Should I return?

[Thortok2000]

I played Guild Wars way back when it came out and stopped playing shortly before the first expansion to play WoW instead (which I'm now getting bored of). I thought it was cool. The graphics were okay, the story was alright, and I liked doing quests. I liked being able to play with bot party members when I couldn't find real people to play with, and I liked the missions and the story and the cinematics, although some of the missions could be kind of long.

I think I vaguely remember beating the game once and it looped you back to a major city you'd been in before. Lion's Gate or something? And it was kind of cool. It's been long enough that I don't remember much of the story and wouldn't mind playing it again.

My question is the expansions. I've been away since before they came out and I don't know what they've really brought to the game and if they've made any changes. I've still got my original copy of GW but I thought I'd buy the whole trilogy anyway just because.

What's been going on in the game since then? More, good story? Is it still (mostly) possible to play solo and have a group of bots with you? I'm wondering if it's worth returning.

[sarcasteak]

My question is the expansions. I've been away since before they came out and I don't know what they've really brought to the game and if they've made any changes. I've still got my original copy of GW but I thought I'd buy the whole trilogy anyway just because.

What's been going on in the game since then? More, good story? Is it still (mostly) possible to play solo and have a group of bots with you? I'm wondering if it's worth returning.
Since I was a returning player as well, I'll take the time to give you my thoughts and opinions:



Factions - Despite its shorter and weaker campaign story, the Asian themed environment is my favorite of the three.

Ritualist is a very excellent and versatile class who is the ultimate jack-of-all-trades: Ritualist can efficiently be any combination of a healer, a summoner, an offensive spell caster, or a support buffer. Assassin is a bit fragile for a front line fighter (thus not very popular in PvE parties, especially in Hard Mode) but has excellent spike damage (and conditions) with useful utility skills (making Sin a nice secondary class for even casters). Assassin excels at PvP (due to their spike damage and conditions) or certain gimmick farming builds that involve their unique support skills.

Factions introduced the allegiance system and competitions for PvP players and guilds/alliances, but they don't affect PvE players as much. The henchmen in Factions are generally much better than the ones from Prophecies, with far better skill builds and options. Factions also add a lot of useful and powerful skills to the existing professions.



Nightfall - The exotic African themed environment blows the boring Crystal Desert you saw in the original game out of the water. The story campaign is more epic than the Factions one, mainly because Nightfall ties up the first three campaigns--you'll face the great evil who had been pulling all the strings behind the scene and was ultimately responsible for every major catastrophic events that happened in the trilogy.

Dervish is a durable front-line fighter who emphasizes very heavy usage of enchantments AND benefits from enchantments being ended as well. Paragon is a mid-range fighter who specializes at drastically buffing the entire party with shouts and chants. Nightfall also adds a bunch of very useful or downright overpowered skills to the existing classes.

The most important gameplay innovation introduced by Nightfall is the NPC heroes. Heroes are kind of like NPC henchmen in that they are bots and collect their own share of loots and money, but that's where the similarity ends. Once recruited, these hero NPC characters are available to you anywhere regardless of town/location and are practically your personal posse of players:

1.) You can customize their entire skill bar and attribute builds and change them on the fly with your own saved skill templates. ALL non PvE-only skills that unlocked on your account, including elites, are available to ANY of your heroes. A hero can change secondary classes at any time in outposts the moment you unlock one.

2.) You can customize all of their equipment, whether it's their weapons (you can even share your own with them) or runes and insignia for armors. Salvaging/removing runes or insignia from hero armors will NEVER destroy the armors, so you can safely salvage runes when you want to swap their build.

3.) You can unlock all of these heroes as your progress in story and do quests, but a human player may only bring 3 of them at once to a party. For the rest of the party slots, you can just hire henchmen or other human players (and their own heroes). The heroes are obviously not "perfect" when it comes to skill usage (especially advanced, complex, or unorthodox usage) and prioritization, but they are excellent when it comes to following your orders (call target) and monitoring/reacting to the entire battlefield. They actually perform far better than human players at interruption skills, spammable skills, and "conditional" skills--if a skill requires certain conditions to trigger, heroes will react almost immediately when the condition is met and use that skill right away. To their credit, ANet made the bot AI sufficiently competent when using MOST skills that you don't have to micromanage them most of the time. You CAN micromanage your heroes and tell them how to behave and which skills to use at what time (or what not to use unless manually directed to), but trust me when I tell you that micromanaging three heroes on top of your own character is not as convenient and nowhere as easy to pull off during the heat of battle.

Since you mentioned you liked playing with bots when players aren't available, the heroes system should be music to your ears: no more waiting forever for Monks, as you can always bring your own personal Monks with optimized skill bar and decked-out equipment sets.



Eye of the North - EotN addresses many story loose ends from Prophecies (the original game) and basically continues the original Prophecies campaign. It deals heavily with the Charr and the Dwarves as well as other humanoid races in the Guild Wars world; Norn and Asura, two of the races that will be playable in Guild Wars 2, are introduced and heavily involved in this expansion. Although the great evil behind the first three games has already been dealt with, an even greater evil that will eventually awaken in Guild Wars 2 is already stirring.

EotN is a true expansion (the other three are considered stand-alone campaigns), but its story campaign is just as long as the others and also has many optional dungeons that are much more difficult and longer than your typical end-game missions (even on Normal difficulty).

In addition to new skills, EotN adds even more PvE-only title rank skills and more heroes.



For you, though, the problem with Guild Wars is not with the game itself, but that the game is long past its peak and is now considered dying. There are still more than enough players online and a decent economy and market to support solo-heavy gameplay, but since most players have done all there's to be done, you will generally have trouble finding a full group of human players for most Normal Mode quests and missions. You can usually do fine with just heroes and henchmen as well as a few other human players, but don't expect to find full human player parties often.

ANet does however provide rotating daily missions and bounties and weekly loot collections that give special rewards. Earlier this year, ANet has introduced an on-going "expansion" called War in Kryta that is accessible to any character who has finished either Prophecies campaign or EotN campaign. This free on-going expansion changes Kryta and adds more missions and scenes, for the purpose of bridging Guild Wars with Guild Wars 2. For those daily missions and bounties, you will find a great number of players flood to those missions/outposts. And because the rewards are far greater if played in Hard Mode, that's when you'll find full-human player parties--a henchmen-heavy party is generally not competent enough in Hard Mode. Otherwise, when it comes to Normal Mode, most players with decent hero builds can easily play through on their own without the help of other human players, so they generally don't have a great need or incentives for human player parties. Oh, and full-player farming teams are still very plentiful at Temple of the Ages and other popular spots, if you're into specialized farming teams.


tl;dr version:
Yes, you should return, especially since you're okay with soloing most of the time with bots. The major cities and gathering spots are still very full, but just don't expect to see remote outposts to be populated with people.

[Thortok2000]

I definitely read it. =P Thanks for the reply!

How many expansions are there? Are they all available on steam? I was just going to snag the trilogy (http://store.steampowered.com/app/29570/) (original + factions + nightfall). Will I have to get another expansion after that?

[samm0]

If you get the trilogy, the only thing you'd be missing would be Eye of the North which expands on the map of Tyria from the original Guild Wars. Once you buy the trilogy on steam you can purchase EOTN through the ingame store or on PlayNCs site and add it to your account.

[DARKNIGHT]

Snip

Excellent post here! Have some rep.

[Yob]

Come back and Check out your Birthday Presents.