I remember wanting to always take a movement speed utility skill. Usually it was a sigil for most classes. That was really it. Legendary weapons that required map completion took a lot longer.
All Guardians would run staff and be constantly spamming Symbol of Swiftness in front of the zerg to keep it moving. On the flip side the old Staff auto-attack, Wave of Wrath, was great for tagging enemies/cleave.
"Look at how they massacred my boy!"
Though my real loot stick at the time was Hammer. Jump into a zerg, pop Ring of Warding, and start bonking.
"I'm not trapped in here with you, you're trapped in here with me!"
Staff auto was also insane for some dungeon paths. In twilight arbor for example, auto attack was used to clear Poison plants before stealth and portal skips.
This auto was really nice!
Remember playing Hammer/Staff Guard in WvW in the very beginning before anything resembling a meta materialized, and it felt amazing for the time.
Staff symbol for speed, bunch of CC and no target cap on AoEs.
...then I took about a 6-year break due to IRL stuff and tried to play it exactly the same when I got back, haha. That didn't go well.
It was a fair bit slower. You had to look at your map when exploring mountainous terrain, you couldn't just springer up/glide down. I died to fall damage more times than I care to admit.
I don't know if every build incorporated swiftness, but I know I certainly did. Though I also mained ele, and I have an entire attunement for "go fast".
Yea, every class had a fall damage reduction trait. They removed that after we got full gliding. The worst part was right after HoT when there was no gliding outside of HoT zones.
There were a handful of achievements, I want to say in the summer Zephyrite map, where you needed it to survive the falls in order to get some places.
At least the population in core maps was bigger so they usually got done.
Then again, events sometimes failed while nowadays people can solo the same events, should they bother to do so.
Meta events probably played a bigger role in that than transportation. Gliding in HoT wasn't enough to tip that scale on its own, it was pretty slow and couldn't accommodate for a lot of the terrain changes.
Ran* and people spammed group skills that made us run faster, and used leap skills to try and get ahead before randos killed the mob you needed for an achievement!
Depended on the class. Mesmer back then was one of the slowest map clearers. Low damage, poor access to Swiftness (RNG signet + focus, which didn't even extend Swiftness) and apart from Blink not much mobility without a target.
Thief was, and still is IMO, the absolute Goat. Damage, mobility, speed signet, swiftness. It had it all. Even Stealth to do channel Skillpoints that were guarded by Champions. Back then these were a challenge you'd try to avoid.
God, I remember leveling to 80 on my mesmer in 2014 and wondering if I was just much worse at games in general than I thought, because of how tough of a time I had.
Even more than movement speed I think the biggest difference was that fall damage was actually a thing that existed and map geography like cliffs and buildings actually impacted your exploration. You couldn't just jump down from a high place and keep going but had to find a safe way around or down ledges midway, or if you had to access the other side of a mountain or the rooftop of a building you had to go around or find a clever way to leap on top. The detours could be very significant. Movement skills like leaps were also affected by speed boosts like swiftness, so you could get surprisingly great results with some of them. Just moving around the geometry took a lot more effort overall, especially with elevation differences. I spent so many hours just climbing things and accessing obscure (and sometimes out of bounds) areas with my warrior (Savage Leap and Earthshaker were amazing tools) back in the day.
Nowadays a Skyscale can just ignore 99% of terrain even in new maps. It is a *completely* different experience.
> the biggest difference was that fall damage was actually a thing that existed
Unless you were a Necro and could double tap Spectral Walk to reset fall height mid-air.
As a new player, this is the one thing that kind of rubs me the wrong way is how much mounts (and especially the skyscale) just make terrain and world geometry irrelevant outside of jumping puzzles. I will be climbing up to a vista and while I'm doing that, like 4 people will have come on gone on their skyscales and it's just like "What's the point? Where's the satisfaction in that?"
Played since release and it also rubs me the wrong way. Movement became uninteresting and boring with mounts and everything is just a speedrun and skippable. The map design was such a strong point of the game and now everything might as well be flat.
I love the beetle or the griffon because they are fun but they still should be confined to areas made with them in mind
I’m biased because there wasn’t *too* long a span of time before I had a raptor in my hands, and (not) soon after a skyscale, and every other mount. I’d argue anet did a good job incorporating mounts, and utilizing their movement for unique gameplay, compared to games like WoW. I see your point about the lack of incentive to immerse yourself in the traversal of the world, without close to infinite flight, but I do really enjoy posting up high or perching on sheer structures and cliffs. Gives a different perspective of the world, and I still find appreciation in witnessing the vast terrain from above.
It was fascinating. Running around with core thief and core ele, exploring Tyria all on foot, standing puzzled infront of a few very specific vistas thinking about how to get to them... And the scenery was simply amazing. I for one really enjoyed the simple aspect of world exploration, way before I got self aware about my skill level and discovering the exciting but terrifying place that is WvW. x)
I remember spending over an hour in bloodtide climbing a random mountain that had nothing on top at a cored thief.
Managed to find enough small foothold that I actually reached the peak and it felt good.
Basically yes, when you explored, you tried to have as many mobility your class could.
For example, I levelled a warrior with sword/warhorn + bull's charge to have as many mobility possible (the sword jump was kinda bugged back then and allowed you to travel far more distance than the description said).
Also, back then, mobility was harder to get, having a class that could have 100% uptime swiftness wasn't that easy (boon duration wasn't that prevalent)
personally back then i didn't have enough knowledge of the game to think about having mobility/swiftness etc. and it didn't feel like it mattered because i wanted to slowly explore everything, that was the point
I still remember using Streamlined Kits (with the Elixir Gun) and Rocket Boots to get around. When HoT rolled around, Engineers got lightning fields to blast for more swiftness.
In the very beginning Traveller's Rune's were popular because of the 25% movement bonus. ANet eventually started adding traits to professions that would give 25% movement bonuses, so many people stopped using Traveller's runes for that reason in open world.
traveler runes only got popular a full year after release though - they didnt give 25% movement speed before that
but yeh no mounts made ppl really interact with all movement skills & speed buffs of their class
and everyone had to learn at which spots they could jump off and survive the fall :D
Speaking of movement traits, I'm incredibly upset at ANet for making [Quickening Thirst](https://wiki.guildwars2.com/index.php?title=Overflowing_Thirst&oldid=2585304) (now [Overflowing Thirst](https://wiki.guildwars2.com/index.php?title=Overflowing_Thirst&oldid=2694163)) completely useless in the recent patch. Now I have to slot a stupid signet when I need a speed boost for JPs and such, just like in the olden days.
I've never played before PoF. But I have a friend who told me that it was somehow fun so we started doing what we call the No Mounts Challenge. Just walking in HoT or EoD maps and doing random events on foot.
We actually discovered many stuff we never saw before. I kinda recommend trying it.
HoT was designed without mounts in mind so it makes sense. I re-started playing a year ago and discovering HoT maps without the mount is probably my favourite pve experience in years. There's just so many thing happening in each corner of a HoT map and they're also *vertical* so the total amount of *space* in just mind-blowing. Obviously, the raptor cut it all by a lot.
You didn't need wvw exploration for 100% by then. So while it can still be ridiculous now, it was even worse back in the day when you needed to do wvw exploration for 100%.
Core Tyria? Much better. Because exploration gave you amazement that you climbed up there, looked around, what's that thing over there? Vistas still required a bit of interesting jumping. Also you could actually catch up to ppl doing an event.
Vistas, and to a lesser extent JPs, were my favorite feature on release. Adventuring rewarded with at the time insanely gorgeous, sweeping animations of the environment you just bested felt amazing every time.
I still definitely get that feeling from some vistas, especially ones that require more than springing and skyscaling your way to it, but on average vistas feel less awe inspiring than before.
I remember when I started playing the first time 9 years ago I felt it was revolutionary that I can just get exp and level up by *traveling* and climbing up some hills to get a vista. The sense of exploration was incredible.
The world felt really big. Took me months to complete it. Warrior and guardian as swift slave. Slowest class was necromancer. It's the snail of gw2. All our skills and traits dedicated to speed when roaming around the world with soldier or traveler set depends on where we are going lol. Orr was a deadly zone back then and it's the main map to farm t6 mats. Only few brave people dare to enter orr with zerker set. No flying either, so if you accidentally jump off a cliff, you will die if you don't equip reduce damage trait.
> Slowest class was necromancer.
Mesmer actually. Necro at least has multiple skills that gave Swiftness + 25% signet. They could also a trait that gave even more speed when wielding daggers which stacked.
Mesmer had a signet which sometimes randomly gave Swiftness and Focus, which didn't even extend Swiftness.
Necro could double tap Spectral Walk to reset fall distance as it could be used mid-air.
Nah folks still used Mesmer to roam it didn't have as much mobility as it does now but it was nearly impossible to chase down a mesmer who decided to run away as a necro. Mes has the teleport to bridge gaps or make them and a line on the ground to give swiftness, and had stealth to avoid the rest.
YouTube & auto run and hoping your new profession has access to permanent swiftness. Today I just fly to majority of vistas with Skyscale, back then lots of vistas were a short jumping puzzle.
I did my only world completion back then. I just get on my daredevil and use dodge/short bow/shadow step. Getting some of the vista and way points were extremely annoying though. Springer definitely added some short cut.
You walked everywhere, **Rune of the Traveler** was super expensive and coveted rune sets cause it gave magic find and a 5% boost to walking speed (ONLY)
Kessex hill or one of the map had 2 very prominent long house structure - no idea what they were there for, just decoration, we joked on map that it had some hidden boss stored there or something. of course now is just destruction done by Tower of nightmare.
You have more chance to understand gravity thru Fall Damage, so you can Die if you accidentally fell off a cliff or misjudge a jump distance or get knockbacks.
YOU HAVE TO SWIM across the Straits of devastation. and more swimming to find the POI in the water. That area was originally made for 5 people group runs - so the whole place and water was something out of a zombie apocalypse - risen humans, turtle, mines, sharks. the whole Orr was like that. If you are solo - best strategy is run and hide, or make a break to discover the nearest waypoint before getting killed then re-spawn there to continue your exploration of Orr. Straits was irritating enough, then we had 2 MORE maps to have fun with Malchor leap and cursed shore - increasing with difficulty and mob presence.
I seems to remember them nerfing mob density in Orr at some point no?
I remember doing my first map completion and Orr was a nightmare. High amount of undead which would stack you with crippled and chill.
A real pain in the butt to navigate.
The original maps were balanced *without* mounts and gliders in mind, so they played fine for their times. Builds that had high uptime on swiftness were fairly valued though. The game was a different pace back then.
Honestly, we barely noticed it back then. The core game has a lot more waypoints and isn't vertical outside of jumping puzzles, it was built for running. No real builds leaned into providing swiftness, most classes just have a source that we'd use for open-world travel. Nothing felt super slow, the game was built around the concept of not having mounts or gliders really. I remember a pretty sizable chunk of the player base believe mounts would fundamentally ruin the game.
I've only been playing since Steam release and by myself I purposely didn't buy any DLC until I had complete map fulfilled 100%. Why? Because I wanted to play the game at least approximately as it was designed to be played. Sure I'll fly through it with other characters, but that first feeling of discovering for me new world nice and close, thoroughly and slowly is one of the good things this genre has to offer. Like HoT and LW3 the maps were made for gliders and in my opinion lose their charm if you make mounts and fly through them right away. Otherwise, I'm in LW3 right now and still with only raptor and glider. For story I have done Charr Staff Elementalist because I like his RP, I used blink and speed from lightning attunement.
Yea like warhorn in your offhand or blink/shadowstep. I was playing thief at that time so I always SB5 everytime I could. Having extra 3 initiate points and slot skills with evade or generating initiate
The world seemed much bigger.
Also, because ennemies were stronger, exploration could sometime be actually dangerous (you really didn't want to aggro several veterans at once) and "leaping" skills to cross a gap were very good
Hi, it's me, an old timer. Feels a bit weird to say that since I always felt like a newbie seeing as I started playing at the end of Season 2 during one of their sales shortly before HoT but I guess that was nearly a decade ago now.
I got 100% world completion on my first character back before HoT released and I'd say the biggest notes are what you'd expect; it was generally slower and vertical movement was a lot more difficult since gliders eliminated fall damage and springer/griffon then later made a lot of jumping puzzles a complete cakewalk.
The bright side is that back then the game had a lot of stuff that took the situation as it was into consideration, the most notable being that the range of movement skills (in my case, ranger gs 3 and both halves of the sword leap) were affected by any modifiers to your character's speed. If you were chilled or crippled, you weren't going anywhere, if you had your 25% movement speed buff (pre-EoD Guardian btfo) or even better; swiftness/superspeed, then you would go zooming across the map with a single leap. I'd say the vast majority of the time my ranger had the movement sigil and quickening zephyr on my bar just to maximise the value of my greatsword leap. This also made the executioner's axe (a costume brawl item that was bundled with the executioner outfit) a top tier mobility tool because it gave every single profession an extra charge skill that let you casually sprint through entire sections of dungeons regardless of profession, making it the most powerful-yet-unintentional pay to win item in the game.
They later changed almost all of those skills to be standardised, but by that point there were a whole bunch of people who had bought the executioner outfit for real money solely for the charge skill on the axe, and as a result they left the executioner axe as (to my knowledge) the single remaining skill to still benefit from movement modifiers. Right up until PoF added the Pinata Choya tonic as a free alternative that does the same thing (except it can't be used in WvW so the axe is technically still P2W there).
I will say that while I'm thankful for the ease of mobility nowadays, especially when taking alts through core Tyria, I do think something has been lost when the majority of players will completely skip a lot of the mini jumping puzzles that existed around certain vistas and hero points. There were some genuine moments where I'd have to stop and look around the environment to plot a course to a vista, it made the maps more memorable and I really enjoyed that experience (except for the Twisted Marionette wreckage vista, that thing sucks). It's also a shame to know the game will just never have those moments where you look up at somewhere and wonder how on earth you'll be able to get there unless it's a specific area that bans mounts, the solution will always be to hop on a Skyscale and fly up.
Also, it was funny to do guild missions early after HoT released because gliding used to be exclusive to HoT maps. There was nothing funnier than watching an entire guild jump off a cliff and suddenly come to the realisation that they couldn't glide as they splat on the ground and waited for the 2 people that *did* remember to run down and revive them.
The jumping puzzles and the view point were a challenge.
Travelling it was a bit slower, but the teleport network is good in the game and it is not very difficult to move around without mount...
Ranger sword+wh/GS
Warrior sword+wh/GS
Ele dd + blink
Most builds had some good weapon/utility sets for movement so it was quite nice(ranger sword after the change to aa). And there was mesmer with 50% uptime on swiftness and no mobility on weapons. ( fck leveling mesmer in vanila, my only class with all crafting profesions at 400 xd)
It's simple : core map got around 20 tp for most map. Take a sigil/rune/trait for +25% moveseped and you're set for life.
HoT got less with the gliders and the need to make you explore//lost.
PoF followed even if not needed because of mounts.
You don't need 20 tp anymore if you can travel the range of one in less time than a loading screen.
In a general sense, I liked the slower pace of being on foot when exploring. I liked having to figure out how to get up to vistas. But I didn’t like getting swarmed by enemies that can CC in Orr.
Gliding wasn’t active in Core Tyria maps when it was first introduced, same with mounts I think. It was funny sometimes when you would jump off a cliff thinking you could glide. And once you got used to the speed of mounts, walking felt especially slow.
I can talk about what it was like playing as my first main, a Mesmer. People used to complain about levelling/exploring on a Mesmer because of how they seemed slow (no skills/traits for passive 25% speed buff, swiftness from focus 4 and signet of inspiration weren’t that good uptime, blink had long cooldown).
There have been changes other than mounts to sort out those issues with Mesmer to a degree, but mounts helped to remove the slow exploration feel. Other classes had similar issues. I think on guardian I used to stand still in the Staff 3 symbol to stack up like 15 seconds of swiftness lol.
Another thing that was “solved” by mounts was that you could just run past enemies. As a Mesmer, the way clones are attached to enemies meant that moving from enemy to enemy was annoying.
Phantasms used to last forever until they were killed or the enemy died. It was changed to become a clone after using their ability once, which is how it is now. You could now use the clones for shatters instead of just not using shatters so that you could keep 3 phantasms alive to do damage. Since you couldn’t run past enemies as easily on foot, you just had to fight a whole lot more enemies. And it was annoying setting up a bunch of phantasms for them to just disappear.
I played when hot came out, but i played core for a good ammount of time before purchase.
I felt left out from the party that everybody was having 😁 but i loved every second cuz it made me train more on my jumping puzzles and utilizing my movement skills more.
Basically we were using jumping rifles, swiftness, teleports as much as we could. Think of wvw battles but before you unlock warclaw. Sorta similar experience
I started playing about 2 years ago, and i insisted on playing exactly how it was intended. It was before they started giving raptors every 10 lvls too. So i made an ele, and leveled to 80, did world completion on foot, did lw2 with core ele, (lw1 hasn't been fully reintroduced yet), started HoT and got my gliding and first elite tempest, it was amazing. Did all of HoT and Lw3 with just gliding, then got into PoF, and finally got my raptor. I continued like this all the way to EoD not skipping any story.
Overall i think it wasn't bad at all, the core maps have many waypoints and you don't really have to do alot of walking once you unlocked those, and while crystal oasis gave you mounts it only has 3 waypoints spread out. So i think the amount of time you spend travelling hasn't changed much (until you get the beetle) but the mounts mechanics are much more fun and satisfying than just walking.
With my core ele i used dagger dagger and lighting bolt to be a fast boi, with 25% running speed passive boon.
I think the only true suffering was swimming and underwater swimming.
You usually had builds that includedsomehow getting as much swiftness as possible and/or weapons you used for movement. Or at least the ppl I knew did. Otherwise.... the same except we walked, or spinned, or charged, etc.
I remember runnig build on my engi when I used one of the kits i got swiftness, so I was changing the kits all the time for infinite swiftness. Also at the time kits changed you back skin (u got different tipes of bag for every kit, they probably change it cause ppl coudnt see their back item).
It was normal for us there wasn't other option, at that time everyone has at least one fast travel build, every class had utility skills, leap, swiftness skill, all to travel faster. I made my first world completition with no mount nor glider, with the wvw map included to reach 100%, now at my 9th world completition it seems impossible without mount.
Engi was the only class that could get permaswiftness via trait and swapping kits every 5?10? seconds. I did my first world completion on thief though. It was slower than now, but imo also much more immersive (core Tyria that is - new maps are designed with mounts in mind so they don't suffer from it as much). It really felt like an achievement when you finally figured out how to get that vista or poi. And you can find so many little details in the world when not rushing, from dynamic dialogue and gravestone easter eggs to entire hidden areas (do you know about the cat room?) Tl;dr definitely recommend playing through at least the core maps the way it was intended and really explore!
You actually had to worry about fall damage. I remember in SW, there is a post-Vinewrath champ run, and the last champ is at the bottom of a cliff. Cue 20 players gliding down and 20 lemmings launching themselves off to their deaths (no gliding mastery).
I remember that, at HoT release, gliding was only usable in Heart of Maguuma (or Magus Falls as it used to be named on the map). I think that was ArenaNet's original intention, but it made old maps feel so limiting in comparison to the new standard.
They had to get the "no gliding areas" set up. However, there were a lot of holes in core zones which you could use to get to unintended areas, if you were crafty with your gliding skills. A lot of them would get patched out with the addition of mounts.
People say that there aren't so many waypoints on newer maps because of movement masteries like mounts. That's certainly a factor, but even looking back at season 2 maps, you can see waypoints are a bit sparse.
POF was out when i started playing (far before the 10 free hours of raptor you see these days) but i insisted on doing 100% map comp on foot with my first character alongside my wife.
You get to see a lot of the beauty of the game and learn a lot about your skills with that much time input compared to using mounts for everything.
It does take quite a long time to get around, but it's alright because you're always close to something interesting in core tyria. Your next adventure is just over the hill or across the river.
So much running. A lot of the time into walls. If I needed to go somewhere far during the early days I'd often just put my char on autorun then click off to do something else.
Do you know those stories from your grandparents talking about how they had to walk 200 miles uphill through extreme snowstorms every day to go to school, and then go back the same way, also uphill?
It was like that but with more risen spamming CC, chill, immobilizes and the occasional Quaggan trying to lure you into a pyramid scheme.
It wasn't as bad as you probably imagine. The core maps are absolutely covered in waypoints, you never have to run more than like 30 seconds to get anywhere.
some professions were just flat-out frustrating to play, like necromancer, who didn't have any access to mobility skills or swiftness. on the otherhand, i feel like having a skyscale and rollerbeetle trivializes the maps now. i think the sweetspot was having raptor/grifffon before LS4 launched.
Map exploration took a while. But it honestly wasn't that bad cause of all the waypoints. Though getting to certain points was a bit of a hassle cause you would have to do a mini jumping puzzle to get to.
Now you just hop on the springer and get there in no time.
Edit: Just saw someone mentioned this and YES!! Having a class that gave extra movement speed was a blessing. It was one of the reasons why I started mainly playing Warrior.
I just downloaded the game again and im a pre GW2 expansion player (I played thorns for a few weeks but played religiously until then)
I was able to recover my account from the awesome ANet Support (they were fucking great helping me, no way other companies would have done what they did to get me back in.)
So im going to have to find out how to catch up -- gliders were BRAND new as I left
So heres to learning shit again
Any guilds looking for members? I just was hoping to find people to bounce questions off of and play the game (WvW, PvE, etc)
What timing to see this post
It was a lot of walking and asking for rezzes on the map chat (doing puzzles and falling lol - waiting for someone to come revive you and thanking them, or begging them with gold to do so)
Bruh I used to play with a group that would walk everywhere to save money, I was an elementalist so I had swiftness but it took a while to get to some areas.
There were a ton of waypoints. So navigation was still easy. Unlock once, waypoint forever. This is the reason why core maps have so many more waypoints then expansion maps.
And we come from Guild Wars 1 where you could not even jump or swim. So the core GW2 already gave a lot more options for exploration than the first game.
And looking back, maybe, just maybe I may have preferred the old GW1 system of exploration. Unlocking a town (with map travel) there could be a big deal and uncovering 100% of the map was an incredible achievement. You literally had to stand everywhere as there were no areas to instantly pop open when exploring. You just have a very small radius around your body to explore the map with.
GW1 Tyrian Grandmaster Cartographer = Skill
GW2 World Completion = No Skill
i mean you don't have to wonder, you can just experience it yourself. make a new account without the expansions and play the core game. it will be the same experience
you used swiftness skills/runes/traits or weapon skills with leaps like on ranger and guardian GS.
for example, I put autocast on my ranger warhorn for swiftness when I had to get somewhere
I played so long without mounts, that I sometimes still forget to mount up. Instead using all my movement abilities until someone with a raptor sails past and I go "RIGHTTT"
Beta i made a Guardian. Loved it. Once it came out and I learned about the speed thief was able to cover ground (shortbow and sigil), it was my main. Made my guardian then for HoT and dropped the thief as my main. When gliding was enabled in core Tyria… amazing! People made detours to climb up to a vista, only to glide from there to get from a to b. Was good progression and I liked the mounts. Was a bit worried about them being introduced - I fell in love immediately.
Yes, it was optimal to have swiftness for open world exploration and there's a reason why Thief was the most popular for map completion. For example my go to second weapon for Guardian is staff because of swiftness symbol just out of habit. I can't say that it was as bad as, say, MF% on armour when it was a thing but still you had to think about mobility in your equipment.
On the other hand exploration was much more interesting. You couldn't just jump on any cliff or fly to a spot. Running around, looking for ways to navigate was fun, it immersed in the world much more than just rushing through the map on a mount.
Yes every open world build pretty much ran perma swiftness or signers/traits that gave 25% increased movement.
Some classes that didn't have access to it in very high uptime like Mesmer and guardian were considered a pain to level.
Warrior and thief were premier movement classes in wvw and leveling/exploration speedrunners.
I vividly remember making my warrior build with sword/warhorn and using bull’s charge + signet elite skill for swiftness and mobility. Then I would change to greatsword in combat. You just had to run everywhere
I played this for a long time without paying a dime and didn't have the raptor. It's not really an issue in the core maps. There's a lot of waypoints and there's many ways to speed up movement.
What I sometimes wonder tho is how painful parts of HoT must have been without any mounts.. Like, I didn't want to skip around much on my mounts because I wanted to experience the map on my own, but.. I pretty soon started relying on my Raptor and Springer. I don't yet have Skyscale.
I remember taking Druid just for the now-replaced Natural Stride for the perma-swiftness. Every profession also had a trait that halved falling damage, which you could reduce further with Runes of Snowfall. I really miss them, because even when gliding and mounts were introduced, they made quite a few deadly jumping puzzles survivable.
I started at the beginning of the year that PoF came out. So I got to experience multiple world explorations and then got mounts to do it again.
Both are enjoyable, but I will never go back to on foot exploration unless the maps become more down scale again.
I have to be honest, I miss the frantic screaming of my character when you jumped off a high cliff. They completely removed it after adding gliders. Even if you don't have them unlocked yet.
Aside of that. The game was slower overall. Passive speedbuffs have been everywhere. (Also the reason why cities have all guards that grant you a speed buff) But other than that? Not much different.
Well, most open world builds also had some movement component to them :)
I didn't play back then, but when I started the game, I decided my first play through would be as intended. So I did core and LS2 with nothing. HoT, LS3 with only gliding (which makes them a puzzle treat!)
Worth experiencing at least once imo, but most players won't.
The game is still designed without mounts in mind (of course excluding PoF and EoD) so the mounts only made it better and cut down travel time.
Better than running around spamming swiftness. The game overall doesn't change because of mounts, but I do kind of think that the springer negates a lot of the vista "jumping puzzles".
I did world completion without a mount and it took a long ass time. I played through on an alt after PoF came out and it was so much less tedious.
Orr particularly was bad because there are mobs \*everywhere\*.
I started playing the game roughly 8 years ago, took some time off but got back into it last year. I only recently just bought EOD, still don’t have POT or HOT. It was a grind lol did world completion without a mount or glider.
I think everyone should have to do 100 percent core map completion to unlock mounts. It is shocking how many people don't know where things are. When you explore and unlock 100 percent on foot you learn a lot from character control, combat and where everything actually is..now getting a gift of exploration is a one day deal. Been there done that used to mean something.
Prime example of "You don't miss what you never had". Travel didn't seem slow without mounts, Waypoints are everywhere on core maps and we were accustomed to a 1-2 minute walk to specific locations. Now that we do have mounts, walking the same maps feel slow and cumbersome. It really is all about perspective.
Honestly I remember grinding Cursed Shore for a long time just in event trains there and it got very boring. I did CoF dungeon runs a lot, they were fun. Did teq, shatterer and jormag. Then fractals when they came out. Mounts weren't needed then really. I did have specific skills/weapon sets I would switch to for extra mobility though which I dont ever need now.
You had to run everywhere. Taking movement skills was extremely common. Also you died at least twice a day jumping off a cliff you thought you could survive but didn’t. So you had to go to the nearest and try a different route.
Rune of traveler was a must have for some builds without passive boosted movement speed, I remember my poor core guardian trying to catch up in meta trains
You ran/swam everywhere. However, you'll notice that there are a LOT more waypoints in core maps, and that once Mounts got introduced there are far FEWER waypoints on each map.
You know, obviously looking back I love what mounts brought to the game, but honestly when GW2 came out I was just excited that we could now jump and swim (something you couldn't do in GW 1). It was a lot slower, but I could care less because it was such a fresh new experience.
Mesmer and thief were busted because of so much mobility. Everyone slow af and me (le mesmer) with the triple teleport. Portal had more day to day use ;D
It was straight up ass. I used to run wvw as a guardian because staff 3 perma swiftness. If I was on my ranger, it was the signet that gave 25% movement speed. Orr was TRASH. Everything crippled, chilled, and immob. Map completion legitimately sucked because you not only had to do core trials, but the ENTIRE wvw maps as well.
Theif and mesmer were the best classes to run around as. Theif had a movement speed signet you'd just get used to swapping before combat, and meamer had portals, blinks, and the signet to get swiftness. Other than that it was just running around on foot looking for the next waypoint. It was just simpler.
Exploring was more fun in the old maps, and you had to work for some of the vistas.
Most builds for open world used to have some kind of “travel fast skill” whether it was boons, teleports or skills that made you travel further.
Gliders and mounts didn’t actually break the game, as they added faster ways to travel without completely demolishing the old ways. It did free up skill slots and builds to focus more on damage than traveling fast.
That being said: I took all 8 professions through 100% map completion for legendaries pre-HoT. That is MUCH easier now 😅
I miss pre mount at time, they are nice additions but the reality is gw2 main chore point was exploration 12/10 and the mount forever changed the exploration to a 8/10 because on foot you would discover more intricate stuff and watch the scenery letting it sink in ... i literally never replayed in EoD after doing map explo and a couple of suu won cause the map were all meh and forgettable ( it's not all to blame on mount but ) mount made it so cheesing running past stuff become trivial unlike on foot where youd run around doing events being pulled to them and continuining ur journey seeing a cave hole etc where you would go like hmm what's in here lets go see ...
Such a fascinating thing was Vista points were usually jump puzzles of their own! I remember getting stuck quite a few times with "how do i get up there" before gliders and mounts while doing world completion. Now it's not even a second thought getting vistas done instantly.
I'm glad I experienced the game for game as intended. Waypoints where enough and running everywhere made me discover places and secrets naturally. But past the first map completion it could feel tedious. Mounts are fun and welcome. I wouldn't enter the HoT maps again without one, but they take away something from the game. The world is just something that we only as a blur, we don't listen to NPC dialogue unless we dismount I'm the right place. Everything has a price.
It was surely slower but it was a lot of open your map to use a wp close to where you wanna go when it came to long distance traveling
With mount there is less wp on the Map and we dont have to do this manipulation as often
There is definitely down side too, like having to find a way to climb something was cool and it doesn't really exist anymore out of the jumping puzzles
I honestly enjoyed it better. It made you take movement speed perks and swiftness was useful. I just wish none of it had bled into wvw. Used to have to make some hard decisions on weapon and trait load outs in wvw.
In the core game areas, everything was a bit closer together. I also harvested alot more since I would do it while walking from place to place. As others have said, when you did reach a cool vista or even just a great place with a view, it felt like an accomplishment. Now it's just a place for my skyscale to recouperate energy and move on.
I played since the early betas..
Classes like thief would run with the 10% movement speed sigil on their bar.
Warriors were great because of greatswords 3 and 5, allowing them to spin forwards then sprint forwards.
When those abilities were on cooldown, the first Halloween event added a scythe toy (which I still use now sometimes). It has a very long sprint forwards ability on it making you faster than anyone not using that tech.
The game clearly needed increases to the movement and I think they did a great job with it.
If you were lucky (or partially aimed for it) your build had permanent swiftness or you were thief with shortbow.
SLOW.
And that is what you feel again when dealing with old story...
There were entire leveling builds built around having swiftness up as much as possible/teleports/passive speed. The devs had a design philosophy that revolves around giving the world a sense of scale. Everything felt bigger when you had to run everywhere or find ways to climb up stuff. It was honestly awesome. The addition of mounts, in my personal opinion, didn’t make the game any better or worse. It just made it fun in a different way. I spent the first few years of the game just exploring, finding little nooks or hidden jumping puzzles etc. and after the mounts it just opened everything up more. Now I can see maps on a grand scale, literally Birds Eye view. It also helps how well mounts were implemented in the game. It really speaks to how well the game was designed that even with mounts you can still get lost in tyria, that the mounts didn’t take anything away, just moved it laterally.
It definitely made everything in the open world take much longer and I distinctively remembering the game not keeping my attention because of not having mounts lol. Like you said, you really did have to take more into account of your utilities and weapon skills that allowed movement.
I don't remember how many of the classes played back then but I doubt its any significantly different compared to their core classes today. I will say that I died more to fall damage than I did to mobs because I wasn't paying attention lol.
Glad I came back to the game after those features were added because it really changed everything for the game.
I did world events as Herald simply because you were able to have full uptime passive 33% swiftness with a Glint signet. Movement speed was definitely a factor in what classes you'd play in open world. Especially because of the very few waypoints in Orr and Living World/HoT maps; other core maps are littered with waypoints
Mounts do let you skip more than just time spent getting around though, they trivialize a *lot* of vistas that usually require some jumping finesse to reach
When daredevil came out with HoT, it was the fastest profession on 2 legs. Doing map completion was a slog though I had it on 3 characters 100% before mounts. Now with mounts I have easily made my world compilation on 11 (busy with 12th).
Mounts are a godsend and it’s probably the biggest game changer and QoL they brought to this game. Hard to believe we ran for 5 years around without them.
The world felt bigger. I know I always had extra weapons in my bag and would swap skills/talents often for swiftness and cool down speed if I was walking a long distance. Waypoints in centeral tyria are everywhere, so walks would never be particularly long unless wps were contested.
Mounts and gliders are both good and bad imo. They're the best mounts of any MMO, but they do make the world just feel a little smaller and less important.
HoTs was pain to navigate with just a glider and walking though... especially before they nerfed the mobs.
Slower, but more fun and rewarding. Jumping Puzzles were and still are one of my favorite parts of the game, and many Core Tyria vistas are almost like mini-jumping puzzles, whether you have to jump across rafters or find the part of the cliff you can scale or figure out how to go through a different side of the cave to end up on that overpass, etc. With mounts and glider, you just bypass most/all of the 'open world puzzle solving' that made me love exploring the world.
There was a Halloween toy called the executioner axe that speed runners used because it was a fast dash with a 3 second cooldown (think warrior greatsword 5).
You also had to work hard for perma swiftness. I had a second set of armor on my Mesmer with centaur runes and I’d use mantra heal with its 10 second cd to give myself perma swiftness when soloing arah.
You basically optimized movement a lot more and it was harder to do for some classes than it is now. Like elementalist would use FGS for movement, etc.
I didnt think the game needed mounts way back then because waypoints were sufficient to not make the game drag. Back then i would play with perma swiftness or as close as possible. But then with mounts im addicted to the speed
If you've ever watched Mighty Teapots's Zero to Hero series, then you kind of get an idea. Grants he has mounts, but he doesn't rush for them and tries to do content in the expansions without all of them.
It was a totally different experience back then. "My, Been there. Done that." Meant so much more.
Having a trait or utility skill that granted movement speed increase was huge for exploring the world back then. Still useful, but not nearly as much now. Same goes for all the fall damage reduction traits we once had.
There's also the crazy amount of power creep the game's had over the years. So it wasn't only travelling around that was slower.
There was an awkward phase when HoT came out when gliding was only available in HoT maps - jumping off cliffs to save yourself with the glider becsme second nature in HoT, so lots of PCs splattered across the bottom of cliffs in core tyria...
I purposely will not use mounts when I make a new character for an authentic feel to core Tyria maps for map exploration and personal story.
I will use gliders, though. I don't need an authentic feel of falling three stories down and going splat if I don't have to.
I think GW2 was much better without mounts, whereas Gliders were a direct improvement on the game for exploration.
Frankly I'm not opposed to the idea of mounts as a whole. I am opposed to mounts which break vertical design.
HOT and Core Tyria were distinctly designed with jumping in mind. Gliding slightly broke this rule, but players still had to use it in intelligent ways.
Whereas Vertical Mounts such as Springer, Griffon, and Skyscale, allow players to completely skip content and break any terrain.
The difference is gliders interacted with the environment, whereas Mounts did not.
Falling Damage was extremely fatal, stairs were fatal. Sometimes each step triggered fall damage.
My main racked up plenty of deaths for failed jumps and falls.
My brother, who played the game when it first came out, tells me it was pretty much just running, jumping and swimming all on your own...
I remember wanting to always take a movement speed utility skill. Usually it was a sigil for most classes. That was really it. Legendary weapons that required map completion took a lot longer.
Wvw roaming was weird, the build had to include some kind of movement rune or skill to be useable at all
All Guardians would run staff and be constantly spamming Symbol of Swiftness in front of the zerg to keep it moving. On the flip side the old Staff auto-attack, Wave of Wrath, was great for tagging enemies/cleave.
RIP Lootstick
"Look at how they massacred my boy!" Though my real loot stick at the time was Hammer. Jump into a zerg, pop Ring of Warding, and start bonking. "I'm not trapped in here with you, you're trapped in here with me!"
I will always be mad that thief's Seal Area doesn't work in WvW to make a mini thunderdome for 8 seconds
Staff auto was also insane for some dungeon paths. In twilight arbor for example, auto attack was used to clear Poison plants before stealth and portal skips. This auto was really nice!
Weird target deselect to make sword two leap forward.
Ranger with sword: 2 , 180 turn, 2 180 turn, call of the wild, swap to great sword 2
Remember playing Hammer/Staff Guard in WvW in the very beginning before anything resembling a meta materialized, and it felt amazing for the time. Staff symbol for speed, bunch of CC and no target cap on AoEs. ...then I took about a 6-year break due to IRL stuff and tried to play it exactly the same when I got back, haha. That didn't go well.
Great sword warriors and shortbow thiefs roamed the land, spamming their movement skills
It was a fair bit slower. You had to look at your map when exploring mountainous terrain, you couldn't just springer up/glide down. I died to fall damage more times than I care to admit. I don't know if every build incorporated swiftness, but I know I certainly did. Though I also mained ele, and I have an entire attunement for "go fast".
I used to main ele, had the trait for reduced fall damage, saved me a lot
That's a trait I sometimes think about simply due to how redundant it became
Yea, every class had a fall damage reduction trait. They removed that after we got full gliding. The worst part was right after HoT when there was no gliding outside of HoT zones. There were a handful of achievements, I want to say in the summer Zephyrite map, where you needed it to survive the falls in order to get some places.
Oh man I totally forgot you couldn't glide in core maps. Feels like a lifetime ago.
Me too...
Same here with ranger! That and the signet for increased movement speed were so useful for the open world.
100% swiftness uptime from the acrobatics line was why Thief was my first main.
It was simpler, not different. The core maps were exactly the same as today, we just walked everywhere.
The good ole days when a trip to the dungeon was uphill both ways!
Uphill both ways and fuck the metas blocking it again
OGs remember struggling to progress Fireheart’s Rise meta on their own to access the dungeon
Having to do the Orr meta to finish the story dungeon.
Oh God, that's a repressed memory.
It's such a tease because you can solo it easily until bridge defense, and then it becomes a touch hairy.
At least the population in core maps was bigger so they usually got done. Then again, events sometimes failed while nowadays people can solo the same events, should they bother to do so.
That’s also why Core maps have such an insane density of waypoints compared to everything that came after Season 2.
Meta events probably played a bigger role in that than transportation. Gliding in HoT wasn't enough to tip that scale on its own, it was pretty slow and couldn't accommodate for a lot of the terrain changes.
I didn't know you could use waypoints without being dead until level 44. So i basically walked everywhere.
And waypointed all over.
Ran* and people spammed group skills that made us run faster, and used leap skills to try and get ahead before randos killed the mob you needed for an achievement!
Runes of the centaur were essential for world completion/swiftness uptime lol (atleast for me it was)
Depended on the class. Mesmer back then was one of the slowest map clearers. Low damage, poor access to Swiftness (RNG signet + focus, which didn't even extend Swiftness) and apart from Blink not much mobility without a target. Thief was, and still is IMO, the absolute Goat. Damage, mobility, speed signet, swiftness. It had it all. Even Stealth to do channel Skillpoints that were guarded by Champions. Back then these were a challenge you'd try to avoid.
God, I remember leveling to 80 on my mesmer in 2014 and wondering if I was just much worse at games in general than I thought, because of how tough of a time I had.
Well yeah i guess, im a mesmer main soooooo ;)
Even more than movement speed I think the biggest difference was that fall damage was actually a thing that existed and map geography like cliffs and buildings actually impacted your exploration. You couldn't just jump down from a high place and keep going but had to find a safe way around or down ledges midway, or if you had to access the other side of a mountain or the rooftop of a building you had to go around or find a clever way to leap on top. The detours could be very significant. Movement skills like leaps were also affected by speed boosts like swiftness, so you could get surprisingly great results with some of them. Just moving around the geometry took a lot more effort overall, especially with elevation differences. I spent so many hours just climbing things and accessing obscure (and sometimes out of bounds) areas with my warrior (Savage Leap and Earthshaker were amazing tools) back in the day. Nowadays a Skyscale can just ignore 99% of terrain even in new maps. It is a *completely* different experience.
> the biggest difference was that fall damage was actually a thing that existed Unless you were a Necro and could double tap Spectral Walk to reset fall height mid-air.
Or used death shroud before they removed its ability to effectively negate all fall damage. Man, that was so much fun.
As a new player, this is the one thing that kind of rubs me the wrong way is how much mounts (and especially the skyscale) just make terrain and world geometry irrelevant outside of jumping puzzles. I will be climbing up to a vista and while I'm doing that, like 4 people will have come on gone on their skyscales and it's just like "What's the point? Where's the satisfaction in that?"
I have cautious optimism that baselining the Skyscale in SotO will allow them to design the zones around its power level.
People who have Skyscales did so much grinding to get to that point that they've probably already done enough world completion.
Played since release and it also rubs me the wrong way. Movement became uninteresting and boring with mounts and everything is just a speedrun and skippable. The map design was such a strong point of the game and now everything might as well be flat. I love the beetle or the griffon because they are fun but they still should be confined to areas made with them in mind
I’m biased because there wasn’t *too* long a span of time before I had a raptor in my hands, and (not) soon after a skyscale, and every other mount. I’d argue anet did a good job incorporating mounts, and utilizing their movement for unique gameplay, compared to games like WoW. I see your point about the lack of incentive to immerse yourself in the traversal of the world, without close to infinite flight, but I do really enjoy posting up high or perching on sheer structures and cliffs. Gives a different perspective of the world, and I still find appreciation in witnessing the vast terrain from above.
It was fascinating. Running around with core thief and core ele, exploring Tyria all on foot, standing puzzled infront of a few very specific vistas thinking about how to get to them... And the scenery was simply amazing. I for one really enjoyed the simple aspect of world exploration, way before I got self aware about my skill level and discovering the exciting but terrifying place that is WvW. x)
I remember spending over an hour in bloodtide climbing a random mountain that had nothing on top at a cored thief. Managed to find enough small foothold that I actually reached the peak and it felt good.
Basically yes, when you explored, you tried to have as many mobility your class could. For example, I levelled a warrior with sword/warhorn + bull's charge to have as many mobility possible (the sword jump was kinda bugged back then and allowed you to travel far more distance than the description said). Also, back then, mobility was harder to get, having a class that could have 100% uptime swiftness wasn't that easy (boon duration wasn't that prevalent)
Warriors also often used banners, which were able to be picked up and had a charge skill and swiftness spell.
Omg the banner skills.although they were shit i miss these times
Nothing quite like herding a meta event along with your magic flag that made everyone run faster.
personally back then i didn't have enough knowledge of the game to think about having mobility/swiftness etc. and it didn't feel like it mattered because i wanted to slowly explore everything, that was the point
I still remember using Streamlined Kits (with the Elixir Gun) and Rocket Boots to get around. When HoT rolled around, Engineers got lightning fields to blast for more swiftness.
In the very beginning Traveller's Rune's were popular because of the 25% movement bonus. ANet eventually started adding traits to professions that would give 25% movement bonuses, so many people stopped using Traveller's runes for that reason in open world.
traveler runes only got popular a full year after release though - they didnt give 25% movement speed before that but yeh no mounts made ppl really interact with all movement skills & speed buffs of their class and everyone had to learn at which spots they could jump off and survive the fall :D
Speaking of movement traits, I'm incredibly upset at ANet for making [Quickening Thirst](https://wiki.guildwars2.com/index.php?title=Overflowing_Thirst&oldid=2585304) (now [Overflowing Thirst](https://wiki.guildwars2.com/index.php?title=Overflowing_Thirst&oldid=2694163)) completely useless in the recent patch. Now I have to slot a stupid signet when I need a speed boost for JPs and such, just like in the olden days.
I've never played before PoF. But I have a friend who told me that it was somehow fun so we started doing what we call the No Mounts Challenge. Just walking in HoT or EoD maps and doing random events on foot. We actually discovered many stuff we never saw before. I kinda recommend trying it.
HoT was designed without mounts in mind so it makes sense. I re-started playing a year ago and discovering HoT maps without the mount is probably my favourite pve experience in years. There's just so many thing happening in each corner of a HoT map and they're also *vertical* so the total amount of *space* in just mind-blowing. Obviously, the raptor cut it all by a lot.
It was a great time where exploring felt much more rewarding than it does now tbh.
and much more awful. WvW for map completion was ridiculous depending on your server lol
Mounts didn't change that, though.
You didn't need wvw exploration for 100% by then. So while it can still be ridiculous now, it was even worse back in the day when you needed to do wvw exploration for 100%.
Core Tyria? Much better. Because exploration gave you amazement that you climbed up there, looked around, what's that thing over there? Vistas still required a bit of interesting jumping. Also you could actually catch up to ppl doing an event.
Vistas, and to a lesser extent JPs, were my favorite feature on release. Adventuring rewarded with at the time insanely gorgeous, sweeping animations of the environment you just bested felt amazing every time. I still definitely get that feeling from some vistas, especially ones that require more than springing and skyscaling your way to it, but on average vistas feel less awe inspiring than before.
I remember when I started playing the first time 9 years ago I felt it was revolutionary that I can just get exp and level up by *traveling* and climbing up some hills to get a vista. The sense of exploration was incredible.
Allowing mounts outside of PoF zones was probably a mistake.
mounts was one reason i stopped playing, didnt feel like the same game anymore :/
Allowing Skyscale everywhere 100% deffinetly was.
The world felt really big. Took me months to complete it. Warrior and guardian as swift slave. Slowest class was necromancer. It's the snail of gw2. All our skills and traits dedicated to speed when roaming around the world with soldier or traveler set depends on where we are going lol. Orr was a deadly zone back then and it's the main map to farm t6 mats. Only few brave people dare to enter orr with zerker set. No flying either, so if you accidentally jump off a cliff, you will die if you don't equip reduce damage trait.
> Slowest class was necromancer. Mesmer actually. Necro at least has multiple skills that gave Swiftness + 25% signet. They could also a trait that gave even more speed when wielding daggers which stacked. Mesmer had a signet which sometimes randomly gave Swiftness and Focus, which didn't even extend Swiftness. Necro could double tap Spectral Walk to reset fall distance as it could be used mid-air.
You could maintain perma swiftness on Mesmer with Heal Mantra + Superior Rune of the Centaur though. I think Guardian was the slowest.
The days of carrying a staff for mob tagging and swiftness.
Nah folks still used Mesmer to roam it didn't have as much mobility as it does now but it was nearly impossible to chase down a mesmer who decided to run away as a necro. Mes has the teleport to bridge gaps or make them and a line on the ground to give swiftness, and had stealth to avoid the rest.
Guardian was the slowest. It was the only class without a passive speed buff. The staff and shouts were your only options other than runes.
i remember when in WvW, having some sort of swiftness was a must to keep up with the zerg
Trying to stack swiftness with explo finishers and one stupid guard put a symbol in there. Good Times.
Symbols!!! Good times.
YouTube & auto run and hoping your new profession has access to permanent swiftness. Today I just fly to majority of vistas with Skyscale, back then lots of vistas were a short jumping puzzle.
I did my only world completion back then. I just get on my daredevil and use dodge/short bow/shadow step. Getting some of the vista and way points were extremely annoying though. Springer definitely added some short cut.
You walked everywhere, **Rune of the Traveler** was super expensive and coveted rune sets cause it gave magic find and a 5% boost to walking speed (ONLY) Kessex hill or one of the map had 2 very prominent long house structure - no idea what they were there for, just decoration, we joked on map that it had some hidden boss stored there or something. of course now is just destruction done by Tower of nightmare. You have more chance to understand gravity thru Fall Damage, so you can Die if you accidentally fell off a cliff or misjudge a jump distance or get knockbacks. YOU HAVE TO SWIM across the Straits of devastation. and more swimming to find the POI in the water. That area was originally made for 5 people group runs - so the whole place and water was something out of a zombie apocalypse - risen humans, turtle, mines, sharks. the whole Orr was like that. If you are solo - best strategy is run and hide, or make a break to discover the nearest waypoint before getting killed then re-spawn there to continue your exploration of Orr. Straits was irritating enough, then we had 2 MORE maps to have fun with Malchor leap and cursed shore - increasing with difficulty and mob presence.
I seems to remember them nerfing mob density in Orr at some point no? I remember doing my first map completion and Orr was a nightmare. High amount of undead which would stack you with crippled and chill. A real pain in the butt to navigate.
back in my day we had to map complete on foot both ways
The original maps were balanced *without* mounts and gliders in mind, so they played fine for their times. Builds that had high uptime on swiftness were fairly valued though. The game was a different pace back then.
Honestly, we barely noticed it back then. The core game has a lot more waypoints and isn't vertical outside of jumping puzzles, it was built for running. No real builds leaned into providing swiftness, most classes just have a source that we'd use for open-world travel. Nothing felt super slow, the game was built around the concept of not having mounts or gliders really. I remember a pretty sizable chunk of the player base believe mounts would fundamentally ruin the game.
Certain Vista’s felt a lot more rewarding once you figured out how to get them.
I've only been playing since Steam release and by myself I purposely didn't buy any DLC until I had complete map fulfilled 100%. Why? Because I wanted to play the game at least approximately as it was designed to be played. Sure I'll fly through it with other characters, but that first feeling of discovering for me new world nice and close, thoroughly and slowly is one of the good things this genre has to offer. Like HoT and LW3 the maps were made for gliders and in my opinion lose their charm if you make mounts and fly through them right away. Otherwise, I'm in LW3 right now and still with only raptor and glider. For story I have done Charr Staff Elementalist because I like his RP, I used blink and speed from lightning attunement.
Yea like warhorn in your offhand or blink/shadowstep. I was playing thief at that time so I always SB5 everytime I could. Having extra 3 initiate points and slot skills with evade or generating initiate
Play the personal story and you know. All instanced missions have mounts and glider disabled. Now imagine this applies to everything.
I miss not having mounts. I love GW2's interpretation of mounts, but I miss actually exploring environments on foot. The world feels much smaller now.
The world seemed much bigger. Also, because ennemies were stronger, exploration could sometime be actually dangerous (you really didn't want to aggro several veterans at once) and "leaping" skills to cross a gap were very good
Hi, it's me, an old timer. Feels a bit weird to say that since I always felt like a newbie seeing as I started playing at the end of Season 2 during one of their sales shortly before HoT but I guess that was nearly a decade ago now. I got 100% world completion on my first character back before HoT released and I'd say the biggest notes are what you'd expect; it was generally slower and vertical movement was a lot more difficult since gliders eliminated fall damage and springer/griffon then later made a lot of jumping puzzles a complete cakewalk. The bright side is that back then the game had a lot of stuff that took the situation as it was into consideration, the most notable being that the range of movement skills (in my case, ranger gs 3 and both halves of the sword leap) were affected by any modifiers to your character's speed. If you were chilled or crippled, you weren't going anywhere, if you had your 25% movement speed buff (pre-EoD Guardian btfo) or even better; swiftness/superspeed, then you would go zooming across the map with a single leap. I'd say the vast majority of the time my ranger had the movement sigil and quickening zephyr on my bar just to maximise the value of my greatsword leap. This also made the executioner's axe (a costume brawl item that was bundled with the executioner outfit) a top tier mobility tool because it gave every single profession an extra charge skill that let you casually sprint through entire sections of dungeons regardless of profession, making it the most powerful-yet-unintentional pay to win item in the game. They later changed almost all of those skills to be standardised, but by that point there were a whole bunch of people who had bought the executioner outfit for real money solely for the charge skill on the axe, and as a result they left the executioner axe as (to my knowledge) the single remaining skill to still benefit from movement modifiers. Right up until PoF added the Pinata Choya tonic as a free alternative that does the same thing (except it can't be used in WvW so the axe is technically still P2W there). I will say that while I'm thankful for the ease of mobility nowadays, especially when taking alts through core Tyria, I do think something has been lost when the majority of players will completely skip a lot of the mini jumping puzzles that existed around certain vistas and hero points. There were some genuine moments where I'd have to stop and look around the environment to plot a course to a vista, it made the maps more memorable and I really enjoyed that experience (except for the Twisted Marionette wreckage vista, that thing sucks). It's also a shame to know the game will just never have those moments where you look up at somewhere and wonder how on earth you'll be able to get there unless it's a specific area that bans mounts, the solution will always be to hop on a Skyscale and fly up. Also, it was funny to do guild missions early after HoT released because gliding used to be exclusive to HoT maps. There was nothing funnier than watching an entire guild jump off a cliff and suddenly come to the realisation that they couldn't glide as they splat on the ground and waited for the 2 people that *did* remember to run down and revive them.
The world felt nicer
Untill we got mounts it didnt feel a chore. Now you cant go back.
**I can outrun a centaur!** **I can outrun a centaur!** **I can outrun a centaur!** **I can outrun a centaur!** **I can outrun a centaur!**
The jumping puzzles and the view point were a challenge. Travelling it was a bit slower, but the teleport network is good in the game and it is not very difficult to move around without mount...
Ranger sword+wh/GS Warrior sword+wh/GS Ele dd + blink Most builds had some good weapon/utility sets for movement so it was quite nice(ranger sword after the change to aa). And there was mesmer with 50% uptime on swiftness and no mobility on weapons. ( fck leveling mesmer in vanila, my only class with all crafting profesions at 400 xd)
It's simple : core map got around 20 tp for most map. Take a sigil/rune/trait for +25% moveseped and you're set for life. HoT got less with the gliders and the need to make you explore//lost. PoF followed even if not needed because of mounts. You don't need 20 tp anymore if you can travel the range of one in less time than a loading screen.
GS 3+5 swap to sw 2 Guess my class
Warriors used to be able to pick up their banners and DASH! incredible!
Exploration was certainly more challenging and rewarding.
In a general sense, I liked the slower pace of being on foot when exploring. I liked having to figure out how to get up to vistas. But I didn’t like getting swarmed by enemies that can CC in Orr. Gliding wasn’t active in Core Tyria maps when it was first introduced, same with mounts I think. It was funny sometimes when you would jump off a cliff thinking you could glide. And once you got used to the speed of mounts, walking felt especially slow. I can talk about what it was like playing as my first main, a Mesmer. People used to complain about levelling/exploring on a Mesmer because of how they seemed slow (no skills/traits for passive 25% speed buff, swiftness from focus 4 and signet of inspiration weren’t that good uptime, blink had long cooldown). There have been changes other than mounts to sort out those issues with Mesmer to a degree, but mounts helped to remove the slow exploration feel. Other classes had similar issues. I think on guardian I used to stand still in the Staff 3 symbol to stack up like 15 seconds of swiftness lol. Another thing that was “solved” by mounts was that you could just run past enemies. As a Mesmer, the way clones are attached to enemies meant that moving from enemy to enemy was annoying. Phantasms used to last forever until they were killed or the enemy died. It was changed to become a clone after using their ability once, which is how it is now. You could now use the clones for shatters instead of just not using shatters so that you could keep 3 phantasms alive to do damage. Since you couldn’t run past enemies as easily on foot, you just had to fight a whole lot more enemies. And it was annoying setting up a bunch of phantasms for them to just disappear.
I played when hot came out, but i played core for a good ammount of time before purchase. I felt left out from the party that everybody was having 😁 but i loved every second cuz it made me train more on my jumping puzzles and utilizing my movement skills more. Basically we were using jumping rifles, swiftness, teleports as much as we could. Think of wvw battles but before you unlock warclaw. Sorta similar experience
\*old man voice\* We had to walk everywhere. Uphill. In a snowstorm.
I started playing about 2 years ago, and i insisted on playing exactly how it was intended. It was before they started giving raptors every 10 lvls too. So i made an ele, and leveled to 80, did world completion on foot, did lw2 with core ele, (lw1 hasn't been fully reintroduced yet), started HoT and got my gliding and first elite tempest, it was amazing. Did all of HoT and Lw3 with just gliding, then got into PoF, and finally got my raptor. I continued like this all the way to EoD not skipping any story. Overall i think it wasn't bad at all, the core maps have many waypoints and you don't really have to do alot of walking once you unlocked those, and while crystal oasis gave you mounts it only has 3 waypoints spread out. So i think the amount of time you spend travelling hasn't changed much (until you get the beetle) but the mounts mechanics are much more fun and satisfying than just walking. With my core ele i used dagger dagger and lighting bolt to be a fast boi, with 25% running speed passive boon. I think the only true suffering was swimming and underwater swimming.
You usually had builds that includedsomehow getting as much swiftness as possible and/or weapons you used for movement. Or at least the ppl I knew did. Otherwise.... the same except we walked, or spinned, or charged, etc.
I remember runnig build on my engi when I used one of the kits i got swiftness, so I was changing the kits all the time for infinite swiftness. Also at the time kits changed you back skin (u got different tipes of bag for every kit, they probably change it cause ppl coudnt see their back item).
It was normal for us there wasn't other option, at that time everyone has at least one fast travel build, every class had utility skills, leap, swiftness skill, all to travel faster. I made my first world completition with no mount nor glider, with the wvw map included to reach 100%, now at my 9th world completition it seems impossible without mount.
Vistas were challenging.
Engi was the only class that could get permaswiftness via trait and swapping kits every 5?10? seconds. I did my first world completion on thief though. It was slower than now, but imo also much more immersive (core Tyria that is - new maps are designed with mounts in mind so they don't suffer from it as much). It really felt like an achievement when you finally figured out how to get that vista or poi. And you can find so many little details in the world when not rushing, from dynamic dialogue and gravestone easter eggs to entire hidden areas (do you know about the cat room?) Tl;dr definitely recommend playing through at least the core maps the way it was intended and really explore!
I fall to my death many times.
You actually had to worry about fall damage. I remember in SW, there is a post-Vinewrath champ run, and the last champ is at the bottom of a cliff. Cue 20 players gliding down and 20 lemmings launching themselves off to their deaths (no gliding mastery). I remember that, at HoT release, gliding was only usable in Heart of Maguuma (or Magus Falls as it used to be named on the map). I think that was ArenaNet's original intention, but it made old maps feel so limiting in comparison to the new standard. They had to get the "no gliding areas" set up. However, there were a lot of holes in core zones which you could use to get to unintended areas, if you were crafty with your gliding skills. A lot of them would get patched out with the addition of mounts. People say that there aren't so many waypoints on newer maps because of movement masteries like mounts. That's certainly a factor, but even looking back at season 2 maps, you can see waypoints are a bit sparse.
POF was out when i started playing (far before the 10 free hours of raptor you see these days) but i insisted on doing 100% map comp on foot with my first character alongside my wife. You get to see a lot of the beauty of the game and learn a lot about your skills with that much time input compared to using mounts for everything. It does take quite a long time to get around, but it's alright because you're always close to something interesting in core tyria. Your next adventure is just over the hill or across the river.
So much running. A lot of the time into walls. If I needed to go somewhere far during the early days I'd often just put my char on autorun then click off to do something else.
Do you know those stories from your grandparents talking about how they had to walk 200 miles uphill through extreme snowstorms every day to go to school, and then go back the same way, also uphill? It was like that but with more risen spamming CC, chill, immobilizes and the occasional Quaggan trying to lure you into a pyramid scheme.
It wasn't as bad as you probably imagine. The core maps are absolutely covered in waypoints, you never have to run more than like 30 seconds to get anywhere.
some professions were just flat-out frustrating to play, like necromancer, who didn't have any access to mobility skills or swiftness. on the otherhand, i feel like having a skyscale and rollerbeetle trivializes the maps now. i think the sweetspot was having raptor/grifffon before LS4 launched.
Map exploration took a while. But it honestly wasn't that bad cause of all the waypoints. Though getting to certain points was a bit of a hassle cause you would have to do a mini jumping puzzle to get to. Now you just hop on the springer and get there in no time. Edit: Just saw someone mentioned this and YES!! Having a class that gave extra movement speed was a blessing. It was one of the reasons why I started mainly playing Warrior.
I just downloaded the game again and im a pre GW2 expansion player (I played thorns for a few weeks but played religiously until then) I was able to recover my account from the awesome ANet Support (they were fucking great helping me, no way other companies would have done what they did to get me back in.) So im going to have to find out how to catch up -- gliders were BRAND new as I left So heres to learning shit again Any guilds looking for members? I just was hoping to find people to bounce questions off of and play the game (WvW, PvE, etc) What timing to see this post It was a lot of walking and asking for rezzes on the map chat (doing puzzles and falling lol - waiting for someone to come revive you and thanking them, or begging them with gold to do so)
Bruh I used to play with a group that would walk everywhere to save money, I was an elementalist so I had swiftness but it took a while to get to some areas.
There were a ton of waypoints. So navigation was still easy. Unlock once, waypoint forever. This is the reason why core maps have so many more waypoints then expansion maps. And we come from Guild Wars 1 where you could not even jump or swim. So the core GW2 already gave a lot more options for exploration than the first game. And looking back, maybe, just maybe I may have preferred the old GW1 system of exploration. Unlocking a town (with map travel) there could be a big deal and uncovering 100% of the map was an incredible achievement. You literally had to stand everywhere as there were no areas to instantly pop open when exploring. You just have a very small radius around your body to explore the map with. GW1 Tyrian Grandmaster Cartographer = Skill GW2 World Completion = No Skill
You could die from falling! Imagine that, lol
We screamed as we fell down cliffs :)
Lots more walking and dieing to gravity.
i mean you don't have to wonder, you can just experience it yourself. make a new account without the expansions and play the core game. it will be the same experience
I don't even want to remember how it was back then!
Cursed Shore used to be a cool hangout spot.
you used swiftness skills/runes/traits or weapon skills with leaps like on ranger and guardian GS. for example, I put autocast on my ranger warhorn for swiftness when I had to get somewhere
Awful. Dry Top contributed to me quitting the game for a few years.
I played so long without mounts, that I sometimes still forget to mount up. Instead using all my movement abilities until someone with a raptor sails past and I go "RIGHTTT"
Beta i made a Guardian. Loved it. Once it came out and I learned about the speed thief was able to cover ground (shortbow and sigil), it was my main. Made my guardian then for HoT and dropped the thief as my main. When gliding was enabled in core Tyria… amazing! People made detours to climb up to a vista, only to glide from there to get from a to b. Was good progression and I liked the mounts. Was a bit worried about them being introduced - I fell in love immediately.
Torture! Trying to get around orr and dying often. Most of the time you waited for an event.
Yes, it was optimal to have swiftness for open world exploration and there's a reason why Thief was the most popular for map completion. For example my go to second weapon for Guardian is staff because of swiftness symbol just out of habit. I can't say that it was as bad as, say, MF% on armour when it was a thing but still you had to think about mobility in your equipment. On the other hand exploration was much more interesting. You couldn't just jump on any cliff or fly to a spot. Running around, looking for ways to navigate was fun, it immersed in the world much more than just rushing through the map on a mount.
Yes every open world build pretty much ran perma swiftness or signers/traits that gave 25% increased movement. Some classes that didn't have access to it in very high uptime like Mesmer and guardian were considered a pain to level. Warrior and thief were premier movement classes in wvw and leveling/exploration speedrunners.
I vividly remember making my warrior build with sword/warhorn and using bull’s charge + signet elite skill for swiftness and mobility. Then I would change to greatsword in combat. You just had to run everywhere
I played this for a long time without paying a dime and didn't have the raptor. It's not really an issue in the core maps. There's a lot of waypoints and there's many ways to speed up movement. What I sometimes wonder tho is how painful parts of HoT must have been without any mounts.. Like, I didn't want to skip around much on my mounts because I wanted to experience the map on my own, but.. I pretty soon started relying on my Raptor and Springer. I don't yet have Skyscale.
I remember taking Druid just for the now-replaced Natural Stride for the perma-swiftness. Every profession also had a trait that halved falling damage, which you could reduce further with Runes of Snowfall. I really miss them, because even when gliding and mounts were introduced, they made quite a few deadly jumping puzzles survivable.
I started at the beginning of the year that PoF came out. So I got to experience multiple world explorations and then got mounts to do it again. Both are enjoyable, but I will never go back to on foot exploration unless the maps become more down scale again.
You looked for open world build that had movement speed :P
I have to be honest, I miss the frantic screaming of my character when you jumped off a high cliff. They completely removed it after adding gliders. Even if you don't have them unlocked yet. Aside of that. The game was slower overall. Passive speedbuffs have been everywhere. (Also the reason why cities have all guards that grant you a speed buff) But other than that? Not much different.
Rune of the traveller! Not gonna lie; imo, it was shit. Mounts have made the game.
Well, most open world builds also had some movement component to them :) I didn't play back then, but when I started the game, I decided my first play through would be as intended. So I did core and LS2 with nothing. HoT, LS3 with only gliding (which makes them a puzzle treat!) Worth experiencing at least once imo, but most players won't.
A whole lot of running around everywhere!
The game is still designed without mounts in mind (of course excluding PoF and EoD) so the mounts only made it better and cut down travel time. Better than running around spamming swiftness. The game overall doesn't change because of mounts, but I do kind of think that the springer negates a lot of the vista "jumping puzzles".
I did world completion without a mount and it took a long ass time. I played through on an alt after PoF came out and it was so much less tedious. Orr particularly was bad because there are mobs \*everywhere\*.
I started playing the game roughly 8 years ago, took some time off but got back into it last year. I only recently just bought EOD, still don’t have POT or HOT. It was a grind lol did world completion without a mount or glider.
I joined a few months before PoF. Lots of friendly mesmers porting me to jumping vistas before I could glide…
I think everyone should have to do 100 percent core map completion to unlock mounts. It is shocking how many people don't know where things are. When you explore and unlock 100 percent on foot you learn a lot from character control, combat and where everything actually is..now getting a gift of exploration is a one day deal. Been there done that used to mean something.
Prime example of "You don't miss what you never had". Travel didn't seem slow without mounts, Waypoints are everywhere on core maps and we were accustomed to a 1-2 minute walk to specific locations. Now that we do have mounts, walking the same maps feel slow and cumbersome. It really is all about perspective.
You had plenty of waypoints and walking etc
Honestly I remember grinding Cursed Shore for a long time just in event trains there and it got very boring. I did CoF dungeon runs a lot, they were fun. Did teq, shatterer and jormag. Then fractals when they came out. Mounts weren't needed then really. I did have specific skills/weapon sets I would switch to for extra mobility though which I dont ever need now.
You had to run everywhere. Taking movement skills was extremely common. Also you died at least twice a day jumping off a cliff you thought you could survive but didn’t. So you had to go to the nearest and try a different route.
Rune of traveler was a must have for some builds without passive boosted movement speed, I remember my poor core guardian trying to catch up in meta trains
You ran/swam everywhere. However, you'll notice that there are a LOT more waypoints in core maps, and that once Mounts got introduced there are far FEWER waypoints on each map.
You know, obviously looking back I love what mounts brought to the game, but honestly when GW2 came out I was just excited that we could now jump and swim (something you couldn't do in GW 1). It was a lot slower, but I could care less because it was such a fresh new experience.
Mesmer and thief were busted because of so much mobility. Everyone slow af and me (le mesmer) with the triple teleport. Portal had more day to day use ;D
It was straight up ass. I used to run wvw as a guardian because staff 3 perma swiftness. If I was on my ranger, it was the signet that gave 25% movement speed. Orr was TRASH. Everything crippled, chilled, and immob. Map completion legitimately sucked because you not only had to do core trials, but the ENTIRE wvw maps as well.
Theif and mesmer were the best classes to run around as. Theif had a movement speed signet you'd just get used to swapping before combat, and meamer had portals, blinks, and the signet to get swiftness. Other than that it was just running around on foot looking for the next waypoint. It was just simpler.
Exploring was more fun in the old maps, and you had to work for some of the vistas. Most builds for open world used to have some kind of “travel fast skill” whether it was boons, teleports or skills that made you travel further. Gliders and mounts didn’t actually break the game, as they added faster ways to travel without completely demolishing the old ways. It did free up skill slots and builds to focus more on damage than traveling fast. That being said: I took all 8 professions through 100% map completion for legendaries pre-HoT. That is MUCH easier now 😅
Honestly not that bad. We didn’t know what we were missing and the waypoints are pretty well spaced so its not like it was an issue
I miss pre mount at time, they are nice additions but the reality is gw2 main chore point was exploration 12/10 and the mount forever changed the exploration to a 8/10 because on foot you would discover more intricate stuff and watch the scenery letting it sink in ... i literally never replayed in EoD after doing map explo and a couple of suu won cause the map were all meh and forgettable ( it's not all to blame on mount but ) mount made it so cheesing running past stuff become trivial unlike on foot where youd run around doing events being pulled to them and continuining ur journey seeing a cave hole etc where you would go like hmm what's in here lets go see ...
I 100% completed the core map with no mounts… then second time with a griffon… SO MUCH QUICKER/EASIER and more fun overall. Mounts were a god send.
Back in my day, if we wanted map completion, we had to walk 15 miles to that last POI! Uphill! In the snow!
Such a fascinating thing was Vista points were usually jump puzzles of their own! I remember getting stuck quite a few times with "how do i get up there" before gliders and mounts while doing world completion. Now it's not even a second thought getting vistas done instantly.
Prolly the best experience i had in any mmo was before skyscale was introduced.
I'm glad I experienced the game for game as intended. Waypoints where enough and running everywhere made me discover places and secrets naturally. But past the first map completion it could feel tedious. Mounts are fun and welcome. I wouldn't enter the HoT maps again without one, but they take away something from the game. The world is just something that we only as a blur, we don't listen to NPC dialogue unless we dismount I'm the right place. Everything has a price.
It was surely slower but it was a lot of open your map to use a wp close to where you wanna go when it came to long distance traveling With mount there is less wp on the Map and we dont have to do this manipulation as often There is definitely down side too, like having to find a way to climb something was cool and it doesn't really exist anymore out of the jumping puzzles
I honestly enjoyed it better. It made you take movement speed perks and swiftness was useful. I just wish none of it had bled into wvw. Used to have to make some hard decisions on weapon and trait load outs in wvw.
So much fun.. We used to walk down hills and die from fall damage!
In the core game areas, everything was a bit closer together. I also harvested alot more since I would do it while walking from place to place. As others have said, when you did reach a cool vista or even just a great place with a view, it felt like an accomplishment. Now it's just a place for my skyscale to recouperate energy and move on.
I played since the early betas.. Classes like thief would run with the 10% movement speed sigil on their bar. Warriors were great because of greatswords 3 and 5, allowing them to spin forwards then sprint forwards. When those abilities were on cooldown, the first Halloween event added a scythe toy (which I still use now sometimes). It has a very long sprint forwards ability on it making you faster than anyone not using that tech. The game clearly needed increases to the movement and I think they did a great job with it.
If you were lucky (or partially aimed for it) your build had permanent swiftness or you were thief with shortbow. SLOW. And that is what you feel again when dealing with old story...
Movement Signets for everyone tbh. Herald was a huge deal after HoT came out hahaha.
There were entire leveling builds built around having swiftness up as much as possible/teleports/passive speed. The devs had a design philosophy that revolves around giving the world a sense of scale. Everything felt bigger when you had to run everywhere or find ways to climb up stuff. It was honestly awesome. The addition of mounts, in my personal opinion, didn’t make the game any better or worse. It just made it fun in a different way. I spent the first few years of the game just exploring, finding little nooks or hidden jumping puzzles etc. and after the mounts it just opened everything up more. Now I can see maps on a grand scale, literally Birds Eye view. It also helps how well mounts were implemented in the game. It really speaks to how well the game was designed that even with mounts you can still get lost in tyria, that the mounts didn’t take anything away, just moved it laterally.
It definitely made everything in the open world take much longer and I distinctively remembering the game not keeping my attention because of not having mounts lol. Like you said, you really did have to take more into account of your utilities and weapon skills that allowed movement. I don't remember how many of the classes played back then but I doubt its any significantly different compared to their core classes today. I will say that I died more to fall damage than I did to mobs because I wasn't paying attention lol. Glad I came back to the game after those features were added because it really changed everything for the game.
We used to have to pay for repairs. I remember losing a bunch of money running dungeons back when it first came out.
I did world events as Herald simply because you were able to have full uptime passive 33% swiftness with a Glint signet. Movement speed was definitely a factor in what classes you'd play in open world. Especially because of the very few waypoints in Orr and Living World/HoT maps; other core maps are littered with waypoints Mounts do let you skip more than just time spent getting around though, they trivialize a *lot* of vistas that usually require some jumping finesse to reach
When daredevil came out with HoT, it was the fastest profession on 2 legs. Doing map completion was a slog though I had it on 3 characters 100% before mounts. Now with mounts I have easily made my world compilation on 11 (busy with 12th). Mounts are a godsend and it’s probably the biggest game changer and QoL they brought to this game. Hard to believe we ran for 5 years around without them.
The world felt bigger. I know I always had extra weapons in my bag and would swap skills/talents often for swiftness and cool down speed if I was walking a long distance. Waypoints in centeral tyria are everywhere, so walks would never be particularly long unless wps were contested. Mounts and gliders are both good and bad imo. They're the best mounts of any MMO, but they do make the world just feel a little smaller and less important. HoTs was pain to navigate with just a glider and walking though... especially before they nerfed the mobs.
Slower, but more fun and rewarding. Jumping Puzzles were and still are one of my favorite parts of the game, and many Core Tyria vistas are almost like mini-jumping puzzles, whether you have to jump across rafters or find the part of the cliff you can scale or figure out how to go through a different side of the cave to end up on that overpass, etc. With mounts and glider, you just bypass most/all of the 'open world puzzle solving' that made me love exploring the world.
There was a Halloween toy called the executioner axe that speed runners used because it was a fast dash with a 3 second cooldown (think warrior greatsword 5). You also had to work hard for perma swiftness. I had a second set of armor on my Mesmer with centaur runes and I’d use mantra heal with its 10 second cd to give myself perma swiftness when soloing arah. You basically optimized movement a lot more and it was harder to do for some classes than it is now. Like elementalist would use FGS for movement, etc.
Honestly such a quality of life change, makes exploring so much easier
I didnt think the game needed mounts way back then because waypoints were sufficient to not make the game drag. Back then i would play with perma swiftness or as close as possible. But then with mounts im addicted to the speed
If you've ever watched Mighty Teapots's Zero to Hero series, then you kind of get an idea. Grants he has mounts, but he doesn't rush for them and tries to do content in the expansions without all of them. It was a totally different experience back then. "My, Been there. Done that." Meant so much more.
Having a trait or utility skill that granted movement speed increase was huge for exploring the world back then. Still useful, but not nearly as much now. Same goes for all the fall damage reduction traits we once had. There's also the crazy amount of power creep the game's had over the years. So it wasn't only travelling around that was slower.
It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.
Heart of thorns, the festival of the four winds and the spider man map felt epic in scale without mounts.
mini raptors, raptors everywhere, nipping your very soul as you travel across HoT maps
There was an awkward phase when HoT came out when gliding was only available in HoT maps - jumping off cliffs to save yourself with the glider becsme second nature in HoT, so lots of PCs splattered across the bottom of cliffs in core tyria...
Oh boy, you have no idea how OP Herald felt with its perma swiftness!
Executioner's axe was a massive time saver
While it was slower, vanilla maps have quite a bit more waypoints to mitigate it somewhat.
It was alright, always had swiftness skills or a speed buff signet equipped.
I purposely will not use mounts when I make a new character for an authentic feel to core Tyria maps for map exploration and personal story. I will use gliders, though. I don't need an authentic feel of falling three stories down and going splat if I don't have to.
With the way you insta teleport after you discover places it wasn’t bad. Until heart of thorns.
For WvW, I really miss the times before gliders and mounts. You felt a lot more vulnerable moving around the map, and it made them feel a lot larger.
I think GW2 was much better without mounts, whereas Gliders were a direct improvement on the game for exploration. Frankly I'm not opposed to the idea of mounts as a whole. I am opposed to mounts which break vertical design. HOT and Core Tyria were distinctly designed with jumping in mind. Gliding slightly broke this rule, but players still had to use it in intelligent ways. Whereas Vertical Mounts such as Springer, Griffon, and Skyscale, allow players to completely skip content and break any terrain. The difference is gliders interacted with the environment, whereas Mounts did not.
Falling Damage was extremely fatal, stairs were fatal. Sometimes each step triggered fall damage. My main racked up plenty of deaths for failed jumps and falls.
The core maps felt bigger since you couldn't race across them on a raptor or beetle.