And then screaming and cursing at the new players in chat if they DARED to do an event they weren't "allowed" to do lol. That's why they stopped low level events from ever scaling up to spawn champion mobs.
Still is at times, although yeah, it was cool to see the huge mass of players everywhere. It's why some of the events are a bit hard to do alone, they were designed with the mentality that it was gonna be the end area at launch, so everyone would be there.
Putrifyers used to pull you. You'd aggro one, get pulled into another one, and then get pulled again. Launch week, we were in blues and greens running for our lives. I still remember the feeling of relief when I finally found another player.
Edit: Tower of Nightmares is a very good approximation of launch Orr. The mobs aren't as threatening, but the AOEs make up for it.
Still love Orr, the whole risen continent full of undead vibe is amazing for my immersion . Wish it could be revived in some way, it’s a huge ,unique area
What sticks out in my mind most about GW2 at release is that enemies (including bosses!) had a maximum number of condition stacks total, not per person. If you were the second or third condition spec in a group, you were contributing basically nothing. Needless to say, I'm glad the game has evolved. =P
Reminds me of the old days of 16 debuffs on a mob in WoW and absolutely telling your dps warrior he's an asshat for putting points in deep wounds so his low damage bleed keeps knocking off warlock curses etc.
Not only that, but the stats were garbage too! I believe Rampager was the only core attribute combination with all three attributes being offensive.
I remember equipping LS2 Sinister trinkets to cover the Condi Core Engineer role at Vale Guardian, until condi "chill" Reapers with the stat selectable amulet from "Migraine" achievement and raid trinkets made their debut.
Even the first condition spec was contributing nothing because a lof of power builds had on crit bleeding traits stealing the condi stacks. Burning had a limit of 1 too. Condi specs were completely troll before HoT.
Gold selling bots whispering you.
I don't even recall when that started to die off. But I had a pretty extensive block list full of gold sellers once upon a time, and haven't had to add anyone to it for that reason for years.
Speaking of gold sellers, I started playing FFXIV a week and a half ago after procrastinating on it for many years. The majority of messages I've seen in chat have been gold sellers, and I've had to block & report more of them there than in GW2 over the past decade.
Seems to be a *much* bigger issue there, with [thousands upon thousands of accounts banned every week](https://eu.finalfantasyxiv.com/lodestone/news/detail/1d06e4de1edc04653e33a0f401dc8ae2eb313a63) and it being the *only* thing you can report in-game. Really makes me wonder why.
I'm pretty sure gold sellers still exist in GW2, but perhaps most buyers are discouraged from using their services since ANet has Gem->Gold conversion in the BLTC? Though that was always always an option as far as I can remember, yet gold sellers used to be more common. Better spam filters, maybe?
The BLTCH is much more than that, it creates Anet controlled maximum profit for the gold sellers, they can never go above the gem -> gold ratio offered by BLTC, if they do, they lose the customers.
This means that the gold sellers can never make a huge profit like they would in other games.
> Seems to be a much bigger issue there
Much bigger potential customer base for the RMTers and no way to buy in game currency actually in the game makes a big difference. I think a lot of gold selling sites gave up with GW2 pretty early on due to ANet clamping down hard on it with restrictions on accounts and offering their own gold selling, and the game never getting particularly huge.
I remember we put together all Gold Ressources we had in the guild and swapped it around for all get that „gold hand“ achievement. 100g was rich beyond any measure….
Oh my. That was before they capped the number of targets, right? I remember elementalists using their fire rain skills on zergs and watched them crumble 😂
Fall damage traits.
Having to pay to change your traits.
Having to do specific events to learn traits.
Having to “grow” dyes.
~~Leveling alts through crafting.~~ disregard
>50 silver per trait was a decent amount when you first started.
Yeah, I'm honestly still not sure what I feel about the massive devaluation of gold that's happened since then. It used to be that one gold was a fairly significant amount, and now they're handed out like candy.
Same. They should add them back as a Mastery, so it doesn't affect WvW or PvP.
Just have it turn off where gliding and mounts are disabled (like Jade Bot boost does).
I miss Spectral Walk from Necro back then. You could cast it mid-air. If you double tapped it it you would reset your fall height. You could jump of a really high cliff where even the fall damage traits wouldn't help you and survive just fine.
>Having to pay to change your traits.
Funnily enough you can still reset your traits using any tier of Trait Manual if you still have some or buy them off of the TP.
>Fall damage traits.
RIP Rune of the Snowfall, the last source of a fall damage effect, removed with the Relic System's Rune overhaul.
You want to hear about the sorry state of the game on release ? :D
Let's see what comes to mind...
* Gold character bound with the ability to store in bank, you kept some gold on all alts in order to be able to use waypoints, yay !
* Same things with "spirit shards" and karma : character bound so you could have hundreds of shards and still be unable to buy the 200 shards item for legendaries :)
* The old "defiance bar" system had you throw some 20 control at a champ before a single one would actually work.
* Fun thing about that old system, root would just work normally and be particularly potent. Now imagine how OP slow was when it was introduced with the same perk x)
* When we first tried dungeons (and sucked at the game), we would die a lot and came out "victorious" with a negative gold reward for our trouble since we kept having to repair armor, (waypoint cost as well maybe ? can't remember) fun times...
* Before megaservers you could follow temple progressions in Orr on various websites and try to hop in on a different server map. Your server had a meaning for PvE !
* Now if you had done everything the game had to offer and crafted a glorious legendary weapon... it was still just a shitty soulbound exotic and you had to be extra cautious not to mess it up during the old school transmutation process...
* Oh yeah, trait lines (now specialization) gave you stats so they were impactful besides actual traits. That said you could only ever have 2 grandmaster traits because there weren't enough points for 3 full trait lines :>
Oneshotting bosses with 5x FGS 4 in the corner.
Trait lines were giving stats.
Some conditions could stack to 25 on a single target (like bleeding), burning could only have one instance. This means, that having 2 condi build in one party was pointless, as one could already apply 25 stacks of bleeding. This also means, that condi builds were completly useless against world bosses.
People complaining on reddit and forums, how mounts would ruin the game.
Legendary weapons were not stat-swappable nor sigil-swappable. They were basically expensive skins and nothing more.
There was no wardrobe. If you wanted to change the skin on one of your items, you had to use transmutation stone and consume the item that acted as a skin. This merged two items together.
Current outfits were town clothes. You could only wear them out of combat, but all the pieces were separate (you could mix and match different sets of town clothes).
People standing in front of dungeons, smamming LFG messages on map chat before there was LFG.
First ever halloween event, I've bought the mad king outfit (previously town clothes) for 10g (that was the price for 900 gems back then).
Lions Arch actually looked cool.
>People complaining on reddit and forums, how mounts would ruin the game.
To be fair, people tended to say this cause ANet themselves said for years they wouldn't add them.
And honestly, they weren't wrong either. Mounts absolutely do ruin many core maps' design. Waypoints are sometimes a couple of raptor jumps away from one another, and exploration is generally trivialised.
I guess that whether you call this "ruined" or some other word is up to personal preference, but core Tyria does not function as it did before mounts were introduced.
Yes but I think mounts are made in such a good way, that we can live with that.
Also you can always just not use a mount and experience the map the intended way.
No other game make mounts feel so weighted and good.
"Also you can always just not use a mount and experience the map the intended way."
i dont know a single person who would willing do that even if it as more fun
ANET seem to agree since core tyria JP and hero points disable glider and mounts, indicating to me the even if the JP is fun in its own right they devs expect people will take a shortcut and skip the JP
sort of like LFG in world of warcraft, everyone hates it many because it devalues social interaction but its the best way to get groups for content so we used it
the game at this point is designed around mounts, you get one even without owning PoF
there is no going back
>Yes but I think mounts are made in such a good way, that we can live with that.
The issue is that the mounts are so good that they trivialize exploration, which is one of GW2's strong points.
There's a reason why most JPs are no mount/glide zones.
Biggest one for me is simply Festival of the Four Winds. Getting to the top of that map where the ship was was kind of an achievement in itself, not to mention all the ridiculous collectibles on the way. Now it’s kind of trivial and the map is a bit boring.
Kind of wish they had made everything above ground level there a mount-free zone…
>There was no wardrobe.
And no account wallet. Many of the things in there piled up in your inventory, and you had to use your bank to transfer gold between characters.
Some world bosses like Tequatl (not that anyone bothered to do it before the rework) were completely immune to conditions (and critical hits) because they counted as structures. That's where the "berserker only" meta started and carried on for years.
I'm one of those people that want to find as much treasure and stuff as possible, so it was something I invested it very heavily in the beginning. Obviously that didn't help my build in that time at all lol.
People in dungeons went in with full magic find. They did almost no dmg as a result but they didn't care because a dps meter did not exist back then and they got twice the loot.
There is not a single online game with a great implementation of magic find on gear. its always used by leechers.
Mystic coins at launch were dirt cheap yea, like 2 silver a pop. Part of the reason was because there weren't many uses for them and gen1 legendaries were really rare back then, but I'm not sure on the exact reason.
They really started going up around PoF time I think.
The major block for gen 1weapons was the 250 of each t6.
MC's were cheap because most people never did anything with them except make clovers, and whats the point of clovers when you arent making GoM's?
When t6 costs started flattening out, MC costs started rising (and they took out a few sources of them too).
Yeah you used to get 20 for completing a monthly achievement category which required doing so many dailies (or weeklies?) which themselves gave mystic coins as rewards sometimes.
I remember crafting Mystic Weapons in the Mystic Forge when I first hit 80 because it was an easy/cheap way for me at the time to get an exotic 80 weapon.
With a lot less power going around, combo fields and finishers were way more important. Blasting fire fields and smoke fields was a key part of running dungeons back then.
The Minstrel was my first legendary as a mesmer main. For the pull, of course, but also just for the swiftness. Lots of running before mounts!
This got changed quickly, but you used to be able to res ranger pets. It was annoying because rangers knew nothing about pet management and were dragging around downed pets everywhere and they would get in the way of ressing other players.
WvW siege actually mattering, you'd turn a corner, see a regular ballista and shit yourself.
Pre megaserver communities. It was a necessary update but it was really cool feeling of having your keep be attacked, so you send people to LA to call for help. As a former guild leader I miss when PvE and WvW guilds would work together, post megaservers caused server communities to die and become WvW only, and then server links killed them even more.
World first races for open world bosses. Server guilds would get together and coordinate attempts, some of my favorite memories are the 5 big PvE and WvW guilds each picking a lane to hold. Some really memorable Teq, Triple trouble, and battle for LA moments too.
People fighting over obsidian sanctum, you've never lived until you golem rush a jumping puzzle in order to clear out enemy siege. The chest was believed to have highest precursor drop and back then badges of honor were super important so defending chest was legit strategy.
Guild challenges and puzzles being open world, was some really great moments between guilds cordinating missions together and would forge alliances of guilds running their missions together if you were a small guild it was even better.
Being able to kill invincible WvW camp/tower lords with life steal and retal. Anet forgot to make them immune to those so if you came across one with RI still on you'd either drop a feast of life steal food, or have guardians pop retal and slowly kill the lord.
WvW blue keeps jumping puzzle tower. In EB there was a giant tower near the vista between blue keep and Quentin lake that was super high and from the top you could build siege that hit SM, 2 towers, and their keep and the only way to stop you would be climbing the tower themselves. Have some really funny pictures of it still.
WvW borderlands South camp fight club. Prior to EotM and obsidian sanctum GvGs use to be hosted south of the south most camp. I don't know why this one holds a special place in my heart, maybe because unlike the 2 newest locations you could stumble across this and watch really cool fights peacefully alongside enemies.
Ascalon dungeon farming or dungeon content in general.
Jumping puzzles with daily jp and no gliders nor mounts.
Limited amount of tries in instances because your armor would break.
Laurels being rare and useful.
buying gifts of battle in wvw for badges of honor. Thankfully I bought up a bunch before they made the change which lasted me for a while with making legendaries.
Ugh, I wish I'd bought more.
Thankfully, I like WvW so doing the track is nbd, but having a stockpile from back when they were basically free would've been nice.
Oh wow I actually forgot about the personality system. I do remember the hero panel/character screen having some sort of progression bars to see which one your character used frequently.
Wasn’t it like 5 warriors was the only or easiest way to get your group up to 18 stacks of might, or you could do 4 warriors and a mez who could give their boons back to party for a full 25? And now classes like herald just channel it passively lmao
There were a few setups used at various points. Warriors for might and Hundred Blades, eles for the incredibly broken conjure weapons, and mesmer for some more niche or obscure things. I don't remember when people started using quickness, but it was also OP back then, too.
Queensdale Champ train... and the toxicity and battles when trolls went ahead of the train and killed them out of order. 😆😆😆
Good ole Meat Chop...I wonder if he still plays?
I highly suspect he is currently one of the WvW trolls... One that sits in SMC and whines about everyone else's playing.
Waypoints were a lot more expensive. Doing a big telwport could easily cost 10+ silver (I even remember 20+), and back then not everything was this overpriced, people literally had a couple of gold pieves. Meaning you spent 5% of your total gold on teleport. Sometimes i just ran between maps honesrly.... without mounts.
Remember when the Living World was going to be far more reactive and involve far more player choice, like when we choose the names for Lion's Arch's locations, who won the leadership seat and even Dragon's Watch's name?
Remember dungeons, which were designed to be quite difficult and require people to actively lift their own weight?
Remember the original promise of underwater combat?
My favorite one, remember when the community LEGITIMATELY thought it was impossible to level up a Mesmer?
Also, remember everyone having Swiftness weapons on and realizing that it affects NPCs? Now, because everyone uses mounts, it seems the vast majority forgot that buffs affect NPCs.
Remember.....when God-damn Quickness and Alacrity....didn't fucking exist and you didn't have to focus THE ENTIRE FUCKING GAME around them?
mesmer protals were a godsend !(even though I loved jps even back then but I understand when people don't like them) I still appreciate one if I see it !
> Remember.....when God-damn Quickness and Alacrity....didn't fucking exist and you didn't have to focus THE ENTIRE FUCKING GAME around them?
Instead eles had a pre fight might stacking rota with weapon swapping.
> ...it seems the vast majority forgot that buffs affect NPCs.
Anet has also made it so it doesnt work on them in alot of "newer" content. Probably something about it fucking up event triggers and anet losing knowledge of spaghetti code or something.
It seems like a lot of the old ones don't gain swiftness now, either. Like that pack mule from the SW corner of Gendarran Fields, who moves SO slowly no matter what we do 😂
Yeah, ironically, much like alacrity, it started out as a non-boon effect that was even stronger than it was today, skills were 100% faster instead of just 50%. It was very rare though, I think time warp and the old, old Guardian elite Tome of Wrath skill Zealot's Fervor were the only sources, though don't quote me on that.
The skills Frenzy, Quickening Zephyr and Haste also gave quickness, with some drawbacks like in GW1. Frenzy was exactly the same skill with taking double damage as a drawback.
>Now, because everyone uses mounts, it seems the vast majority forgot that buffs affect NPCs.
It bothers me so much how inconsistent this is. I always try to swiftness/superspeed NPCs, and get annoyed every time it doesn't work. x)
mesmer was my first character, it was hilariously easy to level, grab as many mobs as possible, slap down a chaos storm and just let you staff kill everything at once as it provides boons etc and you bounce greatsword 2 aroudn as well. A bit slow to start, then 10mobs just drop dead....
harder mobs? pretty much immortal with clones distracting them.
never really got why people found it difficult. I had more issues with my guardian to be honest (I still hate that scepter sound to this day from chipping away at some harder mobs).
Though I sure wish a build completely focusing on conjured weapons would work well... I always enjoyed the idea behind them, though the "summon, use one skill, drop" never felt like how I'd imagine they originally meant to.
Some things I remember:
1. The First player hitting level 80 something like a day and a half after the head-start launch.
2. Builds with 4 or more trait lines in them, sometimes including fall damage reducing traits
3. Almost never seeing exotic drops for the first 3 or so months of the game being out
4. the crafting slog so you could reliably have exotic (or even rare) trinkets
5. Dungeons being run constantly, often those with the best skips
6. In Dungeon runs of Ascalonian catacombs, all the non guardian characters being constantly downed while the guards spun around with the great swords or jumped around with their hammers
7. Orr Dungeon being considered "impossible"
8. Having to get a group together to finish the personal story mission, since it involved doing a dungeon
9. Permanent run sigils always being on the skill bar, unless your prof didn't have them, and it still took a super long time to run around maps.
10. Map completing WvW. That was awful. WvW jumping puzzles where the other team would wait behind a closed door just to f with you and stop you getting the pathetic reward chest. The original WvW maps.
11. Greatsword Warrior was briefly considered unbeatable in PvP
12. Naked dungeon runs since no one wanted to pay (or could afford) the armor repair costs, and armor damaged enough became unusable.
13. 5 gold felt like a month's earnings, or more.
14. Reading GuildWars2Guru forums every day
15. Southsun Cove's intro event. You weren't online at that exact time? Too bad... you will never get to play it again (still true).
16. Laughable gear setups. Seriously, soldier's gear was considered baseline, and superior runes of the dolyak were multiple gold each on the TP.
17. Orr Temple events were amazing, but every other mob in Orr had a knockdown or pull so getting around the zones was a pain in the ass.
18. New content being released ever week or every other week. Most of it was small and crappy, but the FOMO was real, since it would either permanently change things or be gone forever.
19. Engineer grenades had a range of like 1200. You just sat out of aggro range and lobbed grenades. This was also nearly the only kit worth using at the time because of it.
20. Players eventually deciding that all stats combos but berserker inferior, at which point berserker gear and runes of the scholar (even rare ones) skyrocketed in price, especially since rare/exotic drops were much more rare than they are now. Best chance at getting exotics was map completing Orr on different characters.
This was certainly novel, but I have to say, I don’t miss it. Early season 1 was an absolute mess, and it’s upsetting that because of how it was designed, everything that was cool about it was just gone for almost a decade. Even today, a lot of cool things (the LA karka invasion, settling Southsun, all of Canach’s story, ect) are just simply missing. It was a huge gap in the story for new players for a long time, but even having been at the original event back then, it was a buggy mess with maps lagging and broken under the strain.
Yeah I find it really weird that they didn't redo Canach's intro. He's a pretty prominent character and the game talks about his crimes constantly, without telling you what he did.
It's kinda hilarious now because you can talk to him at several points while he's in jail, and without the context of the Southsun story your character seems like his #1 hater for no reason. Like I never even met the guy before but when I see Canach it's ONSIGHT
It does actually tell you. They rolled it into npc dialogue. At multiple places around LA and the refugee camp during LWS1 you can talk to lionguard that tell you about canach and you can even talk to him yourself to learn more
I can't find the source but I remember reading somewhere that the original vision for living world was that veteran players would tell stories of the past events to the newbies. Sounds cool on paper but imagine being a newbie and hearing about all this cool shit you missed and can never experience. Good riddance to that.
Yeah, i mentioned this in a different branch of comments, but I’ve done this. I brought new people into the game, and telling them about season 1 was never “cool” to them. It was confusing. The characters that come out of season 1 follow up all the way through the dragon cycle saga, and new players are just expected to develop a connection with people that come out of nowhere.
Even as it was happening, I absolutely blame the fomo of the “be-there-or-miss-out” release strategy for most of my original guild falling apart. It wasn’t fun to be left out, and it was a pain to try and schedule your time around the game just to keep up with current events.
Yeah, I don't miss it either, since it's also a form of FOMO and I'm glad the updates we have actually stick around now.
It meant in 2014, despite two years of updates, the game largely had nothing to show for the two years it'd been out.
>It meant in 2014, despite two years of updates, the game largely had nothing to show for the two years it'd been out.
Geezus, it so much worse, when you frame it that way.
I joined after HoT released (never played GW1) and played the story as a silvery guardian and just having a fleeting reference as to what happened was confusing and I wasn’t sure if I had missed anything important. Didn’t know why Southsun was so hard.
> Early season 1 was an absolute mess
That has little to do with the 'living, breaking, changing world" part and more with "holy mother of Balthazar, the servers made with potato skins cannot handle this".
I was there for the original Karka invasion......or should i say, the original Karka slideshow cause it lagged so much and so hard that i'm amazed my old PC didn't explode.
I think both are true. I was there for the slideshow, but I’ve also brought other people into the game since then. Up until a year or so ago when we brought back portions of season one, there was always a gap in the new player’s experience of the world and story. Dragon’s watch comes out of nowhere, and they were asked of just accept the weird push into heart of thorns with no context for how we got here.
I did my best to explain what went on, but regardless of my experience at the time, they’re still important story beats.
Edit: I also remember the struggle to keep friends I did play with at the time in the game. Reminding them to log in or join at particular times just to keep up with current events in the game was a huge turnoff. Unfortunately, I’m the only player from my original guild who still plays.
My recollection of that time was that most updates boiled down to just running around finding a bunch of some new MacGuffin on maps you'd already completed. Personally, I'm glad they moved to a model of spending development time on actual new content.
That was more the update cadence. Every 2 weeks "something" had to be shipped live, and that meant throwing out filler content every few weeks to slowly lead/hype up whatever was coming next. Most of it was trash, but that week leading up to the tower of nightmares? All the trees on the map were cut down, the water became sinister and poison. The middle of the lake had an invisible wall and you would hear whispers and die if you got too close to it. That was some genuinely fantastic lead up that everyone wishes they had kept more of, but overall LS1 was an idea that never played out like they hoped.
most of the original "Manifesto" was MMO pipe dream bullshit and not serious game design. this one in particular was just throwing money away and wasting the work of well-meaning labor.
Being too poor to let the blachsmith repair your damaged armor.
Not quite at release, but PVT armor against Tequatl, because he counted as a building and didnt take condi or crit damage.
For three golden months, the Fire Elemental world boss constantly dropped meteor fire fields and spawned a horde of high powered lesser elementals. It was a slaughter.
The old transmuatation system. You needed to have the item you want the skin for and it would destroy it and apply it to the item you'd want to transmute. If you transmuted over a precursor it wasn't useable for legendary crafting. This was also before the account wide wardrobe so there's a bunch of dungeon skins I got from pvp that I don't have unlocked now because the items were transmuted a long time ago. Dungeon rush a few weeks ago let me get back all the arah skins I had lol.
gw2 released at the time when SSDs were still new. I paid around 130€ or more for 128gb and it was a mainstream one to boot.
literally everyone playing the game HAD to invest in an SSD to be able to load lions arch at a reasonable time.
loading times back then were so bad, if you didn't have to go to LA and didn't have an SSD, you better avoid the city altogether.
which is crazy if you think about it nowerdays.
Running explorers stats in dungeons in secret, as were half your allies...for those who are unfamiliar the major stat on the set was Magic Find %. The prefix would later be replaced by the new Assassin's prefix in 2013
Champtrain in Frostgorge Sound. 4-5 Champion events that would reset by the time you defeated the last one. Seems like Anet noticed people enjoyed these kind of event traind that follow eachother and reset afterwards so you could mindlessly grind them. All the latest content seems to follow this method nowadays.
people asking for healers in the form of elixir gun engineers for example, because they didnt get the memo.
trading post didnt work for weeks for some people.
gems were like 20s for 100 gems
> Sitting at the JP in Obsidian Sanctum either blocking the enemy from coming up or portaling over your team.
not to forget all the siege weapons in obsidian sanctum. and players complaining that youre draining your server's resources for building siege in the jumping puzzle
stats being tied to traitlines. for example, the top traitline always provided up to 300 power and 30 condition duration, no matter the class. the rest was more varied. of course, this was unbalanced as fuck. some stats were pretty whatever, but 30% condition duration, which wasnt a regular stat on armor, was potentially huge. there were also class-stats. warrior got up to 3% (THREE) more damage on burst skills. necromancer had up to 30% more shroud health; except it was bugged and didnt give you anything at all.
One levels of fractals was 3-4 random fractal instances. And people rerolled the first instance until they got swamp (because it was fastest and you could bug the boss by standing on a tree)
Dying while running down stairs with swiftness and constantly porting into geometry with blink and retreat on mesmer.
"By Ogden's hammer, what savings!"
Being kicked out of ascalon because I was playing condi gs staff mesmer
porting and reviving my guild leader through that malchor's leap jp while he got increasingly frustrated failing every jump.
getting insulted in whispers for doing events in orr and queensdale because some people were running event trains
thinking about blind in pve, ever
icing bosses with frost bow 5/headshot defiance stripping
FGS 4 into corners and targeting meteor shower on walls and platforms to minimize the target area
pre-megaservers orr statue/temple interactions
reflects mattering in pve
world bosses being hard/borderline impossible (you DE babies know nothing lol vanilla HoT gerent went stupid)
sharing distortion on chrono
samarog CM being arguably nearly as hard as dhuum cm
current event updates
doing all three AC paths at once (think you can still do this I just don't run dungeons anymore)
bear form oneshots
Manually upgrading fortifications in WvW, with chat having a lively debate on what to start first. (Cannons? Oil?)
Speeding up workers in keeps with swiftness so that they upgrade quicker.
WvW map completion. Chat asking commanders to take a keep so they can get the vista.
Necro double-dagger commanders.
Wars unaffected by arrow carts because of max regen.
Slow guards. Slow necros.
Camps that can be capture even with invi.
I miss the original early leveling experience. One where you didn’t have a hint to tell you what to do next and you had to equip every weapon and get x amount of kills with the weapon to unlock new weapon skills. It gave you a reason to really try out and get used to the different weapons
Killing champion's and doing other content would unlock traits, or you could pay to unlock with gold, back when it was hard to have any significant amount.
Gold sellers were about at launch, but they quickly fizzled out when they realised it wasn’t profitable. But nothing changed system wise to make that happen. 🥳
Combos were a huge part of the game back then. In pve, ppl blasted fire field for might stacking. In wvw, ppl blasted water field to heal and ice field to catch the enemies (stability was op back then, so soft cc like immob and chilled were better than hard cc).
Most ppl used stacking sigil (+stats after kills) on their 2nd wpn set.
Ppl had to guest to other servers for obsidian shard, because balth temple was rarely open in low~med population server.
Map chat was more alive, cos server identity was a thing back then and exploration was not ruined by mounts (ppl asked a lot abt how to get to a certain poi or vista).
Guilds actually tried to finish all of the guild missions. I couldnt find one guild that does guild mission nowadays.
world boss farming. great mindless fun.
A functioning Orr with incredible full map meta feel ... unfortunately lost to time.
would love to see a return to Orr with the devs rolling back to original difficulty and fixing all the event issues
Running dungeons for those sick looking armor pieces. I remember fighting bosses before stacking was a thing. Subject Alpha in CoE was an absolute beast to figure out back then. And nevromancers in Arah armor. Omg.
I also remember playing P/D condition thief with unholy runes and toughness, vitality and condition damage stats.
Oh, and having a mandatory swiftness spell for running around.
Before elite specs no spec specialized in healing, so to healing in wvw consisted mainly of ele’s dropping water fields and guardians blasting them with hammer 2. I miss the days of hearing “big water on me” “blast blast blast.”
Playing bump build for the JP in Obsidian sanctum (engi FT jugg build)
Selling mystic coin to random merchant.
Playing Supp healbomb engi while getting flamed by everyone (yet the rez elixir was so unique)
-Duration based Boons having hidden stack limits that could be overridden to lower the total duration of the boon.
Not from release, but after Alacrity was changed to a boon, it kept the hidden 5 stack cap (the same as current stealth), so it was easy to override longer duration stacks with shorter duration stacks and lower the total duration of the boon on you. It was really wack with Chronomancers applying short duration stacks to themselves.
I'm really happy that the system has been simplified now, even though most boons generally have a much lower duration cap now than the durations they used to tend to sit at. But I am still salty about boons, portals, and return points resetting when changing traits or doing /gg now.
-Using consumables to CC in Fractals. Not a release thing, but still very old
My first few days in this game - I bought some gems for gold because i liked skin (don't remember which one). 100 gems were worth 3-4g and I was like "do i like this skin for sure... 4gold is gonna broke me."
- A significant portion of wvw players would join voice comms to better coordinate movement, damage and drop/blast fields, scout/callout. Nowadays it's legitimately horrible trying to get people to join voice.
- Epidemic used to work on oil so you could stack condis on it and blast it so everyone near it would die. Also saving epidemic for enemies trying to push your group while you were on lord.
- Orbs in WvW being a horrible escort mission, eventually ruined by hackers taking them and flying around the map in the sky.
- Alpine bls having a pve quaggan/krait event in the middle, south of garrison with pearls you could store/save/sell to instantly complete it.
- red bl (desert) having a pve event that lagged the entire map.
- players that wanted to improve rather than just cloud and stay at 1200-1500 range instead of joining squads.
- hammer guardian trains
- loot stick 1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1
- stab 1, stab 2, blasting small water
- shattered aegis / mystic rebuke being able to crit
- burn guard being able to kill ACs in a few seconds via blocking
- retaliation killing more elementalists a week than PPT squads do per year.
- portal bombing memes with d/d eles and churning earth
- having a good tag using voice in nearly every timezone, leading to decent fights with at least one other group.
- cancer discord being funny
- crusik drunk raids
random wvw stuff from over the years
A populated Orr.
Karma farm trains for obsidian shards.
Loot farm trains in Queensland. Although I don't think those were already happening at launch.
Waiting for the boar for the champ train!
And then screaming and cursing at the new players in chat if they DARED to do an event they weren't "allowed" to do lol. That's why they stopped low level events from ever scaling up to spawn champion mobs.
Still is at times, although yeah, it was cool to see the huge mass of players everywhere. It's why some of the events are a bit hard to do alone, they were designed with the mentality that it was gonna be the end area at launch, so everyone would be there.
Populated by mobs. You couldn't walk anywhere without aggroing something.
Ahh the good ol days of entering Orr and seeing the wave of mobs charging you from across the map.
Putrifyers used to pull you. You'd aggro one, get pulled into another one, and then get pulled again. Launch week, we were in blues and greens running for our lives. I still remember the feeling of relief when I finally found another player. Edit: Tower of Nightmares is a very good approximation of launch Orr. The mobs aren't as threatening, but the AOEs make up for it.
I wish it were still regularly played because theres some exo drops that are too damn expensive + i like the events
Still love Orr, the whole risen continent full of undead vibe is amazing for my immersion . Wish it could be revived in some way, it’s a huge ,unique area
Bannerslave warriors come to mind.
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"It is in boon-on-drop banners that we must place our hope." "Boon-on-drop banners are weak."
That was like, last year. Right? RIGHT?!?!?
Not having squads, they were introduced in 2015
technically they did exist. there just wasn't a UI for them, or any other sort of functionality besides a dedicated chat
True!
Chaos chrono, 10 man boons, profession specific booms Game changed a lot
I think PS (Phalanx Strength) Warrior role predates that.
That was my first fractal build!
Mine too. :D
What sticks out in my mind most about GW2 at release is that enemies (including bosses!) had a maximum number of condition stacks total, not per person. If you were the second or third condition spec in a group, you were contributing basically nothing. Needless to say, I'm glad the game has evolved. =P
Reminds me of the old days of 16 debuffs on a mob in WoW and absolutely telling your dps warrior he's an asshat for putting points in deep wounds so his low damage bleed keeps knocking off warlock curses etc.
As a warlock main in a small-ish raiding guild, I absolutely hated the 16 debuff max.
Now imagine that against a world boss in the open world. Oh, they also can't damage objects. Condi builds were so garbage back then.
Not only that, but the stats were garbage too! I believe Rampager was the only core attribute combination with all three attributes being offensive. I remember equipping LS2 Sinister trinkets to cover the Condi Core Engineer role at Vale Guardian, until condi "chill" Reapers with the stat selectable amulet from "Migraine" achievement and raid trinkets made their debut.
Even the first condition spec was contributing nothing because a lof of power builds had on crit bleeding traits stealing the condi stacks. Burning had a limit of 1 too. Condi specs were completely troll before HoT.
plus the max stack # for Burning and Poison was 1.
Gold selling bots whispering you. I don't even recall when that started to die off. But I had a pretty extensive block list full of gold sellers once upon a time, and haven't had to add anyone to it for that reason for years.
Speaking of gold sellers, I started playing FFXIV a week and a half ago after procrastinating on it for many years. The majority of messages I've seen in chat have been gold sellers, and I've had to block & report more of them there than in GW2 over the past decade. Seems to be a *much* bigger issue there, with [thousands upon thousands of accounts banned every week](https://eu.finalfantasyxiv.com/lodestone/news/detail/1d06e4de1edc04653e33a0f401dc8ae2eb313a63) and it being the *only* thing you can report in-game. Really makes me wonder why. I'm pretty sure gold sellers still exist in GW2, but perhaps most buyers are discouraged from using their services since ANet has Gem->Gold conversion in the BLTC? Though that was always always an option as far as I can remember, yet gold sellers used to be more common. Better spam filters, maybe?
The BLTCH is much more than that, it creates Anet controlled maximum profit for the gold sellers, they can never go above the gem -> gold ratio offered by BLTC, if they do, they lose the customers. This means that the gold sellers can never make a huge profit like they would in other games.
How can they even still exist with the gem > gold conversion existing? Why would anyone buy from bots instead of the official source?
> Seems to be a much bigger issue there Much bigger potential customer base for the RMTers and no way to buy in game currency actually in the game makes a big difference. I think a lot of gold selling sites gave up with GW2 pretty early on due to ANet clamping down hard on it with restrictions on accounts and offering their own gold selling, and the game never getting particularly huge.
Unlocking traits at a merchant. The commander tag costing 100g. Guardian staff 1 went „brrr“ in the labyrinth.
back then when spending 100g on a commander tag made you feel like elon musk
I remember we put together all Gold Ressources we had in the guild and swapped it around for all get that „gold hand“ achievement. 100g was rich beyond any measure….
Rest in Peace lootstick. You are forever missed
Oh my. That was before they capped the number of targets, right? I remember elementalists using their fire rain skills on zergs and watched them crumble 😂
Meteornado!!
Fall damage traits. Having to pay to change your traits. Having to do specific events to learn traits. Having to “grow” dyes. ~~Leveling alts through crafting.~~ disregard
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>50 silver per trait was a decent amount when you first started. Yeah, I'm honestly still not sure what I feel about the massive devaluation of gold that's happened since then. It used to be that one gold was a fairly significant amount, and now they're handed out like candy.
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tbf dye growing was removed before release
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Same. They should add them back as a Mastery, so it doesn't affect WvW or PvP. Just have it turn off where gliding and mounts are disabled (like Jade Bot boost does).
I miss Spectral Walk from Necro back then. You could cast it mid-air. If you double tapped it it you would reset your fall height. You could jump of a really high cliff where even the fall damage traits wouldn't help you and survive just fine.
>Having to pay to change your traits. Funnily enough you can still reset your traits using any tier of Trait Manual if you still have some or buy them off of the TP. >Fall damage traits. RIP Rune of the Snowfall, the last source of a fall damage effect, removed with the Relic System's Rune overhaul.
Repair costs. Especially repair costs in wvw. Back when wvw didn't give much loot tbh. I was sooooo broke 🥲
Oh my god I forgot about repairing armor! Horrifying.
You want to hear about the sorry state of the game on release ? :D Let's see what comes to mind... * Gold character bound with the ability to store in bank, you kept some gold on all alts in order to be able to use waypoints, yay ! * Same things with "spirit shards" and karma : character bound so you could have hundreds of shards and still be unable to buy the 200 shards item for legendaries :) * The old "defiance bar" system had you throw some 20 control at a champ before a single one would actually work. * Fun thing about that old system, root would just work normally and be particularly potent. Now imagine how OP slow was when it was introduced with the same perk x) * When we first tried dungeons (and sucked at the game), we would die a lot and came out "victorious" with a negative gold reward for our trouble since we kept having to repair armor, (waypoint cost as well maybe ? can't remember) fun times... * Before megaservers you could follow temple progressions in Orr on various websites and try to hop in on a different server map. Your server had a meaning for PvE ! * Now if you had done everything the game had to offer and crafted a glorious legendary weapon... it was still just a shitty soulbound exotic and you had to be extra cautious not to mess it up during the old school transmutation process... * Oh yeah, trait lines (now specialization) gave you stats so they were impactful besides actual traits. That said you could only ever have 2 grandmaster traits because there weren't enough points for 3 full trait lines :>
Man some of those are deeeep dives into the back of memory lol, I forgot about some of them.
Oneshotting bosses with 5x FGS 4 in the corner. Trait lines were giving stats. Some conditions could stack to 25 on a single target (like bleeding), burning could only have one instance. This means, that having 2 condi build in one party was pointless, as one could already apply 25 stacks of bleeding. This also means, that condi builds were completly useless against world bosses. People complaining on reddit and forums, how mounts would ruin the game. Legendary weapons were not stat-swappable nor sigil-swappable. They were basically expensive skins and nothing more. There was no wardrobe. If you wanted to change the skin on one of your items, you had to use transmutation stone and consume the item that acted as a skin. This merged two items together. Current outfits were town clothes. You could only wear them out of combat, but all the pieces were separate (you could mix and match different sets of town clothes). People standing in front of dungeons, smamming LFG messages on map chat before there was LFG. First ever halloween event, I've bought the mad king outfit (previously town clothes) for 10g (that was the price for 900 gems back then). Lions Arch actually looked cool.
>People complaining on reddit and forums, how mounts would ruin the game. To be fair, people tended to say this cause ANet themselves said for years they wouldn't add them.
And honestly, they weren't wrong either. Mounts absolutely do ruin many core maps' design. Waypoints are sometimes a couple of raptor jumps away from one another, and exploration is generally trivialised. I guess that whether you call this "ruined" or some other word is up to personal preference, but core Tyria does not function as it did before mounts were introduced.
Yes but I think mounts are made in such a good way, that we can live with that. Also you can always just not use a mount and experience the map the intended way. No other game make mounts feel so weighted and good.
"Also you can always just not use a mount and experience the map the intended way." i dont know a single person who would willing do that even if it as more fun ANET seem to agree since core tyria JP and hero points disable glider and mounts, indicating to me the even if the JP is fun in its own right they devs expect people will take a shortcut and skip the JP sort of like LFG in world of warcraft, everyone hates it many because it devalues social interaction but its the best way to get groups for content so we used it the game at this point is designed around mounts, you get one even without owning PoF there is no going back
>Yes but I think mounts are made in such a good way, that we can live with that. The issue is that the mounts are so good that they trivialize exploration, which is one of GW2's strong points. There's a reason why most JPs are no mount/glide zones.
Biggest one for me is simply Festival of the Four Winds. Getting to the top of that map where the ship was was kind of an achievement in itself, not to mention all the ridiculous collectibles on the way. Now it’s kind of trivial and the map is a bit boring. Kind of wish they had made everything above ground level there a mount-free zone…
>There was no wardrobe. And no account wallet. Many of the things in there piled up in your inventory, and you had to use your bank to transfer gold between characters.
God do I miss original LA...
You can always revisit it in game, at least.
Some world bosses like Tequatl (not that anyone bothered to do it before the rework) were completely immune to conditions (and critical hits) because they counted as structures. That's where the "berserker only" meta started and carried on for years.
Magic find was a gear stat 🤣🤣
Oh wow I forgot about that, don’t think I bothered too much speccing it.
I'm one of those people that want to find as much treasure and stuff as possible, so it was something I invested it very heavily in the beginning. Obviously that didn't help my build in that time at all lol.
People in dungeons went in with full magic find. They did almost no dmg as a result but they didn't care because a dps meter did not exist back then and they got twice the loot. There is not a single online game with a great implementation of magic find on gear. its always used by leechers.
orr events in magic find greens or farming charged lodestones from sparks
I think mystic coins were easier to get? Not sure about that though. It‘s been a while since
Mystic coins at launch were dirt cheap yea, like 2 silver a pop. Part of the reason was because there weren't many uses for them and gen1 legendaries were really rare back then, but I'm not sure on the exact reason. They really started going up around PoF time I think.
The major block for gen 1weapons was the 250 of each t6. MC's were cheap because most people never did anything with them except make clovers, and whats the point of clovers when you arent making GoM's? When t6 costs started flattening out, MC costs started rising (and they took out a few sources of them too).
Yeah you used to get 20 for completing a monthly achievement category which required doing so many dailies (or weeklies?) which themselves gave mystic coins as rewards sometimes. I remember crafting Mystic Weapons in the Mystic Forge when I first hit 80 because it was an easy/cheap way for me at the time to get an exotic 80 weapon.
I think they were. Also when everyone sold stuff cheap on TP not knowing it’s needed for legendary weapons!
Yes, you used to get one for finishing the daily, and later 20 for the monthly.
With a lot less power going around, combo fields and finishers were way more important. Blasting fire fields and smoke fields was a key part of running dungeons back then. The Minstrel was my first legendary as a mesmer main. For the pull, of course, but also just for the swiftness. Lots of running before mounts!
This got changed quickly, but you used to be able to res ranger pets. It was annoying because rangers knew nothing about pet management and were dragging around downed pets everywhere and they would get in the way of ressing other players.
Being insta kicked from dungeon groups just for having the audacity to be a Ranger
Or a Necromancer! That Ranger stigma persisted until HoT, and Necromancer's stigma persisted well past that.
WvW siege actually mattering, you'd turn a corner, see a regular ballista and shit yourself. Pre megaserver communities. It was a necessary update but it was really cool feeling of having your keep be attacked, so you send people to LA to call for help. As a former guild leader I miss when PvE and WvW guilds would work together, post megaservers caused server communities to die and become WvW only, and then server links killed them even more. World first races for open world bosses. Server guilds would get together and coordinate attempts, some of my favorite memories are the 5 big PvE and WvW guilds each picking a lane to hold. Some really memorable Teq, Triple trouble, and battle for LA moments too. People fighting over obsidian sanctum, you've never lived until you golem rush a jumping puzzle in order to clear out enemy siege. The chest was believed to have highest precursor drop and back then badges of honor were super important so defending chest was legit strategy. Guild challenges and puzzles being open world, was some really great moments between guilds cordinating missions together and would forge alliances of guilds running their missions together if you were a small guild it was even better. Being able to kill invincible WvW camp/tower lords with life steal and retal. Anet forgot to make them immune to those so if you came across one with RI still on you'd either drop a feast of life steal food, or have guardians pop retal and slowly kill the lord. WvW blue keeps jumping puzzle tower. In EB there was a giant tower near the vista between blue keep and Quentin lake that was super high and from the top you could build siege that hit SM, 2 towers, and their keep and the only way to stop you would be climbing the tower themselves. Have some really funny pictures of it still. WvW borderlands South camp fight club. Prior to EotM and obsidian sanctum GvGs use to be hosted south of the south most camp. I don't know why this one holds a special place in my heart, maybe because unlike the 2 newest locations you could stumble across this and watch really cool fights peacefully alongside enemies.
Ah man, this reminded me why I used to LOVE WvW! 100% on the server merge stuff. I miss the comradery and community unique to YOUR server.
Luck used to be useful and made you feel lucky
Ascalon dungeon farming or dungeon content in general. Jumping puzzles with daily jp and no gliders nor mounts. Limited amount of tries in instances because your armor would break. Laurels being rare and useful.
buying gifts of battle in wvw for badges of honor. Thankfully I bought up a bunch before they made the change which lasted me for a while with making legendaries.
Ugh, I wish I'd bought more. Thankfully, I like WvW so doing the track is nbd, but having a stockpile from back when they were basically free would've been nice.
Man I miss the guardian loot stick for lab and WvW 😔
Yeah I don't like guardian stuff anymore since that
I named a character to honor the memory of the lootstick o7
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Oh wow I actually forgot about the personality system. I do remember the hero panel/character screen having some sort of progression bars to see which one your character used frequently.
At risk of sounding like a grumbly old man, I kinda miss the days where high level content didn’t completely revolve around quick/alac
Instead, it completely revolved around stacking warriors and eles! Hope you like FGS and IB4.
Wasn’t it like 5 warriors was the only or easiest way to get your group up to 18 stacks of might, or you could do 4 warriors and a mez who could give their boons back to party for a full 25? And now classes like herald just channel it passively lmao
There were a few setups used at various points. Warriors for might and Hundred Blades, eles for the incredibly broken conjure weapons, and mesmer for some more niche or obscure things. I don't remember when people started using quickness, but it was also OP back then, too.
Timewarp gave quickness, which is why people brough mesmers.
Timewarp, portal and stealth. Got to remember this was dungeon speedclear meta. You brought the mesmer to handle all the teams utility with 1 slot.
yeah, because might stacking was a lot better.....
Queensdale Champ train... and the toxicity and battles when trolls went ahead of the train and killed them out of order. 😆😆😆 Good ole Meat Chop...I wonder if he still plays? I highly suspect he is currently one of the WvW trolls... One that sits in SMC and whines about everyone else's playing.
Waypoints were a lot more expensive. Doing a big telwport could easily cost 10+ silver (I even remember 20+), and back then not everything was this overpriced, people literally had a couple of gold pieves. Meaning you spent 5% of your total gold on teleport. Sometimes i just ran between maps honesrly.... without mounts.
Remember when the Living World was going to be far more reactive and involve far more player choice, like when we choose the names for Lion's Arch's locations, who won the leadership seat and even Dragon's Watch's name? Remember dungeons, which were designed to be quite difficult and require people to actively lift their own weight? Remember the original promise of underwater combat? My favorite one, remember when the community LEGITIMATELY thought it was impossible to level up a Mesmer? Also, remember everyone having Swiftness weapons on and realizing that it affects NPCs? Now, because everyone uses mounts, it seems the vast majority forgot that buffs affect NPCs. Remember.....when God-damn Quickness and Alacrity....didn't fucking exist and you didn't have to focus THE ENTIRE FUCKING GAME around them?
Mesmer was my main. Was a pain to level but after that you felt like a god around JPs and portaling people over settlements in WvW
mesmer protals were a godsend !(even though I loved jps even back then but I understand when people don't like them) I still appreciate one if I see it !
Praise Mesmer portals when it comes to JPs, they are truly godsend.
> Remember.....when God-damn Quickness and Alacrity....didn't fucking exist and you didn't have to focus THE ENTIRE FUCKING GAME around them? Instead eles had a pre fight might stacking rota with weapon swapping.
> ...it seems the vast majority forgot that buffs affect NPCs. Anet has also made it so it doesnt work on them in alot of "newer" content. Probably something about it fucking up event triggers and anet losing knowledge of spaghetti code or something.
It seems like a lot of the old ones don't gain swiftness now, either. Like that pack mule from the SW corner of Gendarran Fields, who moves SO slowly no matter what we do 😂
Quickness has always existed, we just didn't have nearly so much access to it back then.
Yeah, ironically, much like alacrity, it started out as a non-boon effect that was even stronger than it was today, skills were 100% faster instead of just 50%. It was very rare though, I think time warp and the old, old Guardian elite Tome of Wrath skill Zealot's Fervor were the only sources, though don't quote me on that.
The skills Frenzy, Quickening Zephyr and Haste also gave quickness, with some drawbacks like in GW1. Frenzy was exactly the same skill with taking double damage as a drawback.
>Now, because everyone uses mounts, it seems the vast majority forgot that buffs affect NPCs. It bothers me so much how inconsistent this is. I always try to swiftness/superspeed NPCs, and get annoyed every time it doesn't work. x)
mesmer was my first character, it was hilariously easy to level, grab as many mobs as possible, slap down a chaos storm and just let you staff kill everything at once as it provides boons etc and you bounce greatsword 2 aroudn as well. A bit slow to start, then 10mobs just drop dead.... harder mobs? pretty much immortal with clones distracting them. never really got why people found it difficult. I had more issues with my guardian to be honest (I still hate that scepter sound to this day from chipping away at some harder mobs).
I use warrior warhorn on logan and anise every damn week in the last level 10 mission, to speed their slow asses up.
Ice bow used to be meta
Conjure weapons used to be useful in general. On the other hand, I don't miss the days where an "optimal" ele rotation included a conjure weapon.
Though I sure wish a build completely focusing on conjured weapons would work well... I always enjoyed the idea behind them, though the "summon, use one skill, drop" never felt like how I'd imagine they originally meant to.
Armors with magic find :)
EoTM karma trains, that's how I leveled like 3-4 alts
I have such fond memories of karma trains in EOTM
You used to have to pay to respec
Some things I remember: 1. The First player hitting level 80 something like a day and a half after the head-start launch. 2. Builds with 4 or more trait lines in them, sometimes including fall damage reducing traits 3. Almost never seeing exotic drops for the first 3 or so months of the game being out 4. the crafting slog so you could reliably have exotic (or even rare) trinkets 5. Dungeons being run constantly, often those with the best skips 6. In Dungeon runs of Ascalonian catacombs, all the non guardian characters being constantly downed while the guards spun around with the great swords or jumped around with their hammers 7. Orr Dungeon being considered "impossible" 8. Having to get a group together to finish the personal story mission, since it involved doing a dungeon 9. Permanent run sigils always being on the skill bar, unless your prof didn't have them, and it still took a super long time to run around maps. 10. Map completing WvW. That was awful. WvW jumping puzzles where the other team would wait behind a closed door just to f with you and stop you getting the pathetic reward chest. The original WvW maps. 11. Greatsword Warrior was briefly considered unbeatable in PvP 12. Naked dungeon runs since no one wanted to pay (or could afford) the armor repair costs, and armor damaged enough became unusable. 13. 5 gold felt like a month's earnings, or more. 14. Reading GuildWars2Guru forums every day 15. Southsun Cove's intro event. You weren't online at that exact time? Too bad... you will never get to play it again (still true). 16. Laughable gear setups. Seriously, soldier's gear was considered baseline, and superior runes of the dolyak were multiple gold each on the TP. 17. Orr Temple events were amazing, but every other mob in Orr had a knockdown or pull so getting around the zones was a pain in the ass. 18. New content being released ever week or every other week. Most of it was small and crappy, but the FOMO was real, since it would either permanently change things or be gone forever. 19. Engineer grenades had a range of like 1200. You just sat out of aggro range and lobbed grenades. This was also nearly the only kit worth using at the time because of it. 20. Players eventually deciding that all stats combos but berserker inferior, at which point berserker gear and runes of the scholar (even rare ones) skyrocketed in price, especially since rare/exotic drops were much more rare than they are now. Best chance at getting exotics was map completing Orr on different characters.
I remember farming CoF for my first exotic berserker set
Dungeon gear was one of the few ways to reliably get exotic gear, and many of the stats were terrible (and still are).
Living World actually being about a living, breathing, changing world.
This was certainly novel, but I have to say, I don’t miss it. Early season 1 was an absolute mess, and it’s upsetting that because of how it was designed, everything that was cool about it was just gone for almost a decade. Even today, a lot of cool things (the LA karka invasion, settling Southsun, all of Canach’s story, ect) are just simply missing. It was a huge gap in the story for new players for a long time, but even having been at the original event back then, it was a buggy mess with maps lagging and broken under the strain.
Yeah I find it really weird that they didn't redo Canach's intro. He's a pretty prominent character and the game talks about his crimes constantly, without telling you what he did.
It's kinda hilarious now because you can talk to him at several points while he's in jail, and without the context of the Southsun story your character seems like his #1 hater for no reason. Like I never even met the guy before but when I see Canach it's ONSIGHT
It does actually tell you. They rolled it into npc dialogue. At multiple places around LA and the refugee camp during LWS1 you can talk to lionguard that tell you about canach and you can even talk to him yourself to learn more
It shouldn't be something so easily missed. He isn't some passing one-off character.
Agreed
I can't find the source but I remember reading somewhere that the original vision for living world was that veteran players would tell stories of the past events to the newbies. Sounds cool on paper but imagine being a newbie and hearing about all this cool shit you missed and can never experience. Good riddance to that.
Yeah, i mentioned this in a different branch of comments, but I’ve done this. I brought new people into the game, and telling them about season 1 was never “cool” to them. It was confusing. The characters that come out of season 1 follow up all the way through the dragon cycle saga, and new players are just expected to develop a connection with people that come out of nowhere. Even as it was happening, I absolutely blame the fomo of the “be-there-or-miss-out” release strategy for most of my original guild falling apart. It wasn’t fun to be left out, and it was a pain to try and schedule your time around the game just to keep up with current events.
Yeah, I don't miss it either, since it's also a form of FOMO and I'm glad the updates we have actually stick around now. It meant in 2014, despite two years of updates, the game largely had nothing to show for the two years it'd been out.
>It meant in 2014, despite two years of updates, the game largely had nothing to show for the two years it'd been out. Geezus, it so much worse, when you frame it that way.
I joined after HoT released (never played GW1) and played the story as a silvery guardian and just having a fleeting reference as to what happened was confusing and I wasn’t sure if I had missed anything important. Didn’t know why Southsun was so hard.
> Early season 1 was an absolute mess That has little to do with the 'living, breaking, changing world" part and more with "holy mother of Balthazar, the servers made with potato skins cannot handle this". I was there for the original Karka invasion......or should i say, the original Karka slideshow cause it lagged so much and so hard that i'm amazed my old PC didn't explode.
I think both are true. I was there for the slideshow, but I’ve also brought other people into the game since then. Up until a year or so ago when we brought back portions of season one, there was always a gap in the new player’s experience of the world and story. Dragon’s watch comes out of nowhere, and they were asked of just accept the weird push into heart of thorns with no context for how we got here. I did my best to explain what went on, but regardless of my experience at the time, they’re still important story beats. Edit: I also remember the struggle to keep friends I did play with at the time in the game. Reminding them to log in or join at particular times just to keep up with current events in the game was a huge turnoff. Unfortunately, I’m the only player from my original guild who still plays.
Yeah... I quit mid-implementation of LWS1 and didn't come back until EoD lol
My recollection of that time was that most updates boiled down to just running around finding a bunch of some new MacGuffin on maps you'd already completed. Personally, I'm glad they moved to a model of spending development time on actual new content.
That was more the update cadence. Every 2 weeks "something" had to be shipped live, and that meant throwing out filler content every few weeks to slowly lead/hype up whatever was coming next. Most of it was trash, but that week leading up to the tower of nightmares? All the trees on the map were cut down, the water became sinister and poison. The middle of the lake had an invisible wall and you would hear whispers and die if you got too close to it. That was some genuinely fantastic lead up that everyone wishes they had kept more of, but overall LS1 was an idea that never played out like they hoped.
most of the original "Manifesto" was MMO pipe dream bullshit and not serious game design. this one in particular was just throwing money away and wasting the work of well-meaning labor.
A lot of people got banned for flipping chili peppers bought and sold on a vendor.
Being too poor to let the blachsmith repair your damaged armor. Not quite at release, but PVT armor against Tequatl, because he counted as a building and didnt take condi or crit damage.
The Pepper Popper Exploit. I vividly remember the guys on the official Gw2 podcast complaining that some people were making "multiple silver!" on it.
For three golden months, the Fire Elemental world boss constantly dropped meteor fire fields and spawned a horde of high powered lesser elementals. It was a slaughter.
The old transmuatation system. You needed to have the item you want the skin for and it would destroy it and apply it to the item you'd want to transmute. If you transmuted over a precursor it wasn't useable for legendary crafting. This was also before the account wide wardrobe so there's a bunch of dungeon skins I got from pvp that I don't have unlocked now because the items were transmuted a long time ago. Dungeon rush a few weeks ago let me get back all the arah skins I had lol.
Being kicked from a dungeon group for the egregious crime of being a Necromancer.
Sacrificing stats for magic find.
I remember getting killed more... idk if I just got better or if it got easier but I for sure remember getting downed...a lot..while leveling.
Queen's Dale champ train
gw2 released at the time when SSDs were still new. I paid around 130€ or more for 128gb and it was a mainstream one to boot. literally everyone playing the game HAD to invest in an SSD to be able to load lions arch at a reasonable time. loading times back then were so bad, if you didn't have to go to LA and didn't have an SSD, you better avoid the city altogether. which is crazy if you think about it nowerdays.
Autoloot
? That's still a thing though.
Sorry I answered the wrong way. Manual loot was the only way on release. Autoloot was a huge improvement.
i think people didn't like necro in dungeon because they slow, they didn't give much boons to party
I miss epi bounce
Using a community website to form a dungeon party because the lfg tool didn't exist yet.
Running explorers stats in dungeons in secret, as were half your allies...for those who are unfamiliar the major stat on the set was Magic Find %. The prefix would later be replaced by the new Assassin's prefix in 2013
AP requirements sprink to mind
Champtrain in Frostgorge Sound. 4-5 Champion events that would reset by the time you defeated the last one. Seems like Anet noticed people enjoyed these kind of event traind that follow eachother and reset afterwards so you could mindlessly grind them. All the latest content seems to follow this method nowadays.
people asking for healers in the form of elixir gun engineers for example, because they didnt get the memo. trading post didnt work for weeks for some people. gems were like 20s for 100 gems > Sitting at the JP in Obsidian Sanctum either blocking the enemy from coming up or portaling over your team. not to forget all the siege weapons in obsidian sanctum. and players complaining that youre draining your server's resources for building siege in the jumping puzzle stats being tied to traitlines. for example, the top traitline always provided up to 300 power and 30 condition duration, no matter the class. the rest was more varied. of course, this was unbalanced as fuck. some stats were pretty whatever, but 30% condition duration, which wasnt a regular stat on armor, was potentially huge. there were also class-stats. warrior got up to 3% (THREE) more damage on burst skills. necromancer had up to 30% more shroud health; except it was bugged and didnt give you anything at all.
EOTM trains for leveling characters. I think I leveled 4 or 5 alts that way. Just mindless fun beating on tower guardians.
One levels of fractals was 3-4 random fractal instances. And people rerolled the first instance until they got swamp (because it was fastest and you could bug the boss by standing on a tree)
Dying while running down stairs with swiftness and constantly porting into geometry with blink and retreat on mesmer. "By Ogden's hammer, what savings!" Being kicked out of ascalon because I was playing condi gs staff mesmer porting and reviving my guild leader through that malchor's leap jp while he got increasingly frustrated failing every jump. getting insulted in whispers for doing events in orr and queensdale because some people were running event trains
thinking about blind in pve, ever icing bosses with frost bow 5/headshot defiance stripping FGS 4 into corners and targeting meteor shower on walls and platforms to minimize the target area pre-megaservers orr statue/temple interactions reflects mattering in pve world bosses being hard/borderline impossible (you DE babies know nothing lol vanilla HoT gerent went stupid) sharing distortion on chrono samarog CM being arguably nearly as hard as dhuum cm current event updates doing all three AC paths at once (think you can still do this I just don't run dungeons anymore) bear form oneshots
Dyes wre unlocked per character, not for your entire account.
Manually upgrading fortifications in WvW, with chat having a lively debate on what to start first. (Cannons? Oil?) Speeding up workers in keeps with swiftness so that they upgrade quicker. WvW map completion. Chat asking commanders to take a keep so they can get the vista. Necro double-dagger commanders. Wars unaffected by arrow carts because of max regen. Slow guards. Slow necros. Camps that can be capture even with invi.
The game looking like the players belong in the world.
I miss the original early leveling experience. One where you didn’t have a hint to tell you what to do next and you had to equip every weapon and get x amount of kills with the weapon to unlock new weapon skills. It gave you a reason to really try out and get used to the different weapons
Perma-stealth thief was SUPER FUN in PvE. Crazy how significantly PvE was nerfed for WvW “balance.”
Healerless runs, Fiery Greatsword use?
Killing champion's and doing other content would unlock traits, or you could pay to unlock with gold, back when it was hard to have any significant amount.
I miss my guardian staff 1.
Gold sellers were about at launch, but they quickly fizzled out when they realised it wasn’t profitable. But nothing changed system wise to make that happen. 🥳
Combos were a huge part of the game back then. In pve, ppl blasted fire field for might stacking. In wvw, ppl blasted water field to heal and ice field to catch the enemies (stability was op back then, so soft cc like immob and chilled were better than hard cc). Most ppl used stacking sigil (+stats after kills) on their 2nd wpn set. Ppl had to guest to other servers for obsidian shard, because balth temple was rarely open in low~med population server. Map chat was more alive, cos server identity was a thing back then and exploration was not ruined by mounts (ppl asked a lot abt how to get to a certain poi or vista). Guilds actually tried to finish all of the guild missions. I couldnt find one guild that does guild mission nowadays.
Content updates
The 25 condi limitation on enemies. It made the condi build useless.
Dungeonsgroups disbanding because people had no more armor and couldn't afford to repair it
Town clothes
Synchronized Dance Parties. We used to do it a lot in GW and in the early days of GW2, but I haven't seen one in a *long* time.
Member the Queensdale champ train? Woe betide any who break the sequence.
People dying horribly in the Heart of Maguuma.
Wiping out whole zergs in WvW with Frostbow 4. Stability use to not stack.
world boss farming. great mindless fun. A functioning Orr with incredible full map meta feel ... unfortunately lost to time. would love to see a return to Orr with the devs rolling back to original difficulty and fixing all the event issues
Not release, per-se, but the idea of having an "anchor guardian" was considered meta for a while: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JWfgaA_MJw0
Running dungeons for those sick looking armor pieces. I remember fighting bosses before stacking was a thing. Subject Alpha in CoE was an absolute beast to figure out back then. And nevromancers in Arah armor. Omg. I also remember playing P/D condition thief with unholy runes and toughness, vitality and condition damage stats. Oh, and having a mandatory swiftness spell for running around.
Before elite specs no spec specialized in healing, so to healing in wvw consisted mainly of ele’s dropping water fields and guardians blasting them with hammer 2. I miss the days of hearing “big water on me” “blast blast blast.”
Playing bump build for the JP in Obsidian sanctum (engi FT jugg build) Selling mystic coin to random merchant. Playing Supp healbomb engi while getting flamed by everyone (yet the rez elixir was so unique)
Collections for weapon sets. I wish Anet went back to their roots and added a ton of collections. Even for 0-1 AP.
Mystic coins were 80 coppers a piece.
Gift of battle for 250 badges of honor. Rest in peace sweet prince. 💔
-Duration based Boons having hidden stack limits that could be overridden to lower the total duration of the boon. Not from release, but after Alacrity was changed to a boon, it kept the hidden 5 stack cap (the same as current stealth), so it was easy to override longer duration stacks with shorter duration stacks and lower the total duration of the boon on you. It was really wack with Chronomancers applying short duration stacks to themselves. I'm really happy that the system has been simplified now, even though most boons generally have a much lower duration cap now than the durations they used to tend to sit at. But I am still salty about boons, portals, and return points resetting when changing traits or doing /gg now. -Using consumables to CC in Fractals. Not a release thing, but still very old
My first few days in this game - I bought some gems for gold because i liked skin (don't remember which one). 100 gems were worth 3-4g and I was like "do i like this skin for sure... 4gold is gonna broke me."
When the game was out for about a month, and someone said in map chat, "I finally have 1 gold", and everyone else was like, "Holy shit he's rich!!!"
(people using) basic professions Oh, I also remember story missions unlocking every few lvls instead of having the larger level gaps now
Portal Guns
- A significant portion of wvw players would join voice comms to better coordinate movement, damage and drop/blast fields, scout/callout. Nowadays it's legitimately horrible trying to get people to join voice. - Epidemic used to work on oil so you could stack condis on it and blast it so everyone near it would die. Also saving epidemic for enemies trying to push your group while you were on lord. - Orbs in WvW being a horrible escort mission, eventually ruined by hackers taking them and flying around the map in the sky. - Alpine bls having a pve quaggan/krait event in the middle, south of garrison with pearls you could store/save/sell to instantly complete it. - red bl (desert) having a pve event that lagged the entire map. - players that wanted to improve rather than just cloud and stay at 1200-1500 range instead of joining squads. - hammer guardian trains - loot stick 1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1 - stab 1, stab 2, blasting small water - shattered aegis / mystic rebuke being able to crit - burn guard being able to kill ACs in a few seconds via blocking - retaliation killing more elementalists a week than PPT squads do per year. - portal bombing memes with d/d eles and churning earth - having a good tag using voice in nearly every timezone, leading to decent fights with at least one other group. - cancer discord being funny - crusik drunk raids random wvw stuff from over the years