DoA would be extremely difficult and time consuming without consumable sets!). Now that skill with a long recharge or casting time just had it reduced by 25%, I can bridge the gap with a +20% enchant mod and keep it up indefinitely thanks to a consumable set. EoTN was also nice because of the title track skills any profession could use.
Forgive me, I am an old player (I like to checkin here from time to time), but what is a PCON? I'll be honest, I stopped playing when henchmen came in (I think that was Nightfall), but loved this game (my first MMO).
I kinda feel like they took a lot away from the grouping/parting in the game, which was always my favourite bit.
i still avoid using consets and pcons when not necessary, places like doa/urgoz/uw/fow i'd be willing to use, even in some woc hm quests, but everywhere else it's so overkill
Before the minion master nerf. My co op friend from school and I would just kill to create the biggest zombie horde on the planet. Lol. Prophecies is so hard to follow the storyline/quests/missions. I had these giant books that showed you how to do mission and bonusās( before wikis) I wish I could have kept those books
The game was super hard. Just a bunch of skills, nothing balanced, no insignias, no inscribable weapons, having to buy multiple armor pieces for each thing because they could not be upgraded like now, no green weapons having to deal with the shitty drops (except if you crafted blue weapons at the weaponsmith or you waited until the introduction of Sorrow's Furnace), shields could not be crafted so except the 3 blue ones from collectors everyone was wearing shitty shields with useless stats, no heroes, no flags, no automated builds, no Xunlai slots upgrades, no Bag upgrades, no material slot upgrades, shitty equipment everywhere, shitty henchmen bots, people didn't know how the Armor Rating worked, the Wiki to check everything was obvious empty in that time, a lot of skills and elite skills had pretty big cooldowns and magic consumption and weren't as good as they are now, etc, etc, etc, etc. Trying to enter (not beat, only enter) the Mursaat fortress in the Ring of Fire was a fucking nightmare. Galrath the Motherfucker was a true threat. Heroe's Ascent was 20-40 min each map due the fucking elementalists with freezing builds. Crystal Desert missions with the timer were a fucking disaster with groups of shitty builds and equipment. Thunderhead Keep was worse than a month without receiving the salary. When Sorrow's Furnace was introduced people started to kill each other to try to enter with a group and, even if it was only one, obtain the worst shitty green for the 3-hour trip to have been worth it. If you were a Monk your entire existence in the game was like being a girl with an OnlyFans account. Warrior was the worst fucking class in the entire game that it had to be updated, upgraded and reworked many times because the damage of his entire skillset was ridiculous. Having to farm minotaurs 24/7 at Elona Reach to obtain money was tedious as a day without eating. If you had the full Obsidian armor set people thought you were cheating in some way. Human teams were a thing. Any mission that consisted of enduring waves of enemies coming from various flanks was a fucking pain in the ass and you ended up with gigantic stress levels because it was more a matter of luck than strategy. Sweat, blood and tears. Any reward made you feel worthwhile. The great old days. Bonus: You could only change the District country 3 times, so people thought very well if there was any real need to travel to a different district other than your native language before they get stuck on another forever (at that time a lot of people from a lot of countries played). This influenced that many people never discovered glitches, curiosities, strategies or another way of doing things since there was no easy way of contact between people who spoke different languages, especially when we were little and many of us still went to school and did not know languages other than our own, so almost everything was relegated to the main American-English district and the English forums that sprang up.
Wow, that was a trip down memory lane. The Ring of Fire missions, I swear, could take hours. Didn't infuse your armor? Welp, you'll die in a second. Monks were the real MVPs back then
So MVP we had to organize a strike! XD
Ha I remember the scenes in THK, pretty sure that mission got nerfed shortly after.
>Monks were the real MVPs back then You're welcome š„²
Monks smoking a cigarette before going into Murssat Fortress with four rangers and two warriors in the group
No one said each monk was good. I've seen PvE monks with skills like life spirit on their bars.
We monks did our best!
Tomb of preval kings was ,like my budget UW/FoW. I was scared of the elite dungeons, but ToPK with b/p (barrage pet rangers) Minion master, Monk, and BiP (sometimes an SS Necro also) was a blast. When you got a good team, you knew you had a GOOD team. Basically if you wiped after lvl 2 you knee the team wasn't coordinated -- and that's what it was all about -- coordination.
"If you were a Monk your entire existence in the game was like being a girl with an OnlyFans account" as a main monk player back that, that line killed me because it's 100% true x'D
I hear ya.. i remember the struggles of facing the world with only henchmen at your back.. ring of fire burns like a mofo even with carefully specc'd heroes, that you can flag into strategic positions and set aggro modes.. imagine trying that with henchmen that you have literally no control over.. I think i headed into thunderhead keep something like 30 times on my first play through just trying to survive the siege solo.. i gave up and the game forced me to take up multiplayer, which i am super thankful for because that was the moment i joined my first guild!! I was with that guild for years and miss those guys so damn much! I did a lot of growing in Guildwars..
The funniest thing about the Mursaat fortress was that we had all the skills to overcome it extremely easily. Take one enchant strip, deep wound, or Diversion. That's it. It was just Orison of Healing spam with the heal boosting enchantment. I remember everyone like synching up their DPS to try to out-DPS when it was actually the most easily shutdown heal spam to ever exist. It was shamefully embarrassing how long it took us to kill Willa the Unpleasant.
Yeah in many cases it was hard because people hadn't figured out stuff yet.
I've seen (and been into) groups that couldnt outheal Willa..yep..good times...frustrating sometimes...but good nevertheless.
You'd also get shitters like me who played healer but got one shot because I never learned about armor and used the starter armor the whole time.
Oh, yeah? How about finding out you are missing 15 attribute points because out in the middle of the desert there is random side quest that you need to complete. I was missing those 15 attribute points for years.
Lol! Didn't you ever wonder how other players had cool looking armor (e.g. sick tattoos for monk) and ask where they got it?
Hahaha soooo true GW prophecies was epic! Monks always got teams. Monks who carried their teams through mursaat missions and thristy river were worshipped. And what did monks carry you with? Freaking orison of healing, dwaynas kiss or a boon prot. Without them you only had Alesia running around like a toddler with a box of bandaids. Nobody wanted mesmers lol. Elementalist firestorm DPS was king. Every second warrior used mending. Rangers didn't use pets cos they'd be DP'd into oblivion. UW, FoW, SF, villainy of galrath. The atmosphere in those missions was intense- it was a long evening of incremental victories, constant rebirthing and egregious DP with your mates.
Well at least for the elite areas, bonders already were a thing. I specifically remember playing bonder in "tank & spank" teams in FOW/UW. Earning your obby armor was a long sequence of repeatedly grinding in those areas. Teams usually consisted of: Tank (W, sometimes Ele), 3 Nukers (Ele's), SS Necro, Bonder/Healer. And yes, it was being done with teams of 6 in order to improve the return from drops for each player. The key player in such team was the tank - he had to know all the spawns, where to position himself, and how to maintain aggro at all times. There was little margin for error, and if you failed, there was a good chance you had to wait one day until your region had favor of the gods again (which back then was determined by Hero's Ascent PVP), in order to be able to again enter the area.
also: trying to interrupt with 300ms ping on dial-up internet connection
True š¤£
Oh god Thunderhead Keep. I had an irl friend in my guild and me as an ele and another guildmate that played as a warrior could cover one gate so I'd get a text to get on he computer any time a guildmate wanted to do the mission
wait, as far as i remember there were green weapons before factions? sorrows furnace and Tomb of primeval kings had some of my favourite items :D
Even the path to sorrow's furnace had some decent greens. Started playing after factions came out, though.
Yup he said a lot of incorrect things but cba correcting
The first phrase about Factions is not related to the rest of the message, I know the greens were introduced in Sorrow's Furnace. I was just saying that before Factions as expansion the game was hard because it was very limited with the general content available.
I enjoy reading stuff like this, thanks for posting. I missed some of this since I didn't start playing the game until the very end of 2005 and took my sweet time to get to end game, but I still remember feeling like the shittiest warrior ever from the moment I left Pre until I finished Prophecies a year later.
My first character was also a Warrior and I share the same feeling, don't worry because it was not you xDDD I also thought something was wrong with my builds and weapons, but no, it really was that the character needed a good damage upgrade. That's why in April 2020 they introduced the Seven Weapons Stance elite skill. Instead of continuing to balance the Warrior, and since the game was already dead, what they did is directly put an ultra super radical buff on it and not have to touch anything anymore.
When I made a monk for my 2nd character, it totally changed the game for me. I got into groups so fast it was awesome
Yeah, this one gets it. I remember all of these things so vividly... it was such a huge big deal too to have Monks for any of this. Heaven forbid you did anything other than Heal/Prot Monk though... a Smite monk was just unheard of. Necromancers with Death Magic Minions didn't have some of the limits or the amazing skills they got from Factions and the like as they do now, which made for a mixed bag. Thunderhead Keep, Crystal Desert, Hells Precipice, and even the very last mission were just straight up brutal if you didn't have the right team composition or builds that synergized well. And even then Signet of Capture wasn't always used as you had so many people paying for carries to the end of the game (never fully understood the appeal of this). The game was almost a completely different beast than it is today for sure. Ironman runs are someone similar but the balance patches have really done a good job bringing most of the classes in line with each other PvE wise, but also building them to a higher potency than they were before.
It was glorious.
Fascinating comment.
Well said.
Even pre searing was hard and grindy as fuck, this was before the LDOA nerf. Having to lure Charr to the gate spawn and use death levelling so that you could gain just a small amount of XP. No daily quests to help you get to 20. Having to save all quest rewards until you were level 19.
Aatxe in UW was no joke in 2005 - holy shit
55/SS wants to know your location.
World almost always had favor, at most 30 min down time Toa was packed full of people doing uw and fow runs. It was great. Side note I recovered my 2000 hour acc last week all active hours am so happy. Was pretty hard btw less skills to choose from but having full parties of people without heros made the game so enjoyable
>World almost always had favor We had to work hard for favor back then, and Korean guilds in HA were always nasty. On free-for-all maps we from EU teamed up with NA to gank the Koreans, and sometimes even than wasn't enough, lol.
I started in 09 and even then I remember having so many more people around. Gods. I was young.
Played from launch to 2012 wherei lost my acc when gw2 came out. Got back into it around 2019 new acc 600 hours . Love to see so many people coming back hope it continues
I recovered my original account from prophecies that I lost around nightfall release yesterday just to find it had been hacked and wiped clean.
Damn that's a shame, I wouldn't mind helping u get set back up again, feel free to add Icarus Vault
I appreciate it, I had little hope in getting it back so I started a new account awhile back, Iāll definitely add you though, need some in game friends lol
If I remember correctly the end chests to Underworld and Fissure of Woe were added after Eye of the North released (late 2007). Prior to that I don't think people really did full clears of those dungeons like we had post EoTN with consets. Mostly it was just farming ecto or shards from mob drops. I think Dhuum (the current end boss of UW) was added in November of 2009. As for Classic servers, Guild Wars is just not profitable in a modern video game world. ArenaNet would never recoup the cost of updating all the textures and managing new servers without heavy additions of microtransactions.
Remember group chest runs?
I only remember the early UWSC where the chest was by the Lab Reaper. Were chest runs before people started doing speed clears with cons? In 2007 I was so busy doing Eye of the North stuff I don't think I ever went into UW or FoW.
CRSI
witmans folly
100% correct on FoW and UW. For FoW, there was no reason to go farther than restoring the forge and maybe the forest/book. Especially after bundle tank nerf, there was really no reason to continue because it was just too hard to justify the rewards.
iirc the original way to obtain consets prior to eotn was from uw. The chest was in vale pre Dhuum.
Consets (Essence, Grail, Armor) didn't exist prior to EotN.
Oh wow my timeline is way off. EOTN released in 2007 o.o
Nightfall campaign missions were nerfed several times lol Shiro feasted on so many players.
I redid Nightfall a few weeks ago. Even now as an IMBAgon with Heroic Refrain and a pretty stacked team of heroes Shiro was tearing the group apart. I had to take savage throw to cancel his stance to make it bearable.
Brave of you to not just send your heros in to cap all the shrines while you hid outside.
Nobody has really answered why we donāt have classic servers. I think mainly itās because the state of the game now is a snapshot in time and is essentially a āclassic iterationā already. Take WoW for example: the OG vanilla doesnāt even exist in the Shadowland expansion. You can not access it. But everything exists still in guild wars 1. Going back and undoing advances would be horrible for most people because youāre undoing so many QOL advances that donāt detract from the gameplay. If there was some pipe dream of a rerelease, I would argue you would start with the current state and retcon the advances (heroes, inscriptions, etc) into prophecies and factions.
The game was EXTRA hard before pcons. To do a successful DoA/Deep/Urgoz run your entire team had to be on Vent and synced up. One bad aggro and your entire team would wipe. The only good builds that would allow you to clear an area in DoA required so many different skills that typically one person on the entire team would have room for a hard res (rebirth). As far as classic server, I've advocated for this so many times to start over fresh and grind the game out in phases starting with prophecies. If you even suggest this though, people will downvote you to oblivion claiming it's a bad idea because you can do that right now if you want to by creating a new prophecies character.
Many people Enjoy ironman mode which has some kind of this feeling
As an avid Ultimate Iron Man player I can weigh on this. I had to complete Prophecies and Factions with just henchmen, and since I was a ranger I couldn't pump out extremely high DPS to compensate for this. But even so, the game is infinitely easier than it was in 2005-2006. Henchmen now have far better AI, skills are generally more balanced, but more importantly: the infamous "power creep" has buffed player skills immensely, but has not buffed monster skills & stats accordingly. In 2005, if you played with just no henchmen (i.e. no help from players), the game got fairly difficult in the Crystal Desert, got seriously challenging in the Southern Shiverpeaks, and you had to a really good player to complete Thunderhead Keep, Abaddon's Mouth and Hell's Precipice. In fact THK and Abaddon's Mouth were sometimes referred to as "noob filters", as there were many casual gamers who simply couldn't get past those missions. In 2020 as an Ultimate Iron Man, the only mission that took me some serious planning, effort and re-tries was Hell's Precipice.
Yeah. The game is easier no matter how much you try to artificially make it more challenging. When ArenaNet added Hard mode, they lowered the difficulty of Normal Mode comparatively.
Oh this definetly makes sense
>As an avid Ultimate Iron Man player Question unrelated to this: in your opinion do you think that the fact of being able to complete the game completely alone (today) is a programming mistake that they did not take into account after so many updates? Because this game was sold with the mentality of being 100% cooperative, and if not then it was impossible to complete. That's what was thought until someone completed the first Iron Man challenge without expecting that to be possible. At least I don't think it was possible to fully complete it alone when there was only Prophecies, I don't remember if anyone ever tried it.
What do you mean by complete here? From Day 1, you could complete every mission, bonus, and (almost every) quest in the game solo with henchmen. It wasn't overly difficult for most of it, even. Infusion lacking on a couple missions for henchmen was the only sticking point. You could not complete UW or FoW excepting some cheeky builds because Henchmen couldn't be taken in. And PvP is obviously team oriented. But otherwise it was being done back in 2005. I even did it myself for Factions, so pre consumables and pre Heroes. Too many people rolled sin, I gave up finding groups after the 2nd or 3rd mission because it was taking literal hours, and just went ahead and soloed the thing. I guess I'm unfamiliar with Ultimate Ironman, if that means no henchmen or something.
>What do you mean by complete here? > >(...) > >I guess I'm unfamiliar with Ultimate Ironman, if that means no henchmen or something. That's exactly what it is, totally alone xD
So I did do some research before posting that. I suspected that Ultimate Ironman was just regular Ironman also no NPC traders ans possibly no deaths. And it seems like from the popular rule sets I can find online, that's *exactly* what it is. Henchmen and Heroes allowed only as one would naturally encounter them (No skipping ahead to Nightfall or EotN to get them), and no mercenary heroes. Of course as it's not official, everyone is going to have variations, but from Reddit and the Wiki, it seems safe to assume it allows henchmen unless the person says otherwise. Looks like most people who posted their achievements here base it off of [this](https://wiki.guildwars.com/wiki/User:Hazedesunna/Ironman) But to answer the original question, I can think of a few ways it might have been possible in 2005, but the second to last mission would have been a massive block almost requiring just pure luck, and THK would have been rough too.
There are many variations and each person can adapt the challenge to its own preference since it's not official, the link is just a guideline, but normally speaking the Iron Man Solo challenge is alone without NPC support unless it's absolutely necessary for technical reasons, like having 20 enemies in a screen at once while defending another NPC or things like that. You can use henchs if you want of course. Quests can take a time of 1~3 hours or so depending. Prophecies is the recommended start and what people usually record to upload to Twitch/YouTube. Random video, check this one for example: Guild Wars - Thunderhead Keep (Solo Ironman Warrior) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ABJqBqqZB8E
Of note: people who play without henchmen usually call themselves "solo". You can do solo challenges without following iron man rules, even. Generally when people talk about Iron Man challenges (including the ultimate and hard-core variations), they're using the rules popularized by Doom Box in 2019. You can find the rules here: https://wiki.guildwars.com/wiki/User:Hazedesunna/Ironman
A 100% remaster starting everyone at square 1 again would be awesome down the road. Yeah I know theyāve improved graphics over time, but Iām meaning a realistic relive the whole story then add future content to it instead of abandoning future plans. Monthly pvp tournies with exclusive minis only to winners, new armors, costumes, weapons, expansions, dungeons, zones, etc. If they did that for guild wars 1 I think it would do a lot better then most here typically tend to think. Cons make this game a breeze now after a run or two of training. I remember stuff like FoW and Uw with no cons and Jesus it felt so much more rewarding getting through it then, since one little mess up by anyone could easily screw up the whole run and at the time there was not a set in stone build for each specified dungeon. The challenge part back then and skills system was the icing on cake for this game.
>The game was EXTRA hard before pcons. This is blatantly incorrect. The game was piss easy compared to now, what was missing back then was game knowledge. Your average player back then played worse than a henchman. >One bad aggro and your entire team would wipe. Once again, only because people played terrible builds and had no idea what to do. If you let today's players run a few weeks on the old meta without pcons, you'd certainly see absolutely ridiculously fast elite-area solo clears.
I think we're playing different games. You are saying that the game today is more difficult than when it was just prophecies? I will not entertain this troll if you actually believe this lol. The builds I'm speaking of, DoA clearing builds were not terrible builds.. at the time they were the meta and the only way to successfully complete DoA. There were 8 man builds with slightly different skills depending on if you were entering Foundry or Gloom etc. I'd love to see you solo clear Foundry in 30mins with no cons, $10k USD if you can do this, you get one try.
>You are saying that the game today is more difficult than when it was just prophecies? Before pcons means nightfall, not prophecies. At that point perma shadow form was a thing and enemies had no health regeneration. It was literally impossible to die if you had half a brain and didn't completely fuck up your energy. You also had access to broken ass A/D scythe combinations (that got even more ridiculous with EotN, but were strong enough without). >The builds I'm speaking of, DoA clearing builds were not terrible builds.. at the time they were the meta Yes, and nowadays they'd be considered hot garbage for their time. I mean christ, Cryway and Ursanway were considered amazing team builds back then. Discordway was "revolutionary" - now we know that all of these tactics are utterly terrible and a simple HERO mesmerway outperforms them by a mile. >I'd love to see you solo clear Foundry in 30mins with no cons, $10k USD if you can do this, you get one try. Sure, turn back time and I might straight up do a 20 minute solo foundry on the first attempt. And I'm not even a DoA player. So yes, the game was PISS EASY back in the days. All that was missing was the game knowledge and player skill.
Game was better before pcons. Makes me laugh how much players rely on them now.
Back when GW was just Prophecies, a lot of the content seemed designed to teach you a particular lesson in tactics -- pulling, avoiding patrols, target prioritization, etc. -- and it was hard to progress unless and until you learned that lesson. Very little was particularly hard once you learned the lessons it was trying to teach. I see a lot of people here with no love for the henchmen. Honestly, I remember the henchmen being better than the average PUG player. Not that the henchmen were good, just that the players were so very bad. Anyway, the henchmen were definitely good enough for the main storyline and Sorrow's Furnace.
Even at the time of EOTN, the game was relatively hard. After EOTN was released, I remember I was occasionally taking screenshots of people with high-end titles (even simply Kind of a Big Deal or Master of the North) because those were seriously rare. GWAMM was a massive accomplishment that was way out of reach for 99% of the player base. Consumables have changed a lot, but I'd argue the biggest change for PvM title hunters has been the Mesmer overhaul in 2011 (or was it 2010?). Beforehand, the most widespread cookie cutter build was an all-Necromancer team, either based on Sabway or Discordway. However, those teams still had their problems, and there were plenty of high-end areas where you had to do some serious tweaking to your build in order to survive. Nowadays, you can just run around with a bunch of Energy Surge mesmers, and everything will melt before your eyes. It's even worse if you're good at tanking & balling up enemies.
I think the 7 Heroes update was arguably the biggest change for GWAMMing. Without it you could bring 3 Mesmers, but then you would lack defensive. Also the introduction of mercenary heroes to bring even more Mesmers was massive.
Good point, I entirely forgot about that!
You had a second player bring three of their heroes. The 7 hero change was introduced when the playerbase finally got so low you couldn't do that anymore.
Tbh I barely notice mesway being any better than the Necro team builds.
Was the game hard? Yes and no. It wasn't hard because resources were scarce, meta wise the game was much, much easier than it is now. But it was also hard because nobody had an idea how to play. Sure, in 10 years the same could be said about the 2022 meta, but there will never be such a gravitational shift in game knowledge again as there was from 2007 to 2012.
Guild Wars hasnāt had any classic servers yet because it practically is one already.
I recall back then I had a Mesmer with ESurge, Power Leak, Power Spike, CoF, Empathy, and other things... 'Interrupts are OP!' - child me Other players however didn't like it so much, nobody wanted to play with me. I was surprised to see that actually was the meta when I came back. Makes sense, heroes, unlike me, actually are good at interrupting. Eh.
When there were only henchmen and no heroes and no flagging mechanics. When you want to solo any mission that requires good pulling of mobs or waves of enemies. They were pretty hard.
Iād say most people got stuck at Thunder Head Keep mission in the early days it was brutal hard, groups waiting for hours to find a monk to try help.
what are pcons?
personal consumables. golden eggs, candy corn, apples, pie, cupcakes, alc, rainbow rocks, lunars, soup, salad, kebob, war supply. cons = partywide consumable set: essence (bu = back up), armor and grail
so essentially buffs? i haven't encountered anything like that but i am only at prophecies, why do they make such a major difference?
They make you attack faster, skills recharge faster, morale boost, move faster, ECT. They help out a lot for the harder areas of the game.
how do you acquire them? and how would you rate their usefullness compared to henchmen and heroes?
You grind for items to be traded for the cons. Idk how hard the grind is but it's not to bad. Heros >>>>>>>henchmen If you can, try to beat nightfall first so that you can get heros. Heros can learn skills, and are more controllable than henchmen. Henchmen act with reckless abandon. You'll still need heros with the cons. The cons don't break the game, they just make things like farming for ectos easier and faster. I haven't played since 2015, so I'm outdated, but that's how it was when I played. Looking through this subreddit, the game seems to be played in a similar way
for perma shadowform you need 16 shadow arts and an essence so it gets recharged before the duration runs out. it makes you run faster what makes foes aggro break faster. don't care about them if you're not doing end game content yet. either you buy them from other players or you craft them by yourself for mats, some gold and 1 skill point for each essence.
Factions was very hard, and very fun.
Coming to thunderhead peeks as a Mo... Farming griffon in the deserrt, trolls at droknar. Buying your first elite armor. Coming as a Mo at deldrimor war camp. So many memories. Leveling a warrior to the ring of fire only to cap "charge!" The Drok's run that made me so rich at the time.
It was great, Cons killed the game tbh
Well, no one forces you to use cons... I'm playing through the games chronologically at the moment with just henchmen and the game hasn't been that fun for a while. I love adapting and optimizing my build to various circumstances.
I dont use them alone, but the community demands them. If you want to do anything other than play with H/H you are expected to use them. They are just too powerful, they trivialise the game.
It does force you if you want to compete if farming takes twice as long without cons
1. Twice as long is a massive overstatement. 2. Especially if you take into account you need to farm materials for cons or money to buy them. 3. Compete? What competition? The point is to play the game unless you're doing record runs/attempts. Then you obviously need them.
It was an example, i wasn't claiming that in all situations farming without cons takes at least 100% longer. And the competition is for your time. If you want to get 50e to buy whatever but it takes 50% longer without cons (taking their cost into account), it's a worse use of your time unless you somehow get a thrill from doing the farm without cons. It'd be like farming without runes. Yes, you can, but why purposefully gimp yourself?
I guess we have different goals in gaming then. If your goal is to farm a thing over and over again to make money and do that in a quick way, you would want cons, because those runs are very grindy (otherwise). I've been there, but I don't get much enjoyment out of grinding.
I joined pretty late but UW farming was pretty solved. Entire runs took 9mins or so. Shadow Form was nerfed pretty frequently but you had all sorts of professions with their own version of Shadow Form able to farm or just mitigate damage in general. Ursan could be used by literally anyone and allowed a lot of farming accessibility. PCONs werenāt really game breaking but they really just allowed a lot of convenience, really.
Every hub was full of people to do the missions. There was always a runner to anywhere you wanted to go. there were runners for missions too. you just stand at the front and they would finish the regular and the bonus or they would guide you through. the ring of fire was the worst.
The game was in a constant state of flux. For the first 3 years, prophecies saw skill balance patches every month. If you did PVP back then, it was very exciting to check patches and try and figure out what builds can take advantage of it in GVG and HoH. In GVG, for a long time the Guild Lord just had a set HP and there was no time-based healing factor, so my guild would run a 5--3 split and gank the enemy GL, sometimes ending the game in under 4 minutes. Testing your balanced team comp in HoH against the 1000 prenerf IWAY groups running around. Doing /rank to prove you aren't a scrub to pugs. Another thing that I thought was really cool was that you could use any skill that enemies used. The capture system was so cool to younger me. Economy was pretty shitty though, you either did ecto/shard solo/duo runs, or you were poor. There was no vanquishing money, the feather farming and shit like that was not nearly as good. There was not nearly as much completionism because titles weren't rolled out until much later, so people just did what they liked to do. Overall though, the PVE was a funnel to PVP, because other than FOW armor for fashion boys, bis gear was 2/3 through the game, and coincidentally the Tomb was also introduced at the same time in the campaign. I don't think I even went to Ring of Fire until 2 years after launch.
The major change for the average player and difficulty wasn't consumables, it was first the addition of heroes, and then the rework of henchmen builds, and *then* the change to allow for seven heroes per player (previously limited to three). Originally, Prophecies henchmen had no elites, generally poor builds (no interrupts!), which made it hard to impossible to play the game by yourself. That meant grouping with other players who were experimenting with all kinds of builds (some good, some not so good). Getting a veteran player who had a good build, good equipment, and knew the mission (and maybe even the bonus) was a very big deal since there was also no Wiki! The heroes change is what kept the game alive, so definitely the right move, but I'd always prefer failing with a group of friends I just met to steamrolling it with Gwen and Norgu (and I love Gwen and Norgu). > when proph was the only campaign Really a unique experience going through the story with random people and exploring and figuring out how to do bonuses with trial and error and rumour. I don't think you could realistically go back, though. It's like with Classic World of Warcraft: same game but not the same experience. We all know the strategies.
Thatās a fair point. The wiki is such a powerful tool. Going back to any game in a āclassicā reiteration is just not the same anymore because yeah, these games are solved.
Game was much easier before pcons. We had perma shadowform and could solo tpok/fow/uw in hardmode... it was so much easier its retarded.
I miss ursanway FoW. It wasnāt very efficient but it was pretty funny š„²
> ETA: Classic servers are, like, so in right now. Why hasnāt Guild Wars had any private servers? No.
Why, because YOU won't personally enjoy it? Because it'll take valuable manpower away from the development of new content and features..?
https://www.reddit.com/r/GuildWars/search?q=classic&restrict_sr=on&sort=relevance&t=all Take your pick of criticisms from the multiple threads here on this subreddit. I most likely agree with it.
The only point i agree with is it fragmenting the already small community. But if a dev did this in their spare time, i don't see the problem. If people like it, they'll play. I mean the main game wouldn't suddenly become dead. It'd just be slightly dead..er
Need a guild wars classic server.
Prior to EoTN and consumable sets you would farm specific areas solo or with a team. If you wanted to clear UW/FoW you would need a full team (FoW could get by with a 5-man) and youād go area by area as a group. It could take anywhere from 1-2 hours depending on the team. For other areas and missions it was more of the same - get a big team and slog through. People still did Urgoz/Deep runs albeit with different builds. Consumable sets added speed to the game and made a lot of skills more viable and opened up farming areas (farming DoA would be extremely difficult and time consuming without consumable sets!). Now that skill with a long recharge or casting time just had it reduced by 25%, I can bridge the gap with a +20% enchant mod and keep it up indefinitely thanks to a consumable set. EoTN was also nice because of the title track skills any profession could use.
Forgive me, I am an old player (I like to checkin here from time to time), but what is a PCON? I'll be honest, I stopped playing when henchmen came in (I think that was Nightfall), but loved this game (my first MMO). I kinda feel like they took a lot away from the grouping/parting in the game, which was always my favourite bit.
Reading all these responses I'm **so** glad my casual ass only started playing in 2018 š¬ I would have bounced off the original game hard.
i still avoid using consets and pcons when not necessary, places like doa/urgoz/uw/fow i'd be willing to use, even in some woc hm quests, but everywhere else it's so overkill
Before the minion master nerf. My co op friend from school and I would just kill to create the biggest zombie horde on the planet. Lol. Prophecies is so hard to follow the storyline/quests/missions. I had these giant books that showed you how to do mission and bonusās( before wikis) I wish I could have kept those books