I think you could argue that, after all the new content in the form of new chapters, GW:EN, etc, the time of Prophecies was easily the best, for several reasons:
1. No Wiki -With the arrival of Guildwiki, and later, the official Wiki, the fun seems to have drained out of playing. All the mystery is gone. Why explore an area for a quest when the wikis both give you maps of the area with the best possible route for the quest? PvXwiki made the situation even worse, promoting build elitism and preventing people from desigining their own builds. Template codes were both a good and bad addition, as now you could save all your builds and swap them with ease. The problem with this is that new players can simply request a "good warrior build plz", and not really thinking themselves. I'm not entirely blaming the wikis - after all, you can simply not look at them and discover everything yourself. However, this leads on to the next problem...
2. No Repetition - Sure, you can ignore the wikis, but in the later chapters, like Factions and Nightfall, and especially GW:EN, the sheer number of enemies is insane. These enemies are easy to kill, but it takes a painfully long time to cut through them all, even with a very good group. This means that you no longer are focused on the environment, but simply where the next popup will appear, or whether you'll run into a patrol or overaggro. This is a real shame as GW:EN has some of the most beautiful environments in any of the chapters. Think of Arbor Bay - the cavern in the top part of it was stunning, but I only noticed it by the end of the path. It's fun to explore, but these chapters present so many obstacles to exploration that you just don't bother - instead focusing on the Primary Quests. Prophecies only had these annoying areas in Post-searing Ascalon and in some parts of the crystal desert.
3. Open-ended and vast explorables - Yes, the explorables in all chapters are essentially the same size, but the sheer number of enemies in them (see above) means that they are no longer vast, but tiny areas which feel very claustrophobic. Nightfall handled this very well, with areas of wilderness with few enemies and a proper sense of scale. Prophecies has plenty of wonderfully free explorables which actually give you an urge to explore, to see "what's around that corner" without the fear of tons of enemies.
4. Storyline - Prophecies still feels like it has an epic storyline, with varied and interesting quests to go along with it. These quests are often interesting because they are not "fed-ex" quests, or quests which are simply variations on "kill x number of enemies". They expand the lore greatly and because you have the freedom to move properly in the explorables, they suddenly become fun. The actual storytelling of all the games are pretty good, but the presentation impedes your understanding of them. GW:EN also has plenty of new lore for us all, but we have to fight tooth and nail through hordes of enemies to find it out.
4. "Good" and "Bad" Grind - What I mean here is that some kinds of what you'd class as grind are good, such as a slower level progression, and some are bad, such as the allegiance titles, introduced in Factions, continued in Nightfall, and completely hammered into you in GW:EN. Both Factions and Nightfall require a small amount of boring grind to continue through the storyline (Factions has FFF, the fed-ex quests giving you small amounts of allegiance faction, and AB - Nightfall has Sunspear points, which, again, have boring quests or repeatedly killing enemies in order for you to progress). GW:EN has no compulsory grind to speak of, but to get your hands on the PvE skills with a rank that makes the skills useable, you need to complete the game and hand in a completed Book. Fair enough, you might say. What if you want skills from another title track? Do a few dungeons. Again, fair enough. In GW:EN, however, the grind is hidden in the form of long, repetitive dungeons packed with slow-to-kill enemies every inch. The primary quests would be fun if the situation wasn't the same above ground. "Good" grind comes in the form of playing through the game and levelling up/gaining a title WITHOUT thinking "Phew, only 154 enemies to kill and I have the title/level up" or "Once I complete this quest...blah blah". A player should NEVER be thinking this. They should be enjoying the quest right now. With prophecies, the fact that you were "nearly level 6" in presearing really never came into your mind as you carry a beehive over a bridge, explore an eerie and beautiful Catacombs (with, guess what, less enemies!), or exploring beyond the wall with a friend. As you slowly progressed past post-searing and into the northern shiverpeaks, you knew you were now level 12 and were pleased about it, but you were much more eager to find out what would happen next, or, even if replaying from the beginning, you might notice something that you didn't notice the first time.
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Anyway, if you made it this far, thanks for reading!
