What is the difference between GW1 and GW2 classes?

A few days ago I read a post about how GW1 mesmer was different than what we have now in GW2. They mentioned that elementalist didn't have attunements. Can you guys tell me more about it? I don't have the first game yet so it would be enteresting to hear about that. (Sorry if I misspelled something, english isn't my native language.)

They didnt had class mechanic that is always available. They had distinct skill lines and skills that where asigned to them and thus the corresponding possible playstyles. They had 1 weapon per class and no rigid weaponskills asigned to them, weaponskills were actually optional if you wanted to.Additionally there are some game mechanics that are different in Gw1 and gw2 like hexes which do not exist in gw2.

The gameplay is fundamentally different between the two games, so a direct comparison isn't really possible. GW1 was a tactical game about timing, position and building your skill deck to counter the enemy; gw2 is much more of an action/reflex game.

GW1 was way beyond during its time which GW2 didn't - in my opinion- surpass yet. Combat in gw1 were based on tactical preparation and we're not restricted by weapons unlike what we have right now. I played Ranger in GW1 which is WAAAYYYYY better than GW2 ranger in every angle

Gw1 let you pick a second subclass ie, you could be a Mesmer/warrior.

They didn’t just give you all the skills either, you had to go find them from trainers.

You had followers that went with the same recipe.

I don’t know about others, but I spent more time setting up, preparing, in menus and looking at the wiki than I did actually playing the game.

If you want an example, let's see at mesmer in GW1. They, especially if we are talking about pvp, are debufers. They can make you suffer a lot.

For example:

Cry of Frustration:"Spell. If target foe is using a skill, that foe and all foes in the area are interrupted and take 15...63...75 damage." (15...63...75 damage - difference between numbers depend on stat current skill requires).Such skill is useful against casters like Elementalist, enemy Mesmer, Necro, Monk...

Conjure Phantasm:"Hex Spell. For 2...13...16 seconds, target foe experiences -5 Health degeneration."This is a "direct" damage from mesmers in GW1 :D Very useful against those, who has high resist against physical damage. Yeah... mesmers in GW1 don't have a direct damage like in GW2.

Diversion:"Hex Spell. For 6 seconds, the next time target foe uses a skill, that skill takes an additional 10...47...56 seconds to recharge."

Empathy (PvP):"Hex Spell. (5...13...15 seconds.) Target foe takes 15...39...45 damage whenever it attacks."This skill is especially dangerous against melee characters. Warriors, assassins... If you auto-attack someone with this "hex" on you, each auto-attack will hurt you. And it will hurt you really bad.

Energy Surge:"Elite Spell. Target foe loses 1...8...10 Energy. For each point of Energy lost, that foe and all nearby foes take 9 damage."Energy is mana in GW1.

Energy Tap:"Spell. Target foe loses 4...6...7 Energy. You gain 2 Energy for each point of Energy lost."

Guilt:"Hex Spell. For 6 seconds, the next time target foe casts a spell that targets a foe, the spell fails and you steal up to 5...12...14 Energy from that foe."

As you can see Mesmers in GW1 can disable you in pvp. If you are a warrior with "Empathy" hex on you, you better just stay and do nothing, or die from your own attacks. If you elementalist and you have this hex "Cry of Frustration" or something like this, you will better wait.

You can see a full skill list here: https://wiki.guildwars.com/wiki/List_of_mesmer_skills

There are all skills for all professions. You can examine them if you like and you might understand what's the difference between classes from GW1 and GW2.

And when looking at those damage values, remember that in GW1 at max level you had 480 health with maybe upwards of 600 max if you went all in for gear.

@Azoqu.8917 said:And when looking at those damage values, remember that in GW1 at max level you had 480 health with maybe upwards of 600 max if you went all in for gear.

or you could go the crazy monk thing and make a... what was it? 55 health?

@MrMojoRisin.7364 said:

@Azoqu.8917 said:And when looking at those damage values, remember that in GW1 at max level you had 480 health with maybe upwards of 600 max if you went all in for gear.

Yup. You had to keep the starter armor so you wouldnt receive any health bonuses. But I think they ended up nerfing it’s effectiveness which made 600 hp monk a thing. It’s been s while though

if i remember correctly, you had like a skill or aura that made it so any hit on you could only do a certain % of your life, which at 55 was like 5 health or something, then you paired that with a health regeneration aura

it's been a while. i never did link my old gw1 account to this one. don't even remember the login details.

@MrMojoRisin.7364 said:if i remember correctly, you had like a skill or aura that made it so any hit on you could only do a certain % of your life, which at 55 was like 5 health or something, then you paired that with a health regeneration aura

it's been a while. i never did link my old gw1 account to this one. don't even remember the login details.

It combined Protective Spirit (can only take up to 10% of total health in damage per hit) and either Healing Breeze (health regeneration) or Shielding hands and Shield of Absorption (both reduced damage taken).Gods I miss how skills acted in gw1.

RIP Protective Bond :'(

@kizashi.9527 said:A few days ago I read a post about how GW1 mesmer was different than what we have now in GW2. They mentioned that elementalist didn't have attunements. Can you guys tell me more about it? I don't have the first game yet so it would be enteresting to hear about that. (Sorry if I misspelled something, english isn't my native language.)

GW1 was a team-based skirmish game rather than one focused around stacking passive AoE buffs, 1v1s or instantaneous ranged damage.

Interrupts in GW1 put skills onto full cool down and the interrupted player still lost resources (either energy/mana or adrenaline) for activating the interrupted skill. GW1 Mesmers, like GW1 rangers were often put on interrupt duty and also brought a number of unique debuffs which typically focused on pressuring the free-casting ability of enemy casters or healers.

Elementalists had to typically decide on a single or paired set of elements to use in order to not spread their attribute points too thinly (thus weakening their base spell effectiveness in any one element). Taking four was impractical given the limited effectiveness of over-spread attributes or how one had to take an elite enchantment (which was vulnerable to necro or mesmer enchant removal and also, by virtue of being an elite skill, denied the ele from taking other, more utilitarian or directly powerful elite skill options). Eles would build around what a team needed or what kind of encounters a team faced, although fire was pretty mainstream for PvE while air and earth were quite strong in PvP. Water/air was a decent option for guild vs guild flag runners at one point.

tl;dr: GW1 mesmer was a gimmicky debuffer who denied opponents regular use of their abilities (could still spec to deal damage in peculiar ways, although post-EotN e-drain spammer was always mega cheese and never really got nerfed); GW1 ele was a team-based DPS class with a fair amount of anti-melee and snaring utilty.

Annnnddddd I’m downloading GW again for the nostalgia.

Your main profession in GW1 would give you access to a specific profession only mechanic. The mesmers was fast casting. Eles was magic storage. Each profession had a magic system similar to GW2s revenant does. Increasing the amount of magic on an Ele would allow them to cast more costly spells more often. So your huge AoE nukes like meteor shower. The fast casting made the mesmer very useful in pvp. It was almost pointless bringing anything with a cast time greater than 2 seconds in pvp as this would be easily interrupted. (There was a crucial focus on interrupts for denial).

You would also need a second profession and this would grant you access to that classes skills but you would most likely want this to synergise with your main profession. Mesmer/Elementalist for example would allow you to cast the powerful and costly Ele skills very quickly with mesmers fast casting, but without energy storage you wouldn't be able to do it for long.

In the early days mesmer was pretty much unused in pve as they did very little damage and focused heavily on energy denial and interrupts. Most of which were pointless against the pve mobs. Later on they added pve only skills and changed/buffed a lot of mesmer skills making them meta.

@Rhyse.8179 said:The gameplay is fundamentally different between the two games, so a direct comparison isn't really possible. GW1 was a tactical game about timing, position and building your skill deck to counter the enemy; gw2 is much more press everything you can mindlessly as quick as you can...or use macros

Fixed it for you.

Another big thing that differs is that nearly all skills also used a resource called Energy. Spellcasters had the biggest pool of energy (60) and warrior the lowest (20). It regenerated over time, but if you had too low energy you were unable to cast skills and your combat slowed significantly. So items and skills that increased Energy regeneration or refunded Energy points were common in my loadouts for prolonged encounters.Mesmer excelled at denying, stealing and burning energy from opponents.

Guild wars 1's combat also had much smaller numbers than GW2, a characters max health pool was much lower around 600 at level 20 which was max level, so the damage you will see in this thread will seem much lower than you will be used to. You could not just take out another player in 1 second with a combo in this game, you would need other players to 'spike' a target and hope their monk wasn't paying attention. There was no 'berserker' or 'nomad' gear here it was all in the skills you chose.

The attribute system was completely different too, you had ranks 1 to 12 in certain categories of attribute such as for elementalists 'Fire magic'. With gear you could surpass the 12 maximum by using gear. The headpeice granted +1 attribute point depending on which one you wanted and superior runes would grant an extra +3 points at the cost of -75 health. There were a few skills that could boost it higher for a short time too but were rarely used, we only had 8 slots for skills and usually one would always have a ressurection skill especially in the early days of the game anyway.

Professions had a primary attribute which was specific to them, for example an elementalist had 'Energy Storage' and for each rank it would grant 3 extra maximum energy, they were the only spellcaster to have such high energy, while other spell casters had other ways of getting it. Mesmers used skills that stole energy from their target (though this wasn't part of their primary attribute) and necromancers received energy from every death (linked to their rank in their primary attribute and played much like lifeforce in GW2).

The mesmer specifically in GW1 was a profession that could be set up to almost completly counter specific enemies. Empathy as explained above in another post caused damage when the target used an 'attack skill' or auto attack and did damage 'per hit'. This made it lethal to a warrior using the GW1 variant of Hundred Blades where they would attack everyone around them twice. That is pretty much instant death with 6 people being hit by it. There also wasn't an artificial target limit for skills that struck multiple enemies.

The main advantage here is direct damage from the mesmer was 'Chaos damage' and it ignores the armour value of the target unlike physical or elemental damage of some other professions like warrior and elementalist. The necromancer and monk also had armour ignoring damage but the mesmer due to the conditional nature of much of their hexes relying on punishing actions usually had potentially higher damage numbers.

@raveparade.7582 said:RIP Protective Bond :'(

RIP Fort Aspenwood (Kurzick) Bonder. :'(

I do miss the sheer variability of the original GW skill system, but I like the new system very much... Especially since my original skill bar looked almost identical to what we have now.

All the classes are radically different from their gw1 counterparts. Some more than others. For example necromancer in gw1 isn't even the same type of class it is in gw2. Although both used debuffing gw1 necromancers curses builds where more similar to what a condi Mesmer does in gw2. Although there are some differences. Gw1 necromancer would nuke foes with hexes and we're very much in the role of a offensive support profession. If they weren't punishing foes for taking action they were enhancing ally damage against a target or triggering damage pockets from allied attacks.Necromancer had more ways to support than just that though. They would heal allies by making their attacks vampiric, hex foes to heal allies when they where struck or died, and would provide powerful energy regeneration. They also supported through minions which would physically body block foes and act as bombs in a very zerg like army.However, necromancer was also very frail. Because of their life sacrificing ways and lack of defensive abilities they had to rely on debuffs and damage recovery as opposed to the damage control they have now. The only damage reduction skill they had was linked to minions and wasn't a normal part of them.

One of the main differences at the core of both games is that GW1 was designed in a way that made you pretty dependent on other players and a party system. Each class had a role that needed to be supported by other classes (at the very least, you had AI companions to serve as your party).

GW2 is very much designed to liberate the player from the GW1 system. Every class is more or less self sufficient, and you can potentially solo PvE/story completely alone. Everyone takes care of their own healing, has methods of dealing damage, cleansing conditions, etc. Some are better in certain fields than others, but in the end every class can beat the game alone (lord knows the Dragon's Watch companions are only set dressings in GW2, albeit pretty ones).

So the games conceptually diverge in an inherent way. There are echoes of the GW1 classes in GW2, but it's difficult drawing a straight comparison to from a tactical game to a modern, action mmo.

unique hexes and enchantments. There were conditions and boons and such, but classes had more flavor and uniqueness due to having unique hexes in the place of conditions, like mesmers conjure phantasm in gw1 was a hex that provided around -7 ticks of health degeneration. Instead of confusion, mesmer had two hexes, one that would damage when the enemy attacked, or the other one that would damage every time the enemy used a spell. They couldn't be stacked so it was easier to balance.

Necromancer had a lot of lifesteal, poison, and some life-sacrificing skills. Necro was a powerhouse and I think people used elementalist skills on them because of the necros primary attribute which let them regen their energy faster from things dying. And you could take secondary professions which could be switched around whenever.

Guild Wars 2 was specifically designed around Magic: The Gathering Card Game, even with a lot of the skill art being taken from artists who worked on Magic Playing Cards. So there was a trinity of balance, every class had something unique to bring to the table as well. It was less action oriented and more build, timing, and teamwork oriented. You had to stand still for most of the skill casting as well. There was also a crap ton of skills, a lot were useless but a lot were useful and fun to mess around with. You had to obtain elite skills by finding specific bosses and using a skill slot for an elite skill capture and basically kill the boss and steal the skill.

Looking at these posts everyone who played gw1 looks like they can all agree how great it is.

Each class felt so much more like it's class in a way. I wish they just reworked the graphics, added jumping and pressed forward with updates

@Sylent.3165 said:Looking at these posts everyone who played gw1 looks like they can all agree how great it is.

Each class felt so much more like it's class in a way. I wish they just reworked the graphics, added jumping and pressed forward with updates

It’s still a a good game. Actually playing it now. Working my way through a LDoA and the not dying one that I can’t think of the name

Was GW1 a mostly pvp oriented game? Everyone here is talking about pvp, was there any open world pve in GW1?