Kill Ten Rats

Man, that’s a great spawn you’ve put together. I bet our players will want to fight it 15-20 times in one sitting.
— GW1 design meeting minutes

I am open to the argument that Prophecies PvE content was good when it came out. Maybe if you start in Prophecies and play through, this seems fine. If I grant you that, I need you to grant me that whoever put together Prophecies hard mode did what could very charitably be described as “the best s/he could, given the circumstances.”

I would love to help you VQ Eastern Frontier, but I promised my mom I’d quit cutting myself for Lent.
— guildmate

It is not just that the content is poor and not much fun. It comes in huge doses that the game encourages you to choke down. Guild Wars encourages its players to go kill all 300 enemies on that map. There are only 4 or 5 different spawns on that map, and you get a small team size, so go have fun killing those 4 or 5 groups for an hour or two. It is a bad sign when the wiki recommends starting 6+ zones away as a time-saver because it you can run a large team from a distant zone faster than you can vanquish a zone with a 4-person group.

Vanquisher runs of this area without active quests requires defeating around 350 foes. Including quest influences, it has been reported to range from 271 to 393.
— Guild Wars wiki

I’ll discuss sometime soon why balancing Prophecies hard mode is nigh impossible.
: Zubon

This Van Hemlock post inspired my ranger’s use of conditions. Fleshy foes are fun targets for Apply Poison-Hunter’s Shot-Epidemic. Oh look, that entire clump of enemies is poisoned and bleeding. (As I have mentioned, I really hated non-fleshy foes when I was using that build.) Broadhead Arrow-Epidemic-Volley is a fun way to oppress groups of casters. I have grown fond of spreading conditions, so I love having heroes that spread them further. “You move like a dwarf!”

I’ve read Saramago. Blindness is totally contagious. I don’t see why cut hamstrings should be any less so.

: Zubon

Each Guild Wars campaign has a title for various 100%s. Completing the campaign nets you a Hall of Monuments trophy but no title. Completing all campaign missions with all bonuses is the Protector title, then Guardian if you do so in hard mode. Kill every monster in every zone in hard mode to get Vanquisher, and uncover the entire map to get Cartographer. Capturing every elite skill is another.

Then there are meta-titles. There are titles for getting all the Vanquisher titles, all the Cartography, all the elite skills, and for combined Protector and Guardian. The real meta-title is “Kind of a Big Deal” through “God Walking Amongst Mere Mortals,” based on your number of maxed titles. Maxed titles plug into the Honor monument, points for your Guild Wars 2 rewards. All of these are good and fine, to the extent that they are sane.

Add Eye of the North to that. Do you need to conquer this new campaign in all ways to complete the meta-titles? What happens if you already have one? And how do dungeons factor in? The developers handled all that with a combined Master of the North title. Missions, dungeons, vanquishing, and cartography add points.

This is poor because of the effort to reward ratio for Eye of the North versus other campaigns. I can take Factions to 100% complete and get six Honor statues in the Hall of Monuments (plus progress on meta-titles), or I can do the same in Eye of the North (with dungeons instead of skill-capping) and get one. Eye of the North has multiple reputation titles, but those are less readily available for the Hall of Monuments than the Factions or Nightfall titles. On the other hand, Eye of the North is rather shorter than, say, Prophecies’ 25 missions and 54 zones.

It is good content, which is intrinsically rewarding, but the extrinsic rewards for 100% completion are lacking relative to the base campaigns. Most of the extrinsic rewards come from the new PvE skills, which make it easier to gain those base campaign rewards.

: Zubon