Guild Wars 1

[rusty_shackleford]

a more RPG focused guild wars is one of the few things I'd be willing to spend ridiculous amounts of money on to kickstart or back or whatever
basically just take pre-searing, smash it together with nightfall heroes, make about 50+ hours of content and I'll give you my bank account

 

[BoroMonokli]

Not to be too much of a boomer but scythes dont belong to the monk, or into the game at all, and maybe not even daggers. i mean, Black's fun post aside when have daggers ever been in a good spot? They had 1-2 strong chains and the rest were impractical or rubbish.

Scythes were just aoe focused hammers, without the knockdowns. In every aoe situation (which is 80% of pve) they completely supplanted other melee weapons that aren't daggers.

Anyways regarding the gw2-style expansion of existing professions makes sense - they settled for it in gw2 after all, probably for the same reason. It has the same problem regarding skill bloat though.

 

[what am i doing]

Thematically, the Dervish is a religious warrior, basically a combat monk, hence if you were going to add that new line of stuff to any profession, Monk makes the most sense both thematically and in terms of rounding out the class.

 

[BoroMonokli]

Thematically, I agree, its between a warrior and a monk. The base 70 AR and the enchantment focus with a good amount of holy damage says so.

Scythes are still a problem though, at least as of all their implementations: Originally they were good on almost any martial class BUT the dervish which had wonky e-management, and all scythe attacks cost lots of energy:

Rangers could reduce the cost with expertise, and leverage their blocking stances and high anti-element AR to stay in the thick of it while being nearly impervious to armor-respecting damage (the main form of incoming damage pre-mesmer update).
Assassins had almost guaranteed (and with malicious strike, guaranteed) criticals, which did insane damage with the scythe, (owing to the high damage range, and that crits always roll maximum) it was so bad that ANET specifically toned down the critical damage bonus of scythes for the dervish update. Combined with the kurzick skill (+% damage with scythes) and Vow of Strength (+% damage), crit scythes could one or two-shot everything in Cathedral of Flames. Oh and critical hits solved the energy management problem too.
Warriors had "merely" Warrior's Endurance and strength-derived armor penetration to go with.

With the Dervish update it became a little better, Assassins are no longer the outliers, and rangers no longer have the nutty inherent advantage with most high-powered scythe skills turned to use adrenaline. Warriors are still good, but have to deal with the enchantment tax and the energy drain that creates, so dervishes are finally the best at making use of their weapon. However this also makes it a "gimmick weapon", like bows for the ranger. Bow skills if you remember, cost a lot of energy to account for the ranger's primary attribute reducing attack skills' energy cost, making the weapon pretty much useless on any other profession. (example: During the Barrage/Pet era, Rangers were by far the top barragers, having energy cost reduction, attribute bonus from runes for expertise, BM, and marksmanship, and the ability to take splinter. Ritualist could get a stronger splinter, but weaker barrage with worse e-management (Spirit Siphon was weak). Assassin could get critical hits often, but lacked splinter. Paragon could support the party with shouts, but had to poop out adrenaline-based shouts and chants to keep going (although a command barrager was a funny concept).

All in all, GW as it was was more or less "lightning in a bottle", held together more by the miraculous alignment of stars than conscious planning.

rusty_shackleford I'm not entirely sure what you mean by a "more RPG focused GW1", but I'm all for it if it means getting rid of the gimmicks and making the skill system work as it should.

 

[NoMoneyNoFameNoDame]

a more RPG focused guild wars is one of the few things I'd be willing to spend ridiculous amounts of money on to kickstart or back or whatever
basically just take pre-searing, smash it together with nightfall heroes, make about 50+ hours of content and I'll give you my bank account

I wouldn't mind if people offered up their bank accounts. But I must know what the goals/requirements are.

If I were to convert my game, or make a spinoff to be like presearing + nightfall's heroes.. I have a few questions for you.


Why presearing?
Is it the exact visuals and themes?
Or is it just the well executed combo of what it offers?
The pacing?
How far into presearing should inspiration be drawn?
What parts of presearing are acceptable climaxes of plot / challenge?

What isn't in presearing, that you would want to carry over anyway?
You know there's more game beyond the first part.
Would there be anything you must have?


What do you hate about post-searing that you would not want to see?
locations, quests, etc.

What about nightfall heroes matter?
Is it the story they contribute, or just your ability to command and customize.. them?
Is there something about skills / attributes of nightfall classes that are also important?

Why Guild Wars / Guild Wars 1?
What is the minimum set of things you are expecting?
Is it the focus on only non-futuristic stuff? (including siege engines etc)(what about the Asura techstuff?)
Is the fully customizable UI important?
The horizontal progression?
How everything gets presented? e.g. buying skills from skill vendors.
Is multiplayer important to any of this?
The combat complexity and aI?

 

[BoroMonokli]

I've been thinking a couple times, since it's a rather bad idea to waste time tearing up old wounds left by gw2's betrayal of everything that was gw1, that an old idea I had in mind, to run various content with groups that:

• Only use a single profession, and builds with only skills from that profession
• no heroes, no henchies
• naturally this excludes eotn pve skills, but allows sunspear/luxonkurzick skills
• no consumables, with the maybe-maybe exclusion of rez scrolls, although I'd rather allow hard rez skills on a secondary profession than rez scrolls personally, like the only options being Resurrect and Restore Life.

The target content could be something simple, like hard mode 4man areas such as old ascalon, or difficult things like normal mode hell's precipice (which I imagine would exclude something like a warrior team, but who knows?)

Anyone interested? if so which professions sounds fun to you? Maybe I should take it to the codex playground instead?

My thoughts after a discord chat are the following:

easiest professions:

• Monks are probably the best suited for this, being slow grinders as a team. They have quick heal spells, prots, antihex and anticondition skills, and smiting with RoJ as a nuke.
• Ritualists are also extremely potent, having condition removal in spades, SOS/SOGM spirit wall, soul twisting, healing, and nukes in channeling.
• Dervishes can actually do healing, self-remove hexes, self-and-party remove conditions, apply conditions, and nuke with various aoe skills.

more difficult/restricted professions:

• Paragons, while they can boost up their armor and get ridiculous healing through their shout/chant spam, as well as deal with conditions easily, lack hex removal, so they suffer in any hex-heavy area greatly.
• Rangers lack heals and condition removals for themselves (besides antidote signet), but have "expendable", extremely durable, and high powered pets, as well as high armor vs elemental damage and strong blocking stances
• Elementalists have defensive spells but suffer against enchantment hate and have very minimal party healing
• Mesmers have extreme shutdown and high damage, but have no healing for each other
• Necromancers have minions, curses for a degree of shutdown, condition removals/transfers to the enemy, although they lack anti-caster defense, and their best option for healing (besides just going straight up blood magic caster) is using the minions as portable healing.

Challenge only:

• warriors. No condition removal, no hex removal, no healing besides self-heals, and traditionally weak blocking stances. In fact even with secondary profession skills allowed, a warrior team would still struggle in many areas.

 

[Average Manatee]

Ranger

Spoiler

could absolutely destroy almost everything easily through trap builds of course but those are lame.

Together As One and Pet builds would also probably be very powerful if done properly. Pets legitimately deal a lot of single target damage and are very tanky now (-33% damage taken according to wiki as a baseline, which applies to armor-ignoring damage), and having 16 bodies instead of 8 to distribute damage across along with powerful party-wide healing should work. This also minimizes the effect of hexs/conditions since you'll have more targets and half will be up front and the other half spread out. Throw on otyugh's cry for 104 total armor, call of protection for -20 damage reduction and symbiotic bond to split the damage 50/50 with your pet while everyone has high health regen. Should be close to unkillable. And pets are easily ressable with no DP. Offense-wide your pet is dealing ~50-60 damage per hit with 33% IAS using Together as One and Feral Aggression.

Spirits are also good to work with, for example Greater Conflagration + Winter means your whole group can wear Frostbound Insignia for 105 base armor. You can then take Quickening Zephyr and Storm Chaser to have basically infinite energy and lots of skill spam.

For your bow stuff everyone can of course bring 1 or 2 interrupts, have one guy with Apply Poison and one with Barbed Arrows. If you really need to interrupt just one boss then Broad Head Arrow is king and if you want mass interrupt spam then multiple rangers with Choking Gas for AoE interrupts is lols. Throw down a Nature's Renewal if you really want to ensure those hexes don't get on you in hard mode.

Warriors

Spoiler

DO have Save Yourselves which is god tier and a bunch of warriors pain-training important casters with Hundred Blades to output AoE damage murdering everything around them does a lot. With secondary profession skills allowed it should be workable everywhere. 2 or 3 W/Ps using non-leadership refrains/finales can add a lot of healing/condition removal/damage while a few others go /Me for Hex Eater Signet giving AoE hex removal.

Ritualists should be amazing. Two spirit spammers and everyone else goes Destructive was Glaive + restoration spells.

Monks I think would be really bad for offense. Smiting prayers really just suck. Everything has mediocre damage/AoE/recharge profile and your energy management isn't great. Really have to coordinate single target spikes here and group up enemies.

For Eles

Spoiler

here's what I'd try: 8x characters with a 12/10/8 earth/water/energy storage attribute and Mist Form/Elemental Lord/Earth Attunement/Kinetic Armor/Intensity/Earthen Shackles/Obsidian Flame/Stoning. Do Intensity->Earthen Shackles->Obsidian Flame (118 armor-ignoring damage + 94 In the Area (the most OP AoE radius range) armor ignoring damage)->intensity->Obsidian flame again. 8 of these is going to murder damn near anything, and if it doesn't you've still got Kinetic Armor for 156 armor, and as long as your obsidian flames were targetted against whatever can remove enchantments and killed them off you're pretty fucking safe. From there whatever is left is weakened and you can have people chain knockdown with stoning. Everyone having mistform means massive healing as well. Might actually be TOO safe in fact. Energy management is not that great unfortunately so could swap out some safety for that.

EDIT: Wait Obsidian doesn't work with intensity since it only applies to elemental damage. Still I think the alpha striking idea with Intensity is a promising team build idea. You'd probably want to go fire or air magic for damage then. Something like Invoke Lightning or Star Burst/Searing flames would absolutely rape groups with multiple elementalists spamming it + intensity. Can't do mist form then though. Might sacrifice kinetic armor and instead just run one warder, some mistform with the weaker air/fire magic spells and some with elite air/fire magic.

 

[BoroMonokli]

For monks, a cheap way out is just going to undead heavy areas, like kryta, cathedral of flames, etc.

eles

Spoiler

I was thinking, that with aura of restoration, elemental lord, and elemental attunement, you gain nearly as much energy back as with normal dual attunement for 5 and 10 energy spells, while healing yourself for 700% the spell cost.

if you roll dual attunement on top of that and spam lightning orb (105 selfheal), and lightning hammer (175 selfheal) while getting to pop intensity for even more damage, you have decent sustain and ability to spam blinding flash on anything that looks funny at you.

Regarding fire options, I recall Rodgort's Invocation. Immolate used to be awesome before the nerf it got bc mind blast, and I guess we can use flame burst and now phoenix heals nearby allies.

Earth options suck, its all just ebon hawk, stoning. so no big chunks of healing.

Water has deep freeze, ice spikes, frozen burst, and of course swirling aura if you bring exhaustion.

 

[Average Manatee]

Trying the winds of change stuff because I never finished before and damn, now I remember why. This is some tedious shit.

- Way too long. It's 35 quests according to wiki and I'm still not done.
- Way too repetitive, especially the early missions which are all killing afflicted
- I think this is the only thing in the game that you have to do on hard mode to get an important reward for (rit hero).
- Even worse, you have to do the WHOLE THING on hard mode. And you can't just do it on hard mode, you have to do every quest on normal, then on hard mode. So 70 quests. As much as the completionist in me wants to get it and try out some builds, I probably won't. God help you if you want to play more than 1 class.
- It's not terribly hard but the enemies have annoying builds with lots of healing and stuff that you have to pay attention to like ray of judgment. And the healing presents the usual problem of nearby groups getting aggroed because a healer ran halfway across your compass to heal something you were fighting. So basically do really good pulls or suffer in a lot of these quests.
- Difficulty goes down drastically over time since early levels are afflicted and later levels seem to get easier and easier builds. Or maybe I'm just remembering how to play more. But I think its the enemies.
- Poor writing. After all this shit the game tried to guilt me into feeling bad for clearing a den of a thousand level 20+ criminals with OP builds because "uhh, don't you know you're killing real human beings?".
- You have to listen to a bunch of unskippable NPC dialog in most quests, GW2-style

EDIT: Ohh jesus there's literally a multicultural/multiracial/multifactional meeting of evil peoples from all continents where they discuss what to do with the do-gooders disrupting their planes. Yes they actually use the words "do-gooders". Even stone summit make the trip to the canthan underworld.

EDIT2: There's a "muh right to protest" quest too.

 

[Zurbo]

- Difficulty goes down drastically over time since early levels are afflicted and later levels seem to get easier and easier builds. Or maybe I'm just remembering how to play more. But I think its the enemies.

Yeah, I think that the most irritating quest was rescuing some peasants at Minister Cho Estate, which is like 7th quest in chain.

- Poor writing. After all this shit the game tried to guilt me into feeling bad for clearing a den of a thousand level 20+ criminals with OP builds because "uhh, don't you know you're killing real human beings?".

To be honest I was never really bothered whether the story was well written, as it was never some huge advantage of GW for me. They gave some new challenge, some boxes with rewards to open. I was rather content.
But true, WoC had some silly moments.

 

[Average Manatee]

I can ignore writing most of the time (though lots of original trilogy quests had good writing), but when they pause the quest for 60 seconds to have unskippable slow dialog then its on them to make it interesting.

The challenge, too, it's OK. The new enemy builds are pretty decent. The number of quests is just too high, you could cut them in half and the player is still going to have to master how to fight each of the enemies.

I did notice that you get a LOT of gold from going through all these quests. Not that it's terribly useful anymore. Although lmao @ sup vigor runes being 100 plat each.

 

[Average Manatee]

After finishing winds of change decided to change from my main (ranger) to Assasassassassin to play around a bit. Came up with a nice scythe build.

Spoiler

My controls are QWER/ASDF for my skills, 1/2/3/4/5/T/G to activate skill 1 on heroes 1/2/3/4/5/6/7. I have Z bound to target me, so I do Z45TG to get all the buffs on me before targetting an enemy, hitting 123 to queue up the hero offense and teleporting in. Works pretty well. Kind of sucks having a 20s cooldown on the teleport, wish it would be 10s. Might even be worth dropping critical eye for Dark Prison just to get to enemies faster. It's kind of hilarious that thanks to Shadow Theft buffing Scythe Mastery my assassin has 18 in the attribute after it's used twice (more than a Dervish can get).

Was using a fairly similar team build on the ranger to clear WoC where I was memeing around with a pet build (w/ Enraged Lunge, Scavenger Strike, Great Dwarf Weapon and Ebon Battle Standard of honor) and dropped the rit for another E/Me nuker.

 

[Sentinel]

My controls are QWER/ASDF for my skills

wtf how do you move your character?

 

[Average Manatee]

Click to move, it's faster* and less prone to lag teleports**. In-battle I'm also using target nearest enemy a lot and space to go at them.

*Always instantly turns you around to run at full speed, whereas any direction with WASD other than W-forward is much slower. Which is also really good if you need to dodge projectiles.

**WASD-movement is telling the server what direction you want to go, but if the server thinks your position is somewhere different from where you are, and that position is stuck on something, then you're gonna remain stuck on it. Click to move on the other hand tells the server where you want to move to, so it will be more likely to figure out its own path around whatever obstacle is in your way. Still gets stuck if you're completely bodyblocked but its generally better.

 

[Sentinel]

Do you play with maxed zoomed out camera? Otherwise I don't see how you can move quickly in crowded environments when you need to get out of an AoE.

 

[Average Manatee]

Yeah, mostly.

 

[Zurbo]

Do you usually encounter enough corpses to keep two minion masters filled with minions in a satisfying degree?

 

[Black]

Depends where, some areas have more or less exploitable corpses to go around. Some areas may have fewer but tougher enemies.

 

[Zurbo]

Depends where, some areas have more or less exploitable corpses to go around. Some areas may have fewer but tougher enemies.

I meant more like: While doing more difficult content with damage heavy enemies, minions tend to keep dying quickly, so it may be difficult for two MMs to replenish their numbers. Moreover both of them are running Aura of the Lich, so they keep stealing whole groups of corpses from each other.

 

[Black]

Moreover both of them are running Aura of the Lich

Well, that's a problem, try switching one to Jagged Bones + Animate Shambling Horror maybe? This should also help with them dying.
Personally, I never viewed minions dying as something bad, usually a minion dying means it ate an attack or spell that would've otherwise hit your actual team.

 

[Zurbo]

Personally, I never viewed minions dying as something bad, usually a minion dying means it ate an attack or spell that would've otherwise hit your actual team.

I wouldn't say it's something to be considered good/bad in general.

If you have a Minion Bomber build with Death Nova, then exploding minions are your way of dealing damage, but you need to create them constantly. That's why you'd rather bring Bone Minions than Bone Fiend: you get two from one corpse and they're melee.

On the other hand, when you're running a Minion Master on Bone Fiends, you don't want them to die, because it decreases your damage potential.

Of course you'd prefer for your minion to die, rather than dying yourself, but that's another topic.

 

[Average Manatee]

Do you usually encounter enough corpses to keep two minion masters filled with minions in a satisfying degree?

Absolutely, in probably 95% of areas I spend 95% of the time at 11 minions for both necros. You need to basically be in areas without any corpses at all or way, way too much AoE for it not to work well.

Remember that AotL is creating its own minions and they are both healing all minions in the group with Blood of the Master, so you're getting twice the healing and far less die (obviously having more minions also means non-AoE damage is more spread out). These are also tough level 21 minions to begin with, not baby bomber minions. If you want to micro a bit you can force them to use BotM for more healing (like if the enemy puts a fire nuke on your minions you can often just out-heal it with both of them) and when you aren't capped on minions force them to spam AotL to make more.

Alternatively for easier areas or when you otherwise aren't using their prots you can have the necros go /P with Fall Back! which speeds up moving around with minions a lot. And I do recommend having Ebon Battle Standard of Honor if you can fit it into your build, plop it down on 10 bone fiends and the damage is ridiculous.

Moreover both of them are running Aura of the Lich, so they keep stealing whole groups of corpses from each other.

For the first 3 or so fights that's fine since you don't particularly care whether your MMs both have 5 minions or one has 10. Once you're capped it all sort of just evens out and you get a nice mix of bone horrors and fiends.

 

[Average Manatee]

Spoiler

Gate of Pain HM, minion capped by the time I get to the bridge. LB rank on this character is only 3 too. Tortureweb Dryders are a pain if they get a spell off but you do have a lot of interrupts.

 

[Zurbo]

Yes, I see. Feel free to share how they handled WoC HM, if you ever feel like doing it.

 

[Average Manatee]

Oh yeah, it works fine. Bit of a meme to use it in 4-man areas but once you get started its incredibly easy.

Spoiler

You want to prioritize AoE enemies and the necromancers that like to steal corpses or your minions of course.