YMMV / Guild Wars

• Accidental Innuendo: There is a Titan boss named Exuro Flatus. While it's probably meant to mean "burning blast", it can also be translated as "burning fart".
• Anti-Climax Boss:
  • The Lich in Prophecies. The plot builds up to facing him and you have to traverse a rather lengthy stage to get to him for the final fight, yet he is literally weak to almost everything. Killing him isn't the trick; it's killing him on the soulstone that finishes him. And that's it.
  • Abaddon in Nightfall is an actual god, but battling Abaddon is relatively straightforward and it mercifully doesn't regen health like other bosses do.
  • Shiro Tagachi is either an Anticlimax Boss in Factions but That One Boss in Nightfall, That One Boss in Factions but a Breather Boss in Nightfall, or That One Boss regardless of campaign.
• Best Level Ever: Tihark Orchard. When players heard this was a solo mission, flashbacks to the doppelganger ensued. But it proved to actually be a complete change of pace. It wasn't - in fact it wasn't even a combat mission, it was a mission in which you were literally attending a party. When combat does happen, it's against Mooks that the NPCs can handle. The only reason you can't stand back and let them handle is that it was designed so someone playing a healing ritualist or a monk would have to at least keep the NPCs alive, or be able to handle the Mooks themselves.
• Better Off Sold: In the case of many once-rare "gold" weapons. Due to the longevity of the game and the fact that a number of areas boasting once-highly-desirable weapons have been excessively farmed, many once-rare weapon skins are now considered strictly merchant fodder.
• Broken Base:
  • Kaineng's City. Some people think it's an interesting interpretation of Kowloon Walled City on a much larger scale. Others think the zone is hideous and often confusing with its multi-level hallways.
  • Kurzick vs. Luxon. Depending on who you ask? One faction is objectively better than the others in almost every way. Of course, your chosen faction was always the one who was bad at PvP activities...
• Brutal Bonus Level: The Underworld in the original (Prophecies) campaign is this, as it's meant for players who've reached level 20 and completed the main quest, and has some really nasty enemies such as the dreaded aatxes
• Cheese Strategy:
  • Even the most hardcore "Stop Having Fun" Guys wouldn't shame you for using such a strategy against the doppelganger simply because the doppelganger is surprisingly difficult - and That One Boss. Any Game-Breaker builds? The Doppelganger knows too - and it can exploit most of them easily.
  • See That One Boss below - Varesh is another boss most players cheese.
  • Zigzagged in the case of Gyala Hatchery. Gyala Hatchery as well is an Escort Mission that most players cheesed by simply running away from the start and not picking up anything that would start the caravan. Then, rush to the route and attack all the Kurzick patrols and trigger the reinforcements that would ordinarily make the mission much more difficult. Thus, when they return for the actual escort part, there are little to no adds except at the end. This is zig-zagged in that some actually find this harder, since the patrols were designed around the player dropping smoke canisters to trigger cannon fire.
  • One reason "Touch Rangers" were despised was because they were seen as this. Their skills would never miss and would oft outheal their incoming damage. To top it off, rangers were very hard to kite and could easily put stances that made them hard to take down at range.
• Cliché Storm: Sure, the plot feels very half-assed now, but one should excuse that. What is less excusable, is Nightfall's very very standard plot even at the time. Some people were able to draw obvious comparisons with its cast to Star Wars, Final Fantasy VI, Skies of Arcadia, and Fire Emblem: The Sacred Stones, all of which were old news by Nightfall in late 2006. Nightfall simply put wasn't remembered very much for its story.
• Complete Monster:
  • Abaddon was originally the god of water and secrets. It was he who first supplied the races of Tyria with magic. However, he gave out magic way too freely and ended up starting wars as a result. Even after the other gods warned him it was having a bad effect he wouldn't stop, and when they created the Bloodstones to try to rein him in, he attacked them. As a result he was imprisoned in the Realm of Torment. Since then, he worked behind the scenes to cause various atrocities. He created the titans to pose as gods and convince the Charr to wage war on the other races. When the nation of Orr was beleaguered by the Charr, Vizier Khilbron was persuaded by his "advisor" Razakel—who was really a demon working for Abaddon—to use the Lost Scrolls. This drove off the Charr but turned the entire nation of Orr into evil undead and the Vizier into a lich. In Cantha, he convinced the Emperor's bodyguard Shiro Tagachi to kill him by sending a fortuneteller, who was really just a demon in disguise. Shiro killed him, which led to the Jade Wind. Nightfall featured perhaps his worst acts yet, as he and his followers sought to cause the Nightfall, which would either turn Tyria into a hellish wasteland or destroy it all together.
  • "Prophecies" campaign: "Undead Lich" is a vessel for Razakel, the right hand of Abaddon. Having manipulated Vizier Khilborn of Orr in a war against the Charr, Razakel saw the nation exterminated in The Cataclysm, reducing the inhabitants to undead shells. Rising later as The Lich with an undead army to ravage the world, Razakel intends to unleash the Titans to obliterate all the lands for the victory of Abaddon.
  • "Factions" campaign: Shiro Tagachi was a skilled guardsman of Cantha, swayed to evil to murder his sovereign, the Emperor. Killing many loyal soldiers and unleashing the Jade Wind to petrify many with his death, Shiro becomes a corrupt spirit that harvests the souls of the dead to corrupt them into monsters, having others killed to join his army, intending on sacrificing the emperor to live again with no compunction on leading Abaddon's dark armies to ravage the world.
• Demonic Spiders: The Bladed aatxes in the Underworld. Essentially minotaurs made out of darkness and wielding axes, they can easily hit a player for over 300 damage (most players will have about 500-600 hp at level 20)
• Die for Our Ship: The main reason some see Keiran as The Scrappy.
• Epileptic Trees: A few. First, you've got the origins of the Mursaat, but the one with the most obscure roots is Arachnia. To elaborate, several parts of the Realm of Torment look, well, insect-like. Code discovered in the game referred to these areas with names like 'Arachnia Plateau' and mentioned a spider goddess older than even the core six of the series. Arachnia herself has never appeared, but you can probably find players on any GW forum making speculations about what role she played.
• Game-Breaker:
  • Given the ease and large number of options for customizing your build, smart players have found many throughout the years. Most of them tend to get Nerfed by changing one of the key skills in an update.
  • The infamous 55hp build for monks. It relied on using Power at a Price items that give large bonuses at the cost of reducing maximum health to 55hp (480 hp is normal for a level 20 character), and then use a skill that caps the maximum amount of damage the player takes to a certain percentage of the player's health and a skill that heals a fixed amount of health per second. This made the player practically unkillable, and was very popular for solo-farming. During an update, the most popular farming area was changed to include insect enemies that, according to an NPC, migrate and are attracted to places where a lot of killing has taken place. These insects happened to have the perfect skills to counter the 55hp build.
  • The assassin's Shadow Form makes the player virtually invulnerable (causing attack to miss and spells to fail), with the downside of losing ~90% of your hitpoints when it ends. But since it can be kept up indefinitely with the right skills, you may never experience the downside. Oops. After a long time of this build ruling the solo-farming scene, Arenanet attempted to nerf it by letting the enemies hit you, limit the damage you could do and take less damage while under it's effect while removing some of its already existing downsides. However, the nerf failed: while solo-farming had become much harder, it is actually considered to be better for use in groups carrying the build to finish specific areas in the game in record times.
  • Similarly, several specialized builds were developed that enabled monks to "run" various dungeons, in conjunction with other player-character monks or NPC hero monks. These builds were widely used (some would say abused) in dungeons such as Cathedral of Flames before Arenanet finally "nerfed" them.
  • In the early years, Necromancers had no cap on the number of minions they could summon. As long as they had enough corpses and could maintain the minions and themselves, they could roll through a map with dozens of minions. That has since been capped to a maximum of 11 minions.
• Genre Turning Point: It's hard to look at the modern MMORPG scene today, even its successor, and not see things this game did back in 2005 that was considered "different":
  • While not the first "Free" MMORPG, it was still a mainstream one that had "no subscription fees" as a selling point.
  • This game's story was told, not through in-game or real life books and easily skippable sidequests, but via... cutscenes. The fact that you had multiple cutscenes wherein NPCs spoke to your character and your characters spoke back. These days, the cutscenes come off as Narm and Cliché Storm— hell, the fact that the characters' mouths moved after the Nightfall update was a big thing for this game.
  • The sheer amount of solo content. It was very much like a single player game with Drop-In-Drop-Out Multiplayer - the games all had a Final Boss and an ending sequence. In theory, you could "Beat" the game by yourself, employing the use of henchmen characters to help you accomplish the in-game objectives.
• Goddamn Bats: Quite a few enemies (especially mesmers), but the necromancer's minions, ritualist's spirits, and several PVE summon skills/items are notable for being friendly Goddamn Bats. All of them do little damage damage individually, but the player's party can field quite a few of them and they are very usefull for keeping your opponents busy and drawing their fire away from the players.
• Growing the Beard:
  • The PvP experience, while already considered great from the start, was improved with much more Anti-Frustration Features around late Prophecies and early Factions, when pre-made builds (many of which were feasible) allowed characters to experiment and help perform better rather than grind with a bunch of crappy basic abilities until they could afford some better skills.
  • Nightfall was where the PvE experience was perfected. In contrast to Factions's Schizophrenic Difficulty and assumptions that all players had played Prophecies first, Nightfall features a much much fairer difficulty curve and gives a tutorial on how to play and how most strategies worked.
• Harsher in Hindsight: "I swear, if we didn't need him, I would shove him off a bridge.". Cue Gadd's death at the end of the G.O.L.E.M. mission, and Vekk scattering his ashes from the bridge in Riven Earth.
• It's Hard, So It Sucks!: Factions was criticised for having a higher and more punishing difficulty curve than Prophecies, which meant that people who either joined or truly got into the game in Factions (And there were a lot of them) would be shocked at various Those One Levels which were considered to have been near the level of late-game Prophecies missions. Then they were followed up by missions that were much easier, then missions that were once again difficult.
• Memetic Mutation: Frenzy Heal Sig, Echo Mending, IWAY, Mini Crab
  • Norn have no need of memes, we are Norn!
  • In fact, the IWAY build has so much notoriety that virtually any successful team build is now called X-way.
• Narm: "As a boy I spent much time in these lands. Look at them now." To their credit, A-Net poked fun at themselves about this line during the Nightfall campaign with some Bad "Bad Acting" and writing in the Obvious Trap play performed for Prince Bokka.
• The Scrappy: Kormir from Nightfall, who is hated for releasing Abaddon, being considered absolutely useless both in the story and gameplay, AND getting rewarded for it by becoming a god.
• Sequel Difficulty Spike: Prophecies has a couple hard missions but some of them were more because of bad luck (ie, a monk boss being near unkillable due to not being in a fixed place). Factions meanwhile...Despite that it's far easier to hit the level cap (quests give you thousands of experience points whereas quests in Prophecies gave you hundreds) the game does not screw around and immediately throws you in some difficult missions early on. (Vizunah Square was nerfed, though.) Nightfall is perhaps the friendliest; it doesn't take forever to level up or get started, and it doesn't throw you into the hard missions before you even had a chance to get an elite skill yet. It does have several tough missions, but they come in late into the game after a steady difficulty increase.
  • The main reason Prophecies was made way easier is mostly due to power creep of skills not in the original and the introduction of Heroes, customisable NPC's which you can take along instead of the henchmen with pre-set skills. Try playing trough it with only prophecies skills, no consumable items and no heroes, and you'll see how some missions are a lot harder than you thought them to be. Granted, the skill sets of some enemies are simply outdated by now.
• Tear Jerker: Seeing how beautiful Ascalon is in the tutorial/prologue, it's hard not to get sad seeing it turned into Mordor by the searing. Made even worse by how in the sequel (which takes place 250 years later) you see it hasn't gotten any better.
• They Changed It, Now It Sucks!:
  • This pops up every time ArenaNet updates the game to change PvE or PvP skills; their skill rebalances often make popular builds obsolete or disrupt familiar gameplay.
  • The expansion wank. People have had complaints about every expansion ruining Guild Wars forever, such as introducing more PvP modes that drew people away from others, lore or story developments that they disliked, or not liking aesthetic aspects.
• That One Achievement:
  • For a long time, this title could belong to either "Legendary Defender of Ascalon" or "Legendary Survivor". Updates later reduced the difficulty and grind involved.
  • The original drunk title also qualified to a degree, due to the careful need to calculate your drunk level and maintain it via creative zoning and consumption for hours on end. Arena Net nerfed the title in 2011 so that player characters can now reach the maximum title level simply by consuming 10,000 points worth of alcohol without needing to worry about timing themselves to maintain a constant "drunk" level.
• That One Boss:
  • Shiro in each of his appearances is bound to make at least one player tear their hair out. And some of the Monk bosses at the end of Prophecies, thanks to their healing capabilities, can take quite a while to whittle down.
  • Also a lot of elementalist bosses, since bosses get a double damage bonus a lot of them can kill players in seconds. Ritualist bosses with Spirit Rift are equally infamous for their party-slaughtering abilities.
  • VARESH. She's harder than the final boss!!! (So much so, in fact, that many players choose to rely on monks with specialized builds to "run" the Ruins of Morah mission for them instead of expending time and frustration in trying to kill the Warmarshal themselves.)
  • The Dreadspawn Maw and Mallyx the Unyielding in the Realm of Torment.
  • The Doppelganger. The problem is that despite how customizable the game classes are, the game is still designed around there being a party - which means that players will end up suffering from Crippling Overspecialization when going solo. Even if you can cheese it because it's too stupid to utilize some skills correctly, it knows how to use Assassin combos, Dervish stances, Paragon Cries, and Ritualist spirits. Presumably, this is why it was not allowed to use some PvE only skills.
• That One Level:
  • The Gate Of Madness mission in Nightfall, where you fight the final bosses of Prophecies and Factions at the same time. As if Shiro Tagachi wasn't bad enough on his own during the final battle of Factions...
  • The Foundry of Failed Creations sub-level in the Domain of Anguish. Groups that make it through the three other zones often fail in the third room of Foundry. There's a reason gemstones from it cost half-again to double what the gemstones in the other zones cost.
  • Thunderhead Keep is by far the hardest of the original Prophecies missions, in particular the ending where you have to defend the fort from a seemingly endless onslaught. The final mission (Hell's Precipice) is pretty much a joke compared to this.
  • Of the three ascension missions in Prophecies, Thirsty River stands out as an annoying brick wall for many players. The mission gimmick is that you have to kill a priest in their shrine before their mooks respawn which means that if you aren't fast enough, you can easily get swarmed by several powerful enemies, including a boss type enemy. This is made worse by the priest packing powerful healing spells which is especially troublesome with one of the last shrine with the boss also being a healing focused enemy making it even harder to kill them before everything respawns as they heal each other endlessly.
• The Un-Twist: The fact that Vizier Khilbron was actually the Lich was almost painfully obvious when first meeting him.