The hardest area in Guild Wars

[QUOTE=Chthon]I'd say there's 4 things that annoy me more than any others:

1. Mobs that exploit the stupidity of H+H.

2. Over-buffed Mobs.

Mobs with super stats are no fun to fight + and I don't enjoy being forced into a very small number of options -- PS, obsidian tank, ursan, SY/TNtF spammer, seed bonder -- to have any hope of surviving more than 3 sec.

3. Super-healing mobs (less annoying for me than for Chthon but he has a point generaly)

4. Cheesy Environmental Effects (This can be fun and challenging when used sparingly and in innovative ways but too much of it like they have been doing is very unpleasant, not challenging and for me a almost automatic "no attempt" on my part. It's like salt, some recipes need some, but too often people put way too much)

I don't like them. They feel "cheap" and "unfair." I agree

Random comments on my part : I find that some areas or battles are allowing us less flexibility and freedom in team compositions. Too often I end up either playing with skills I don't like or enjoy simply to be able to beat a mission, only to not get any satisfaction completing it !

Do not get me wrong, I surely do not want everyone to be able to finish game with only the same 2 skills for all missions and attribute points set on "who cares" but it's happening too much imo.

I would rather have a long loosing battle that I can learn from my mistakes than slug it out .5 seconds with a overpowered mob 58 times, only to learn 1 thing to get past to the next half second and do that another 58 times to see what I should of brought as skills.

My experience of non-elite areas:

NM:
Tyria: Ice Flow and Ice Dome was the areas I struggled most with before I got the hang of it. But I would not call them frustrating, only "kind of hard".

Cantha: Pretty good. The well balanced Jade Brotherhood teams were a nice addition. Maybe minion masters had a bit too big overall advantage in most areas.

Nightfall: The torment area was hard but still doable with H&H and several different team builds. But some quests/missions were very hard unless you had a decent, mostly human team (like "Troubled Keeper").

EotN: Many challenging well balanced monster groups that need different approaches. It is hard to go through all areas with one single team build (3 Searing Flames heroes are not the answer to all questions ). However, in every area you can use a range of different team builds with good results. My favorite area for PVE.

HM:
Tyria: Some Ascalon areas are pretty hard to vanquish for a team of 4. Also some "help npc" missions can be pretty frustrating. Most high level areas are not very different from NM in difficulty. But with a decent H&H almost all areas are vanquishable (for me the only exception was Rotscale and I am not a very good player.)

Cantha: Some mega-damage bosses have to be handled with care and a few missions can be hard (eternal grove).

Elona: Was actually a tiny bit disappointed that HM was "not that much harder". Joko's domain vanquish was long and rather hard without consumables. Torment area was very much like in NM. My favorite mission, Gate of Madness, felt almost identical.

EotN: Some areas are pretty hard, but then it should be so! This is HM of the final expansion, I want it to involve some "struggle". Most difficulties are reduced a lot by changing builds.

Regards,
Cloudbunny

You know, I might have to say that completion of the Four Horsemen in the Chaos Planes pre-Factions might actually be harder than the completion of Foundry upon its release. Making a build using only Prophecies skills that completes everything up until the Chaos Planes and then doesn't die on them was intensely difficult and took a great deal more time than Foundry... however it's hard to say if that's because of actual difficulty or because of the lack of reward offered for completion of UW back in the day. Was it harder because there was nothing there and no one really cared?

I've been playing since the early days of Proph. Pugging is dead, and the nail in the coffin for me were areas where people felt compelled to only bring cookie-cutter party configs. I don't have the time nor inclination to wait for a party for hours only to have them get frustrated and disband at the first failure (DoA).

So, in general I would say that any areas that cannot be done with a variety of party configs = negative enjoyment factor. I'm not saying they aren't possible, just not fun.

More specifically, I would say that I love the Elite missions, but I think they are too long. I'm sure some people reading this will say, 'well then don't play', and I do avoid them. But that's not to say I wouldn't like to finish them. For example, I prefer the approach of GWEN and Sorrow's because the missions are split up into manageable chunks. I don't have hours to dedicate to one instance that can't be paused and picked up the next day (ala Urgotz or the Deep) - totally kills replayability for me.

Just my take.

Hands down a 4 in 1 run of slavers with heroes and hench only in hm. No zoning between bosses to change or tweak builds. Took me all day to do it ... had to do it so I could say I had done everything in all 4 chapters with heroes and hench.

shards of orr is hard in that it is wildly stupid. the form 1 kill then kill 2 form 2 is an interesting and creative boss design, but the fact that he has over 9000!!!!!!!!!!!(just an estimate) hp in HM makes it horrible. everytime he spawns, u get ritualist spiked or ranger spiked so it means u basically have to rez spawn charge over and over to get him. it doesnt help that the nearest rez shrine is like 3 rooms away.

the hardest legit challenge would be imperial sanctum hm / vloxen excavation (2nd lvl). the mm boss starting with corpses from the dredges is really nasty as ull get death nova / jagged bones combo'ed over and over.

After vanquishing everything, I find these places a bit annoying:

1. Tyria, Eastern Frontier (Hard to kill Grawls)
2. Tyria, Majesty's rest (Rotscale & Co)
3. Nightfall, Joko's Domain (Undead mobs that rez fast and can't be reached with junundu siege attacks)

Most other areas are beatable with heros/henchmen.


GW:EN HM+dungeons:
Nice balance over all IF you employ high ranked PvE skills (such as Ursan Blessing)

Urgoz/Kanaxai:
Never done HM there, environmental effects can be nasty.

Domain of Anguish:Its fine now.


^ IMO, playing a wammo

/ Jinx

Vloxen Excavations HM (lvl2) has some nasty groups (the jagged bones boss and the 2 precedent groups). Imo one of the hardest places in the game

From Beacon's Perch to Droknars Forge

One of the designers must have thought it would be fun to create a place where all the mobs of GW can come together.

You get hexed, KD, beaten up, burned, poisoned, stumped, eaten, res, hexed, KD, beaten up, burned, poisoned, stumped, eaten, res, hexed, KD, beaten up, burned, poisoned, stumped, eaten, **OUT OF RES GG**.

Wurms, Avicara, Grawls, Imps, Stone summit, Pine souls, Trolls. Did i miss something?

forgot the giants :P

anyway, i recently found that the holiday quest "Straight to the heart" was a nice challenge, and ive been working almost nonstop to beat it. it may be easier with a different profession, but as a ranger, i find it quite challenging. probably the most irritating part of it would be the fact that you need to run straight into a HUGE (and i mean HUGELY HUGE) group of 50-damage-per-hit snowmen just to make the grentches any help whatsoever. and by the end, i dont have enough grentches left to even have a chance of beating freezie and his incredibly large gang of snowmen bodyguards. its a great challenge anet, but maybe removing a few snowmen here and there would be desirable.

yeah wammo solves everything doesn't it lol

only if u bring mending, frenzy, heal sig, and healing hands.

You forgot Echo

On topic:

In my opinion, the hardest area in Guild Wars has to be DoA, more specifically Mallyx. The very amount of crying that Mallyx has produced on these forums - from being initially beatable through a glitch, to the introduction of overpowered skills that some say the playtesters used - is a testament to that.

Personally, though, I have still not set foot in DoA. RoT was enough of a taste for me, and I simply did not feel masochistic enough to subject myself to the punishment that the game designers were calling "an elite challenge." Yes, anything can be beaten with the right setup, but in a game where rewards can't really be unique because of PvP balance there just isn't enough motivation for me to do something I won't enjoy. To me, the rewards themselves do not justify the difficulty, but I'm also probably not looking for a challenge as much as I am looking to - a shock of shocks! - have fun in a game.

dont use pugs there

Ice dome back when it was prof. only... god that was hard xD

anyone ever tried ice dome on hard mode?

pre searing ascalon!

if u have truble with this mission pm me ingame(lord nowe,if im online il help u)did this mission more tan 10 times sucesfully and it isnt hard,it might be hard in hm but in normal mode its easy just requires some tactic ,spoil victor necro(not ss),warior or tank with wild blow(i did it good with sin to).That is the basic of what u need ,can use heroes ofc because i only went with pug once or twice,it is also posible(done it several times )to pull shiro solo(i alwyas kill him first) kill him ,than take care of the lich(for bonus i sugest killing te lich first snce he hits harder than shiro) also for the lich fre is very god against him he has 50 al against fire i think,it is actually harder to get to the end bosses tan to actually kill tem

warror in urgoz? well he normay could tank but the rits have disenchantement(spirit) so that one cuts trough all the defences of the warrior,unless u got shadow form which will not be removed by the spirit.
A continual shadow form tank could also be a solution ,but people use rit to make spirit walls in front of the mob while eles nuke them ,it doesnt last long need to last enough for the first mobs to die than eoe does the job

I did. Jagged Bones MM + SS + SF heroes made everything seem easier than when I crawled over the whole zone mapping it (before titles were introduced - I simply loved Prophecies and wanted to see every corner of every zone lit up on my map ). Only wiped once - when I accidentally pressed the space bar while tabbing through targets, and the overzealous Stefan ran into a different mob, doubling the party's aggro.

If we're talking Prophecies as it was released, Lornar's Pass should actually be much higher on the list than Ice Dome. I still remember the "Oh $h!t" feeling of having a wurm pop up under a party of henchies, and how hard they seemed to take down back then. That, and the deadly Ice Imp slowdown + Maelstrom combo, and the usual huge Stone Summit mobs with healers on the east side... yeah, had fun mapping that one

While it may be the hardest to get through, I honestly hope it stays that way.

I can't stand Unwaking Waters Explorable...