Guild Wars

"Bless you, Dwayna for my wisdom. Thank you, Grenth and Balthazar, for my prowess in war. Praise to Melandru for my courage, and to Lyssa for my incredible good looks."

- Sogolon

Arguably the second-most popular MMO, produced by ArenaNet, a splinter group formed off of Blizzard Entertainment, and published by the Korean MMO giant NCSoft. Has been both lauded and criticized for its notable and unique business plan, which is quite simple: It's an MMO that requires no monthly fee. Part of the reason is due to instancing, and part due to design. Anet has said (to paraphrase) that it's not aiming to be a World of Warcraft killer, but that it's happy being its own niche. Indeed, Guild Wars was largely an experiment to see if this business model could even succeed in the first place, which it undeniably has.

The game, instead of one core game and several expansions, features three stand-alone "campaigns" which have independent, if interlinked, plots and differing mechanics. The three can be linked, allowing one character to play all three stories. A fourth release acts as an expansion that can link to any of the main campaigns and is notable for providing primarily end-game content. The original campaign, subtitled Prophecies after the second campaign launched, contains 6 player classes (termed "professions", Warrior, Ranger, Monk, Elementalist, Mesmer, Necromancer) and each character chooses a permanent primary profession and a changeable secondary (the order matters). The two additional campaigns, Factions and Nightfall, each feature two additional professions unique to their continents (which are East Asian (mainly) and North African/Middle Eastern themed, respectively). Additional story elements have been introduced in the on-going Guild Wars Beyond, including the War in Kryta and Winds of Change. The intent of these releases is to create a bridge between the original campaigns and the upcoming sequel.

The game, instead of a roving world with several human-controlled factions duking it out, instead plays like a console RPG: A storyline-based affair that has a definite ending; thus, it can be beaten. It can be played solo (with AI-based henchmen and heroes), or in groups, and features its titular "Guilds" as organized player groups.

Also notable is that it tries to balance both casual and hard-core play, and has both PvE ("Player versus Environment", the "single-player" portion of the game) and PvP, with specific arenas, tournaments, and guild versus guild battles for the latter. The game is virtually devoid of Level Grinding, due to a low level cap of 20, and instead focuses on what skills, abilities, and strategies one brings to the field of battle, instead how much time one has spent playing the game.

Stylistically, it's very hard on physical realism, and exploring the world of Tyria for the sheer level of detail put into its architecture is rather breathtaking.

As a sort of hybrid between the typical "Persistent World" MMO and a CRPG, the game dips its ice cream scoop of writing into both buckets.

A sequel, Guild Wars 2, was released on August 28, 2012.

"Devona (Agreeing to not retire from being heroes):"I guess so. And after 's great victory, how can we do less? For Ascalon, and for glory!" Eve: "Unless we all die trying.... But that's never stopped us before.""
 * Aerith and Bob: Mocked in one of the NPC dialogues. "We haven't survived this long against the Charr by giving our supplies to every Tom, Dick, and Teardrinker who passes through here."
 * Accidental Engagement: In Eye of the North, there's a quest chain in which you accidentally become engaged to a Norn and politely getting unengaged.
 * Action Girl: Notably: Devona, Nika, Zenmai, Melonni, Jora, Gwen and many others (and the player also if the character is female)
 * A God Am I: Luckily the last one isn't a Big Bad.
 * We are led to believe that every god has gone through this, what with several "predecessors" being mentioned, the fact that we know they are not the first pantheon having existed, and the fact that they are younger than the Elder Dragons, and presumably, event the giants that are mentioned in the lore.
 * Alliance Meter: Used to tot up the amount of faction points you have gathered towards Balthazar, the Luxons and Kurzicks, and the Canthan Dragon Empire. Also, titles for the Luxons and Kurzicks show how much faction has been donated towards the respective alliance.
 * Exclusively Evil: The Charr, Titans, Demons and the Destroyers.
 * Ancient Conspiracy: The Flameseeker Prophecies, the Nightfall Prophecy.
 * Animate Dead: Tons of Necromancer minion-creating spells.
 * Anti-Grinding:
 * One of the goals of Guild Wars' design was to reward skill and strategy instead of Level Grinding. Maxing your level and getting all the best stuff is easy to do. Knowing how to use it all effectively is the challenge.
 * Guild Wars 2 plays with this, since the max level is 80 (just like World of Warcraft at the time the decision was made), but apparently it still won't be the major part of how the game works. PvP will apparently scale the levels of the players, for instance. And then there's all the talk about the fact that "each level will require approximately the same time".
 * Achievements and titles in Guild Wars 2 will be account wide, which should make things a lot easier for players with multiple alts.
 * The new, web-based "Hall of Monuments rewards calculator" demonstrates the account-based nature of Guild Wars 2 rewards in dramatic fashion (and, by the way, sparked a recent frenzy of buying and selling in-game as players scrambled to obtain items like crafting materials and miniature pets to put in their Hall of Monuments to boost their scores).
 * Ironically, many of the titles and expensive items for the Hall of Monuments require extensive money grind. In fact, most of the "no grind" thing was dropped by Eye of the north with the reputation titles.
 * Anti-Poopsocking: You are reminded every hour on the hour of how long you have been playing and after 3 hours the message "Please take a break." is added.
 * Anti-Villain: Palawa Joko. At least during Nightfall; his minions will help the players on several side quests.
 * But in Guild Wars 2 he becomes a true villain, conquering Elona by taking out their water supplies thanks to a dam on the Elon River.
 * Possibly driven by the player's actions in a Halloween mission.
 * Arabian Nights Days: Vabbi
 * Arc Words: "You lead, I shall follow." is uttered, at some point or another, by at least half of the cast of Nightfall. While the phrase itself seems innocuous enough,
 * Artifact Title: The Guild Wars haven't been relevant since before the Searing; that is, since before the first game's prologue.
 * Unless you PvP, the highest level of which is Guild versus Guild.
 * Ascended Meme: Some players kept a character in Pre-Searing, the tutorial area of the first game (the only place where you can never return to after leaving it), making it Perma-Pre. Some even reached the level cap through the most masochistic and timeconsuming kind of Level Grinding: Have enemies kill you over and over to level them up enough that they are worth XP again for a character close to the level cap, and then kill them. As a reward for these hardcore dedicated players/masochists that need to find a job, Areanet created an achievement for this.
 * Actually fixed in a recent patch, adding repeatable quests that have enemies of a level close to one's own, allowing players to get the title without "Death Leveling."
 * It still takes a few months effort, since you get only 1 quest per day and the experience gained isn't very high.
 * Ascended Fanboy: Several members of high ranked Guilds got their own NPC, some others got references in dialogue, etc.
 * Ascend to a Higher Plane of Existence: The druids, who used to be human, but transformed themselves into nature spirits in the backstory.
 * The Atoner:
 * Also, General Morgahn.
 * Awesome but Impractical: Meteor Shower, which hits for massive damage and knocks things down 3 times with a gap just long enough for them to stand back up, unfortunately it takes 5 seconds to cast, in PvE most enemies have probably already scattered or died by this point and in PvP you'll be lucky to get 4 seconds through casting before someone decides it's time to interrupt it. It is useful against monk-walls though.
 * Until you use Glyph of Sacrifice and Assassin's Promise. Then it's Awesome Yet Practical.
 * Also, the Warrior skill Decapitate, which gets an insane damage boost, is always a critical hit, gives the target a deep wound and drains the user's adrenaline and energy completely.
 * Badass Normal: In the game you have mages, necromancers, illusionists, spirit-callers, divine conduits, scythe-wielding furies, shadow jumping assassins, priests of healing and smiting, hunters that can charm beasts and summon nature spirits, and warriors. That last one is the only class in the game with no magic whatsoever. At all. And they are awesome. Devona falls under this trope as well.
 * Technically, through secondary profession, they can have access to any of the mentioned super powerful abilities. On the scale of the whole game, anyone becomes a Badass Normal, since you face
 * also technically, warrior, ranger and paragon all have no magic (they are the only classes with no spell skills). interestingly enough, these three classes are also the only classes in the game with access to shouts.
 * Engineer from Guild Wars 2 seems to be this. Uses explosives, guns, and elixirs in battle. Special ability is a tool belt. Also, the warrior profession returning from the original Guild Wars.
 * Bag of Sharing: Every city, town, and mission outpost in the game has a Xunlai Storage chest which any character on your account can access for a one-time, 50gp fee to the nearby Xunlai Agent. For 50gp more that character can also access the shared crafting materials storage space in the chest.
 * Bare Your Midriff: Wouldn't be a fantasy game if some costumes didn't. But it's not too common compared to other fantasy games.
 * More specifically, elementalist females do this with almost every set they have. The feel to them is of a tease, what with all the running away and smiting with fire, so it evens out.
 * Paragons of both genders do this at times.
 * Battle Aura: Bosses have an aura indicating their profession.
 * Belly Dancer: Female elementalists, especially with armor from Nightfall.
 * Big Bad: At least one per campaign. Factions is the only campaign where there was just one throught the entire story.
 * Bigger Bad: The presence of the Elder Dragons is hinted at in Eye of the North by the creation of the Nornbear and the awakening of the Destroyers.
 * Big Good: The Master of Whispers, leader of an ancient organization preparing to battle against Abbadon's return.
 * Big Eater: Professor Yakkington. A good number of Nicholas' requests focus on food for the dolyak... or food for Nicholas after Yakkington eats it all.
 * Body Horror: All of the Afflicted. They range from the mostly-humanoid hunchbacks that are their Warriors, to the Ritualists, which are basically a malformed mass of flesh lurching around on four of its six arms to resurrect its fellow Afflicted. They explode when they die, inflicting damage, and leave behind such lovely Vendor Trash as pulsating flesh and putrid cysts.
 * The Realm of Torment has the Domain of Pain, which is basically a gigiantic fleshy cave/plain/something, with several giant limbs and organs coming from the walls.
 * Bonus Dungeon: The Fissure of Woe, Sorrow's furnace, The Underworld, The Deep, Urgoz's Warren, the Domain of Anguish, and Slaver's Exile.
 * Boom Stick: Staves and wands can help empower spellcasting, but their primary attack is just to shoot magic blasts. Like other weapons, wielders don't need any particular attributes to use one, but it's much more effective if they do.
 * Boring but Practical: Several examples, one of the foremost is Warrior's Endurance. A very simple skill, and not flashy at all, but allows spamming high damage energy-based attacks. Even melee weapons outside the warrior profession can be effectively abused as the skill provides more than enough energy in a very reliable manner, while the attribute it's linked to provides additional armor penetration. This was so effective in PvP that it was quickly changed back to being a stance.
 * Boss Battle: Ranging from mixed-in with normal enemies to entire missions built on taking one down. Since bosses are the sole source of elite skills, many players will organize expeditions with the sole object of hunting down and killing bosses and "capturing" their elite skills (capturing all the available elite skills in a given campaign will give you one of the Bragging Rights Reward titles).
 * Bragging Rights Reward: Titles started this way.
 * Rare weapons and expensive armour, since they've got the same stats as the cheap stuff.
 * Also due to the account-based nature of Guild Wars 2 rewards referred to above, since a player will only need to obtain one of each of a certain kind of weapon or set of armor per account to accrue the reward point on his/her account.
 * Break the Cutie: Gwen. And how!
 * Breast Plate: Thankfully averted. Female warriors wear just as much armor as their male counterparts, and with the exception of Elementalists and one Monk outfit, most female armor sets are fully and semi-realistically clothed. Also, subverted with one male warrior prestige armor set, called "Male Stripper Bra Set" for a reason. Oddly enough, it was extremely popular. In pink.
 * Also subverted with some armor sets where men show as much or more skin than the women do.
 * Well, not quite averted. Female warriors (to say nothing of other frontliners) still show more skin on average than the males, with breasts lovingly sculpted into every last one of their chestpieces.
 * Bribing Your Way to Victory: Kinda/sorta. The small bonuses for sale through the GW store and the preorder bonuses are fun and useful shortcuts to having the most options, but they don't really make you any make you more powerful. If you don't know how to use them right, you'll still get curbstomped in competition.
 * One quest in Factions requires to literally bribe a Corrupt Bureaucrat with 1 platinum to complete the quest.
 * Actually, 2 platinum, but a bug allows you not to pay at all. Another quest in Nightfall requires you to pay off a pirate boss, but the same bug occurs here.
 * Although you can get out of paying the pirate without bugs, thanks to the quest's second option.
 * Talking to one of the Princes required you bribe him, either with 1 platinum or a vase which you could buy for 1 platinum... or murder the person with the vase for no cost.
 * Brick Joke: Several, The continents of Cantha and Elona were briefly mentioned on Prophecies even Vabbi, Palawa Joko, Turai Ossa and the Margonites from the latter get a passing reference on the Crystal Desert.
 * Turai Ossa doesn't really count, however, being the (unnamed in Prophecies) Ghostly Hero around whom the 3 main missions in the Crystal Desert revolve.
 * Gwen is the ultimate brick joke, if you're willing to accept a tragic definition of the word "joke."
 * Button Mashing: Inverted. The game will auto-attack once told to attack, and will actually warn a player if they attempt to mash the attack button. Skills can still be button mashed, although this generally doesn't help at high levels of play.
 * In GW 2 auto-attack doesn't exist anymore, but you can order your character to use a skill repeatedly. And you usually have a skill that will act similarly to a basic attack.
 * Cain and Abel: Balthazar, the God of War, finds an archnemesis in his half-brother Menzies, Lord of Destruction.
 * Subverted with Togo and the Emperor in Factions. Had they both wanted the throne, they could have split Cantha into a civil war, but both were wise enough to sort out the succession issue, and both are fiercely devoted to each other still.
 * Cartography Sidequest: You get titles for exploring the map. There is also a mapmaker in Maatu Keep that gives you a quest to visit five points in each explorable area of both the Jade Sea and Echovald Forest.
 * Cast from Hit Points: See the wiki page dedicated to this.
 * Also one of the main ways to kill a certain dungeon boss. He keeps re-summoning his minions, and gets tons of defensive bonuses while they're alive, but the spell he uses to revive them costs 5% of his health.
 * Catfolk: The Charr
 * Chekhov's Gun: The Tapestry Shred you can get from Gwen in Pre-Searing Ascalon
 * Chekhov's Gunman: Gwen herself.
 * Chosen One: Zig-zagged. There's not so much a Chosen one as it is Chosen ones plural. The White Mantle hunts these down and . It's revealed that
 * Church Militant: The White Mantle (on the side of evil) and the Zaishen Order (on the side of good).
 * City Guards: Free-roaming in explorable areas. Somewhat helpful in battle, but tend to get themselves killed if the players are not nearby to help.
 * Clingy Jealous Girl: Cynn, just Cynn.
 * Collective Groan: for example, in the cutscene preceding the "Venta Cemetery" mission in Nightfall.
 * The Computer Is a Cheating Bastard: Enemy mesmers have the ability to interrupt your party's spells with much more accuracy than any human player can possibly achieve, on the other hand your AI-controlled heroes also have the same ability so...
 * A good tactic to follow, when engaging an enemy mob that has one or more interrupt mesmers in it, is not to lead off with your most powerful skill, lest the enemy mesmer interrupt that skill and leave you at a disadvantage while it recharges.
 * Similarly, groups of enemies with interrupts or knockdowns will always stagger the usage with perfect coordination among their members. They also will only begin corpse exploit casts if nobody else on the field is already casting a similar spell on said corpse.
 * A player-controlled Ranger facing a computer-controlled enemy Ranger has an annoying tendency to receive "Target Obstructed" messages about their own attacks if the terrain is at all questionable, while taking full damage from the enemy, who apparently can get a clear shot. Their arrows should be traveling essentially the same flight path in opposite directions, so a major difference in obstruction without anyone behind cover doesn't make sense.
 * The mission Boreas Seabed is largely symmetrical as a PVP encounter would be. The previous year's champion, Argo, has a unique more powerful version of Meteor Storm named Argo's Cry. This isn't too bad as "more power" here comes about equivalent to someone who specialized in fire magic with gear focused on it. The real cheat is that as a "boss" he has half casting time and double spell power, turning a slow but relatively strong spell into a near instant one hit kill that (if you're playing solo) can kill the entire party instantly. One of the other competitors does claim Argo cheated last year, but there's no other indication it's anything but the words of a sore loser.
 * Conservation of Ninjutsu: At least when the "Inverse Ninja Law" PvP effect is active, causing players to weaken for each nearby ally, and get stronger for each nearby enemy. If the players are all Assassins, then this trope gets pretty literal.
 * Conspicuously Selective Perception: In the tutorial parts of the game, extremely low-level monsters will ignore a player until attacked.
 * Well, not all creatures in the world have to be agressive.
 * Copy and Paste Environments: Averted. While areas may use similar textures and objects, the map design varies quite a bit, and the look visibly changes from biome to biome.
 * However, the careful observer of Eye of the North dungeons will notice that several levels of certain dungeons look very much like each other: for instance, parts of the second level of the Catacomb of Kathandrax and the first level of Oola's Lab, and a good portion of the first level of Arachni's Lair and the third level of the Shards of Orr look virtually identical.
 * Not virtually identical, just identical. The only Dungeons that seem to have unique areas are those you also visit in story-line missions, and Slaver's Exile.
 * Corrupt Bureaucrat: The ministers in Factions.
 * Actually most of the ministers aren't corrupt so much as completely out of touch with the people. They honestly are trying to help, but between the arguing amongst themselves and all the self-imposed red tape, they get nowhere fast. They don't ever abuse their power, and most of them are on your side. At least one actually tries to help when you have to ask him for something during a quest.
 * Corrupt Church: )
 * The Shamans, too,.
 * It is, by Guild Wars 2,.
 * Crapsack World: In the Tyrian continent of the first campaign, Ascalon is, the Dwarf Kingdom is in being destroyed from within by civil war with the Exclusively Evil Stone Summit, Kryta is taken over by the White Mantle who  , and the Kingdom of Orr was completely obliterated off-camera  . Cantha (outside of Kainen City, at least) and Elona tone this back to more reasonable levels.
 * Judging by what's been released about the storyline of Guild Wars 2, the ENTIRE place will pretty much be a Crapsack World after the rise of the
 * A similar kind of Scenery Porn as in is the Dragonbrand region in GW 2, corrupted because  Now those guys are badass.
 * Crippling Overspecialisation: Players may only equip eight skills at any one time, and when you start forming teams, there's a cap at eight characters per party. Without careful planning, it's easy to overspecialize. Therefore, one of the keys to successful play in both PvE and PvP is the careful balancing and combination of skills, and there's a website, http://www.gwpvx.com, dedicated to collecting and distributing builds of particular effectiveness for all the Guild Wars professions. On the other hand though, under-specializing can be just as disastrous.
 * Apparently you can't do Crippling Overspecialisation in GW 2, since you have at least one healing skill, and five skills (read: half of your skill bar) can be changed willingly (though with a little cooldown).
 * Crystal Dragon Jesus: Glint, though with four times the crystal and 1/3 the Jesus. She is really more of a benevolent-neutral prophet, but she is a gray dragon covered in crystalline spines, who, using bizarre dragon-magic, lives in a single grain of crystal sand in the Crystal Desert, and she lays crystal eggs. The game has the five elementally-themed pseudopagan gods as the true pantheon, however.
 * She is one of the first/oldest servants of the Old Gods however, so maybe there is a bit of the Jesus thing involved.
 * Cutscene: In-game cutscenes, with party leader speaking dialogue. Skippable, so long as everyone in the party wants to skip. It is advised that they are watched as they are very entertaining in MST 3000 spirit.
 * Not to mention being rather important for conveying the story to the players.
 * This troper particularly liked the subtitles if the language was set to Bork! Bork!, making cutscenes he had seen dozens of times enjoyable again.
 * Damage Sponge Boss: The infamous Rotscale, a bone dragon that has fairly simple moves, a small entourage of mooks... and over 20,000 HP. In a game where the regular max HP without any boosts is 480, and a SERIOUSLY stacked player might get up to 1,500 (with several other players helping with buffing skills). If you somehow manage not to get mauled by the always-poisoned arena and the mob that's with him, it can still take upwards of ten minutes to whittle him down.
 * And with the addition of Dhuum to the underworld, Rotscale is dwarfed. After going through what is arguably the hardest area in the game which takes a balanced group up to 3 hours, you get to a boss that has 100.000 health, and can take up to half an hour just killing him. Oh, and he summons Mooks too.
 * Dance Battler: Female Dervishs.
 * Dark Is Not Evil: Neither the Necromancers or their divine patron, Grenth, are at all evil, . Though, during Wintersday, Grenth can be kind of a dick.
 * Of the three Necromancer heroes, Olias is frankly rather creepy. The Master of Whispers,, is a solemn type much given to mysterious utterings. Livia is perhaps the most likeable of the three, being an idealistic young woman devoted to the Shining Blade and its cause of liberating Kryta from the White Mantle (and, in all honesty, for being as hot as the proverbial pistol).
 * Ritualists as well. Ritualists cast spells by binding angry spirits with ethereal chains or channeling the raw anger of dead souls, but much like Necromancers, can be perfectly heroic people. Heck, Master Togo is a Ritualist, and he's arguably the nicest guy in the entire Factions campaign!
 * Deader Than Dead: Banned players. When a person's account is banned, they are visited by Dhuum, old god of death, specifically of death eternal. He appears before them and, with a unique skill called "Vengeance Is Ours", cuts them down with his scythe, sets them on fire, and transports their soul to a prison in the underworld. As the skill used to do this says, "Ressurrection skills won't help you. Your account is banned." Let it never be said that Arena Net doesn't have a sense of style when it comes to banning people.
 * Death Is Cheap: Monks and other professions carry resurrection spells, the real problem comes from death penalty which reduces your total HP/MP, thankfully there are items that can reduce or eliminate the penalty, not to mention that it is also reduced by gaining XP. In fact, the optional tutorial mission in Factions kills you automatically during the mission, to teach you about resurrection shrines and death penalty. If you're a Survivor candidate (trying to get to a certain number of XP without dying), however, death is not at all cheap, because even one death will stop your progress in that title track, forcing you to start gathering the required XP without dying anew.
 * As originally conceived, a single death in the Survivor title track would permanently bar your character from advancing any further on that track, thus forcing you to roll a new character if you wanted to achieve Legendary Survivor (the highest level).
 * Lampshaded by Eve in the area after beating the GW:EN storyline.
 * As originally conceived, a single death in the Survivor title track would permanently bar your character from advancing any further on that track, thus forcing you to roll a new character if you wanted to achieve Legendary Survivor (the highest level).
 * Lampshaded by Eve in the area after beating the GW:EN storyline.

"Player Character: There sure are a lot of them. Koss: No, there are three of us, and only two corsair ships. We outnumber them!"
 * Guild Wars 2 averts this in favour of No One Should Survive That: player characters can't be killed, only "downed" or, at worst, "defeated". Members of any class can revive defeated players, only costing them a little time. Or you can warp for a small fee and be revived as well.
 * Death Mountain: The Ring of Fire Islands. Oddly, the extreme heat doesn't seem to bother anyone.
 * Difficult but Awesome: Mesmers, when played well, can completely shut down the enemy team. The only problem is, one requires lightning-quick reflexes and a thorough knowledge of the Metagame to play a mesmer well.
 * Not to mention a decent latency...
 * Doomed Hometown:
 * Doomy Dooms of Doom: The old god of Death, Dhuum. Suffice it to say that Grenth is the nice one.
 * Down the Drain
 * Dressing as the Enemy: Done twice in Nightfall, first to bust up a bad guy negotiation and then (depending on which exclusive mission you took) to rescue your commanding officer. Also used when the players have to stop the Jade Brotherhood from setting a crazed golem into the streets. Your party is listed under a 'disguise' that affects all but non-human characters, leading to some pretty funny dialogue (borrowed from Star Wars) when they try putting shackles on the bad-tempered centaur.
 * Interestingly, there is no similar dialogue when bringing in other non-human heroes along. I found it interesting when I brought Zhed and M.O.X. on that mission.
 * this is because all the other non-human henchmen a) where introduced AFTER nightfall came out and b) would not exactly fit with the chewie joke.
 * There are also obtainable tonics that can turn you into imps, golems, NPCs of different races...
 * One of the costumes purchasable in the in-game store allows player characters to wear White Mantle uniforms in both outposts and explorable areas.
 * Dungeon Bypass: There exist a few methods for this, some designed and some not.
 * One of the earliest unintentional examples is the Nolani Academy mission, where you're supposed to follow Rurik through a dangerous path and fight through a Charr army after demoralizing them... or go right and end the battle in a third of the time.
 * Eye of the North added Secret Switches which open doors and allow access to hidden areas. Some are purely loot sources, but others are shortcuts.
 * During the War: Most of Nightfall.
 * One joke quest has you traveling back in time to the titular Guild Wars in order to stop a golem from killing Gwen's mother.
 * Easter Egg: Too many to list!
 * Eldritch Abomination: Abbadon seems to have turned into one of these in his confinement... unless all the gods look that freakish in their true forms. Guild Wars 2 will give us five primordial dragons who predate (and possibly threaten) the gods, with an interesting knack of causing... well, things to happen - world-shaking and unnatural things - just by existing.
 * Elemental Rock-Paper-Scissors: Partial subversion. While the classic four of Earth, Air, Fire, and Water exist as the types of elemental magic, they don't oppose each other or imply weakness. Instead, they vary in their styles: Air focuses on one target, fire hits areas, earth is defensive, and water focusses on disrupting and slowing down enemies.
 * However, enemies that are related to an element are usually more resistant to it and weaker to the opposed one (the Destroyers come to mind).
 * In a nutshell, the elements have their rock-paper-scissors effect if the target is inherently elemental in nature, like the Titans and Fire Imps being weak to cold damage. The power to cast elemental spells doesn't require an inherent nature, however.
 * Eleventh-Hour Superpower: The Celestial Skills given to each character towards the end of Factions.
 * And the "Breath of the Great Dwarf" skill you aquire in Eye of the North just before the final battle.
 * Elite Mooks: At least one type per campaign, with the Mursaat and later the Titans for Prophecies, the Shiro'ken in Factions, the Margonites and later the Torment Demons in Nightfall and the Destroyers in Eye of the North.
 * In Eye of the North, all the enemies could be considered the equivalent of Elite Mooks in the three main campaigns, which should give you an idea of how tough the Destroyers can be, especially in Hard Mode.
 * Even Varesh's human army has elite -insert profession here- amongst their ranks.
 * Anything in the Realm of Torment can turn into this as well.
 * Enemy Mine: During the Winds of Change storyline,.
 * Enemy Summoner: Aside from NPCs with minion master and ritualist builds, there are also the Torment demons and any Charr who can summon a Hunter Beast.
 * Escort Mission: While escortees in main missions are fairly competent, they can make bonus objectives miserable.
 * Escortees are definitely NOT competent. Well, it might be escorters. Also, you get to escort Leeroy Jenkins' embodiment (Kilroy Stonekin) with all the expected difficulty (though you do get an Über-buff from him in return).
 * You also get allies to follow you around in certain dungeons come Eye of the North, but they can thankfully die as many times as possible, and will come back whenever a room is cleared of enemies.
 * Kilroy's just an Homage to Leeroy - there's a very good reason that Prince Rurik has been known by many as "Prince Leeroy"...
 * Factions is mostly escort missions. However; the people you're escorting (Mhenlo and Togo) are actually fairly competent at least at keeping themselves up. They heal themselves and attack enemies, and most importantly, hold their ground and most often follow YOU. However, they aren't smart enough to walk around chests, and have been known to get stuck in place during a few missions because a chest spawned in their path.
 * The "Vizunah Square" mission is especially notorious for problems involving getting Togo and Mhenlo to keep up properly with the party, especially if the party involves a minion-controlling necromancer; Mhenlo will stop to heal the minions. This can result in the player's losing the maximum reward for completing the mission, because most Factions missions are time-dependent (you have to complete the mission within a set period of time to earn the "Master's" reward).
 * One Nightfall mission, "Venta Cemetery", offers an interesting variety of escort mission: You have to escort six allies to safety, but only one has to survive, and every single one has the Monk profession and will heal each other and your party. You would almost have to be actively trying to get them killed to lose even one. Due to this, a good player can often dispense completely with hero or henchman monks when forming the mission team.
 * Estrogen Brigade Bait: Somehow, Mhenlo, the pleasant, upstanding, and good-hearted monk. Even he doesn't seem to understand why he's so pimptastic.
 * This really gets on Cynn's nerves in Factions, where everywhere Mhenlo goes he seems to run into another attractive young woman he knew way back when he was studying under Master Togo in the old days.
 * Everything Fades: Mostly subverted. Corpses will stay corpses until you leave the area. This is rather important for necromancers, who use corpses to power some of their spells.
 * Actually, corpses do fade eventually, it just takes a bit.
 * Boss corpses, however, never do, allowing you to capture their skills
 * Everything's Deader with Zombies: There are the Orr zombies, the Plague zombies, Joko's mummy/zombies, and player created zombies.
 * Everything Trying to Kill You: One would think that the monsters roaming around the world would prefer the other extant fauna, rather than consistently taking on the heavily-armed adventurers.
 * At some points, they do - mobs of different kinds of monsters or different affiliations will - if no adventurers are present - beat on each others. Most amusing to behold. It's also a good tactic for players to allow rival enemy mobs to fight it out in areas where it would otherwise be difficult to fight one's way through the swarms of enemies.
 * Sometimes, but only with certain mobs, the friend or foe logic seems to bug out. One of the most common locations for this to happen is the Fissure of Woe, Where the Shadow army occasionally starts fighting itself, and a few specific groups are always hostile to others of the Shadow army.
 * The Evil Army: Most notably, the White Mantle of Kryta.
 * The Shadow Army of Menzies qualifies as well.
 * And don't forget the Kournan military
 * They're not really evil, only their leaders are, they just have to follow orders. Admittedly, 2 of the 3 generals are truly evil, but.
 * Subverted though in the case of the Canthan Imperial Army which is depicted as being full of Reasonable Authority Figures.
 * Evil Is Visceral: In Nightfall, the "Gate of Pain" map, which is set in a landscape composed entirely of overgrown viscera, but the whole landscape infected by Abaddon throughout the later parts of the game show signs of this trope, with tentacles and insectoid body parts growing out of the ground, rock formations with eyeballs in them, etc.
 * Evil Overlord: Palawa Joko sheds his Anti-Villain facade in Guild Wars 2 diverting an entire river to establish a new kingdom in the Crystal Desert (while wrecking much of Elona), and usurps the once-heroic Sunspears to be his personal stormtroopers.
 * Exclusive Enemy Equipment: Certain bosses drop their gear as "unique" green items.
 * Slightly subverted in that many players prefer "gold" (rare) items to the green items, even though the latter generally have perfect statistics or bonuses. For example, the "gold" Bone Dragon Staff, which drops from the reward chest at the end of the Shards of Orr dungeon in Eye of the North, is a consistently high-demand, exceptionally high-value item, even when the item's statistics are comparatively poor. Conversely, many "green" items are easily farmed and thus are not especially valuable.
 * The reason for this is that Green items have fixed stats, while Gold ones can have weapon upgrades added to them to get the stats you want on the weapon skin you want.
 * Expansion Pack: With the exception of Eye of the North, the three main campaigns are stand-alone.
 * Fantastic Racism: In Nightfall, most of the centaur herds have been enslaved and forced to work on plantations across Kourna. The Luxons and the Kurzicks in Factions aren't particularly fond of each other, either.
 * The Stone Summit dwarves are rabidly xenophobic and hate both humans or other races that "invade" their mountains, and their saner Deldrimor dwarf cousins.
 * The Norn are, if not contemptuous of humans, rather skeptical at first of their fighting abilities due to the fact that they're much smaller. Meanwhile, the Asura call humans "bookahs", after a mythological monster that's known mostly for being loud, clumsy and not especially bright.
 * The Centaurs derisively call humans "two-legs".
 * In Factions, the Tengu (the avian race) and the Dredge (mole-like creatures, whom the player has previously encountered as slaves of the Stone Summit in Prophecies) have a hard time of it at the hands of the humans. As mentioned elsewhere on this page, the one quest where the player actually encounters a Corrupt Bureaucrat has to do with trying to improve conditions for Tengu refugees in Kaineng Center. And one of the side quests in Kurzick territory involves the player trying to get permission from the Kurzick lord for the Dredge refugees to settle in Kurzick lands.
 * And then you've got the revealed details about Guild Wars 2, where it turns out the future emperor basically assimilates the Luxons and the Kurzicks into Canthan culture and exiles ALL non-human creatures from their shores, as well as anyone who disagrees with that. And this is after those Luxons, Kurzicks, and at least one Tengu helps expel a supernatural evil. Real nice.
 * Then again, the Kurzicks and Luxons had been carrying on a bloody civil war for CENTURIES on rather flimsy premises. No doubt a lot of player-characters who wended their way through the Factions campaign were wondering why the Emperor didn't just exercise his authority, already, and establish order in the eastern regions of Cantha. After all, from several hints dropped during the campaign, both factions are at least theoretically subordinate to the authority of the Emperor in Kaineng Center.
 * Fantastic Rank System: The tables of ranks of the Sunspears and the Order of Whispers in the Nightfall campaign.
 * Fantasy Counterpart Culture: Every human nation throughout the world of Tyria was deliberately based on a mix of real-world civilizations run through a "what if?" scenario.
 * Fantasy Gun Control: Largely played straight in the first game (the Luxons have cannons), but 250 years later with the sequel, the Charr have developed guns, and the technology has spread across the world.
 * Fetch Quest: Optional. Collector NPCs stand out in explorable areas, offering unusual items or armor pieces in exchange for monster drops.
 * Filler: Prophecies fits itself into the definition by the end, especially in hindsight. The campaign starts with your homeland, Ascalon, being destroyed by the charr and you leading refugees to safety in a nearby kingdom, Kryta. You find that this kingdom has its own troubles with undead. After helping out against them for a bit, you find out that, and you agree to help against them. This leads you on a great journey to distant lands to seek a way to defeat their "unseen" masters, the Mursaat. Along the way, you are occasionally helped by a mysterious vizier who tells you of a power that can defeat the Mursaat. When you finally reach that power,  that wants to use the Titans it summons to take over the world. You defeat him of course, and then the campaign ends. The epilogue has a closing line about the lich's Titans wiping out the Mursaat before getting sealed away, but none of this seems to have any series momentum.
 * The charr continue to use the power of the Titans (and eventually by the time of Guild Wars 2, and the War in Kryta events prove that neither the White Mantle nor the Mursaat were ultimately destroyed in Kryta. Even the Scepter of Orr, a MacGuffin early in Prophecies that was scooped up by the villain by the end, ends up conveniently back in the Shining Blade's hands in Eye of the North's epilogue. In other words, the two main plot lines in Prophecies: Ascalon being under attack and the White Mantle's evil are not advanced at all by the actual campaign. The only thing you do is defeat the Lich, who officially reveals himself literally for the last level and has no direct connection to any of the other major events, aside from an off-screen destruction of a country, and even his defeat almost doesn't carry story momentum, as he attempts to.
 * It should be noted however that the original overarching goal (though considerably downplayed later in the story) was the defense, evacuation, and protection of thousands of Ascalonian refuges seeking a new life away from the Charr. The PCs originally joined the Shining Blade only because they would have eventually come for the refugees as well.
 * Finishing Move: Assassins, whose style of play focuses on linked attacks, have their most powerful moves as Finishing Moves.
 * Also the Warrior skill "Final Thrust", which deals a high amount of damage - and doubles it if the target is at less than half health - but takes a load of Adrenaline to use and drains all the Adrenaline in your other skills to boot.
 * Five-Man Band:
 * The Hero / The Medic: Mhenlo.
 * The Lancer / Playing with Fire: Cynn
 * The Big Guy / The Captain: Devona
 * The Smart Guy / Team Dad: Aidan
 * Dark Action Girl / The Minion Master: Eve
 * The Sixth Ranger / Player Character: You.
 * Five Races
 * Asura: The Smart Guy, Guild Wars' equivalent of gnomes and goblins
 * Charr: Proud Warrior Race Guy / Beast Man
 * Dwarves: Standard dwarves.
 * Humans
 * Norn: Giants who can transform into beast men, Proud Warrior Race Guy / The Big Guy
 * The Four Gods: Played straight in the Asia-inspired continent of Cantha.
 * Fungus Humongous: Echovald Forest.
 * A non-mushroom fungus creature appears in certain dungeons as well
 * Fun with Acronyms: Guild Wars: Eye of the North reintroduced the NPC Gwen.
 * Gameplay and Story Segregation: One of the arguably justified cases; because there are several parts in each campaign in which it's implied you have to tread carefully or don't have time to waste. If you really don't have time to waste, new characters would have some trouble because some of these missions open up when they can get some elite skills that they probably really need.
 * Sometimes subverted, however. In the first mission of Prophecies, you don't get discovered by a massive horde of Charr just in the story.
 * Gangsterland: The war between the Am Fah gang and the Jade Brotherhood in Kaineng City.
 * Get on the Boat: At the end of the Sanctum Cay mission and is the only way to open up the Crystal Desert.
 * After finishing the tutorial section of Factions, Shing Jea Island, in order to travel to mainland Cantha
 * In the Nightfall campaign, the mission Consulate Docks has you sail from the large island of Istan to mainland Ehlona's Kourna region
 * And in every game, if you own another expansion, there'll be a mission that requires you to get on the boat to go to the next continent over so that you can start doing missions from the other expansion.
 * Giant Hands of Doom: The fight with
 * God Is Good: The six primary gods are anyway. Balthazar, god of war (who has an Evil Twin). Dwayna, god of light. Grenth, god of death (who is much nicer than the last guy who had the job). Melandru, god of nature. Lyssa, god of beauty and illusion. And finally.
 * Gondor Calls for Aid
 * Gorgeous Period Dress: Anything worn by Mesmers.
 * Gradual Grinder: Rangers and Mesmers.
 * The Great Player-Versus-Player Debate: PvE and PvP are segregated. Some players and guilds only focus on one or the other, and the strategies for each are vastly different.
 * Guild Wars 2 will be similar, limiting PvP to specific areas and events. Outdoor explorable areas will no longer be instanced though, so a degree of kill- and loot-stealing by passing strangers might be possible.
 * Loot will probably be protected, if the current practice of "assigning" loot to a person on drop holds. Kill-stealing (and perhaps, kill-stealing to get drops) might be a problem.
 * According to Anet, they're attempting to solve the kill/loot-stealing issue by a very simple decision- all enemies give full exp and drops to all players who contribute to the kill. If they can pull it off, it could spell the beginning of the end of being an asshole to people you've never met for lulz.
 * And apparently you can't kill other player characters outside PvP areas anyway.
 * Griefer: Random Arenas love hosting players who just flat out quit before the match begins.
 * Humans Are Special: Played straight in the first campaigns, although it has been steadily averted from Eye of the North onward.
 * As of the second game, many of the other races see humans as an old race in its decline, too caught up in their strange religion to move forward.
 * Heel Face Turn: Morgahn. Granted though, if you've played any evil empire story, you know that at least one general on the opposing side is going to do it..and upon seeing how Morgahn is the only one who doesn't have "Bad general" written all over him...
 * He Knows About Timed Hits: In the various tutorials, NPC allies will talk about Fourth Wall-breaking game elements. Kormir, in particular, can be annoyingly long-winded while teaching the player character about those game elements.
 * Hello, Insert Name Here: While NPCs in cutscenes will only use pronouns to refer to the player when speaking, the captions accompanying the speech will regularly place the player's name where it makes sense.
 * Many players have had fun naming characters stuff like Carmen Sandiego names.
 * Heroic Sacrifice: We all are very grateful that it happened. Luckily, he is Not Quite Dead and we get to
 * And back when there was only the first campaign
 * That elite skill, Hundred Blades, is once again considered a highly desirable one by Warriors and other players who use Warrior skills. Especially for farming.
 * The same goes for in Factions, and  in Nightfall.
 * Once AGAIN with the new War in Kryta updates
 * Hey, It's That Voice!: Don't be surprised if Vekk happens to ask you if you're pondering what he's pondering.
 * And in Prophecies and Factions, the male player character is voiced in cutscenes by Steven Jay Blum, aka Spike f'ing Spiegel. As is the Charr hero Pyre in Eye of the North.
 * In Guild Wars 2, Zojja, an important Asuran NPC, will be voiced by Felicia Day.
 * Hit Points
 * Hot Amazon: Jora. Nine freaking feet of smoking hot Nordic Amazonian Action Girl. And every other female Norn.
 * Improbable Species Compatibility: There's a quest chain involving an accidental engagement to a Norn and finding a polite way to cancel the engagement. For female characters, the prospective husband mentions that he wants to raise a dozen half-Norn children. Also, as half-giants, the Norn themselves could be the product of this, however a A Wizard Did It is more likely and far less horrific.
 * Humans Are White: Averted. The player can choose from a lot of skin tones, but will tend toward colors and features appropriate for the setting - European for Prophecies, Asian for Factions, and African for Nightfall (where even white PCs look quite Mediterranean). The different regions in each campaign have noticably different dominant skin tones, with only the Ascalons of Tyria being typically white. The dwarves and norn, however, are all pretty uniformly white, but are also confined to one small geographic area (corresponding to the Alpine and Scandinavian regions of Europe).
 * I Like Those Odds: Nightfall has this in the first mission, when you get a good look at the opposing forces:


 * Incredibly Lame Puns: Kai Ying's dialogue in Factions. Especially the Elementalist beginner quests.
 * Impossibly Cool Clothes: The "15k"/Ascended armor sets. Ironically, they don't provide any extra protection over basic "maximum" armor; they just look better and can be put in a player's Hall of Monuments.
 * Inescapable Ambush
 * Inexplicable Treasure Chests: Which are almost always locked.
 * Infinity+1 Sword: Subverted. Weapon damage reaches a limit, and most weapons sold for high prices merely have unusual or rare appearances. Mechanically, they're nothing special.
 * Arguably exists though with the ridiculously rare weapons that have damage +15% with no downside at all. However these weapons only dropped for a relatively short amount of time before they were patched out for being unbalanced and before that they were already the rarest weapons.
 * Informed Deformity: Olrun Olafdottir looks fine in-game, but during the quest chain in which you end up accidentally engaged to her, she talks about her leathery hands, dry skin and bunions.
 * Insufferable Genius: Vekk (just read some of his quotes), and all of the Asura for that matter. Especially Gadd.
 * Gadd is so insufferable, indeed, that even  Vekk can't stand him.
 * Insurmountable Waist-Height Fence: since your character cannot actually jump over things, this would seem to be a common problem, but it is usually avoided through careful terrain design. A few places in the original campaign still fit the title exactly, however.
 * Guild Wars 2, however, will include a 'Z-axis' which will allow characters to jump over obstacles and the like.
 * In fact, the lack of Z-axis in GW 1 allowed melee characters and creatures hit others that were on top of a bridge they were standing under. And vice-versa.
 * And sometimes even body-block creatures standing under or above themselves.
 * Interchangeable Antimatter Keys: Partially subverted. Keys must match the correct region, and there are items called lockpicks, which work anywhere and have a chance to be retained with use.
 * Invisible Wall: Mostly averted through good terrain design.
 * Irony: A favorite curse of Abaddon's followers is "Abaddon will eat your eyes." When Abaddon is killed and absorbs his power, she becomes the blind goddess of truth.
 * To be fair,.
 * Item Crafting: Not as much crafting them yourself as having the right materials for the crafter to make something out of.
 * I Want My Beloved to Be Happy: Rebellious Princess Tahlkora stepping aside so . Aww.
 * Jiggle Physics: Usually handled pretty realistically, however there are some monk statue monsters which use the same wireframes, animations and jiggle physics as female human monks.
 * Jungle Japes: Maguuma and the Tarnished Coast.
 * Just Before the End: The world slowly comes apart around the players during the three campaigns, and the upcoming sequel is set After the End, in a sense.
 * Done twice in Prophecies. The intro even states "the last day dawns on the kingdom of Ascalon"
 * Justified Tutorial: One for each campaign.
 * Kangaroo Court: Zinn's trial. The prosecution calls themselves the "persecution" and doesn't call any of the 32 witnesses they've gathered ("No need. Everyone knows [he's] guilty."). Talking to the various participants reveals that Oola's bribed members of the Council and witnesses for their help in exiling Zinn
 * Katanas Are Just Better: Averted. In Cantha, katanas are no better or worse than any other sort of sword.
 * However, a piece of endgame weaponry for the Assassin in Factions, are katanas. They're very good weapons (though inferior to regular modded daggers), and unique, as Assassins usually use daggers, not swords.
 * Kill'Em All: Seems to be ArenaNet's default way to end an event. The preview for the game, before Prophecies came out, ended with hundreds of clones of Gwen annihilating everyone in Ascalon City with ridiculously powerful fire magic. Wintersday tends to end with Grenches running around murdering people, while Dwayna revives the fallen, only for them to get Grenched again.
 * To be more specific, that happens during the finale, if you're playing on Grenth's side during the Grenth-versus-Dwayna contest. (This is one reason why it's noted above in the Dark Is Not Evil entry that Grenth can be kind of a dick during the Wintersday celebrations.)
 * Heck, they even do this in player-run events. A sizable crowd of players got together and threw a party/protest in hopes of getting the Mursaat a role in the upcoming Eye of the North game. A-Net's response? They listened...and spawned an army of Mursaat to slaughter all the partiers.
 * Knight Templar: The, while starting out seemingly upstanding and virtuous, is willing to dedicate massive effort to exterminating the local gangs in their entirity, and in NPC dialogue are noted to insult the Luxons and Kurzicks as "not true Canthans."
 * Knight Templar: The, while starting out seemingly upstanding and virtuous, is willing to dedicate massive effort to exterminating the local gangs in their entirity, and in NPC dialogue are noted to insult the Luxons and Kurzicks as "not true Canthans."

"Reisen the Phoenix:Maybe you think we're a nameless evil, but our way of life has existed for hundreds of years. Each and every member of this gang, everyone that you have killed, is a person. Reisen the Phoenix:Their families will never see them again, and why? All because 's answer, your answer, to anything they consider wrong is to remove it."
 * Large Ham: Dhuum, Grenth's less-than-pleasant predecessor, who is also a Third Person Person. And most of the dwarves, especially Kilroy Stonekin.
 * Last-Disc Magic: Averted. The power of a skill is dependent on one's rank in the associated attribute. Therefore, skills acquired at the beginning of the game are not necessarily worse than those found at the end.
 * Somewhat played straight with elite skills, which are usually better versions of regular skills, but they're not dramatically better and only one can be used at a time unless you've "captured" a second or third elite skill in an explorable area. Theoretically, if there were enough bosses of your primary and secondary professions in a given area, you could have up to 8 elite skills in your skill bar while you were in that area!
 * This last was reduced when they set a limit on "PvE-only" skills; now you can have a max of four elites, and temporarily more if you utilize some of the skill-stealing moves right.
 * Leaning on the Fourth Wall: Scattered here and there, usually at a safe distance from the game's narrative, such as the holiday celebrations. Take This character's conversation for example.
 * Level Grinding: Averted. In all three campaigns, one reaches the level cap of 20 rather quickly. This might be changed in Guild Wars 2, though.
 * The later Title-grinding have introduced much grinding (to the dismay of some fans), providing in-game bonuses for high ranks, and being required to craft certain armors or consumable items.
 * Level Map Display: There are actually three map displays; a radar-like map of your immediate area which shows the location of friends, neutrals and enemies; a "mini-map" which shows the larger mission or explorable area with objectives and paths; and a map of the entire continent which is obscured at the beginning by "fog of war" and which becomes more detailed and reveals various places as you explore more of the map.
 * Limited Special Collectors' Ultimate Edition: All three campaigns have had a Limited Edition, featuring such Feelies as a soundtrack CD, art book, world map posters, in-game extras, and a desk calendar.
 * Magic Missile: Staff and wand attacks, and "projectile" spells.
 * The Man Behind the Man:, who led Khilbron, Shiro, and Varesh into madness for his own purposes.
 * Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game
 * Meditation Powerup
 * Mega City: Kaineng City.
 * Mega Manning: Several Mesmer skills, like Inspired Hex and Arcane Mimicry, but only temporarily. The universal skill, Signet of Capture, involves permanent acquisition but is limited to one use. It also used to be the only way to acquire Elite Skills in PvE.
 * Mentor Occupational Hazard: Each of the four campaigns has a mentor figure who ends up biting the dust. Rurik in Prophecies, Master Togo in Factions, Kormir in Nightfall, and, at least for Vekk, Gadd in Eye of the North.
 * And in Beyond, Captain Langmar who was Gwen's mentor.
 * The Minion Master: Minion Master Necromancer character builds.
 * Ritualists can also summon minions. However, their Spirits, while they don't require corpses, asre stationary. Ritualists also have the Spawning Power attribute, which boosts the health of all summoned creatures. "Summoned Creatures" includes Necromancer minions, so a Ritualist can dabble in Necromancer-style minion mastery as well. With mixed success.
 * Mob War: The war between the Am Fah and the Jade Brotherhood in Kaineng City.
 * Money Spider: Mostly played straight, but also averted in that collector items are mostly monster body parts and some monsters can be seen wielding weapons of the general sort they drop (bosses are almost always seen wielding their own green weapons, for example).
 * Following a major game update in 2009, a new NPC, "Nicholas the Traveler", appears in a different explorable area of the game each week; you can trade him a number of a specific collector item for special items obtainable only from him, including rare weapons and miniature pets.
 * Mordor: The Ring of Fire volcanic islands where you fight the Big Bad of Prophecies. Subverted at the beginning of Prophecies though, where the blasted and dead lands of Ascalon are the home of the good guys, then completely averted in Eye of the North, where the homeland of the Charr, the fire-worshipping beasts that destroyed Ascalon, turns out to be beautifully wooded pastoral grassland.
 * The  plays this straight in the Realm of Torment. Now who wants to take a hike through that spider-infested swamp of teeth and diseased flesh?
 * It was originally a fortress to, and was said by an NPC there to be corrupted by him.
 * Ms. Fanservice: Livia, Jora and Xandra. If the engine allowed it, you would definitely be expecting lots of jiggle from those three. Instead, you have to make do with lots of heaving bosom, especially from Livia, during the cutscenes.
 * Elementalist females dancing DO appear to jiggle, however, so by default Cynn does when she dances...
 * Acolyte Jin has a rather noticable jiggle every time she fires her bow.
 * Mysterious Backer: The Order of Whispers and their Master himself, in Nightfall. The player character even lampshades it. "I don't trust you or your Order, but we have a common enemy, so I'll help you."
 * Nature Spirit:
 * The Sylvari, which will be one of the playable races in Guild Wars 2.
 * The summons of the ranger class.
 * The druids.
 * My God, What Have I Done?: The devoted General Morgahn in Nightfall, after realizing that his master Varesh Ossa's actions are evil (in the cutscene preceding the "Grand Court of Sebelkeh" mission).
 * Nice Job Breaking It, Hero: Most of Prophecies is spent undoing your own actions
 * In Eye of the North, the Charr arc is caused by the character's actions in Prophecies - . In this case, it's more in the nature of an unintended consequence.
 * Nightfall's plot revolves around this, too, except
 * The only Guild Wars campaign in which this trope doesn't play a part is Factions.
 * In fact,.
 * Well, at least until the Winds of Change content update, where the player (with the perfectly good intention of trying to get rid of the leftover Afflicted) thus steering Cantha onto the path to the unpleasant state it's in in Guild Wars 2.
 * Honestly, Tyria probably would have been a better place had the heroes not existed.
 * Letting the Charr annihilate Ascalon completely, the White Mantle and Varesh win would have been a better outcome??
 * Debatable in Nightfall when you  In the game it is helping a Sealed Evil in a Can to stop a bigger Sealed Evil in a Can, but by Guild Wars 2,
 * Debatable? Not really. Mainly because the player characters are idiots for not putting Joko back in his can after they kill
 * And though it hasn't been released yet, the sequel may very well carry on this fine tradition. There are eight dungeons planned that you must first go through in story mode where you advance the plot, which is supposed to be relatively easy with a full group. After doing that, you unlock the explorer mode where, according to Area-net, you get to clean up the consequences of your actions in story mode. Since explorer mode will be more difficult, this implies at least eight occasions where you make matters worse. One announced dungeon, Ascalonian Catacombs, will have some Sealed Evil in a Can being released in story mode.
 * Not the Intended Use: Charge and similar abilities are more often used to get places faster than to actually, you know, charge.
 * One of the first successful, and most popular farming builds was based around a skill which reduced all damage above 10% of your maximum hitpoints to that same 10%, meant to protect from powerful spiking skills. With enough items that reduced you health, and sufficient regeneration, you would get an invincible character taking only 5 damage per hit and regenerating 16-20 hit points per second.
 * Obstructive Bureaucrat: Cantha's Celestial Ministry. These are people who will deliver mirrors to the hungry, sick, and homeless Canthans, and who will dismiss you to talk to their superiors, who are standing five feet away. The most telling is a mission involving them named "Red Tape". The bureaucracy has gotten so bad, in fact, that many Canthans now prefer to appeal directly to the emperor to answer their needs.
 * Obviously Evil:
 * Of Corsets Sexy: several outfits available to Mesmers and Necromancers (for example, elite Kurzick armor). Also, Gwen's basic outfit.
 * Official Couple: Mhenlo and Cynn, and . It's also hinted that Goren might have a bit of a thing for Deadpan Snarker Margrid the Sly.
 * Considering they created an entire series of events around their romance and subsequent marriage, Gwen and Keiran are the definitive "Official Couple" of Guild Wars.
 * Old Save Bonus: The Hall of Monuments in the Eye of the North records your titles, trophies, elite weapons and armor, and favored companions. Your Guild Wars 2 characters, centuries in the future, will inherit bonuses and benefits based on the contents of your Hall, though Arenanet insists these will mostly be tangible Bragging Rights Rewards instead of unfair game-breakers.
 * As of October 2010, the beta version of the "Hall of Monuments Reward Calculator" is now available at the Guild Wars 2 website. As promised, the bonuses awarded to players with a stated number of points (up to 30 of 50 so far, though it's possible more "tangible" rewards may be added later - from 30 to 50 points, it's strictly titles) are goodies of various kinds, some of which, judging by the reaction on various discussion forums, players have been waiting/hoping for for a long time. The reaction to the new schedule of rewards has so far been overwhelmingly positive, though it did spark a major run on crafting materials, miniature pets and other such items by players anxious to fill up their Halls of Monuments (even though Guild Wars 2 is, at this writing, likely to come out somewhere in 2012).
 * One-Gender Race: All in-game harpies look female (except for the ambiguous gryphons which may or may not be the same species as harpies) and all in-game dwarves and wardens look male. Strangely, while all living centaurs are male, some of the undead ones are female.
 * The Dwarven NPC hero Ogden Stonehealer makes a sly reference to this in one of his random lines of dialogue: "How do you know you haven't already met a female Dwarf? Eh? Eh?"
 * One-Winged Angel:.
 * Our Giants Are Bigger: They turn into bears.
 * There are still normal giants, and several varieties, which are still quite a lot bigger than the half-giant Norn. Not to mention the extinct Giganticus Lupicus mentioned in the Lore. Bones the size of small towns in the crystal desert are presumed to be theirs.
 * Patchwork Map: Subverted. The world map actually makes sense: the Elonian desert was formed from rain shadow of a Himalaya-like mountain range, swamps and bogs are the lowest in elevation, etc.
 * Path of Inspiration:.
 * Abaddon's cult gradually shifts from Path of Inspiration to Religion of Evil during the Nightfall storyline.
 * Paused Interrupt: But only in textual dialog.
 * Pirate Girl: Magrid the Sly
 * Playable Epilogue: Beating each campaign will send you to an explorable area where everybody is celebrating your victory. In addition, the current Guild Wars Beyond content can only be accessed by completing the main campaigns.
 * Please Dump Me: In Eye of the North, there's a quest chain in which you end up accidentally engaged to a Norn and learning a polite way to get out of it.
 * Plotline Death:, followed by.
 * As well as other, less important NPCs
 * Power Creep, Power Seep: ArenaNet semi-constantly updates the power, recharge, and costs of skills to balance things. Naturally, this makes some strategies obsolete, and allows for new ones.
 * Generally, there is more creep than seep, as some skills which were decent when Prophecies came out are simply terrible by now.
 * Preorder Bonus: Normally, small things, like unique weapons or "mini-pets."
 * Pretty in Mink: The Norn Prestige Armor sets.
 * Purely Aesthetic Gender
 * Puzzle Boss: Duncan the Black, as a level 29 NPC with the boss damage multiplier, his spells deal over 3 times as much damage as player spells, and his unique buff, Duncan's Defense, causes his attackers to take twice as much damage as they inflict on him and he's got a huge health pool. The way to beat his incredible cheap combination of powers involves getting him to kill himself with a combination of AI Breaker tactics and another incredibly cheap combination of spells.
 * Puzzle Reset: Thanks to zoning.
 * Ragtag Bunch of Misfits: Oh so much. Our heroes ?
 * Rape, Pillage and Burn: The Charr culture, in a nutshell. Although when it comes to their treatment of humans, there's a lot less Rape and a lot more Eat.
 * Ribcage Ridge: The Crystal Desert, home to many epic and long-forgotten things.
 * The Desolation as well (which is basically a nastier southern continuation of the Crystal Desert)
 * Real Men Wear Pink: Paragons, male and female alike, wear skirts hemmed above the knees. To a lesser extent, male Warriors can sport Gladiator armor, which bares the midriff for both sexes.
 * Rebellious Princess: Tahlkora.
 * Religion of Evil: The followers of Abaddon, Dhuum and Menzies.
 * Religion Is Magic: Shrines to the gods can enhance many powers of the characters. Many forms of magic, at least in original guild wars, are assumed to come from the gods as well, though this is more along the line of the gods introducing the potential for magic into the world, and everyone being able to use it, rather than gods directly creating the magic at people's request. Monk abilities are called "Prayers" though, so it's possible...
 * Repeatable Quest: Many of the quests offered at the annual "Wintersday" festival (which falls around the time of Christmas-New Year's) are repeatable, enabling players to farm huge amounts of holiday items.
 * La Résistance: The Shining Blade in Prophecies.
 * Resurrection Sickness
 * Retcon: The original game, Guild Wars, was given the subtitle "Prophecies" to distinguish from the later two campaigns. For the same reason, Tyria is both the name of a continent and the entire world, as originally there was only one continent for that world.
 * Abaddon.
 * The Charr not having magic until they got it from he Titans.
 * This is incorrect, the lore states that the Charr had magic long before the Humans even settled on Tyria (Ecology of the Charr lore). However, their magic was more natural and not powerful enough to combat the Humans, who were god-powered. This allowed the Humans to mount their first offense against the charr (before the Charr even knew what a Human was), purging Charr by the bucketload so that the greedy Humans could steal their lands. (Sound familiar?) One caste of the Charr tried to prove that they could out-magic humans only to learn that the human gods were still more powerful. After that, the charr turned to technology and atheism.
 * Ride the Lightning: The spell of that name is both an example of this trope and Shock and Awe.
 * Rocks Fall, Everyone Dies: The beta test for the original campaign ended with legions of Gwens spawning and wiping out all players with fire spells, even those in protected outposts and cities.
 * Saving the World: At least once per campaign.
 * Scenery Porn: Seriously... a lot of this game is just plain gorgeous.
 * Schizo-Tech: The Asurans and their brand of Magitek, justified somewhat by a tendency to discard common sense and logical progression in favor of imagination and inspiration. After all, why bother with combustion-powered vehicles when you can make teleportation gates, or armored tanks when you can make giant robots?
 * The response to the new Engineer profession has been mixed because of this. While the steam-punk feel of some skills will match reasonably with the aesthetics of the Charr, not everyone is convinced that modern-style grenades, land mines with blinking red lights, and automated turrets will mesh particularly well with the human or sylvari art style.
 * Scizophrenic Difficulty: Factions plays this most, as the other three have relatively mild difficulty curves. The first mission is an obvious tutorial where Yijo and Master Togo more or less hold your hand and guide you through the mission. The second mission is a little harder. Vizunah Square, however, was a huge Newbie Trap. After that, the missions got harder and harder before...the difficulty dropped for a little while. Then you're thrown into Unwaking Waters, and the final mission is quite easy after what you went through to get there.
 * Sealed Evil in a Can: The Titans and  Fitting that, come Nightfall, their realms were revealed to be connected.
 * Don't forget Palawa Joko!
 * The five primordial dragons of Guild Wars 2 are either sealed or just hibernating, then get turned loose into the world sometime after the end of Guild Wars. Two of them can be seen now, with one entombed in the wall of the Great Destroyer's cavern and another making up the large ridge between two regions.
 * There is also a sleeping dragon in Drakkar Lake, said to be a lieutenant of Drakkar. Even sleeping, its presence was able to create the Nornbear.
 * Secret War: The Fogotten and Order of Whispers against the forces of Abaddon.
 * Self-Imposed Challenge: The game offers displayable-for-bragging-rights "titles" to those looking for 100% Completion, be it map exploration, PvP, or merely guzzling flagons of virtual alcohol.
 * At least one title were added to recognize this type of challenge. Many players refused to leave Pre-Searing Ascalon, and went so far as to pain-stakingly grind their way to level 20 in a zone where that is nigh impossible. For this, the developers introduced the "Legendary Defender of Ascalon" title.
 * Sequel Hook: Palawa Joko in Nightfall, the in the Eye of the North ending cinematic.
 * Sequel Difficulty Spike: Prophecies has a couple hard missions but some of them are because a monk boss might spawn in the worst possible spot and be near impossible to kill unless you're being run through. Factions meanwhile...Despite that it's far easier to hit the level cap (quests give you thousands of experience points whereas quests in Prophecies gave you hundreds) the game does not screw around and immediately throws you in some difficult missions early on. (Vizunah Square was nerfed, though.) Nightfall is perhaps the friendliest; it doesn't take forever to level up or get started, and it doesn't throw you into the hard missions before you even had a chance to get an elite skill yet. It does have several tough missions, but they come in late into the game after a steady difficulty increase.
 * The main reason Prophecies is easy by now is mostly due to power creep of skills not in the original and the introduction of Heroes, customisable NPC's which you can take along instead of the henchmen with pre-set skills. Try playing trough it with only prophecies skills, no consumable items and no heroes, and you'll see how some missions are a lot harder than you thought them to be. Granted, the skill sets of some enemies are simply outdated by now.
 * Sequence Breaking: In the Prophecies campaign, players can choose to "run" through certain, long, difficult explorable regions to reach cities earlier instead of playing the missions. Factions outright prevents this, and Nightfall comes in between, allowing players to explore but not permitting them to perform missions out of order.
 * You can get max weapons and armor very early though. For instance, in Nightfall, it's common for experienced players who have just created a new character to obtain a "ferry" to a certain mission outpost (Consulate Docks) where a NPC trader offering max armor is available, so that their new character can equip with the best possible armor at the start of the game. "Ferries" can also be obtained to the Factions campaign, as max armor and weapons are also to be had in Kaineng Center.
 * With Eye of the North, you can experience the EOTN storyline even before you complete more than half of the missions in any campaign, all of which occur before the EOTN story. Many players choose to do this in order to get the necromancer hero Livia, who is a key component of the multi-necromancer-hero "Sabway" and "Discordway" skill builds.
 * There was actually a glitch that sent players a couple missions ahead of time. Naturally this would lead to some confusion - because in the mission they started in, they're helping the white mantle...then in the apparent next mission, they're trying to subvert the White Mantle.
 * Shapeshifter Mode Lock: Jora. Most Norns have the ability to transform into gigantic bears; she doesn't.
 * Shout-Out: The names of most "shout" skills (appropriately enough) and a few others, as well as Kilroy Stonekin.
 * Some shout examples: "Can't Touch This!" "Finish Him!" "It's Just A Flesh Wound," "Make Your Time!" "For Great Justice!" "The Power Is Yours!" "Never Give Up!" "Never Surrender!" "None Shall Pass!" and Kilroy Stonekin has a shout of his own called, well... "Kilroy Stonekin!"
 * A number of other skills are shout outs as well, such as Rodgort's Invocation. Certain missions are chock-full out shout-outs as well, the most obvious being "Drakes on a Plain", also the Tekks vs Giriff quests.
 * The 'War In Kryta' update recently added a character called Courier Falken who fights using brawling moves, including a unique move called Falken Punch. And sometimes he sings this funny song: Delivery man, delivery man, does whatever a courier can. Transports packages, any size. Brushes off Mantle, just like flies. Oh yeah, here comes the delivery man.
 * Not to mention his habit of asking his opponents "Are you okay?" right before punching them in the face.
 * The War in Kryta update also introduced the Ebon Falcons. Except for Lieutenant Thackeray, they're all named after characters from Spice and Wolf. Some of their dialogue references this.
 * "G.O.X.? What does the G stand for?" 'I DON'T KNOW.'
 * Even further, the guy who made G.O.X., M.O.X., and several other -O.X.es? His name is Zinn.
 * In one bonus mission you are practically a giant head inside a labyrinth that has to "eat" certain enemies while avoiding enemy ghosts. And did I mentioned that the action of "eating" a special type of enemy will give you the power to defeat the evil ghosts chasing you?
 * "Good, bad. I'm the girl with the big weapon."
 * "DIRR-ECT-IVE?"
 * The Norn Fighting Tournament is packed with references to various fighting games (right up to the final opponent, Magni the Bison), as well as in-game references
 * A Dervish boss that resembles a large, black beetle is named The Black Beast of Arrgh. It's special attack is the Touch of Aaaaarrrrrrggghhh
 * The most prestigious titles are all references to Anchorman. My Guild Hall does smell like rich mahogany.
 * In Factions, a side quest requires you to search a beach littered with blue oysters for a magic cowbell.
 * Many character names. The Kurzick elite armor crafter in Factions is named Giygas, an Asuran named Sokka is a warrior and tinkerer, another couple of Asurans named Hicks and Vask accompany you when burning out a bug nest, and there's an Inquisitor Bauer who's very enthusiastic about torture. And that's just for starters.
 * All the dance emotes.
 * The Halcyon and its crew are obvious shout outs to Firefly.
 * As are the Warden boss Jayne Forestlight and his unique weapon drop, Vera.
 * Just before you complete a side quest in Nightfall, there's a James Bond shoutout. "Do you expect us to give you the scythe?" "No, Sunspear. I expect you to die."
 * When you take a character below level 20 into the Eye of the North expansion, they have an effect called Journey To The North that bumps them up to level 20 while they're there. The description of the effect says "Don't stop believing."
 * One of the game's language options is Bork! Bork! Bork!
 * Keiran's battle quotes are more reference-heavy than most, with a peculiar lean toward mecha anime (with some Fallout and Metal Wolf Chaos thrown in).
 * An early NPC in Prophecy is Gern Blanston, which Steve Martin jokingly claimed was his real name on his "Comedy Is Not Pretty!" stand-up routine.
 * Shoot the Medic First: Standard practice. Although Mesmers and Necromancers are also popular targets.
 * Because of the huge amounts of damage they can inflict, some ritualists using the "Signet of Spirits" spirit-spamming build wonder if they may also be becoming a victim of this trope.
 * Shrines and Temples: Mostly in Cantha, but can be found all over Tyria.
 * Sidequest: In Prophecies, rewards typically include skills, arguably the most valuable reward one can get from a sidequest. In Factions and most of Nightfall, they don't.
 * They do, however, include tokens that can be redeemed at Quartermasters for various items (keys, salvage kits, etc)
 * Nightfall allows you to redeem "hero points" (earned when you attain a new level in reputation) for skills, as does Eye of the North. The skills you can get are quite limited though in both cases.
 * The skills obtainable by expending "hero points" are limited in number, to be sure, but include some of the most useful in the game. For example, the Luxon/Kurzick skill "Summon Spirits" in Factions is indispensable to Ritualists, as it moves the player's spirit minions instantly from one place to another and simultaneously heals them. It's also possible to get some "regular" skills by using "hero points" that you would otherwise have to pay a skill trainer for, which can save you some gold.
 * In Eye of the North, many quests give skills as one of the rewards. One skill awarded for completing an Asura quest, "Pain Inverter", which reflects an enemy's attacks back upon itself, is much-sought-after for various builds.
 * Since a major update in 2009, certain quests and enemy bosses are now designated every day as "Zaishen Missions" and "Zaishen Bounties", which award "Zaishen coins" in copper, silver and gold that can be redeemed for rare items (elite tomes, for example, and large-capacity backpacks which are only available through this avenue).
 * Another recent major update (spring 2010) added the "War in Kryta" subplot, which provides daily "Shining Blade bounties", similar in concept to the "Zaishen Bounties" (except that this time the player is directed to kill specifically White Mantle bosses), in exchange for "War Supplies" which can be redeemed for so-called "Royal Gifts", which, when opened, give the player scrolls or rare items (some of which, such as certain miniatures, can be obtained only from these gifts).
 * Slap-On-The-Wrist Nuke : Meteor Shower would be an example. Sure, it's heavily damaging, but not much more so than your regular Fireball. And since it is affected by armor, it's actually less damaging than many other, armor-ignoring spells against high armored of fire resistant foes.
 * Slap Slap Kiss: Koss and Melonni. Arguably Mhenlo and Cynn as well.
 * The Spartan Way: The Charrs live by this trope.
 * Spotlight-Stealing Squad: In Prophecies the player is, for better or for worse, the driving force of the plot. In Factions, you could take out the player, leave Togo and Mhenlo as the protagonists and put in a few Red Shirts that help them get from one plot-critical action to the next, and you'd have trouble spotting the difference. Nightfall and Eye of the North fix this by having most significant NPCs be the Heroes that take orders from the player. Exactly how big the role of Destiny's Edge will be in Guild Wars 2 remains to be seen, but as of now a lot of the information on the story (including an entire novel) has focussed on this group of NPCs.
 * Standard Fantasy Setting: In Prophecies... for about the first two or three hours, and then never seen again.
 * Squishy Wizard: Played straight with the mesmer. Low armor rating, almost no direct damage dealing capabilities, and a lack of self-heals all combine to form this. Averted with an earth elementalist though.
 * In fact, the armor rating is dependant of the primary profession of the character. "caster" professions get 60, which is considered standard (and are usually called "squishies"), the more front-line oriented have 70, and the Warrior and paragon have 80. Some professions get some additional effects, such as the warrior's +20 vs physical damage, and the dervish's standard +25 hp.
 * Standard Status Effects
 * Standing Between the Enemies: At the end of the Gyala Hatchery mission.
 * Start of Darkness: Shiro's is shown in flashbacks and described Factions manual, Abaddon's is described in the Nightfall manual.
 * Stat Meters: Both a Life Meter and a Mana Meter, or "health bar" and "energy bar".
 * Status Buff: Monks and Paragons are known for giving these to your party. Mesmers and Necromancers debuff your enemies.
 * Status Quo Is God: A side-effect of instanced areas.
 * Storming the Castle: Raisu Palace, which is played with because Shiro is holding the emperor hostage in his own castle and you need to get through the Elite Mooks occupying it. It even has a bit of Battle Royale With Cheese added, since you have to select two allies to buy you extra time by sealing off reinforcements.
 * The Guild vs Guild PvP mode is this trope.
 * The Consulate Docks, Ring of Fire, and Abaddon's Mouth are also versions of this.
 * The Prophecies mission "Thunderhead Keep" does this from both sides. Your team has to liberate the titular fortress from the Stone Summit who are occupying it, and then defend it from a combined force of White Mantle and Mursaat.
 * Stripperiffic: Female Elementalists wear midriff-baring, impractically sexy outfits. Also subverted in that every class has at least one modest armor (except Paragons, all of their female armour and most of their male armour looks like skimpy cheerleader outfits, where there's even a male armor with molded nipples (which are dyable parts!) on the chest piece.)
 * Lampshaded by Mad King Thorn: "How are a paragon and a drunk alike? Both like to shout at strangers and run around without any pants."
 * Some players take the view that certain female Mesmer outfits, with their short skirts and thigh-length boots, are also examples of this trope. The "Elite Enchanter" female mesmer outfit, for example, looks much more like something one would wear in the bedroom than on the battlefield. The female version of the Krytan set has an open jacket over a sheer top, the jacket seems to stay in place with magic.
 * Female Assassins are known for wearing half the clothing as the male assassins. However, that depends on the campaign - the Nightfall armour for them seems pretty useful.
 * Arguably justifiable to some extent; Nightfall takes place in an African-like continent, meaning it gets pretty hot. However, that doesn't explain why female elementalists never freeze to death when they go up to the north....
 * The interaction of textures, polygons and shadows on female necromancers' Krytan armor sometimes make it look like there's a Wardrobe Malfunction.
 * Lonai must be wearing flesh-tone tights. Either that or she's got Barbie Doll Anatomy.
 * Monks have some armour sets consisting of underwear and tattoos, while necromancers have sets consisting of underwear and tattoos or scars.
 * Ranger Elite Druid armor. Essentially a bra and a loincloth.
 * Take Your Time: Plenty of occasions, arguably justified so you can actually prepare for the missions more effectively. Varesh never completes any ritual in Nightfall, Togo and Mhenlo never get slaughtered by Shiro'ken and afflicted in Factions, Evennia and Saidra never get sacrificed on the bloodstone in Prophecies, Thunderhead Keep never truly goes under siege until you go there...Pretty much a lot to count.
 * Techno Babble: This is an actual Skill that you can use on enemies, which you earn from the technologically advanced civilization of the Asura. It damages and dazed your opponent, obviously.
 * Those Two Guys: Goren and Norgu.
 * Thriving Ghost Town: Doomlore Shrine in Eye of the North seems to be this these days. It used to be the main hub for players seeking so-called "dungeon runs", but after a skill rebalance in early 2010 "nerfed" one of the key skills used in the most popular Monk "dungeon running" build, many players abandoned the outpost. Since it's still the only outpost in the three Charr explorable regions (Grothmar Wardowns, Dalada Uplands and Sacnoth Valley), it hasn't been completely deserted though.
 * And recently, with the development of new builds for running dungeons which don't depend on the "nerfed" skill, Doomlore Shrine is becoming active again.
 * For a real ghost town, try Maguuma Stade in the Tangle Root explorable area in the southern part of the Wilds (to the west of Kryta). The only perceptible reason for such a remote outpost seems to be to give players a place to start from when doing "vanquishes" of the area. As such, it's virtually always deserted except for the occasional player or team on a vanquishing expedition.
 * This is lampshaded in the in-game lore, which comments that Maguuma Stade is the long-deserted, almost totally overgrown ruins of what may have been a gathering place for the jungle's Druids.
 * Another locale in Prophecies which may qualify for the sobriquet is Marhan's Grotto, south of the Thunderhead Keep mission location. Usually, the only players who come there are those intending to vanquish the nearby Ice Floe explorable area or purchase elite armor from the artisan located there.
 * In the Nightfall campaign, Basalt Grotto, on the western edge of the Vehjin Mines explorable area, is always pretty much deserted. Aside from the fact that it borders Joko's Domain in the Desolation and provides a convenient stopping-off point for vanquishers, there's really no reason for it to exist.
 * In the Factions campaign, the "odd man out" outpost is probably Bai Paasu Reach in the northwestern corner of the Maishang Hills explorable region. Again, there's no special reason for anyone to go there and its main reason for being seems to be to provide an additional town for Luxon-aligned guild alliances to "own".
 * Most mission-outpost are now highly underpopulated compared with a few years ago. The introduction of the Zaishen quests, that daily designated a single mission, boss, area and pvp-battle for being worth an extra reward, was done to concentrate the remaining players so that forming a pick-up group becomes much easier.
 * Took a Level in Badass: Most notably, Gwen, the naive little girl who just wanted to follow you on your adventures, growing into a hardcore Charr-slaughtering sorceress. And more recently, Thackeray, whose transformation from ranger to paragon during the War in Kryta also taught him to stop being such a fragile doormat and start being a man.
 * Trailers Always Lie: The trailer for Prophecies depicted Devona, Cynn and Aidan fighting hordes of undead in what appears to be the Ring of Fire Islands (except for the castle-fortress at the top of a volcano), in the game you mainly fight Mursaat and Titans in that place. Devona is shown to be wielding dual blades while Cynn attacks by hitting with her staff, in the game Devona wields a hammer instead and Cynn, being an elementalist, never engages in physical combat.
 * Moreover, Devona, Aidan, Cynn, Eve and Mhenlo don't become available to the Prophecies player as "henchman" NPC's until perhaps 2/3 of the way into the campaign, after the player has "Ascended" following the Crystal Desert missions.
 * Training Dummy: The wooden dummies in the tutorial.
 * And a few "Students", I.E. Actual people, used to demonstrate various conditions and hexes for you. Most of them are "allied", though, to keep you from hitting them yourself. When you're the "Student of Burning", it may be time to switch your major.
 * Tsundere : Gwen to Keiran Thackeray in the "Hearts of the North" content, and Cynn to Mhenlo as well
 * Turtle Power: The Luxons use turtles as mobile siege platforms.
 * Twenty Bear Asses: Generally avoided for quests, but there are a few such quests, and even then about half of the time the required item will drop from every enemy of the proper type. The other half are among the most annoying quests in the game. It's the NPC collectors who will give useful items for the proper number (usually five, but it can vary from 1 to 250) of an item.
 * Unbreakable Weapons
 * Underground Level: Several, most notable in Eye of the North, which has eightneen instanced dungeons (which range from one to five levels deep).
 * Underground Monkey: Sometimes models are reused for similar enemies, sometimes not (and the ones that are will often be subtly altered).
 * The various amphibian groups (Heket, Agari, Gokir, Ophil) are an example of this. Justified in-game on the grounds that they're all branches of the same species (indeed, for a Nightfall quest that requires you to collect legs from fallen amphibian enemies, you can complete the quest by killing amphibians in the Asura regions of the Eye of the North campaign area).
 * Unperson: Actually an Un-Deity. The Five Gods banished nearly every monument, structure, writing, or individual with knowledge of Abaddon into the Realm of Torment, along with Abaddon himself. Even one person having knowledge of him would strengthen his grasp on reality. Unfortunately, enough escaped the Gods to allow Nightfall.
 * Vendor Trash: Subverted. Most seemingly useless items are either used in Fetch Quests or can be broken down into crafting components.
 * Also, since 2009, many "collector's items" dropped by enemies can be redeemed by the NPC "Nicholas the Traveler", who'll ask for a different item each week and give you one gift per stated number of items, up to five per player account per week.
 * Might be played straight nowadays, though, in the case of many once-rare "gold" weapons. Due to the longevity of the game and the fact that a number of areas boasting once-highly-desirable weapons have been excessively farmed, many once-rare weapon skins are now considered strictly merchant fodder.
 * Victorious Childhood Friend:.
 * Warp Whistle: map travel
 * Was Once a Man: The Undead, Afflicted and.
 * What Measure Is a Mook?: Subverted in the final confrontation in the quest What Waits in Shadow. This in turn leads the character to realize that.
 * What Measure Is a Mook?: Subverted in the final confrontation in the quest What Waits in Shadow. This in turn leads the character to realize that.

"Xin Ji: "How can you sit there and tell me to do nothing while you take up arms against ? I know your history. You are a hero, you are..." Player: "A killer? It isn't as noble when you say it like that, is it? I have slaughtered thousands simply because someone told me it was for a just cause. But something you'll learn over time is, everyone thinks their cause is just.... I looked at them and saw myself. Gullible. Idealistic. Willing to do whatever was asked of me, so long as the intentions were good. Evil acts with good intentions are still evil acts, Xin Ji. Make sure that in your quest to destroy evil, you don't become it.""
 * Further in that quest chain, the dialogue of the player character that leads the party will subvert it to the point of Lampshade Hanging, given the sheer number of mooks every player character has killed by now.


 * We Buy Anything: While true, there are special supply-and-demand-based merchants who offer floating, but usually better prices for specific types of items.
 * Rare scroll traders, rune traders, and material and rare material traders. Any of these will offer you better prices for items in their category than "ordinary" merchants.
 * What Could Have Been: Guild Wars Utopia, a planned fourth campaign with an Aztec theme. Eventually canceled in favor of doing an entire sequel, since Arena.net found themselves so limited by the current game. Instead, they put out Eye of the North, a smaller expansion that presumably reused some of the assets, like the Mesoamerican stuff in the Asuran areas and the Silver Eagle armor.
 * Why Isn't It Attacking?
 * Wild Mass Guessing: Before GW:EN, the fate of Gwen. Somehow an inconspicuous little girl managed to provoke thousands of people to write fanfics and ask what happened to her. Of course, it was shot to hell by GW:EN which blatantly told us.
 * Winged Humanoid:, who don't actually use them, and just levitate around instead. Paragon spell animations also feature wings heavily, and promotional art of the class typically displays very real and very solid-looking wings.
 * Also the harpies and at least one variety of Margonite
 * People who buy Aion, another NCsoft game, get a code to get an item that gives them wings.
 * World of Badass: Many of the main characters are quite capable of major ass-kicking.
 * World Building: Done surprisingly well, creating three continents with their own history, culture and mythology.
 * World-Wrecking Wave
 * Wretched Hive: Kaineng City, even before the plague. Mhenlo comments on this at the beginning of the quest that introduces non-Factions characters to Kaineng. Leaving aside the Afflicted victims of the plague, the various districts of the city are infested with thugs from the Am Fah and Jade Brotherhood criminal gangs.
 * Xanatos Gambit:
 * Yandere: Cynn, dear God Cynn, if you are female and try to approach Mhenlo you risk being turned into a pile of smoking cinders by her.
 * Wutai: Cantha; interesting to note that the game is American, and spent a lot of work designing a mix of Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Thai, and original features.
 * You Can't Go Home Again: Only in Prophecies, when said "home" is a time, not a place.
 * You Mean "Xmas": Wintersday, which features a battle between Dwayna, goddess of life and Grenth, god of death, in the form of a Snowball Fight. And Grenth's minions are very much Dr. Seuss/Grinch inspired.
 * And the whole purpose of the Dwayna vs. Grenth battle is inspired by, of all things, Groundhog Day. (No, not that one.)
 * You Will Be Assimilated: If you want to unlock Elite skills for your characters and heroes, you have to beat them out of bosses by defeating them and using the Signet of Capture on the corpse.
 * Zip Mode: You can travel, at will, instantly to any public area that your character has yet visited, making it unnecessary to trek there more than once.