Why hard mode in Ascalon was a bad idea:

I think your central premise is flawed, namely that the number of foes does not really determine the difficulty in vanquishing, just how long it takes to complete. I would argue that the difficulty is instead determined by the number and type of enemies in each patrolling group. That is why Eastern Frontier is commonly brought up as difficult, even though other zones in Ascalon have more enemies.

Also, Hard mode is hard?! What madness is this?

I only found 3 Vanquishes 'hard'.

None of them were around Ascalon.
One was in Eye of the North, one in Nightfall, and another in the Southern Shiverpeaks.

In Ascalon, one was rather annoying with so many grawls healing each other like crazy, but not hard at all.

With 'annoying' I don't mean 'hard'. Just 'slow and more boring than the average'.
With 'hard' I mean: "I had to discard the same 3 builds I used for all the other 118 vanquishes and make one just for this area".

Bah, these enemies just make us Ascalonians stronger. You should not see it as a disadvantage, but as an advantage. Ascalonians are build stronger.

Eastern Frontier was the only hard area, and I managed to beat it with me as a ranger and three discordway necros (took a while..).

Also, there may be more enemies, but the mobs are smaller and more manageable.

Since nothing in Ascalon can be considered hard to kill, with the exception of over aggro involving grawl healers, I'm going to assume you think it takes too much time to kill all the enemies.

It's not really the amount of enemies that takes time, unless you're actually having problems killing them, but the travel time between fights. The size of the area generally plays a much larger role than the number of enemies, and no area in Ascalon is any exception.

Your idea of # of damage skills / enemies ratio is retarded, because the number of offensive skills on a bar does not directly translate into damage output. I can run 4 skills and output 200-300 DPS, but sadly that does not scale to the point where 24 skills = 1200-1800 DPS.

Also vanquishing is ridiculously easy, quit whining. The only thing bad about Ascalon is that if you miss a mob in some areas it can take 20 mins to find it, but thats true for 1/3rd of the other areas in the game too.

Prophecies does indeed translate poorly into HM. Partially for the reasons you listed, and partially because Proph has a weak backbone anyway and is still filled with bugs and weird pathing errors. More of an annoyance than a difficulty though.

You know , almost all prophecies is easy to vanquish , because mobs don't have many skills.... This is even more right for ascalon areas , where most mobs only have 2 skills!! I guess it's balanced with the fact that there are many mobs , but well i didn't find it really difficult...

The total number of enemies has NOTHING to do with difficulty. It's just an issue of how lond it takes to vanquish.

The real issue is the number of enemies per group, their level and their skill sets. That's the diffuculty, and it is balanced.

The number of enemies in Ascalon is just fine. IMO. Some vanq are more requireing some less but if you comply with 2 basic rules: 1) properly control aggro and 2) know enemies and use right builds to overcome them, almost all vanqs are just walk in the park.

I don't think that the complaint was about the difficulty, but the grind.

Depending on your build for the Eastern Frontier, even that area isn't hard. What's hard is when you try to vanquish Dragon's Gullet with a titan quest on. Thankfully I didn't do that.

Spend a couple platinum for consumables, not necessarily celerity's, but it will buff your team a bit to possibly agro more and kill faster.

I facerooled through whoole Tyria with this:

4 man area - Me SoS, mm/prot, echo sf, monk heal.
6 man area - Me Sos, MM/prot, Echo SF, Panic, E Surge, monk heal.
8 man bla bla..

and I've did Eastern with : 2 rangers, I think I was apply poison + fire, and friend was either barrage or glass arrows...we had 1 monk and 1 ele if im not wrong..back in the days...and that was hard one, now helped one friend and it was easy with SoS, SF, MM Prot and Healer...

Excluding Ascalon from hard mode would have been a bad idea.

Just because you personally have difficulty with it, doesn't mean that it should be removed from the game.

the only thing i had a real issue with was the last Titan Fight in that quest where you have to aid Adelbern and now it's one of my favorite things to play in GW because of the challenge. 4 man team vs Titans at a really high level?! Sign me up!

Grind is not the amount of mobs but more the amount of enemy groups. It's not 1 vs 1 but group vs group. So look at how many groups you have to kill and not how many mobs there are.

In the end, some areas are tougher than others. So what? They can't be all the same. That'd be boring anyways. In the end what counts is that all of them can be beaten without being a total hardcore player. The rest is details.

Why making games that have content that will cost effort to achieve is bad.

To many people complain.

I feel your pain, but caravan VQ'ing from Yak's is the way to go. Except for a couple of charr mobs, the enemy group size is very small and manageable.

My advice is to set aside a block of time, on a weekend and do the whole thing. Save the Flame Temple and Gullet for another time though, since it's a long detour.

The only rough part is hunting down missing devourers in the Eastern Frontier and the Grawl Bowl area. Be very careful in that area since they can bunch up quickly and 3 healers is pretty much doom.

It's easy if everyone brings some summons to make up for the four player group.