What was the toughest part of Guild Wars?

With the recent addition of the expansion GW:EN to Guild Wars, I've noticed an increase in the number of new players in the game.

Spend 5 minutes in Old Ascalon and you'll be shocked just how basic the questions are.

Thinking back to when you first started playing the game, what do you think was the most confusing part of the game?

For me, I thought the entire elite skill part was very confusing.
1. "So I get only 8 skills, and I'm allowed only 1 elite at a time?
2. How do I get an elite? You need a signet of capture equipped near a dead boss to capture the elite.
3. How do I know if I'm near a boss? The NPC has a name, unlike the generic names most mobs have.
4. How can I find out what elite the dead boss has? Just try using the signet of capture and see if any skills pop-up" Etc...

I dunno, seems simple enough now, but I found the entire concept VERY confusing at the time.

What part of the game was the toughest to grasp for you?

for me i thought i had to meet the requirements of the weapon/items inorder to gain the benefits of them...that was hard for me to understand for some reason....

Also the whole running thing in prophecies....totally got me confused...thankfully i never took one...until later

My first char was an ele, and I was confused about the "6 fire magic" requirement. I wasn't sure if I needed 6 in that attribute or 6 fire magic skills :O

How armor effects damage, even now i only half understand it and accept more=better XD

Capping skills used to be harder....the boss had to be alive AND had to have just used the skill..."NO, NO, DON'T KILL HIM!!!" Ah, the good old days.

I guess the hardest thing for me to grasp in the beginning was why every group sat around and refused to leave without 2 monks...ugh. Oh, yeah...still the same. Bah!

I remember for me the biggest mystery was how you could get a guild hall...

there was some mysterious path you had to take, perhaps through the desert or the underworld....you had to make a long journey. Something was whispered about Lion's Arch...something called a "sigil" might be needed...

When I first left pre-searing I dreaded the Charr.

stacking vs. non-stacking

when i didnt know where to get better armor.

or

when i didnt understand requirements

but probably

everything before i found guild wiki

When I started I was used to charms in DiabloII. I filled my inventory with +3 energy items and wondered why nothing was different from an empty inventory.

Yeah, me too. The whole armour + runes business was totally confusing for me and, of course, my first Ele was running around with 3 minor fire runes and 2 minor energy storage runes for ages.

I think I'd got as far as Riverside Province before I realised that you could tell the profession of a boss by its aura.

I'd been playing GW for well over a year before I fully understood all the controls for targetting foes, allies and picking up loot.

Goldleader: I think you've hit it on the head! When I was just a newb I heard that elite skills were skills that bosses used. So, i thought that only the bosses could use them and if i met a boss with one hed use it and absolutely wipe my entire party out for good.

Hmm... then you meet a boss with balthazars pendulum and realise... they ain't so bad.

What comes to mind first is when I kept on wondering in Hell's Precipice mission "what the hell happens to my mending?" (it kept getting rended by necro titans) - "I swear I’ve just cast it!". I also thought that mending alone was giving me extra 45 health (I didn’t realized I had +45 enchanted shield)

Well, yeah, I was a typical wammo mending noob back in those days ))

Villainy of Galrath was a crusade for me - I believe we spent more then 5 hours when we first did it, hell, miss those days. At least 10 times in Kassex Peak I was told "dammit, don't rush" right before I'd trigger next pop up still thinking to myself "damn, I swear there were no red dots here just now!"

Oh, good old days of innocent noobines, how I miss them!

Requirements, for 11 months I thought you needed those requirements just to WIELD the item! (I never tried ;( )

Indeed When I tried equipping req 13 Axe having something like 9 in axe mastery (being low lvl myself) I was stunned: how come I managed to equip it? Woohoo 6-28 damage! let's go KILLLLL STUUFFF!!!

Identification of white items. I never know it was possible to ID them, so I only identified the blue/purple/gold items with [unidentified]. I must have thrown away a lot of money by selling tons of whites without id-ing them first.

Also confusing: the -50hp cesta. When you get it as newbie it appears to be the ultimate useless item, so I merched it immediately. Later I noticed about all the "WTB -50 hp cesta, 5k" messages and realised I threw away 5k by mercing it.

Hmm, hard one.

I guess the thing I was grossly incorrect about (and therefore confused I guess) was the role a secondary played. Because of the slower progression of hardness of the enemies in Prophecies you can get away with a lot of things that you really shouldn't be able to do. My first two attempts at the game failed because of that - an ele that used some earth spells for armor and monk spells to tank (an ele wammo - even worse!) and a ranger that used mesmer skills for degen. They both worked up until about the Jungle and then just became impossible to play. I viewed the secondary as a true "second profession", not something to support your primary. The third I made I had learned and didn't have that trouble again.

I suppose the one of the few times I truly felt confused was the first time I hit some Mesmer enemies with a energy heavy character. Why didn't that cast? Why do I have no energy? Why did I just die? As a warrior there is almost nothing that really shuts you down in the game that you can't see. Blind and hexes show up, something draining your energy or interrupting you didn't. At that time all we had was the name of the skill that caused the damage floating above your head and no wiki to look stuff up on. I had no idea what class I was fighting and no way to find out until I just stumbled upon one of the skills on another character. Heck, at that time it was even hard to tell who was casting what at you too. Not to mention that it was usually just one of many skills currently hitting you and the name was only displayed for a second or two.

After that the Wiki was born and had enough information that I just looked stuff up if I didn't know what happened and we now have almost *too* much information thrown at us in game.

The toughest part of Guild Wars for me was getting started. I was one of the extremely masochistic people who started playing the game as a Mesmer instead of going for an easier profession. It took me a coupla weeks to fully work out exactly what skills I needed to use and what new skill effects I had to look out for to improve my builds. Let alone learning about each skill subtype and which of my skills interacted with the skills that the monsters were using.

Although I think that the whole experience has given me a firm understanding of the game that I might not have got if I had started off with a different profession

Well the first time i played guildwars i had strange problems >.>

I got on my first day in a dutch speaking guild, so that wasnt a problem, but then i talked with them, and they starting to talk "1337"

And i was WTF are you saying ...

And then the stacking/non stacking problems came ...

And the better armor :P I used to walk with my startings armor for weeks :P

(Damn i used to be a newb ... )

Hmmmm....pretty much everything confused me when I first started until I read this site and various articles at GuildWiki. Only been playing for a few months now and still consider myself a bit of a noob but I've certainly learnt a lot over that time.

Single toughest thing for me initially was getting killed repeatedly on the early quests as I tackled them all completely on my own as I stupidly thought that it cost money to hire henchmen to help me