GW1 had the best PvP of any game I ever played. It wasn't about fast-twitch mouse movement, although there were roles that required fast reactions -- it was about tactical decision making and team coordination, along with intelligent team design.
The iconic, role-defining skill of the PvP domination mesmer was Diversion: a 2-3 second cast spell (itself incredibly vulnerable to disruption) that gives an enemy a debuff: for the next 6 seconds, the first skill that enemy uses takes an extra ~60 seconds to recharge.
There is nothing like it in GW2 or any other games I've tried. There are no strong defensive skills on the level of Prot Spirit or Shield of Absorption, no push and pull of hex/condition/enchantment application and removal, no strong shutdown in GW2.
On July 31 2014 11:19 entropius wrote: GW1 had the best PvP of any game I ever played. It wasn't about fast-twitch mouse movement, although there were roles that required fast reactions -- it was about tactical decision making and team coordination, along with intelligent team design.
The iconic, role-defining skill of the PvP domination mesmer was Diversion: a 2-3 second cast spell (itself incredibly vulnerable to disruption) that gives an enemy a debuff: for the next 6 seconds, the first skill that enemy uses takes an extra ~60 seconds to recharge.
There is nothing like it in GW2 or any other games I've tried. There are no strong defensive skills on the level of Prot Spirit or Shield of Absorption, no push and pull of hex/condition/enchantment application and removal, no strong shutdown in GW2.
On July 31 2014 11:19 entropius wrote: GW1 had the best PvP of any game I ever played. It wasn't about fast-twitch mouse movement, although there were roles that required fast reactions -- it was about tactical decision making and team coordination, along with intelligent team design.
The iconic, role-defining skill of the PvP domination mesmer was Diversion: a 2-3 second cast spell (itself incredibly vulnerable to disruption) that gives an enemy a debuff: for the next 6 seconds, the first skill that enemy uses takes an extra ~60 seconds to recharge.
There is nothing like it in GW2 or any other games I've tried. There are no strong defensive skills on the level of Prot Spirit or Shield of Absorption, no push and pull of hex/condition/enchantment application and removal, no strong shutdown in GW2.
Really well said, I cant agree more
Agree on that. The level of depth behind the skill and skill system design is one of the major parts that made GW so special.
Anyone who seriously played the original will agree with that sentiment. It was unique, and nothing to this day even remotely resembles it in a good way.
The entire premise of having what is basically a really extended teamfight as the baseline for the game is just so different from any other game that it doesn't really compare to anything. Everyone I played with still misses the game. Hell most of the competitive community either miss it and have found no substitute or have just completely moved on from gaming by now.
Most people seem to just play either dota/lol now in the search of something that has similarities, because gw2 certainly has none.
Currently there's like less than a dozen guilds that actually play gvg, which is really sad.
I like to believe that if guild wars had come out 5 years later with the much improved infrastructure and possibilities of streaming/recording, social media exposure etc. it would've been bigger and could've had a longer lifespan.
I could literally play that game for 16 hours a day without mentally burning out because of how good it was. Such nostalgia, much wow, incredible sadness of it being gone.
I have a total of around 4k hours in gw1, i still play it to this day. Have two GWaMM and two 50 HoM accounts. I touched gw2 only for a week it was a complete disaster and a major turn off. if only i cud find ppl for gvgs and DoASC. DoASC must be my fav thing about gw1
In GW2 there is less things you can do after story/map exploration. Having such a limited skill pool is really frustrating. At least they add new content on a regular basis.
I admit I like that they're finally adding more content in the form of more zones to expand on the parts of the map that are unused. That was always a big opportunity they also never took in the original.
If there's one thing Anet always had, it's some pretty great artists. The game is certainly pretty as was the original for its dated engine. It's a joy to walk around and take in the beautiful views in the game. As for the actual content though I'm just not sold which is ultimately because I just don't like the basic combat and core gameplay. I find it dull and shallow, thus any content will feel meh when that won't change.
At the core, guild wars had some striking similarities to card games. It was mainly based on sound strategy and tactics and then a low baseline requirement of individual mechanical skill(not enough imo).
GW2 somehow turned that around completely and they've removed almost all player choice and the execution now relies greatly on being able to dodge the right things at the proper time. It's not directly bad or devoid of skill, but it's incredibly uninteresting and much less rewarding in comparison.
I'm probably off-topic by now, but anyone who was invested in the game will suffer from this bittervet syndrome.
Can't help but to agree on the GW1 vs GW2. I love GW2's universe, graphical design, lore and quests and all, but gameplay wise, GW1 was so much richer it hurts. I loved fiddling around with different skills, even in PvE. And of course PvP was so intense...
I played this at release and then stopped for a long time, but I recently started playing an engineer and I'm really enjoying it. PvE leveling seems harder than WoW leveling, I at least have to think to kill some mobs.
I wouldn't play it every day though, I don't think. SC2 seems to be the only game that keeps me coming back...
I still have lots to do there as I got into it way too late. Do you guys know if anyone is/was streaming some more recent GvGs? Apoc's channel has only very old stuff and I'd like to see something new.
I'm excited to even see the conversation of GW1 in this thread, I loved that game, as you all said the PvP was insane, I played at the highest level since beta-first year or two. I remember being one of the first ones to get a tiger (r9) and just showing off to everyone. Having GvG vs EviL and consistently playing vs some of the best guilds in the world was so much fun. Holding HoH for hours upon hours, my god the nostalgia. GW2 is such a letdown and a joke. I played for The Last Pride [EviL] internationa squad and we all agreed that the game was a joke, so we all called it quits along with the world champion korean squad. They are all super nice guys, have some of them on facebook, asked if they would ever come back and they said a lot needed to change.
On August 02 2014 10:13 Manit0u wrote: Again? Let's jump into GW1 instead
I still have lots to do there as I got into it way too late. Do you guys know if anyone is/was streaming some more recent GvGs? Apoc's channel has only very old stuff and I'd like to see something new.
I don't know of anyone streaming/recording and uploading good footage of gvg's anymore. You can however always go to http://www.gw-memorial.net/ and check out the video section. There are plenty great matches from back in the day to keep you occupied. The quality is generally shit, but all of us who grew up watching bw have dealt with worse.
Part of wishing guild wars came out a handful of years later is also that recording was really not something most people could do back then, thus very little of the greatness the game gave us is stored in any other way than memory.
There's one video that summarizes everything awesome about GW1 GvG, really, recorded at a crappy FPS but a fairly good resolution. I don't think I still have a copy, but It's eW vs. QQ.
eW is running an energy denial/pressure build with a dervish-heavy frontline; they have multiple esurge/eburn mesmers running Mind Wrack + Signet of Weariness, a necro running Suffering, and that sort of thing. Team QQ is running a fairly standard balanced build, with a Shatterstone mesmer. The first 20 minutes are the sort of back-and-forth brawl that is hard to follow (as GW wasn't built to be easily observable, sadly, and we have no way of seeing things like the energy levels on QQ's monks).
For those who didn't play GW1: skills in that game required energy to use, and many skills could manipulate your energy or a target's. The eW build used dervishes -- melee characters noted more for their steady damage output than for their ability to output a whole bunch of damage at once. Normally enemy monks -- generally healing and protection specialists of the sort completely missing from GW2 -- are easily able to keep up with this, using a variety of strong protection skills on whatever targets the dervishes attack and cleaning up the rest with powerful healing spells. But the other part of eW's build was a pair of mesmers tasked with depriving the enemy monks of energy and interrupting their casts, and a necromancer tasked with stacking DoTs on the enemy team to force out healing and debuff removal energy. This was a fairly common sort of build: one designed to strain the enemy defenses on multiple fronts until they crack under the strain and the team defense (as defense was a team responsibility!) collapsed.
At VoD [Victory or Death, a mechanic where at 20 minutes players have less health and damage dealt to them is amplified, while healing is suppressed], eW starts to get the better of them, as these sorts of builds do, and scores a bunch of kills on QQ as they fall back to their base. eW piles into their base, but one of the QQ monks hides outside the wall of the Guild Lord area, forcing eW to split off a dervish to go kill him while a mesmer pounds his energy pool. They do this, and he expends the last bits of his energy on heals/prots for the Guild Lord.
Now, two things for those who didn't play GW1:
1) The snowball mechanic in PvP was subtle: a thing called Death Penalty. Dying reduces your maximum health by 15%, stacking to a max of 60%. This makes killing you again much easier. DP is removed by a capture-the-flag mechanic (which is what the giant teamfight brawls are often over) or by scoring kills: each kill clears 2% DP on everyone.
2) There are two ways of coming back to life once dead. Most players carry a one-use-only resurrection skill, Resurrection Signet, that casts in 3 seconds and brings an ally back with full health; this can only be recharged by the capture-the-flag mechanic, which happens every 2 minutes. Barring this, there are other slow casting resurrection spells (most teams carry one), and each team's dead members who don't have 60% Death Penalty revive back at base every 2 minutes on the 2-minute mark.
At this point EW is almost all at 10% boost (the opposite of Death Penalty), and have all their Res Signets. QQ have quite a bit of DP, and no Signets.
Well, eW is pouring punishment into QQ's defenseless Guild Lord, but the timer's ticking up to 22 minutes game time... and then QQ spawns in base as the Guild Lord is on a sliver of health. One of their monks immediately casts Infuse Health on him, a very quick-casting massive transfer of half of the caster's health to the target, followed by Reversal of Fortune, followed by Infuse Health again. This takes the Guild Lord back up to 15% health, and they pour protection spells onto him while their fighting characters charge out of the spawning pad onto eW's squishies. This is another brilliance of the game: Death Penalty makes you easier to kill. It doesn't take away from your ability to do damage. QQ's Warriors can't do the sustained damage of eW's Dervishes, but they have lots of knockdowns and burst damage (called "spike damage" in GW1), and they're running a water elementalist kitted out with Shatterstone, a spell that does devastating delayed damage. Pressure builds like eW's take some time for all the debuffs and energy denial to do their work, but QQ can just come out of the spawning pad swinging, and they do; their monks spawn with full energy and their casters have all cooldowns up, while eW's casters are using their offensive spells on recharge to burn down the Guild Lord.
eW turns to fight but the they're caught off guard by the fresh QQ team; the QQ monks are able to keep everyone alive, and eW loses a few people and falls back under the onslaught; the rest of the video is QQ fighting their way across the map for the win. Their water ele is running Rust, a skill that triples the casting time of signets, and the cameraman actually shows the agonizingly long 9 second cast as one eW player manages to find a safe spot and Res Signets a fallen ally.
The final push + reversal + push is made more awesome by the music: it's "Welcome to the Black Parade", with the "break" in the song timed exactly with the 22 minute baseres + miracle Infuse Health save on the Guild Lord.
If we can find 16 TL GW1 players, we should organize a GvG. =)
If anyone ends up organizing a GW1 thing, PM me. I never got into PvP cus my guild was PvE... but somehow I never did very much in the way of end game PvE content... don't ask me how. Its the story of my life to join great games but then miss doing what is so great about them. >.<
On August 03 2014 12:19 phyren wrote: The nostalgia is strong in this thread.
Only because it's strong among nearly all GW1 players that have also played GW2, as all the ones I've spoken to think that so many of the wonderful ideas that GW1 had were abandoned in GW2 for no good reason.