I think we're going to need to do a fully history lesson on GW at some point! There was so much I didn't cover in this video, so much context missed out! We'll have to do it properly.....
Yes please! Grab Doom Box in the chat and do a Guild Wars 1 tier list to tie into this one! I think it would be fairly interesting to get the GW 1 history of expacs and patches from 2005 to 2020 and modern not to mention it’s perfect talking point for speculations on 2025 if something big hits for 20yrs Lead that into a proper story on modern gw2 expacs and how far we’ve come- light years in terms of how far we’ve gone in advancing combat, utility and gameplay and where we are going. People might not compare the two lightly but together they are a great experience and game in terms of MMOs and as a full game from 2004 to GW2 in 2024. With that in mind a proper full discussion on Guild Wars together and not as a comparison from start to present would be awesome
I think it would also help some people understand the path to the new model. All they look at is "less content", they have rose-tinted specs on the past and forget all content droughts, the S4 potential ending, the unsustainability. People are still free to make their choices, don't get me wrong, but some word of mouth has people believing Anet is just greedy for doing this yearly model as opposed to doing PoF+S4 again.
I would like to see your take on HoT in that. It was the best content GW2 ever put out but a LOT of people quit playing because most people felt the maps were too hard to get through, so there's this juxtaposition of peak of content with lots of people quitting the game. I also felt the maps were really frustrating and I only learned to love them over time. IBS 5-6 caused an exodus of players but HoT also caused a major exodus
@@matthewjw98 this comes down to personal preference. In my case, the mount system drew me to the game and is still by far my favorite part of the game. Even now with this expansion, doing the warclaw chain mechanic on the bosses in the second map, looks and feels so nice
@@matthewjw98 I love the mount but to me they killed the exploration, like everything is so fast / you can skip a lot of things and now that the mount's are here there is no "mini puzzle jump" to reach panorama anymore kinda sad
@@Just-Yap yeah but you dont have to use the mounts right? you are saying that the mounts ruined the experience, but you are very much welcome to not use them. I might agree on that when it comes to meta events, when everybody is flying around you cant walk obviously, but still for solo exploration you can do it without mounts. I usually set myself rules like every 10-15 level I allow myself to use a new mount starting with raptor, or putting limits for myself in certain maps like here you wont be using skyscale etc.
HoT also introduced the Mastery System which really showed the potential of "Horizontal Progression" and that not increasing Item/Level Caps is a viable approach to expansions.
Nothing, literally nothing has ever been able to hold even a half lit candle to heart of thorns. It was peak of peak. It made all other MMO's look like slop, it make gw2 vanilla look like slop. I just wish the mouth of mordremoth didn't get DPSed in 5 seconds nowadays
I don’t get why they do not up the hp on that one. Not all metas need to be hp sponges but thats an elder dragon and also it’s almost a waste of resources to have such an epic fight and have it die immediately. Also despite the public outcry they should really disable mounts there.
Id say path of fire, season 4 and end of dragons wss peak, but what i know, Atleast we are at a decent to good spot storywise again, unlike in Secret of the Obscure, not sure how that went so bad.
56:20 Something else I always thought was really clever about the "return to" achievements was that they very directly incentivized everybody to play chronologically through the game's history - and finish the most recent chapter right on time for that very same 10-year story arc to be concluded in the expansion!
Heart of Thorns felt for me Dark Souls but in MMORPG style. Insane zone design. Verticality fantastic. Masteries impactful. Gliding absolutely brilliantly implemented within this expansion. High quality and repeatable Meta's. Event density fantastic. Cool minigames. Challenge and diffuculty was very high. Gliding ever since HoT has become my favorite traversal tool in any videogame. Only real issue HoT has was its weak story.
it was pure nostalgia, actually having to learn the maps, verticality without being able to cheese it with mounts. I dont like how masteries and mounts spread across the entire game, it would have been way cooler if each area or expansion had its own little gimmick. Also I feel like HoT was way more balanced and the world felt challenging but not impossible. You had to group for certain things or make a unique build to solo it.
Man I miss the queensdale champ train lol I remember waking up before school to play for an hour or so in the morning and hoping that the train would be running
The Ice Brood Saga Champions brought Dragon Strom. A fun instance that has a public and private version that gets played every single day by many gamers. It gives nice rewards, eye infusions and the fight itself is a visual and memorable spectacle. The tunnel just brought despair.
For me Champions is basically the incarnation of all thats wrong with GW2. It killed off one great dragon plot that was lead by Jormag, and gratiously also murdered Primordus without even his own expansion/season - Considering his historical relevance feels like a cheap kill-off, almost out of screen. Everything felt rushed, the rewards are grindy and the instance novelty, and dissapointing end made me quit for like half a year if not longer. Legit was, for me, the worse part of GW2 so far, IBS in general is divisive, and i loved it in general and thought it was setting something cool and right at the end it ruined everything for me. I still don't have the whole mastery line done in that season / proto-expansion. Rarely if ever i do dragonstorm, kinda pisses me off to watch them get rid of two elder dragons like that.
Dragonstorm being a good daily money maker does *not* mean that it was good content or good story. Yeah, tons of people do Dragonstorm daily for the high roll chance and the 2 gold, but literally everything else about champions was bottom of the barrel. It was the most boring and low effort set of releases they have EVER done IMO, and it made it super obvious to the community that they only did it to finish the elder dragon saga as fast as possible.
@@thomaskelley2641 This so much. The same can be said for what Teapot says about Convergences in the video. He mentions convergences, then says Umbriel is fun and therefore Convergences are good. No they are not, apart from Umbriel they are mind-numbingly boring and pose 0 challenge. They are modern day DRM's with better rewards.
Totally with you on this. This was the only part of the list that really bothered me. I would also put Season 3 one tier lower, it really wasn't that special imo.
@@Neonlike0From a pvp standpoint, PoF was really painful for a lot of players. Spellbreaker was ripping boons from hordes of people at once, along with scourge, only held in check by firebrand spamming boons like no tomorrow. It made a really, really unfun pvp meta that took way too long to fix.
I guess it’s down to taste, I love the mounts but it’s my least favorite expansion story and map wise and I don’t really like any of the elite specs either (they’re strong, I‘m not denying that, but I don’t like how they play) PoF is definitely the place I revisit least, even below champions lol
Story is not the whole story (heh gottem). Mounts basically destroying core and HoT maps plus highly overpowered elite specs destroying core/HoT PvE content and completely dominating PvP content is very important context to keep in mind when talking about PoF. The insane amount of power creep changed the game completely, and not in a good way for a lot of people. SOTO was a nothing burger... but at least it didn't actively destroy the game.
Story isn't everything, my guy. That's not the single reason that everyone plays the game. For the record, I agree with you that PoF had some of the best story this game has ever had, and playing through it first time had me GRIPPED. But Teapot said multiple times that he's *not* a story/open world player, which realistically is all that PoF had going for it for a while. The competitive scene around that time was absolute trash and the new elite specs (mostly Scourge, Firebrand, and at the time Mirage) completely dominated everything in PvP and WvW. A lot of those players quit during PoF, so it is explicitly not a good expansion for them.
Something that veterans of GW2 may miss about the Core experience is that the LEVELING experience feels extremely fresh for a new player. Especially one that's played a bunch of MMOs. It's insane to think that a leveling experience that's more than 10 years old at this point feels fresh and innovative today. Honestly, I stuck till 80 and bought the expansions solely for that reason. THEN I had "the Octovine moment" and fell in love with the game.
The teaser for HoT is what made me buy GW2. This was also the first 50% off sale right around that time. I leveled on a staff ele, they changed how condi worked, I switch to condi DD ele, then scepter warhorn tempest after HoT dropped. I remember dumping a lot of gold into crafting exotic viper gear because black diamonds were so expensive.
PoF is at least A tier, if not S. Mounts were the biggest addition to the game, changed the way we travel and explore the open world. Griffon is the best mount in all of MMOs
Lowland Shore's arena event chain giving us open world bosses with interesting, unique, and fun mechanics is giving me hope for the upcoming raidvergence.
I would swap PoF and EoD. The mounts that Path of Fire added became top in class mount implementation of any MMO, I think that alone is enough to grant PoF a way higher ranking.
I'm gonna disagree on HoT having weak story. It has a simple narrative sure but it puts you in goddam vietnam, the most powerful army in Tyria The Pact is getting shredded left and night and it puts you dead center of it. The mordrem are creeping out of the dark to steal the living and the dead, the jungle holds secrets that no one has seen for millennia and everything drives forward to one clear point. Kill Mordremoth. You don't know who you can trust, you don't know what the night holds and you keep trudging forwards with weapons made out of literal scrap metal. It's hard AF.
I expected this video to be sort of "easy content" for views but it is in fact such a rollercoaster, Teapot's "my life in Guild Wars 2", a lot of hot takes but overall a super passionate summary, I'm now afraid Teapot could actually leave GW2 😢
I have the worst sense of direction ever, and I absolutely love Tangled Depths. I had to do map completion 9 times to even remotely be able to find my way around, and I got extremely frustrated at times, but it doesn't matter. That map could almost be a game in and of itself.
HoT’s map creativity is was probably the best ever created on any MMO. The vertical layers on maps, the constant sense of happening and of course the map wide coordinated meta events were just in a class of their own. Nothing ever came close to that level of detail after wards.
tier list videos are the most HYPE. My tier list as someone who values the lore/story and plays mostly casually until recently: S-tier: LWS4 (simply the highest production value, best story in the game so far, consistent content that felt well paced. Great maps (Kourna being the exception), Roller Beetle, ELONA. Never had this much confidence in the game, vibes were great, just an incredible package.) Path of Fire (again great story, high production value, brought mounts which are probably the single most important addition to the game EVER and set GW2 as best in class for that aspect of MMORPGs. Launch hype was some of the most fun playing the game. Griffon still makes me happy to this day, such a high skill ceiling and what a rush to ride. Not super replayable due to lack of metas, but that first playthrough alone earns it S tier in my heart. Also, ELONA) A-tier: LWS3 (again great production value, this is the moment when the GW2 story found its footing at last. Fantastic maps, some of the best in the game. Masteries were kind of lame and one-off, but overall a consistently great package with intriguing lore) Heart of Thorns (only downside keeping it from S tier is the story was too short and extremely rushed near the end, plus the content drought afterwards. Introduced masteries and elite specs which set the baseline for the rest of development, what a fantastic idea. Maps were so obviously leagues above any other maps at the time they felt like playing a different game. Brought gliding which was super fun and changed the game, just not to the extent mounts did. Metas were AWESOME, I actually prefer Tarir to even Dragon's Stand - the feeling of getting that first clear in the last few seconds as we all cheer south to finish, the music reaching a crescendo, and the doors flinging open as all the players pour into the center chamber was pure gaming MAGIC and represents the best of GW2.) Janthir Wilds launch (story is extremely good, first map is probably the best they've done so far. Second map is weaker gameplay-wise, but stronger vibe-wise imo - everytime I see the loading screen I love it, just gives that vibe of dreary, rainy and cold, and yet somehow also cozy? Hard to describe. Great setup, misses S-tier because not enough replayable content and not quite strong enough on the first go to get over that like PoF is for me. Still incredible, great step in the right direction, gives a lot of confidence in the content model. The content map to come looks great as well, SO happy they are doing two smaller maps instead of splitting up one larger one). B-tier: SoTO launch (great new lore with the Wizard's Court, and a big step away from the cringe writing of EoD. Isgarren is the most intriguing character they have written in years. This and JW mark a big improvement in the game's writing, showing much more respect and deference to the world and what has come before. Loses points because I felt the maps were weak and the first meta is meh. I enjoy the Amnytas meta however.) Icebrood Saga 1-4 (at the time I was meh on IBS - it was just so anti-hype after LWS4 to have no new expac, and the vibes were definitely down in the community at this point. In hindsight though, most of IBS has aged fairly well. Bangar is an AWESOME character, the story threads were interesting but rushed, and the 3 maps are honestly some of the best in the game and all have a good distinct feeling. Grothmar is 100% exploration and the metas are sidelines, Bjora strikes a balance of exploration and metas, and then Drizzlewood is 100% meta with exploration more sidelined. I think if the vibes weren't so bad and returning to Eye of the North all the time and AFKing wasn't so boring, this could have been one of the more well regarded chapters in GW2.) Core: Man, what a time to be alive. I was so HYPED for gw2, and the launch was something special. The epic story culminating with the march to Orr was so epic. This was the closest the game felt to an epic fantasy akin to LotR - exploring Orr felt dangerous and mysterious, and really felt like an invasion. Obviously, Zhaitan sucked. But the core game has so many good experiences, it helps balance out the downsides like bad story instance battles, bugs, poor endgame, etc). C-tier: EoD (I hated the EoD story. The writing is so cringe in this expansion, jade tech is boring and a mistake, and the void is a disappointing final enemy faction. Cantha deserved better. EoD ends up here because the gameplay itself was incredible, so the bad story is balanced out. Clearing Dragon's End with seconds to spare for the first time after failing 5ish times was up there with Tarir as a HYPE core memory. I was going hardcore in FFXIV at the time, and I remember reading about HT:CM at the time and how GW2 finally had extremely difficult content, and I thought that was excellent. I have no desire to do it myself, but having hard content is good for a game even if very few players actually do it - it's aspirational goal-setting stuff, and having exclusivity and rare-ness in an MMO has so many knock-on effects to players who won't ever do it - it hypes the community, gives legitimacy to the game for outside players, and is always valuable.) SoTO post-launch (I returned to the game as the final story chapter came out, so I didn't experience the "one hour of story every three months" issue, which dramatically improved my opinion of this content relative to others. I thought the story WAS good - forcing General Nephus to join our side was cool, Peitha is a great character, and learning about the lore of the Kryptis and their Houses was cool. This loses points because Inner Nayos is boring and same-y, and the metas are not bad but not good. Also, while I felt the story itself was good, it was definitely rushed and they obviously couldn't fit the grand scope of what they were going for in this content model). LWS2 (Not bad, the story was still finding its footing and was slow and drawn out, spiked with some hype moments like the Shadow of the Dragon. Story instances still needed work, and I remember the model of slowly releasing already small maps over several content instances felt weak. Big improvement over LWS1, but still lacking in content outside of the story instances.) D-tier: LWS1 (Points for creativity, they were trying to do the live service model years before a lot of other games got it right. However, this was a flop. Content was drip-fed at way too slow a pace, ESPECIALLY for such an important time when you're trying to retain the massive playerbase from launch. The writing was AWFUL - Scarlet was a horrifically bad villain, a Harley Quinn wannabe with cringe dialogue, the "enemy faction teamup of the month" formula was boring and predictable, and it felt like a massive step down from the seriousness of core story. Only bright spot was the destruction of Lion's Arch being really cool and a great idea). What Lies Beneath (Boring map, boring meta, somehow even more cringe story than EoD. Glad I wasn't playing when this dropped. Not much to say, other than once again Cantha deserved better), F-tier: Champions (I mean what else is there to say that hasn't already been said? DRMs are a fine concept but man were they handled poorly here - they should be an extension of the patch content, not the content itself. Story was butchered, lore was trashed - I quit until EoD, my brother quit the game entirely. This would get up to D-tier if we include the Season of the Dragons return to content (which was excellent and inspired, having just finished it), but I do not - that was more of it's own release. The absolute low point of the game for me.)
@@MightyTeapot Appreciated! Your tier list content was what got me back into the game, it was actually seeing your meta events tier list on my algorithm that started the spiral of content watching that drew me back into GW2 and inspired me to take the game a little more seriously/have a better sense for things like goal setting. Ended up watching the entire Zero to Hero playlist, good stuff
As someone who didn't join GW2 until the steam launch I don't think I could have gotten through HoT if mounts didn't exist. I can see why a veteran such as Teapot would see the negatives but for me it could only be positive for someone like myself who didn't understand the game well at all by the time I entered HoT and even today don't consider myself to be a good player of the game. Being eaten alive by pocket raptors over and over would only make me quit the game and never return, which would have been a major shame because I have come to really love GW2, even if I'm not great at it.
That is fair and I share a similar opinion. I played it at launch and I felt it was not really as good as some make it out to be. In particular I hate Metroidvania games and HOT turned GW2 into that. "Want to progress? Level to learn the ixal language!" prior to HOT the game did not put as many blockers to just clearing the story and I blame HOT for the existence of those green bar quests that still exists today to stretch story bits out... speaking of fun fact before HOT the core game did not have the 10 level gap requirements to progress the story. I typically look for the extra stuff after the main story is complete so this was a bit annoying as it forced you to play extra content and wear it out. I also felt throwing major story in meta events was a bad decision. You end up playing the story out of order because event X Y or Z was not active for you. I actually did quit the game at the time and moved on to another MMO before I was gifted Path of Fire at some later date and to me Path of Fire is the S+ tier expansion as it got me back into the game.
I played core then left and didn’t return until after HoT and PoF were over and I bought both at 50% off. Hated HoT. It was empty and I was alone and lost and eaten alive everywhere I turned. Decided to skip ahead to PoF to get the mounts first. Those who played in real time with a huge player base out there at the same time should understand it’s a far different experience for players coming in after the honeymoon of these maps. HoT maos still stress me out to this day. I avoid them.
I wanna say I appreciate your content alot, the energy your bring when you explain hype things combined with your overall insight of the game makes for very entertaining content. Been really helpful for improving my gameplay in GW2.
It’s funny how polarizing Tangled Depths is, with a lot of people I see these days bemoan getting lost there-but I can definitely concede it’s intricate design (and the chak are sweet imo)
Glad you prefaced this video by saying that it’s not objective and only reflects your own personal experience of the game and your memories from when you first played it, even though most people will ignore, or didn’t listen to your introduction to the video. This really isn’t a rating of what the game is like. It’s a personal rating of how you remember the game and how you feel about it (which is fine).
This is media criticism, we can't speak objectively unless you are talking about strictly factual things like player numbers, texture resolution and so on.
That one time Karka event was the biggest fail in GW2 history and the biggest dissapointment, for many of us. Devs was the middle of their experimenting how to optimise the game. I had a mid range PC, I and 95% of my guild mates see nothing but 15-20 player near around and nothing else. NOTHING. We blindly shoting and place AOE, just for same kill. We cant see when bigger karkas come. We died from invisible karkas roll. Naked, dead player mountains everywhere, while lagging... Oh, and the end reward... Guild chat was so toxic for days…
Core had issues as to what to do after 80. Half the systems we have now, but the game was new and fun. Discovery and experimentation with builds, skill level rising,... Season 1 and 2 are just wasted time, nothing to see here if you ask me. HoT was the real thing. Hyped so much, introduced so many systems, actually had one of only fun open worlds in GW2. Introduced fun elite specs that weren't completely broken, well some of them took a bit to fix, but still designed superbly. Only real problem i had with it was desert borderland and not even for the map itself, i still don't hate it like some do, but middle event that lagged the map out for 20min every hour or so... Completely unplayable. Guilds started using guild halls for GvGs, with some really fun tourneys during this time. Hell i even tried out raids and although i sucked at it and than just had no time for it due to having so much fun in wvw, it's only piece of PvE i more or less enjoyed playing. Season 3, ok, for a living season after 1 and 2 it was good, introduced ways to get ascended trinkets, which helped a lot. Pof... well pof introduced power creep on another level, brought little outside of PvE, but ok i guess. I didn't care for mounts and was actively against them and i kinda still am, they don't add anything to gameplay per say, only thing i enjoy is racing with beetle. And why introduce it to WvW to, come on. I guess it was still fine for a time, altough start of it decimated a lot of communities due to broken specs. Season 4, everything formulaic and well boring tbh. Somewhere here i basically quit and only occasionally came back, like for EoD that i didn't even finish. IBS, completely botched presentation, no specs, pve more of the same, hell even raids are dropped. If ANet didn't take 3 years to get HoT out, i think they'd kept some of the dedicated playerbase, but by the time HoT came out higher end communities were so decimated that there was so much whining they had to go and nerf it and PoF 2 years later just cemented the casual nature of the game. Open world and story,...
Wouldn't it be neat if you could spin-up an HoT map that has mounts disabled? Maybe have it so that if mounts are enabled you have less rewards for events but when using a mount-disabled map you can get full or better rewards.
for me, I started playing this game around EOD so it goes like this... EOD>JH>POF>HOT>Base Game>LWS1>IS>SOTO>LWS4>LWS3>LWS2, I was grinding out Ascention during SOTO, but I liked PVP then, I was mostly playing Reaper/Mesmer tho, I wasn't much good on other professions, but Spellbreaker War, and Dragonhunter were good, I remember this one match I 1v3ed the other team on my DH, when the 3v3 was going on, it was the best feeling ever it felt like i really earned that Ascention lol.
If one paid at least some attention to the story LWS2 was a great buildup, realizing that there was a much more powerful villain behind Scarlet and then following that story of sylvari and their connection to Mordremoth - it was very good like a buildup in dance music before the drop which was HoT, that drop in a way needed that buildup, made Mordremoth feel like a really omnipresent danger, a threat you couldn't avoid. I'd say HoT didn't fully live up to that built tension, yes at the beginning of HoT Mordremoth almost won but that sense of despair and urgency quite quickly dissipated with all those frogs and beetles, flying armored ghosts and "how to train your dragon" minigame.
They need to take their encounters team off of fractals. They are more familiar with strikes and that will probably let them also make ok to good raids moving forward, however, fractals don't play like strikes and every fractal ive seen so far has been designed by someone who has the strike design hard wired into their brain.
Oh my -- an hour and a half! Love seeing HOT at S++, I probably would place it there as well due to some heavy heavy biases. Though, looking back I think the story drops quite quickly at the end. EOD I'd probably agree with as well. :D
The thing about Silent Surf is just how dang damage-spongey the boss is. I suppose they tuned him for raid rotations? Otherwise I don’t mind it, it just takes four times as long as previous fractals that I’ve experienced
sPvP at the end of PoF burnt me out in a final climax kind of way (I got into 250 after 2 seasons of trying, found the best match for me in offmeta Sagebrand). Friends were already leaving after end of HoT, because PvP was getting worse, and PoF was a last try to get some fun out of the game. I got it, I'm satisfied, and I left. SotO easy skyscale tempted me back, and EoD fishing made me stay, after a few years' hiatus playing WoW, ESO, Destiny 2, various single player games and BG3. I always loved fishing and also fished a lot in WoW, got the Accomplished Angler achievement, and I'm happy that fishing is nice income and relevant to GW2's PvE account value increase. Working my way through the seasons backwards now, I definitely enjoyed SotO and EoD far more than the previous ones, but I think it might just be me being a few years older and being biased about the previous expansions when I wasn't in a good state of mind.
I don't think people who weren't there can truly comprehend how insane a time S1 was. It had to be the most unhealthy MMO development of all time and it was a blast.
Interesting to see everyone agreeing at HoT being top of the top, I never thought of it that highly. Obviously people loved it so more power to them, not trying to undermine anyone's opinion, but I personally DESPISE the HoT maps. Verticality in maps always throws me for a loop and I spent the majority of HoT not exploring, but getting hopelessly lost in the randomest areas with no idea of how to get to where I wanted to be. I found the PoF maps significantly more navigable, the Janthir ones I like even more, but nothing beats core Tyria for me. Could be just nostalgia and probably is just nostalgia. But nonetheless, core Tyria maps just have such a strong, unique air of immersion about them, and the vanilla OST is, well, probably the all-time best MMO OST. They'll always be my favourite.
Lowland Shore is probably the best map since Verdant Brink. I'd tune the difficulty of stuff up and make events spawn less often but it is just great stuff. It gives a glimpse of what it could be if JW was made with HoT budget. And if we are to get less stuff, I'll always take 1 Lowland shore over 4 living story maps.
I share the same sentiment of the vanilla and HoT on top. The base game and HoT are so unique and innovative, offering genre-defining gameplay. It becomes really hard to beat those. I also agreed that EoD the most fun among the rest of the contents delivered.
I complete agree with Teapot on Season 4. I love everything except the Dragonfall map, "You're fighting an uber dragon and you beat him down by popping pimples on him" lol.
Technically they did add a legendary spear in JW launch, being as everyone who has SotO/JW can now craft a Kamo much more easily rather than relying on the market/collections.
My version looks very similar, with a few minor changes. I'd swap LWS3 and LWS4, I'd have kept SotO in C, and most notably, I'd have dropped EoD down to just below Path of Fire. I still don't get what people see in that expac, its only redeeming feature to me was the fact that Seitung was pretty.
A pleasure to hear this little history lesson taught with passion, and generally having the same feelings it was a good trip down memory lane. I agree with the intro, but Hot is objectively the best tho 😁(and tangle depth is the best map, based) and unraveling core game is definetly one of my best gaming memory, maps are just great.
Did skyscale break design? Of course, but I wouldn’t call it a full flying mount. It has an energy pool to manage altitude. Full flying is unrestricted flight.
Icebrood saga gets over hated but all the maps are great, Drizzlewood being on of my top 5, the Story was great , I still wanna see what happens to Bengar (one of the best villians in the game) in the future with his trial and the vote for Khan Ur being teased in Janthir, which I could see Bengar helping us fight the titans.
I was there since HoT, but champions completely broke me. I needed champions to be something which would distract me and keep me in a positive bubble, but it managed to do the exact opposite (mostly due to how that year went). Still to this day, I am not confident about returning to gw2. I play few weeks a year now, compared to 7-8hrs daily before.
Heart of Thorns, Path of Fire and the Living World stories between and after them are the best content in the game. That's when the NCSoft was spending real money on retaining talent, developing AAA quality content, etc... The introduction of elite specializations, masteries in HoT and the entire mount system in PoF and the importance of these mechanics to the game can not be understated and seeing where you rank PoF has me tuned out... I suppose you can be critical of the story telling itself, that's subjective of course... The new expansion we see repurposing of the sphere and Warclaw and a new player housing system, that while nicely designed doesn't really add much... I think the new expansion is kind of a love letter from the studio to long time players, clearly low-budget and not good enough to pull in a lot of new players, but with a 12 year old game, pleasing your base is the right move. So I respect those who rate it highly for what it is.
I would love for them to go back to icebrood and pick it up and piledrive it out. Just re-do everything that isnt up to scratch. Some stuff is okay and just probably needs a touch up. E.g I kinda like the occasional drizzlewood meta. But DRMs need to be revamped/thrown to the side and re do the story to add in details that bring it in line with itself and feel good to play through.
I agree with most points made here Just cannot agree to PoF... It was a really thematic and beautiful expansion with greatly designed elite specs Its up high for me Soto was lower down for me... Janthie is right up there for me too
Weird to see S2 very low on the list. Silverwaste laid the foundation for meta event design in gw2. It was lauded as the best open world content in any mmo (which is still the trademark for gw2 til this day).
I still really wonder how much of the people's reception to Janthir Wilds is ''well its not as bad as SoTo'' and that relief is causing people to overrate it immensely.
I did decima for the first time yesterday, and he decimated me. So from my PoV, it's not really a tank n' spank encounter at all. I haven't done the other one yet though
Played actively since release until Season 4 - dropped the game just before Icebrood Saga (just had more fun with other games I guess, never had the urge to return). Nothing will ever come close to Heart of Thorns. If the game wasn't sold on how casual-friendly it is for the previous four years, everybody would be talking about it today as the best expansion for an MMO ever.
About the IBS presentation, I was actually in the audience.I made the weekend trip down to Seattle to see it. Honestly though, in person, it was a ton of fun. The devs were hanging out with us before and after, answering questions and just chatting. The trailers with a theater sound setup were cool, and everyine was excited. The NCSoft Marketing guy was super awkward and everyone in the audience was vaguely unconfortable. There's no getting around that. But it was a small piece of the event. Overall I dont regret going at all.
I'll be honest, GW2 is the only game that feels like a golden age whenever I'm playing it. Started back in Path of Fire launch, played ever since on and off sometimes even for years and this game never stops to amaze me when I come back. EDIT: While I agree Heart of Thorns is a great expansion, I feel like there's huge nostalgia factor in play when you put it that high. New player experience is not really that good nowadays in this expansion, so I hard disagree with the "core new player experience" thing you said there. Was it a golden age back then? Maybe, but I just wanted to say that out of 4 my friends that started playing GW2 last year, none of them likes HoT lol.
I'm speaking from my opinion, for me HoT is what Guild Wars 2 is all about, it's not nostalgia, I actually prefer the game that way, you'll see my opinion is VERY consistent too, I like stuff like Dragon's End, melee oriented WvW metas, a highly competitive scene, fresh air tempest and so on lol, all of those things were how the game was in HoT, and that's the kind of gaming I like. I massively reject this nostalgia claim, it's quite an unpleasant dismissal of my opinion by essentially saying that I'm delusional and don't remember it accurately. The game WAS different back then (and there is mountains of evidence that very clearly shows this), the game DID cater to players like me more (that's not even debateable, they had full esports lol), and therefore unsurpsrisingly I preferred that version of the game.
@@Sac-chan that's the worst part of HoT maps for me as well. Maps are too vertical and too confusing. Now with Skyscale it's more bearable in some cases, but before with gliding and mushroom jumping as primary way of traversal, it was just a chore.
@@Sac-chan precisely what make them good for me, you had to engage with the design I'm a medroivania enjoyer so what can I say, they are just the best imo
to be fair out of all i liked PoF the most along with season/LS4. It was such a nice experience especially because there was an interaction with gods. HoT was as well a good one but to this days i hate and love those maps. The one i was enjoying as well was core gw2 story but after all these years i am still disappointed how it ended.
To put Soto on the same level as PoF is a crime. Soto was so much worse. In general, PoF was rated too low in my opinion. The rest is pretty okay. HoT was really good in its day, but Twisted Depths is the shittiest map in all of Guild Wars 2 to date.
Tangled depths you mean. I feel like people who dislike tangled depths are the ones who played HoT with mounts. Because that is the one map that is a pain to transverse even if you have mounts. I played without the mounts back then cause I wanted to do story in order and let me tell you. Verdant brink was a challenge and a pain to go through. It made me want to get all masteries related to mushrooms and gliding. Auric basin aswell, certain areas blocked by vines with no springer, very hard hero points to solo at the time, and when I got to Tangled depthsm it was just another very challenging map. But today I can grab my mount and I will breeze through all of them except tangled depths. Verdant brink terrain is not a problem haven't died of fall damage or out of bounds in ages and Auric Basin mobs have been powercrept. I think tangled depths gets more hate than it deserves.
Everything that led up to cantha was GW2's golden age. It's been a holding pattern since then. I don't think we've really dropped off, but i don't think it's peaked since then.
Core gw2 did have raids. Those massive world boss metas were the raids and they were larger in scale that anything offered in Azeroth. Peak would have been path of fire though simply because Hot is where Gw2 really started taking off. Then we have Janthir.... This expansion is gonna bring good things. It's already the best expansion pve gameplay wise.
Core game is my favorite time for Guild Wars 2. Back when it was harder and the world bosses failed all the time. Back when power was properly reduced when entering lower level zones and no max level characters were over powered. Back when every scary thing around every corner was a champion, until they removed all of them from the game. Back when you had to roam around and collect skill points and could freely unlock any skill you wanted in any order. Back before mounts fucked up the size of the game world and ruined map design. They fucked the game up for a while after Core and then slowly added everything back into the game. Solved the downscaling problem by never releasing a zone below 60 so it's no longer a problem. Added champions back all over the new maps. You collecting skill points again they are just called mastery points. Solved the mount problem by designing so many maps that are only mount maps. Even though I still think the game would be better with only ground mounts and all their unique mobility moves. Not sure what I would say is best after Core. Every expansion has done damage to all the previous ones. Each new mode of travel and each new wave of meta events does damage to all the previous modes of travel and meta events. I think I would choose heart of thorns, the extra traversal options were fantastic and it hadn't been ruined by the addition of mounts. Once mounts are added I think the game was noticeably worse all the way up until the secrets of the obscure and Janthir Wilds, now I'm ok with the flying mounts but I still wouldn't pick those time periods as my favorite.
S POF: Amazing lore/culture, maps, and exploration. Great story. Fun especs. MOUNTS! S Core: The foundation of the game and combat system. Great lore/culture and maps. Story had meaningful choices. S JW Launch: Great lore/culture. 1st map is amazing. Story is good. Spears are fun. Warkitty is fun! A EOD: Maps are absolutely beautiful and filled with lore/culture. Especs are fun. Story is decent. Jade bot is useful. A SOTO Launch: Great story. Skywatch is beautiful, fun, and filled with lore. Weapon masteries are great. A HOT: Verdant Brink and Auric Basin are fun to explore and have good metas. Decent especs. Gliding. Tangled Depths is hit and miss. A S4: Great story. Maps are fun to explore but not enough culture for return visits. Fun metas. PRAISE JOKO! B S3: Good story. Useful collections/vendors. B S1: Nostalgia mostly. Unique story. Old LA. C IBS: Some fun maps. Decent story. METAL LEGION! D SOTO Seasonal: Mostly a letdown in story after a great start. New weapons are meh. Inner Nayos is bland. D WLB: Bad. Story was not compelling. Meta is okay. NA S2: Didn't play.
Unlike you, as a newer player. PoF is what get me into GW2 after hearing about for so long. I like the diversity of the game, more options, classes, maps, mounts, quests, story...etc. To me PoF is PEAK GW2.
I wish I knew about this game at its release. Where was I? Sinking my entire soul and life into a game that I have come to hate because this game showed me how alt friendly an MMO can be and how the game doesn't just dismiss hard work you put in when the new expansion comes out. I played WoW from vanilla launch to shadowlands and my friend told me about this game. When I played it first I was very skeptical of how everything worked. Vistas even made me raise an eyebrow. After a few months of going against the grain, so to speak in terms of my perception of what a MMO is. This game is amazing. The content is great. However I do agree with Teapot that this game is not geared toward higher end gamers. I have been in the hardcore raiding scene in WoW, getting server first raid kills 400 plus wipes on an encounter to get it down. This game does not appease to that crowd so I can understand teapots PoV. As far as the ranking itself goes great content teapot! HoT may have been the greatest but you will never change my opinion of pocket raptors. F THOSE THINGS haha But on a serious note HoT is where I go when I want the game to be challenging to me in the open world. Matter of fact I am working on aurora right now. Which I know is season 3 but season 3 zones still feel harder then say SOTO.
I do agree with most parts. Two exceptions though: As someone who started after HoT I strongly disagree with it's ranking. At first I utterly disliked it but it did grow on me. Still, after many years of GW2 I don't like it enough to see it as anything higher than A-tier. On the other Hand, I always love going back to PoF. Obviously that's just personal taste. However, even if you try to be a bit more objective: PoF brought the industry-best mount system. HoT Masteries don't even compete. Sure, you got Raids in HoT, but they are irrelevant to most players. Some of the HoT Specs are really weird, for example Druid who has no interaction with the Ranger pet, which is after all the standout feature of Ranger. Or the Chronomancer which made any other tanking irrelevant for years. Or the Introduction of Revenant, which allowed you to play core as a class that is technically not invented at that point in the story. Overall, putting HoT at S++ is pure BS. In my eyes both HoT and PoF are A, both with strengths and weaknesses, but definitely not 3 tiers apart. Aside from those 2 I agree with your list. And I am hoping for S-tier updates to Janthir Wilds.
Hey wait a minute... didn't fractals come with Season 1 and not HOT? I also remember HOT partially killing WvW because no one liked whatever they did at the time to the Desert map they added in with that expansion which they then removed from the game only to bring back much later.
I love GW2 and have played since 2013: Teapot really opened up a wound for me talking about icebrood saga champions........sigh. I immediately went back and watched the video from WP where the footage ends because the final patch was less than 30 min.(WP barely posts videos anymore on GW2, only streams, which saddens me incredibly) I almost want them to retcon shit and retroactively make an expansion around Primordus or even both Jormag and Primordus separately in their own expansions. It is STILL such a fakin slap in the face to the entire lore and story of GW2. I have said this before to many people but I believe that Primordus deserved a "heart of thorns level" expansion which would explore the depths of Tyria where we would find old asuran civilizations, DWARSFSSSSS?!?!?! etc. How they just killed off without any payoff THE ORIGINAL ELDER DRAGON!!!!!!! is a travesty that can only be mended by them redoing the story. I´m sorry for being a downer but the elder dragons storyline was THE storyline of GW2 built up over 10 years. It was very clear from what was given in the "icebrood saga champions" that the studio did not care or have respect for the lore or story in any way.
It truly doesn't. Is convinient but not efficient. Griffon/Beetle will always beat it at long travel. Warclaw too, raptor maybe, depends. Springer beats it on the vertical depending on the level design. The only mount truly suffering right now is the Jackal, only real use currently is portals. If you know maps and want to be efficient, you will use most mounts a lot more, but for chill play, yeah, 3D movement as slow as it is, is convinient.
@@dragonfangalexander Sure still think it was a mistake to release it the way it is designed now. I use it all the time, because it is convenient as it can handle pretty much every obstacle that the game throws at you. It could probably do all the PoF content save for the jackals portals. I just think it is too good, other mounts have draw backs that makes you use them only for specific situations while the skyscale can handle almost all of them, that is why I think it was a bad design from Anet to add it they way it was designed. But now that they have released it with its current design, I would not remove or make it weaker it as the would just piss a lot of people off.
Janthir has a lack of long term play atm. I find myself more interested in carrying on with vision instead of playing the janthir maps, done the maps and completed story. Homestead is meh for me
"Boneskinner - Classic!" I mean... yeah kinda but let's be honest here if anything it's a classic in totally failed design. Like the whole fight is in theory based around a mechanic that _no one actually ever used_ and this is not a case of "oh it got power crept" like gliding on Gorseval the whole thing was brute forced with Heal Scourges pretty much on day 1. It's great that it still works out as an encounter, obviously.
Season 3 into PoF into season 4 was the height of what the studio could accomplish. There were still stinkers like the koruna update but they were crancking out quality like crazy back then. The nightmare fractal, bastion of the penitent and the shiverpeakes map come to mind. People forget that the times right after HoT and early LWS3 were pretty miserable. I remeber when the junundu worm model accidentaly got put into the live game and the crazy hype it generated. Also how much hate HoT got before they did the big reward rework patch. I think the healing stats were also poorly balanced at the time. Or some nicer memories like the tarir instance swapping for chests. Got my first ascended weapon with that
As forever hater of all pvp content of gw2, PoF is for me S+ tier, most of problems that were existing werent existing for me, so I had ABSOLUTE blast of the time
Hearing about all the Expansions have me wondering for the future, and just once It be fun to have something with a mist clone of the Commander/Wayfinder an evil clone that changes places with you that you play abit, don't know the story around it I just want to have the spiderman's meme :D
seeing teapot talk about core game made me realise how much I miss those times 12 years ago.... and while we can experience most of it by just playing open world on core maps, is not the same things, and got me thinking, how would be cool if we had some seasons for PvP and WvW, and hell even PvE, that LOCKED the elite specs and made everyone play core classes for some time, would be so cool.... he talking about ele dagger/dagger got me nostalgic.... ohh good times, aura for the wins xD
I think we're going to need to do a fully history lesson on GW at some point! There was so much I didn't cover in this video, so much context missed out! We'll have to do it properly.....
Yes please! Grab Doom Box in the chat and do a Guild Wars 1 tier list to tie into this one! I think it would be fairly interesting to get the GW 1 history of expacs and patches from 2005 to 2020 and modern not to mention it’s perfect talking point for speculations on 2025 if something big hits for 20yrs
Lead that into a proper story on modern gw2 expacs and how far we’ve come- light years in terms of how far we’ve gone in advancing combat, utility and gameplay and where we are going. People might not compare the two lightly but together they are a great experience and game in terms of MMOs and as a full game from 2004 to GW2 in 2024. With that in mind a proper full discussion on Guild Wars together and not as a comparison from start to present would be awesome
Absolutely pls
I think it would also help some people understand the path to the new model. All they look at is "less content", they have rose-tinted specs on the past and forget all content droughts, the S4 potential ending, the unsustainability. People are still free to make their choices, don't get me wrong, but some word of mouth has people believing Anet is just greedy for doing this yearly model as opposed to doing PoF+S4 again.
I would like to see your take on HoT in that. It was the best content GW2 ever put out but a LOT of people quit playing because most people felt the maps were too hard to get through, so there's this juxtaposition of peak of content with lots of people quitting the game. I also felt the maps were really frustrating and I only learned to love them over time. IBS 5-6 caused an exodus of players but HoT also caused a major exodus
Teapot + Wooden Potatoes Collab incoming :D ?
I would bring Path of Fire up to A or S tier. Balthazar was a great antagonist, Elite Specializations were good and mounts were introduced.
Agreed!
path of fire mounts deflated the game a lot for me. I agree with teapot's sentiment that this is around when gw2 departed from my own preferences.
@@matthewjw98 this comes down to personal preference. In my case, the mount system drew me to the game and is still by far my favorite part of the game. Even now with this expansion, doing the warclaw chain mechanic on the bosses in the second map, looks and feels so nice
@@matthewjw98 I love the mount but to me they killed the exploration, like everything is so fast / you can skip a lot of things and now that the mount's are here there is no "mini puzzle jump" to reach panorama anymore kinda sad
@@Just-Yap yeah but you dont have to use the mounts right? you are saying that the mounts ruined the experience, but you are very much welcome to not use them. I might agree on that when it comes to meta events, when everybody is flying around you cant walk obviously, but still for solo exploration you can do it without mounts. I usually set myself rules like every 10-15 level I allow myself to use a new mount starting with raptor, or putting limits for myself in certain maps like here you wont be using skyscale etc.
HoT also introduced the Mastery System which really showed the potential of "Horizontal Progression" and that not increasing Item/Level Caps is a viable approach to expansions.
facts
Nothing, literally nothing has ever been able to hold even a half lit candle to heart of thorns. It was peak of peak. It made all other MMO's look like slop, it make gw2 vanilla look like slop. I just wish the mouth of mordremoth didn't get DPSed in 5 seconds nowadays
I don’t get why they do not up the hp on that one. Not all metas need to be hp sponges but thats an elder dragon and also it’s almost a waste of resources to have such an epic fight and have it die immediately. Also despite the public outcry they should really disable mounts there.
I honestly don't get why they don't go back and rebalance Dragons Stand. It's such a great encounter that gets completely spoilt by power creep.
Id say path of fire, season 4 and end of dragons wss peak, but what i know,
Atleast we are at a decent to good spot storywise again, unlike in Secret of the Obscure, not sure how that went so bad.
56:20 Something else I always thought was really clever about the "return to" achievements was that they very directly incentivized everybody to play chronologically through the game's history - and finish the most recent chapter right on time for that very same 10-year story arc to be concluded in the expansion!
Heart of Thorns felt for me Dark Souls but in MMORPG style. Insane zone design. Verticality fantastic. Masteries impactful. Gliding absolutely brilliantly implemented within this expansion. High quality and repeatable Meta's. Event density fantastic. Cool minigames. Challenge and diffuculty was very high.
Gliding ever since HoT has become my favorite traversal tool in any videogame.
Only real issue HoT has was its weak story.
it was pure nostalgia, actually having to learn the maps, verticality without being able to cheese it with mounts. I dont like how masteries and mounts spread across the entire game, it would have been way cooler if each area or expansion had its own little gimmick. Also I feel like HoT was way more balanced and the world felt challenging but not impossible. You had to group for certain things or make a unique build to solo it.
Man I miss the queensdale champ train lol I remember waking up before school to play for an hour or so in the morning and hoping that the train would be running
The Ice Brood Saga Champions brought Dragon Strom. A fun instance that has a public and private version that gets played every single day by many gamers. It gives nice rewards, eye infusions and the fight itself is a visual and memorable spectacle.
The tunnel just brought despair.
For me Champions is basically the incarnation of all thats wrong with GW2.
It killed off one great dragon plot that was lead by Jormag, and gratiously also murdered Primordus without even his own expansion/season - Considering his historical relevance feels like a cheap kill-off, almost out of screen.
Everything felt rushed, the rewards are grindy and the instance novelty, and dissapointing end made me quit for like half a year if not longer.
Legit was, for me, the worse part of GW2 so far, IBS in general is divisive, and i loved it in general and thought it was setting something cool and right at the end it ruined everything for me.
I still don't have the whole mastery line done in that season / proto-expansion.
Rarely if ever i do dragonstorm, kinda pisses me off to watch them get rid of two elder dragons like that.
The only memorable thing about Dragonstorm is the worst cutscene in the game.
Dragonstorm being a good daily money maker does *not* mean that it was good content or good story.
Yeah, tons of people do Dragonstorm daily for the high roll chance and the 2 gold, but literally everything else about champions was bottom of the barrel. It was the most boring and low effort set of releases they have EVER done IMO, and it made it super obvious to the community that they only did it to finish the elder dragon saga as fast as possible.
@@thomaskelley2641 This so much.
The same can be said for what Teapot says about Convergences in the video. He mentions convergences, then says Umbriel is fun and therefore Convergences are good. No they are not, apart from Umbriel they are mind-numbingly boring and pose 0 challenge. They are modern day DRM's with better rewards.
@@snowdropfox5754 the worst cut scene is that childish flex robo scene after amytas meta... DS end cut scene has fun barf kiss at least😂
WTH?! Path of Fire had the best story and story missions of all the expansions! How can you put it on the same low-tier as SotO? Are you crazy??
Totally with you on this. This was the only part of the list that really bothered me. I would also put Season 3 one tier lower, it really wasn't that special imo.
@@Neonlike0From a pvp standpoint, PoF was really painful for a lot of players. Spellbreaker was ripping boons from hordes of people at once, along with scourge, only held in check by firebrand spamming boons like no tomorrow. It made a really, really unfun pvp meta that took way too long to fix.
I guess it’s down to taste, I love the mounts but it’s my least favorite expansion story and map wise and I don’t really like any of the elite specs either (they’re strong, I‘m not denying that, but I don’t like how they play) PoF is definitely the place I revisit least, even below champions lol
Story is not the whole story (heh gottem). Mounts basically destroying core and HoT maps plus highly overpowered elite specs destroying core/HoT PvE content and completely dominating PvP content is very important context to keep in mind when talking about PoF. The insane amount of power creep changed the game completely, and not in a good way for a lot of people. SOTO was a nothing burger... but at least it didn't actively destroy the game.
Story isn't everything, my guy. That's not the single reason that everyone plays the game.
For the record, I agree with you that PoF had some of the best story this game has ever had, and playing through it first time had me GRIPPED. But Teapot said multiple times that he's *not* a story/open world player, which realistically is all that PoF had going for it for a while. The competitive scene around that time was absolute trash and the new elite specs (mostly Scourge, Firebrand, and at the time Mirage) completely dominated everything in PvP and WvW. A lot of those players quit during PoF, so it is explicitly not a good expansion for them.
Something that veterans of GW2 may miss about the Core experience is that the LEVELING experience feels extremely fresh for a new player. Especially one that's played a bunch of MMOs. It's insane to think that a leveling experience that's more than 10 years old at this point feels fresh and innovative today.
Honestly, I stuck till 80 and bought the expansions solely for that reason. THEN I had "the Octovine moment" and fell in love with the game.
The teaser for HoT is what made me buy GW2. This was also the first 50% off sale right around that time. I leveled on a staff ele, they changed how condi worked, I switch to condi DD ele, then scepter warhorn tempest after HoT dropped. I remember dumping a lot of gold into crafting exotic viper gear because black diamonds were so expensive.
PoF is at least A tier, if not S. Mounts were the biggest addition to the game, changed the way we travel and explore the open world. Griffon is the best mount in all of MMOs
Lowland Shore's arena event chain giving us open world bosses with interesting, unique, and fun mechanics is giving me hope for the upcoming raidvergence.
I would swap PoF and EoD. The mounts that Path of Fire added became top in class mount implementation of any MMO, I think that alone is enough to grant PoF a way higher ranking.
this
Me almost at the end of Icebrood Saga : PAIN SUFFERING EMPTINESS ANGER BOREDOM.
So many emotions !
End of Dragon better be a banger or I'll go crazy.
I'm gonna disagree on HoT having weak story. It has a simple narrative sure but it puts you in goddam vietnam, the most powerful army in Tyria The Pact is getting shredded left and night and it puts you dead center of it. The mordrem are creeping out of the dark to steal the living and the dead, the jungle holds secrets that no one has seen for millennia and everything drives forward to one clear point. Kill Mordremoth. You don't know who you can trust, you don't know what the night holds and you keep trudging forwards with weapons made out of literal scrap metal. It's hard AF.
HoT was peak GW2. No doubt. What a time it was.
I feel blessed now for having taken a long hiatus after getting my skyscale in season 4 and completely missing the despair of Ice Brood Saga lol
Haven't even watched the video yet, but... That thumbnail is the peak of clickbait, got me hook, line and sinker LMAO
i think he secretly really loves champions, he certainly seems to think about it often
Bro I was about to post something similar so good. Haha. Kinda sad IBS started real strong, kinda like SOTO opening. Oh well
I expected this video to be sort of "easy content" for views but it is in fact such a rollercoaster, Teapot's "my life in Guild Wars 2", a lot of hot takes but overall a super passionate summary, I'm now afraid Teapot could actually leave GW2 😢
I have the worst sense of direction ever, and I absolutely love Tangled Depths. I had to do map completion 9 times to even remotely be able to find my way around, and I got extremely frustrated at times, but it doesn't matter. That map could almost be a game in and of itself.
I remember having to go to skill trainers or do open world objectives for traits which is crazy to me looking at the current game.
HoT’s map creativity is was probably the best ever created on any MMO. The vertical layers on maps, the constant sense of happening and of course the map wide coordinated meta events were just in a class of their own. Nothing ever came close to that level of detail after wards.
tier list videos are the most HYPE. My tier list as someone who values the lore/story and plays mostly casually until recently:
S-tier:
LWS4 (simply the highest production value, best story in the game so far, consistent content that felt well paced. Great maps (Kourna being the exception), Roller Beetle, ELONA. Never had this much confidence in the game, vibes were great, just an incredible package.)
Path of Fire (again great story, high production value, brought mounts which are probably the single most important addition to the game EVER and set GW2 as best in class for that aspect of MMORPGs. Launch hype was some of the most fun playing the game. Griffon still makes me happy to this day, such a high skill ceiling and what a rush to ride. Not super replayable due to lack of metas, but that first playthrough alone earns it S tier in my heart. Also, ELONA)
A-tier:
LWS3 (again great production value, this is the moment when the GW2 story found its footing at last. Fantastic maps, some of the best in the game. Masteries were kind of lame and one-off, but overall a consistently great package with intriguing lore)
Heart of Thorns (only downside keeping it from S tier is the story was too short and extremely rushed near the end, plus the content drought afterwards. Introduced masteries and elite specs which set the baseline for the rest of development, what a fantastic idea. Maps were so obviously leagues above any other maps at the time they felt like playing a different game. Brought gliding which was super fun and changed the game, just not to the extent mounts did. Metas were AWESOME, I actually prefer Tarir to even Dragon's Stand - the feeling of getting that first clear in the last few seconds as we all cheer south to finish, the music reaching a crescendo, and the doors flinging open as all the players pour into the center chamber was pure gaming MAGIC and represents the best of GW2.)
Janthir Wilds launch (story is extremely good, first map is probably the best they've done so far. Second map is weaker gameplay-wise, but stronger vibe-wise imo - everytime I see the loading screen I love it, just gives that vibe of dreary, rainy and cold, and yet somehow also cozy? Hard to describe. Great setup, misses S-tier because not enough replayable content and not quite strong enough on the first go to get over that like PoF is for me. Still incredible, great step in the right direction, gives a lot of confidence in the content model. The content map to come looks great as well, SO happy they are doing two smaller maps instead of splitting up one larger one).
B-tier:
SoTO launch (great new lore with the Wizard's Court, and a big step away from the cringe writing of EoD. Isgarren is the most intriguing character they have written in years. This and JW mark a big improvement in the game's writing, showing much more respect and deference to the world and what has come before. Loses points because I felt the maps were weak and the first meta is meh. I enjoy the Amnytas meta however.)
Icebrood Saga 1-4 (at the time I was meh on IBS - it was just so anti-hype after LWS4 to have no new expac, and the vibes were definitely down in the community at this point. In hindsight though, most of IBS has aged fairly well. Bangar is an AWESOME character, the story threads were interesting but rushed, and the 3 maps are honestly some of the best in the game and all have a good distinct feeling. Grothmar is 100% exploration and the metas are sidelines, Bjora strikes a balance of exploration and metas, and then Drizzlewood is 100% meta with exploration more sidelined. I think if the vibes weren't so bad and returning to Eye of the North all the time and AFKing wasn't so boring, this could have been one of the more well regarded chapters in GW2.)
Core: Man, what a time to be alive. I was so HYPED for gw2, and the launch was something special. The epic story culminating with the march to Orr was so epic. This was the closest the game felt to an epic fantasy akin to LotR - exploring Orr felt dangerous and mysterious, and really felt like an invasion. Obviously, Zhaitan sucked. But the core game has so many good experiences, it helps balance out the downsides like bad story instance battles, bugs, poor endgame, etc).
C-tier:
EoD (I hated the EoD story. The writing is so cringe in this expansion, jade tech is boring and a mistake, and the void is a disappointing final enemy faction. Cantha deserved better. EoD ends up here because the gameplay itself was incredible, so the bad story is balanced out. Clearing Dragon's End with seconds to spare for the first time after failing 5ish times was up there with Tarir as a HYPE core memory. I was going hardcore in FFXIV at the time, and I remember reading about HT:CM at the time and how GW2 finally had extremely difficult content, and I thought that was excellent. I have no desire to do it myself, but having hard content is good for a game even if very few players actually do it - it's aspirational goal-setting stuff, and having exclusivity and rare-ness in an MMO has so many knock-on effects to players who won't ever do it - it hypes the community, gives legitimacy to the game for outside players, and is always valuable.)
SoTO post-launch (I returned to the game as the final story chapter came out, so I didn't experience the "one hour of story every three months" issue, which dramatically improved my opinion of this content relative to others. I thought the story WAS good - forcing General Nephus to join our side was cool, Peitha is a great character, and learning about the lore of the Kryptis and their Houses was cool. This loses points because Inner Nayos is boring and same-y, and the metas are not bad but not good. Also, while I felt the story itself was good, it was definitely rushed and they obviously couldn't fit the grand scope of what they were going for in this content model).
LWS2 (Not bad, the story was still finding its footing and was slow and drawn out, spiked with some hype moments like the Shadow of the Dragon. Story instances still needed work, and I remember the model of slowly releasing already small maps over several content instances felt weak. Big improvement over LWS1, but still lacking in content outside of the story instances.)
D-tier:
LWS1 (Points for creativity, they were trying to do the live service model years before a lot of other games got it right. However, this was a flop. Content was drip-fed at way too slow a pace, ESPECIALLY for such an important time when you're trying to retain the massive playerbase from launch. The writing was AWFUL - Scarlet was a horrifically bad villain, a Harley Quinn wannabe with cringe dialogue, the "enemy faction teamup of the month" formula was boring and predictable, and it felt like a massive step down from the seriousness of core story. Only bright spot was the destruction of Lion's Arch being really cool and a great idea).
What Lies Beneath (Boring map, boring meta, somehow even more cringe story than EoD. Glad I wasn't playing when this dropped. Not much to say, other than once again Cantha deserved better),
F-tier:
Champions (I mean what else is there to say that hasn't already been said? DRMs are a fine concept but man were they handled poorly here - they should be an extension of the patch content, not the content itself. Story was butchered, lore was trashed - I quit until EoD, my brother quit the game entirely. This would get up to D-tier if we include the Season of the Dragons return to content (which was excellent and inspired, having just finished it), but I do not - that was more of it's own release. The absolute low point of the game for me.)
YO I LOVE TO SEE THIS MASSIVE WELL WRITTEN COMMENT
@@MightyTeapot Appreciated! Your tier list content was what got me back into the game, it was actually seeing your meta events tier list on my algorithm that started the spiral of content watching that drew me back into GW2 and inspired me to take the game a little more seriously/have a better sense for things like goal setting. Ended up watching the entire Zero to Hero playlist, good stuff
Yep, that's pretty much bang on with my own thoughts. PoF really got me hooked into GW2 and is when I really started playing
It's so interesting to see how differently players rate the expacs, I'd swap HoT and PoF around. Didn't enjoy the former and loved the latter.
As someone who didn't join GW2 until the steam launch I don't think I could have gotten through HoT if mounts didn't exist. I can see why a veteran such as Teapot would see the negatives but for me it could only be positive for someone like myself who didn't understand the game well at all by the time I entered HoT and even today don't consider myself to be a good player of the game. Being eaten alive by pocket raptors over and over would only make me quit the game and never return, which would have been a major shame because I have come to really love GW2, even if I'm not great at it.
That is fair and I share a similar opinion. I played it at launch and I felt it was not really as good as some make it out to be. In particular I hate Metroidvania games and HOT turned GW2 into that. "Want to progress? Level to learn the ixal language!" prior to HOT the game did not put as many blockers to just clearing the story and I blame HOT for the existence of those green bar quests that still exists today to stretch story bits out... speaking of fun fact before HOT the core game did not have the 10 level gap requirements to progress the story. I typically look for the extra stuff after the main story is complete so this was a bit annoying as it forced you to play extra content and wear it out. I also felt throwing major story in meta events was a bad decision. You end up playing the story out of order because event X Y or Z was not active for you. I actually did quit the game at the time and moved on to another MMO before I was gifted Path of Fire at some later date and to me Path of Fire is the S+ tier expansion as it got me back into the game.
I played core then left and didn’t return until after HoT and PoF were over and I bought both at 50% off. Hated HoT. It was empty and I was alone and lost and eaten alive everywhere I turned. Decided to skip ahead to PoF to get the mounts first. Those who played in real time with a huge player base out there at the same time should understand it’s a far different experience for players coming in after the honeymoon of these maps. HoT maos still stress me out to this day. I avoid them.
I wanna say I appreciate your content alot, the energy your bring when you explain hype things combined with your overall insight of the game makes for very entertaining content. Been really helpful for improving my gameplay in GW2.
icebrood saga was pretty good, but the announcement live stream was such a punch in the gut. C tier just for that
It’s funny how polarizing Tangled Depths is, with a lot of people I see these days bemoan getting lost there-but I can definitely concede it’s intricate design (and the chak are sweet imo)
After all those years and almost 10k hours, I still remember entering Verdant Brink for the first time. Nothing compares to that moment.
Heart of thorns maps are a nightmare I hate going there
JESUS CHRIST FINALLY
How have none of the top GW2 youtubers made this video until now? Such a freebee and I'd totally be interested
I was waiting for this tier list. Good job on it
Glad you prefaced this video by saying that it’s not objective and only reflects your own personal experience of the game and your memories from when you first played it, even though most people will ignore, or didn’t listen to your introduction to the video. This really isn’t a rating of what the game is like. It’s a personal rating of how you remember the game and how you feel about it (which is fine).
This is media criticism, we can't speak objectively unless you are talking about strictly factual things like player numbers, texture resolution and so on.
That one time Karka event was the biggest fail in GW2 history and the biggest dissapointment, for many of us.
Devs was the middle of their experimenting how to optimise the game. I had a mid range PC, I and 95% of my guild mates see nothing but 15-20 player near around and nothing else. NOTHING. We blindly shoting and place AOE, just for same kill. We cant see when bigger karkas come. We died from invisible karkas roll. Naked, dead player mountains everywhere, while lagging...
Oh, and the end reward... Guild chat was so toxic for days…
I was there for it; have two ancient karka shell accessories, no precursors
Front page of twitch for the tunnel update btw
And icing on the cake was that the meta was bugged on release
Yeah that was rough lol
lol, I hadn't even heard about it but I thought that Gyala was so bad I never even returned to explore part 2 of that map
94 minutes? I'm here for it!!!
Core had issues as to what to do after 80. Half the systems we have now, but the game was new and fun. Discovery and experimentation with builds, skill level rising,...
Season 1 and 2 are just wasted time, nothing to see here if you ask me.
HoT was the real thing. Hyped so much, introduced so many systems, actually had one of only fun open worlds in GW2. Introduced fun elite specs that weren't completely broken, well some of them took a bit to fix, but still designed superbly. Only real problem i had with it was desert borderland and not even for the map itself, i still don't hate it like some do, but middle event that lagged the map out for 20min every hour or so... Completely unplayable. Guilds started using guild halls for GvGs, with some really fun tourneys during this time. Hell i even tried out raids and although i sucked at it and than just had no time for it due to having so much fun in wvw, it's only piece of PvE i more or less enjoyed playing.
Season 3, ok, for a living season after 1 and 2 it was good, introduced ways to get ascended trinkets, which helped a lot.
Pof... well pof introduced power creep on another level, brought little outside of PvE, but ok i guess. I didn't care for mounts and was actively against them and i kinda still am, they don't add anything to gameplay per say, only thing i enjoy is racing with beetle. And why introduce it to WvW to, come on. I guess it was still fine for a time, altough start of it decimated a lot of communities due to broken specs.
Season 4, everything formulaic and well boring tbh.
Somewhere here i basically quit and only occasionally came back, like for EoD that i didn't even finish.
IBS, completely botched presentation, no specs, pve more of the same, hell even raids are dropped.
If ANet didn't take 3 years to get HoT out, i think they'd kept some of the dedicated playerbase, but by the time HoT came out higher end communities were so decimated that there was so much whining they had to go and nerf it and PoF 2 years later just cemented the casual nature of the game. Open world and story,...
Wouldn't it be neat if you could spin-up an HoT map that has mounts disabled? Maybe have it so that if mounts are enabled you have less rewards for events but when using a mount-disabled map you can get full or better rewards.
Full trolling mode on the thumbnail xD
for me, I started playing this game around EOD so it goes like this... EOD>JH>POF>HOT>Base Game>LWS1>IS>SOTO>LWS4>LWS3>LWS2, I was grinding out Ascention during SOTO, but I liked PVP then, I was mostly playing Reaper/Mesmer tho, I wasn't much good on other professions, but Spellbreaker War, and Dragonhunter were good, I remember this one match I 1v3ed the other team on my DH, when the 3v3 was going on, it was the best feeling ever it felt like i really earned that Ascention lol.
Now tack on the GW1 experience for the full immersive Guild Wars tier list
If one paid at least some attention to the story LWS2 was a great buildup, realizing that there was a much more powerful villain behind Scarlet and then following that story of sylvari and their connection to Mordremoth - it was very good like a buildup in dance music before the drop which was HoT, that drop in a way needed that buildup, made Mordremoth feel like a really omnipresent danger, a threat you couldn't avoid. I'd say HoT didn't fully live up to that built tension, yes at the beginning of HoT Mordremoth almost won but that sense of despair and urgency quite quickly dissipated with all those frogs and beetles, flying armored ghosts and "how to train your dragon" minigame.
They need to take their encounters team off of fractals. They are more familiar with strikes and that will probably let them also make ok to good raids moving forward, however, fractals don't play like strikes and every fractal ive seen so far has been designed by someone who has the strike design hard wired into their brain.
Oh my -- an hour and a half! Love seeing HOT at S++, I probably would place it there as well due to some heavy heavy biases. Though, looking back I think the story drops quite quickly at the end.
EOD I'd probably agree with as well. :D
POF should be higher. Dhuum Raid release saved the game at the time
The thing about Silent Surf is just how dang damage-spongey the boss is. I suppose they tuned him for raid rotations? Otherwise I don’t mind it, it just takes four times as long as previous fractals that I’ve experienced
sPvP at the end of PoF burnt me out in a final climax kind of way (I got into 250 after 2 seasons of trying, found the best match for me in offmeta Sagebrand). Friends were already leaving after end of HoT, because PvP was getting worse, and PoF was a last try to get some fun out of the game. I got it, I'm satisfied, and I left.
SotO easy skyscale tempted me back, and EoD fishing made me stay, after a few years' hiatus playing WoW, ESO, Destiny 2, various single player games and BG3.
I always loved fishing and also fished a lot in WoW, got the Accomplished Angler achievement, and I'm happy that fishing is nice income and relevant to GW2's PvE account value increase.
Working my way through the seasons backwards now, I definitely enjoyed SotO and EoD far more than the previous ones, but I think it might just be me being a few years older and being biased about the previous expansions when I wasn't in a good state of mind.
I don't think people who weren't there can truly comprehend how insane a time S1 was. It had to be the most unhealthy MMO development of all time and it was a blast.
Interesting to see everyone agreeing at HoT being top of the top, I never thought of it that highly. Obviously people loved it so more power to them, not trying to undermine anyone's opinion, but I personally DESPISE the HoT maps. Verticality in maps always throws me for a loop and I spent the majority of HoT not exploring, but getting hopelessly lost in the randomest areas with no idea of how to get to where I wanted to be. I found the PoF maps significantly more navigable, the Janthir ones I like even more, but nothing beats core Tyria for me. Could be just nostalgia and probably is just nostalgia. But nonetheless, core Tyria maps just have such a strong, unique air of immersion about them, and the vanilla OST is, well, probably the all-time best MMO OST. They'll always be my favourite.
Lowland Shore is probably the best map since Verdant Brink. I'd tune the difficulty of stuff up and make events spawn less often but it is just great stuff. It gives a glimpse of what it could be if JW was made with HoT budget. And if we are to get less stuff, I'll always take 1 Lowland shore over 4 living story maps.
I'm glad to hear how much you love Dragon's stand. It really is the best meta, I just wish it was more rewarding.
I share the same sentiment of the vanilla and HoT on top. The base game and HoT are so unique and innovative, offering genre-defining gameplay. It becomes really hard to beat those. I also agreed that EoD the most fun among the rest of the contents delivered.
Rod brought me back to the game after like 3 years of stop. We're I just logged once to unlock season chapters but didn't played them until EoD.
I complete agree with Teapot on Season 4. I love everything except the Dragonfall map, "You're fighting an uber dragon and you beat him down by popping pimples on him" lol.
Technically they did add a legendary spear in JW launch, being as everyone who has SotO/JW can now craft a Kamo much more easily rather than relying on the market/collections.
My version looks very similar, with a few minor changes. I'd swap LWS3 and LWS4, I'd have kept SotO in C, and most notably, I'd have dropped EoD down to just below Path of Fire. I still don't get what people see in that expac, its only redeeming feature to me was the fact that Seitung was pretty.
A pleasure to hear this little history lesson taught with passion, and generally having the same feelings it was a good trip down memory lane.
I agree with the intro, but Hot is objectively the best tho 😁(and tangle depth is the best map, based) and unraveling core game is definetly one of my best gaming memory, maps are just great.
Did skyscale break design? Of course, but I wouldn’t call it a full flying mount. It has an energy pool to manage altitude.
Full flying is unrestricted flight.
Icebrood saga gets over hated but all the maps are great, Drizzlewood being on of my top 5, the Story was great , I still wanna see what happens to Bengar (one of the best villians in the game) in the future with his trial and the vote for Khan Ur being teased in Janthir, which I could see Bengar helping us fight the titans.
I was there since HoT, but champions completely broke me. I needed champions to be something which would distract me and keep me in a positive bubble, but it managed to do the exact opposite (mostly due to how that year went).
Still to this day, I am not confident about returning to gw2. I play few weeks a year now, compared to 7-8hrs daily before.
How did you ever have time to play 7-8 hours every day?? No wonder I’ve always felt “behind” on this game.
Heart of Thorns, Path of Fire and the Living World stories between and after them are the best content in the game. That's when the NCSoft was spending real money on retaining talent, developing AAA quality content, etc... The introduction of elite specializations, masteries in HoT and the entire mount system in PoF and the importance of these mechanics to the game can not be understated and seeing where you rank PoF has me tuned out... I suppose you can be critical of the story telling itself, that's subjective of course... The new expansion we see repurposing of the sphere and Warclaw and a new player housing system, that while nicely designed doesn't really add much... I think the new expansion is kind of a love letter from the studio to long time players, clearly low-budget and not good enough to pull in a lot of new players, but with a 12 year old game, pleasing your base is the right move. So I respect those who rate it highly for what it is.
I would love for them to go back to icebrood and pick it up and piledrive it out. Just re-do everything that isnt up to scratch. Some stuff is okay and just probably needs a touch up. E.g I kinda like the occasional drizzlewood meta.
But DRMs need to be revamped/thrown to the side and re do the story to add in details that bring it in line with itself and feel good to play through.
Great list! Agree with everything in the list except I'd put PoT in A, Season 3 in B, and EoD in B
Story player here. I stopped playing during IBS champions. That ending had killed my excitement for the story.
Only came back 2 years later lol
I agree with most points made here
Just cannot agree to PoF...
It was a really thematic and beautiful expansion with greatly designed elite specs
Its up high for me
Soto was lower down for me...
Janthie is right up there for me too
Weird to see S2 very low on the list. Silverwaste laid the foundation for meta event design in gw2. It was lauded as the best open world content in any mmo (which is still the trademark for gw2 til this day).
I still really wonder how much of the people's reception to Janthir Wilds is ''well its not as bad as SoTo'' and that relief is causing people to overrate it immensely.
I did decima for the first time yesterday, and he decimated me. So from my PoV, it's not really a tank n' spank encounter at all. I haven't done the other one yet though
Played actively since release until Season 4 - dropped the game just before Icebrood Saga (just had more fun with other games I guess, never had the urge to return). Nothing will ever come close to Heart of Thorns. If the game wasn't sold on how casual-friendly it is for the previous four years, everybody would be talking about it today as the best expansion for an MMO ever.
About the IBS presentation, I was actually in the audience.I made the weekend trip down to Seattle to see it.
Honestly though, in person, it was a ton of fun. The devs were hanging out with us before and after, answering questions and just chatting. The trailers with a theater sound setup were cool, and everyine was excited.
The NCSoft Marketing guy was super awkward and everyone in the audience was vaguely unconfortable. There's no getting around that. But it was a small piece of the event.
Overall I dont regret going at all.
I'll be honest, GW2 is the only game that feels like a golden age whenever I'm playing it. Started back in Path of Fire launch, played ever since on and off sometimes even for years and this game never stops to amaze me when I come back.
EDIT:
While I agree Heart of Thorns is a great expansion, I feel like there's huge nostalgia factor in play when you put it that high. New player experience is not really that good nowadays in this expansion, so I hard disagree with the "core new player experience" thing you said there. Was it a golden age back then? Maybe, but I just wanted to say that out of 4 my friends that started playing GW2 last year, none of them likes HoT lol.
I'm speaking from my opinion, for me HoT is what Guild Wars 2 is all about, it's not nostalgia, I actually prefer the game that way, you'll see my opinion is VERY consistent too, I like stuff like Dragon's End, melee oriented WvW metas, a highly competitive scene, fresh air tempest and so on lol, all of those things were how the game was in HoT, and that's the kind of gaming I like.
I massively reject this nostalgia claim, it's quite an unpleasant dismissal of my opinion by essentially saying that I'm delusional and don't remember it accurately. The game WAS different back then (and there is mountains of evidence that very clearly shows this), the game DID cater to players like me more (that's not even debateable, they had full esports lol), and therefore unsurpsrisingly I preferred that version of the game.
Mounts, nerfs and power creep kinda ruined hot now.
But it's absolutely the best, maps, meta, raids, pvp/wvw, class specs... Nah godtier.
@@marmeus I just absolutely hate traveling on those maps, it's very laberynthic and unfun
@@Sac-chan that's the worst part of HoT maps for me as well. Maps are too vertical and too confusing. Now with Skyscale it's more bearable in some cases, but before with gliding and mushroom jumping as primary way of traversal, it was just a chore.
@@Sac-chan precisely what make them good for me, you had to engage with the design
I'm a medroivania enjoyer so what can I say, they are just the best imo
to be fair out of all i liked PoF the most along with season/LS4. It was such a nice experience especially because there was an interaction with gods.
HoT was as well a good one but to this days i hate and love those maps.
The one i was enjoying as well was core gw2 story but after all these years i am still disappointed how it ended.
To put Soto on the same level as PoF is a crime. Soto was so much worse. In general, PoF was rated too low in my opinion. The rest is pretty okay. HoT was really good in its day, but Twisted Depths is the shittiest map in all of Guild Wars 2 to date.
Tangled depths you mean. I feel like people who dislike tangled depths are the ones who played HoT with mounts. Because that is the one map that is a pain to transverse even if you have mounts. I played without the mounts back then cause I wanted to do story in order and let me tell you.
Verdant brink was a challenge and a pain to go through. It made me want to get all masteries related to mushrooms and gliding. Auric basin aswell, certain areas blocked by vines with no springer, very hard hero points to solo at the time, and when I got to Tangled depthsm it was just another very challenging map.
But today I can grab my mount and I will breeze through all of them except tangled depths. Verdant brink terrain is not a problem haven't died of fall damage or out of bounds in ages and Auric Basin mobs have been powercrept. I think tangled depths gets more hate than it deserves.
Everything that led up to cantha was GW2's golden age. It's been a holding pattern since then. I don't think we've really dropped off, but i don't think it's peaked since then.
Core gw2 did have raids. Those massive world boss metas were the raids and they were larger in scale that anything offered in Azeroth. Peak would have been path of fire though simply because Hot is where Gw2 really started taking off.
Then we have Janthir.... This expansion is gonna bring good things. It's already the best expansion pve gameplay wise.
Core game is my favorite time for Guild Wars 2. Back when it was harder and the world bosses failed all the time. Back when power was properly reduced when entering lower level zones and no max level characters were over powered. Back when every scary thing around every corner was a champion, until they removed all of them from the game. Back when you had to roam around and collect skill points and could freely unlock any skill you wanted in any order. Back before mounts fucked up the size of the game world and ruined map design.
They fucked the game up for a while after Core and then slowly added everything back into the game. Solved the downscaling problem by never releasing a zone below 60 so it's no longer a problem. Added champions back all over the new maps. You collecting skill points again they are just called mastery points. Solved the mount problem by designing so many maps that are only mount maps. Even though I still think the game would be better with only ground mounts and all their unique mobility moves.
Not sure what I would say is best after Core. Every expansion has done damage to all the previous ones. Each new mode of travel and each new wave of meta events does damage to all the previous modes of travel and meta events. I think I would choose heart of thorns, the extra traversal options were fantastic and it hadn't been ruined by the addition of mounts. Once mounts are added I think the game was noticeably worse all the way up until the secrets of the obscure and Janthir Wilds, now I'm ok with the flying mounts but I still wouldn't pick those time periods as my favorite.
Path of fire was greater than EOD by far
S POF: Amazing lore/culture, maps, and exploration. Great story. Fun especs. MOUNTS!
S Core: The foundation of the game and combat system. Great lore/culture and maps. Story had meaningful choices.
S JW Launch: Great lore/culture. 1st map is amazing. Story is good. Spears are fun. Warkitty is fun!
A EOD: Maps are absolutely beautiful and filled with lore/culture. Especs are fun. Story is decent. Jade bot is useful.
A SOTO Launch: Great story. Skywatch is beautiful, fun, and filled with lore. Weapon masteries are great.
A HOT: Verdant Brink and Auric Basin are fun to explore and have good metas. Decent especs. Gliding. Tangled Depths is hit and miss.
A S4: Great story. Maps are fun to explore but not enough culture for return visits. Fun metas. PRAISE JOKO!
B S3: Good story. Useful collections/vendors.
B S1: Nostalgia mostly. Unique story. Old LA.
C IBS: Some fun maps. Decent story. METAL LEGION!
D SOTO Seasonal: Mostly a letdown in story after a great start. New weapons are meh. Inner Nayos is bland.
D WLB: Bad. Story was not compelling. Meta is okay.
NA S2: Didn't play.
Unlike you, as a newer player. PoF is what get me into GW2 after hearing about for so long. I like the diversity of the game, more options, classes, maps, mounts, quests, story...etc. To me PoF is PEAK GW2.
I wish I knew about this game at its release. Where was I? Sinking my entire soul and life into a game that I have come to hate because this game showed me how alt friendly an MMO can be and how the game doesn't just dismiss hard work you put in when the new expansion comes out. I played WoW from vanilla launch to shadowlands and my friend told me about this game. When I played it first I was very skeptical of how everything worked. Vistas even made me raise an eyebrow. After a few months of going against the grain, so to speak in terms of my perception of what a MMO is. This game is amazing. The content is great.
However I do agree with Teapot that this game is not geared toward higher end gamers. I have been in the hardcore raiding scene in WoW, getting server first raid kills 400 plus wipes on an encounter to get it down. This game does not appease to that crowd so I can understand teapots PoV. As far as the ranking itself goes great content teapot! HoT may have been the greatest but you will never change my opinion of pocket raptors. F THOSE THINGS haha But on a serious note HoT is where I go when I want the game to be challenging to me in the open world. Matter of fact I am working on aurora right now. Which I know is season 3 but season 3 zones still feel harder then say SOTO.
Personally I loved Path of Fire. Loved the zones, the story, the mounts and progression, this was followed by Season 4!
I do agree with most parts. Two exceptions though:
As someone who started after HoT I strongly disagree with it's ranking. At first I utterly disliked it but it did grow on me. Still, after many years of GW2 I don't like it enough to see it as anything higher than A-tier.
On the other Hand, I always love going back to PoF. Obviously that's just personal taste. However, even if you try to be a bit more objective: PoF brought the industry-best mount system. HoT Masteries don't even compete. Sure, you got Raids in HoT, but they are irrelevant to most players. Some of the HoT Specs are really weird, for example Druid who has no interaction with the Ranger pet, which is after all the standout feature of Ranger. Or the Chronomancer which made any other tanking irrelevant for years. Or the Introduction of Revenant, which allowed you to play core as a class that is technically not invented at that point in the story. Overall, putting HoT at S++ is pure BS.
In my eyes both HoT and PoF are A, both with strengths and weaknesses, but definitely not 3 tiers apart.
Aside from those 2 I agree with your list. And I am hoping for S-tier updates to Janthir Wilds.
I was so scared for the core game. Totally agree with you
Hey wait a minute... didn't fractals come with Season 1 and not HOT? I also remember HOT partially killing WvW because no one liked whatever they did at the time to the Desert map they added in with that expansion which they then removed from the game only to bring back much later.
Really appreciate your passion for the game and well articulated honest and open opinions!!! Does ANET deserve you? Maybe...
I love GW2 and have played since 2013: Teapot really opened up a wound for me talking about icebrood saga champions........sigh. I immediately went back and watched the video from WP where the footage ends because the final patch was less than 30 min.(WP barely posts videos anymore on GW2, only streams, which saddens me incredibly) I almost want them to retcon shit and retroactively make an expansion around Primordus or even both Jormag and Primordus separately in their own expansions. It is STILL such a fakin slap in the face to the entire lore and story of GW2. I have said this before to many people but I believe that Primordus deserved a "heart of thorns level" expansion which would explore the depths of Tyria where we would find old asuran civilizations, DWARSFSSSSS?!?!?! etc. How they just killed off without any payoff THE ORIGINAL ELDER DRAGON!!!!!!! is a travesty that can only be mended by them redoing the story. I´m sorry for being a downer but the elder dragons storyline was THE storyline of GW2 built up over 10 years. It was very clear from what was given in the "icebrood saga champions" that the studio did not care or have respect for the lore or story in any way.
Agree on skyscale, it shouldn't have been added as it basically replaced all other mounts more or less.
It truly doesn't.
Is convinient but not efficient.
Griffon/Beetle will always beat it at long travel. Warclaw too, raptor maybe, depends.
Springer beats it on the vertical depending on the level design.
The only mount truly suffering right now is the Jackal, only real use currently is portals.
If you know maps and want to be efficient, you will use most mounts a lot more, but for chill play, yeah, 3D movement as slow as it is, is convinient.
@@dragonfangalexander Sure still think it was a mistake to release it the way it is designed now. I use it all the time, because it is convenient as it can handle pretty much every obstacle that the game throws at you. It could probably do all the PoF content save for the jackals portals.
I just think it is too good, other mounts have draw backs that makes you use them only for specific situations while the skyscale can handle almost all of them, that is why I think it was a bad design from Anet to add it they way it was designed. But now that they have released it with its current design, I would not remove or make it weaker it as the would just piss a lot of people off.
If GW2 never lived up to it's potential then ranking core high would have been nostalgia bait. But it did, and GW2 continues to improve over time.
Listening to this tier list it makes me wonder WTF anet did with their money after path of fire which was a pretty big success.
1:09:37 I still feel it's half the amount of content than what we got for a living season (3 or 4), disguised as an "expansion"
Janthir has a lack of long term play atm. I find myself more interested in carrying on with vision instead of playing the janthir maps, done the maps and completed story. Homestead is meh for me
wait, the LW3 maps are not the best for accesories anymore? i still use those maps to get that, whats better then ????
"Boneskinner - Classic!" I mean... yeah kinda but let's be honest here if anything it's a classic in totally failed design. Like the whole fight is in theory based around a mechanic that _no one actually ever used_ and this is not a case of "oh it got power crept" like gliding on Gorseval the whole thing was brute forced with Heal Scourges pretty much on day 1. It's great that it still works out as an encounter, obviously.
Haha ironically GW2's mount system is one of the best systems MMORPGs have ever received. With so much power come such responsibilities.
Season 3 into PoF into season 4 was the height of what the studio could accomplish. There were still stinkers like the koruna update but they were crancking out quality like crazy back then. The nightmare fractal, bastion of the penitent and the shiverpeakes map come to mind.
People forget that the times right after HoT and early LWS3 were pretty miserable. I remeber when the junundu worm model accidentaly got put into the live game and the crazy hype it generated. Also how much hate HoT got before they did the big reward rework patch. I think the healing stats were also poorly balanced at the time. Or some nicer memories like the tarir instance swapping for chests. Got my first ascended weapon with that
As forever hater of all pvp content of gw2, PoF is for me S+ tier, most of problems that were existing werent existing for me, so I had ABSOLUTE blast of the time
Hearing about all the Expansions have me wondering for the future, and just once It be fun to have something with a mist clone of the Commander/Wayfinder an evil clone that changes places with you that you play abit, don't know the story around it I just want to have the spiderman's meme :D
EOD s tier... my entire guild quit when eod dropped
seeing teapot talk about core game made me realise how much I miss those times 12 years ago.... and while we can experience most of it by just playing open world on core maps, is not the same things, and got me thinking, how would be cool if we had some seasons for PvP and WvW, and hell even PvE, that LOCKED the elite specs and made everyone play core classes for some time, would be so cool.... he talking about ele dagger/dagger got me nostalgic.... ohh good times, aura for the wins xD