In your time playing Guild Wars 2...what has been your most challenging and memorable experience?

I love Guild Wars 2 most when I am being challenged. And with all these threads lately of people whining about the few difficult portions of the game, I want to make a thread for our stories that will last with us and are impactful to us. I have many but by far the most impactful for me was when after many failures finally solo'd the final HoT story encounter. From the music, to the environment, to the build up to it...the challenge of that fight is what made me very emotionally invested. I felt I was fighting rather than just playing a game. Challenging moments are some of the best in the game for me. What are some of your favorite challenging and memorable experiences in GW2?

Quitting..

Fighting the Queen's Gauntlet back in 2014.Now it really doesn't feel that difficult. I remember i attempted Sabetha several times (not as many as most people since i was on a time-budget and focused more on the Labyrinthine cliffs on the second time, and didn't even realize the gauntlet was a thing the first time).This time around, i killed her in a few attempts... At first i failed because i didn't even remember how it worked... As soon as i relearned it, killed her in 2-3 attempts.

Difficult to answer, but as another that basically chases what I hope is "good challenges" in the game, this is something I constantly tried to reach.

• Back when I started playing at launch and everything felt hard, that feeling of finally figuring out what mobs did, and how to overcome them by learning my own skills one at a time. Probably the best feeling I've had in the game.
• The first times I soloed champions (in general) but especially the first time I together with another player 2 manned the Giant of Nageling with a Thief, that felt epic, after how many times he had killed me before that.
• Toxic alliance events, one of the few PVE events I'll beeline for, always.
• The moment I found the Test dummies in PVP, and finally found some PVE I liked in this game. The only good PVE fights in the game.
• After starting to get into WvW and finally starting to get good enough at my class/build that I could win enough fights, or at least stale-mate a lot of them.
• Self handicapping myself in different ways trying to increase the difficulty (PVE), sometimes this leads to interesting fights, other times it just gets boring (no weapon run was boring as heck).

Sorry if that sounded a bit more Jaded that intended. In general I just don't find bosses with huge amounts of hitpoints challenging or interesting, it usually just gets long and tedious to me. In general I prefer fights where the enemy is dangerous but somewhat fragile, basically following similar rules to our own characters. And prefer that the difficulty comes from the AI and not stats/hitpoints/armor/damage/op-skills etc.

Yeah, I wish the entire game open world was filled with the test dummies from PVP lobby.

That Southson JP without a mesmer

The first time i beat Liadria back when she gave the title on my guardian.

Doing second map completion. Tiring. Repetitive. Unnecessary grind.

For me, the most memorable and challenging things are when I have to play The Floor is Lava because some boss or group of enemies won't stop throwing AoE.It isn't a good challenging, and they aren't good memories, but those are the things I remember the most because they haunt my dreams.

The best good memorable thing I've done is the first time I did Tequatl. I was a newer player just wandering through Sparkfly Fen when suddenly everything went absolutely bonkers; there were more players than I'd ever seen in one place, a giant zombie dragon was killing everything, and I had absolutely no idea what to do.It was some of the most fun I've had in the game and started my obsession with World Boss trains.

Mine has to be during living world 1 Flame and Frost release when we attempted to beat the Molten base.After several failed attempts at the boss my party give up and quit.. but since every time I'd died in the encounter was trying to save one of my allies I got the ridiculous idea that I could probably beat the boss alone since I wouldn't have to worry about any allies (Perfect Necro player moment XD)After almost an hour of exhausting effort though I proved the idea not so ridiculous after all as I finally walked away with the victory.

For me that achievement started a personal trend.. to find strong enemies in the game designed for groups and beat them solo..Something I still enjoy to this day ^^

Most enjoyable - old 8v8 hotjoin when glamour/confusion was a thing and everyone ran home brewed random builds and skill levels varied wildly. My first ever build was a ridiculously stupid p/p+p/p quick pockets (reload) cleric amulet thief that had ridiculous sustain but could barely kill anything! xDOh and particularly old Raid on Capricorn in 8v8 hotjoin - leaping out of spawn into the water with the cool organ/accordion combat music. :DAside from that some duels with thieves on old power shatter when it used to be a game of cat and mouse.

This is the problem with pvp now - they went so far off track with "esports" at the expense of fun, and now it's a toxic mess of pseudo-competitive chest beating when the combat system itself doesn't cater for that kind of thing compared with other games better designed for competitive play.

Most challenging experience? I guess the tedium of world completion when I was making Bifrost a few years ago. I've never hated the game more than when doing that and it was a real challenge to keep motivated. This was also when wvw world completion was required, although that was not the challenging part - rather the pve world completion due to how much there was and how boring it could be. Oh and also doing this with no movement speed bonus (for some reason I didn't think to use Focus for swiftness...).

Organizing and beating the Marionette back in season one. It was pre mega server and my server was less populated than most. A few other guild leaders and I got together and decided to see if we could make it happen. We still talk about beating it with our rag tag group of adventurers. It was fun and engaging.

The beauty and value in this game will always be in the big open world events. It really is what sets it apart from other MMOs.

I'm casual, so pretty much everything is challenging. Memorable? The ol' Queensdale champ trains days. I fell in with a nice group of players then. It was like going to Cheers.

Getting enough Core Tyria Mastery Points to finally stop wasting any additional XP after reaching lv80... end then realizing that there are more than enough MPs =)

Crafting my Legendary Armour.

Mine would be all jps (the jp ball light up in malcor was tough to do) and the ls1 battle of the gaint ass doll in lonar's pass along with the whole sequence of attack on lions arch with it finally ended on taking down scarlet and her holoselfs.

I loved when the whole Scarlet thing was happening, (as for myself) I've never seen the community united in such a common goal before or since when it came to the living storyline. It was fun/challenging when we all got together then vs her up above old LA. Good times they were. =)

The day i finished my Aurora... OMG that was a long jurney...

I still remember when I went with the guild to do our first Arah explorable with the few that had raced to level 80.

2 hours later we gave up cause we couldnt kill Lupicus.

I honestly have to say, my most infuriating experience was the fiery floor of doom in the Moon Fortress; until I studied the patterns a bit more, I just kept getting toasted and freeze dried. I know a lot of people probably found that easy, but I did not. XD

Just to be safe, what's below is sort of spoilers for the last episode of Path of Fire.

! I think my favorite experience was beating the ever-loving shark out of Balthazar. I truly took great pleasure in killing him, so much so that I replayed the story on different characters so they could enjoy the boom di boom!

As an aside...

! I was seriously pissed over what happened to Canach, it was like: "really, really, REALLY? "It's nothing personal..".?"

!"You are so, so, dead, Vorpp!"

! I think Canach seems a lot like my little brother, who I'm fiercely protective of. Hee hee.

setting my foot into AC for the first time in my second week in game or so. Dying with party at the first encounter over and over again. Thinking "this is impossible to beat!" lawl :)

Maybe the 5th day after launch i wandered into a cave in the Shiverpeaks and found a champion spider. With another fellow unlucky player who happend to be there we could kill it. The fight last almost 20 minutes and we res each other all the time. It was fun, and challenging and when we finally kill that beast we felt that we did something great.Sadly, few days ago found that cave and the champion spider and I killed it alone easily. It felt like I lost something there :(

Most challenging combat is definitely Liadri. I spent as long as I could during the original release fighting her (annoyingly Clockwork Chaos temporarily locked us out the Gauntlet so I had to do that before I could get back in) and I couldn't do it. When the Gauntlet returned in the original Festival of the Four Winds I tried again and I was doing it so much I was literally dreaming about that fight, or at least seeing the pattern of her AoE attack as I was falling asleep. But I finally, finally beat her and I was so happy to do it! (I did it again when the festival came back this year and even then it took me 5 attempts before I got her.)

The other one which stands out is the first time I completed the Dark Reverie jumping puzzle. Which seems a bit silly now because these days I can generally complete it on the first attempt as long as I don't do anything stupid, but when I first tried I found it extremely difficult and I died so many times trying to get through it. I was ridiculously happy when I finally made it to the top.

My most memorable experiences on the other hand are all about other people. Little things like doing Sharkmaw Cavern during the release weekend when there was a constant stream of people falling in, dying, being revived and then taking a turn reviving other people before carrying on with the puzzle. Or the first time someone showed me the turkeys in Ascalon Catacombs. Or big things like completing Victory or Death for the first time with 4 friends...and then jumping off the airship and ending up under the map, or joining in with Pink Day in LA.

Top of the list however has to be the 4 friends who were kind or mad enough (or both!) to join me in the second Tournament of Legends so I could get a mini llama (which at the time only came from tournament rewards). I had never played PvP before signing up and none of them had played it much. But they were all willing to join me in utterly humiliating ourselves for my mini pet obsession. We got through the first round by blind luck - the other team didn't turn up. We got absolutely slaughtered in the second round, I don't think we scored a single point. But it didn't matter - we got our llamas, had fun and apparently gave the other team a good laugh with our shiny pink armour.