Guild Wars/YMMV

• Anticlimax Boss: The Lich in Prophecies. He is literally weak to almost everything. Killing him isn't the trick, it's killing him on the soulstone that finishes him. This also carries over to Nightfall. Breather Boss in that in Prophecies, you have to traverse a rather lengthy stage to get to him, and in Nightfall, you have to face him at the same time as Shiro Tagachi, AND have had to traverse a long stage.
  • Abaddon in Nightfall is a relatively straightforward battle and it mercifully doesn't regen health like other bosses do.
  • A rather interesting phenomena with Shiro Tagachi though. Some view him as an Anticlimax Boss in Factions, but That One Boss in Nightfall, while others view him as That One Boss in Factions but a Breather Boss in Nightfall. Others also view him as That One Boss regardless of campaign.
• Breather Boss: The Lich in Prophecies. He is literally weak to almost everything. Killing him isn't the trick, it's killing him on the soulstone that finishes him. This also carries over to Nightfall. Breather Boss in that in Prophecies, you have to traverse a rather lengthy stage to get to him, and in Nightfall, you have to face him at the same time as Shiro Tagachi, AND have had to traverse a long stage.
• Cliché Storm: The wonderfull visuals and promising game mechanics shown in the Guild Wars 2 trailers almost succeed in distracting you from the fact that the narrators are phoning it in at times.

Narrator: Now is the time! Claim your destiny! Forge your legend!

• • Almost.
  • For that matter, there are some one-liners that are awfully cliche, and the plot of Nightfall actually sounds a lot like a Cliché Storm. (Kourna is The Empire, Varesh is the Evil Emperor using evil dark powers; and is defeated most of the way through the game and her master is being fought as the final boss and making her The Dragon. She also has numerous generals; the obviously evil ones as well as the obviously good one who makes a Heel Face Turn.) Although granted, Nightfall does tinker around with the formula a little bit, and Abaddon isn't exactly The Man Behind the Man like in these types of stories, usually.
• Crazy Awesome: It is the general consensus that if Guild Wars 2 doesn't suck, it will be this.
  • Vael
• Crowning Moment of Funny: What do paragons and drunkards have in common? They both run around with no pants, shouting at people!
• Die for Our Ship: The main reason some see Keiran as The Scrappy
• Epileptic Trees: A few. First, you've got the origins of the Mursaat, but the one with the most obscure roots is Arachnia. To elaborate, several parts of the Realm of Torment look, well, insect-like. Code discovered in the game referred to these areas with names like 'Arachnia Plateau' and mentioned a spider goddess older than even the core six of the series. Arachnia herself has never appeared, but you can probably find players on any GW forum making speculations about what role she played.
• Even Better Sequel: Guild Wars 2 is shaping up to be this and more. Industry professionals are getting increasingly excited about it, and some believe it may be the first serious contender to World of Warcraft's vast dominance of the genre.
• Funny Aneurysm Moment: "I swear, if we didn't need him, I would shove him off a bridge.". Cue Gadd's death at the end of the G.O.L.E.M. mission, and Vekk scattering his ashes from the bridge in Riven Earth.
• Game Breaker: Given the ease and large number of options for customizing your build, smart players have found many throughout the years. Most of them tend to get Nerfed by changing one of the key skills in an update.
  • Honorary mention goes to the infamous 55hp build. This build relies on using Power At a Price items that give large bonuses at the cost of health to reduce your maximum health to 55hp (480 hp is normal for a level 20 character), and then use a skill that caps the maximum amount of damage the player takes to a certain percentage of the player's health and a skill that heals a fixed amount of health per second. This makes the player practically unkillable, and was very popular for solo-farming. During an update, the most popular farming area was changed to include insect enemies that, according to an NPC, migrate and are attracted to places where a lot of killing has taken place. These insects happened to have the perfect skills to counter the 55hp build.
  • The hands down winner in the is Shadow Form, making the player virtually invulnerable (causing attack to miss and spells to fail), with the downside of losing ~90% of your hitpoints when it ends. It can be kept up indefinitely with the right skills though. Oops. After a long time of this build ruling the solo-farming scene, Arenanet made an attempt to nerf it by letting the enemies hit you, limit the damage you could do and take less damage while under it's effectm while removing some of its already existing downsides. However, the nerf failed: while solo-farming had become much harder, it is actually considered to be better for use in groups carrying the build to finish specific areas in the game in record times.
• Goddamn Bats: Quite a few enemies (especially mesmers), but the necromancer's minions, Ritualist's spirits, and several PVE summon skills/items are notable for being friendly Goddamn Bats. All of them do little damage damage individually, but the player's party can field quite a few of them and they are very usefull for keeping your opponents busy and drawing their fire away from the players.
• Memetic Mutation: Frenzy Heal Sig, Echo Mending, IWAY, Mini Crab
  • Norn have no need of memes, we are Norn!
  • In fact, the IWAY build has so much notoriety that virtually any successful team build is now called X-way.
• Narm:"As a boy I spent much time in these lands. Look at them now." To their credit, A-Net poked fun at themselves about this line during the Nightfall campaign with some Bad Bad Acting and writing in the Obvious Trap play performed for Prince Bokka.
• Nightmare Fuel:
  • The afflicted.
  • The scarab plague.
  • Fleshreavers are monsters that grow by stealing flesh and grafting it onto themselves.
• The Scrappy: The Asura are intentionallly designed to be annoying as humanly (Asuraly?) possible. I am sad to say that they hit their characterization on the mark.
  • Some players, however, like the Asura precisely because they're so annoying.
    • I'll take the Asura over the Norn anyday
  • And out of the races that will be available in Guild Wars two, there has been a lot of complaining that the Sylvari weren't given adequate Foreshadowing; most players would've preferred the Centaurs or Tengu.
    • This may be changing, though, as information about the Sylvari continues to trickle out. And there's always the possibility one or both of the above will become playable in a GW 2 expansion.
  • Lieutenant Thackeray is starting to get this treatment because of his feelings for Gwen (who is pretty obsessed over by the fandom), especially now that it's confirmed they'll marry and have descendants, at least one of which shows up in GW 2.
    • In an excellent example of how fickle people can be, some are now beginning to apply this trope to Gwen herself, now that Thackeray has "manned up" as a result of the events in the newest "Guild Wars: Beyond" quest series depicting his adventures after War in Kryta; some are even suggesting that Thackeray should have hooked up instead with Miku, the NPC assassin he meets and fights alongside in these quests.
• They Changed It, Now It Sucks: this pops up every time ArenaNet updates the game to change PvE or PvP skills.
  • Not to mention the expansion wank. Some say Nightfall or Eye of the North ruined the game; some trace it back to Factions. And then with the proposed changes in Guild Wars 2...
    • Guild Wars was ruined when they release Prophecies.
• That One Achievement: For a long time, this title could belong to either "Legendary Defender of Ascalon" or "Survivor". Updates later reduced the difficulty and grind involved.
  • The original drunk title also qualified to a degree, due to the careful need to calculate your drunk level and maintain it via creative zoning and consumption for hours on end.
• That One Boss: Shiro in each of his appearances is bound to make at least one player tear their hair out. And some of the Monk bosses at the end of Prophecies, thanks to their healing capabilities, can take quite a while to whittle down.
  • Also a lot of elementalist bosses, since bosses get a double damage bonus a lot of them can kill players in seconds. Ritualist bosses with Spirit Rift are even more infamous for their party-slaughtering abilities.
  • VARESH. She's harder than the final boss!!!
  • The Dreadspawn Maw and Mallyx the Unyielding in the Realm of Torment.
  • Dare I even mention Dhuum?
• That One Level: The Gate Of Madness mission in Nightfall, where you fight the final bosses of Prophecies and Factions at the same time. As if Shiro Tagachi wasn't bad enough on his own during the final battle of Factions...
  • Shiro can be quite easy to take down, with the right builds, and especially if a couple of the players have a debuff which makes him take damage from his own attacks, such as Empathy, Pain Inverter or Spoil Victor. The Warrior skill "Wild Blow" is also highly useful against Shiro, as it will end a key stance he takes that protects him against damage.
  • To be fair, Shiro has lost his most annoying skills from Factions. The Lich however, got a serious boost.
  • The Foundry of Failed Creations sub-level in the Domain of Anguish. Groups that make it through the three other zones often fail in the third room of Foundry. There's a reason gemstones from it cost half-again to double what the gemstones in the other zones cost.
• Ugly Cute: Wallows.
• Uncanny Valley: The Asura seem to have gotten more human faces (especially their eyes) between Eye of the North and Guild Wars 2.