New to GW, Need some suggestions

I am planning on buying Guild Wars this week and have a few questions and need some suggestions.

I have played Silkroad Online since the game came to the states over a year ago. I have a Glave/Lighting, Bow/Ice, Warrior/Bard, Wizard/Claric. Of them I enjoy the wizard the most. The Glave player and warrior are at best ‘bla’ with repetitive actions and no brains. Where as the Bow and especially the Wizard have more of a finesse about them using tactics to kill before being killed themselves. And I love being able to do one-shot nuke kills.

I am trying to decide between a; Ranger – Necromancer – Elementalist, as my toon. Ranger for the bow, necro because it just sounds damn cool using dead monsters as your own and elemnt because it seems to be like a wizard. I do have a high level wolf in SRO but I don’t care to use it because I hate having to watch its heath plus my own, it’s very annoying, so I guess being a ranger is out of the question. So the toss up would be either a Necromancer or Elementalist. SRO has a Warlock that might be close to a Necro, that I don’t care for doing debuffs. I’m more a pve person. I dislike most pvp. Bad memories of EVE Online come to mind.

Also are their any Guilds that teach new players the ropes after their done with the tutorials? Kind of like what some corporations in EVE Online do for new players. I’m assuming that GW has a much less steep learning curve then EVE Online does that can take months to master. If it’s any help to know; I had a 8mil sp miner/builder toon and a 6mil sp covert ops toon.

Thanks for any suggestions given, Tank

I know next to nothing about SilkRoad and even less about EVE. I think it's probably best to just forget about them and start fresh with Guild Wars.

Ranger - Ranger was my first class and is still my favourite. You don't have to have a pet and if you do, you don't need to be too concerned about it's health. A Ranger can fulfill many different roles - barrager (damage), Beast Master, Interrupter, Condition spreader.

Necromancer - I played a Necro for a while, but overall I found the Necro to be so "busy" that I didn't get a chance to actually watch the game, just skill, energy & health bars. (Monk was like that too). I stopped playing my Necro when I got a "Hero" Necro.

Elementalist is always fun and you can use 4 different skill lines (fire, cold, air, earth). But I don't play my Ele any more either. No particular reason though.

You could also try Mesmer - my second favourite class.

Of course, with Guild Wars you will get a least 4 character slots, so you can try more than one class. I'd suggest you get the Platinum Edition (Prophecies plus Eye of the North).

Also look here for more info:
http://wiki.guildwars.com/wiki/Main_Page
http://gw.gamewikis.org/wiki/Main_Page

Warrior is a nice class to begin with, I would suggest sword or axe (allows use of shield).

Elementalists are fun, but require a little more energy management than other classes. They have the highest armor in the game, and can take more hits than pretty much any other class (besides specialized builds), but do require some skill to play. all the classes do (but you learn quick, and pre-searing ascalon is easy enough to not make it a problem.)

Monks aren't as fun to play, IMO, but are in very, very high demand in pickup groups, so a good healing/protection monk can take you far in the game (and monks can be smiting monks, causing decent damage to boot).

Necros are pretty nice, can become the minion masters, vampire types, etc. it all depends on what you want to do.

I don't know too much about mesmers and rangers, Mesmers have fast cast which makes them cast spells quicker, and use alot of hexes and interrupts. Rangers also have interrupts in the form of bow attacks, plus they can lay invisible traps down to snare and set up enemies before taking them down. plus, as stated above, one skill lets you take a pet you tamed with you.

Agree with Quaker. Just some additions.

Necromancer can be fun. Raising minions (we call it Minion Master or just MM) can keep you busy. Necros are also good at other things, like degen and health stealing.

There are probably a lot of guilds that welcome new players and will help you to learn the game. You can PM me, as our guild is one of them The learning curve shouldn't be too bad if you've played similiar games. Mostly just getting used to the differences.

Welcome to GW and Guru.

Hi, Welcome to GW and to guru. I've never played Silkroad, so I'm just offering advice based on the other information you gave.

First - don't discount the ranger, they're great. And you absolutely do not have to take a pet with you, don't let that make up your mind.

Between Necro and Ele, I'd say necro because of your dislike of repetitive blah-ness. Ele is very repetitive and not much "finesse," in my opinion. There are a lot of debuffs on necros, but something like MM or blood spike might be to your liking.

Reconsider mesmer as well. That is a profession heavy in finesse. They may take a while longer to learn, but not much. They're well worth it though.

There *are* guilds that help out new players, but probably more difficult to find. The problem is that there are a lot of smaller guilds scattered around, many of which are disorganized and not necessarily friendly. Have a look at the Guilds Recruiting section of the forums. If you see people advertising in game, be picky and ask a lot of questions.

That said, many guru players will offer advice, suggestions and help along the way. Feel free to add me to your in-game friends' list when you do start.

Most guilds will have someone who shows newbys how to use their char properly and how to equip it and what builds to use , or if they are part of a good Alliance then someone from there could be a designated meeter and greeter.

Before you select a class to seriously play, I'd suggest learning the basics with a warrior simply because it's the simplest class in PvE.

As a sidenote, pets are actually pretty crappy in Guild Wars. Rangers are more of a utility class that focuses on the bow.

Ranger, Elementalist and Warrior are good classes to start with. Warrior and elementalist are pretty straitfoward so choosing between those depends mostly if you're the caster or melee type. As stated previously, you don't need a pet as a ranger. If you do take a pet however, it can serve in attack using pet attack skills or just as a meat shield.

If you want to start with necro, that's fine, i started with necro myself and quite enjoyed it.

I'd recommend against choosing monk for your first character so you can have a better understanding of the game mechanics. It's easier to use a monk if you already know how damage works, which professions are more suceptible to damage etc.

On the learning curve side, prophecies has the best one for a beginner. Nightfall also has a decent learning curve a bit faster that prophecies but good enough to begin with. I'd stay away from faction though, the learning curve is the steepest of the 3 campaigns.

EDIT: quaker gave you the links to both wikis, these will probably be among your best friends. I suggest you use them for thing like the armor and damage mechanics if you wnat to learn them in detail. The official wiki can be accessed via the game too either by pressing F10(default settings) or typing /help in the game chat. The official wiki is less complete than the unofficial one though.

You could say Warrior and Ranger are the basic common type of playable characters. Elementalist and Necromancer also can fall into this, but just on the basis of spellcasting.

Mesmer and Monk, in my opinion, are more "advanced" classes to play as.

Make all 3. Guild Wars is not like every other MMO. You can easily create multiple characters fairly eaisly due to the low level cap.
Plus, you get 4 character slots when you start the game.

As for which you start off with... of those 3 professions ele is my clear favorite. You'll have to make up your own mind.


Ignore the comments about "needing" to make a warrior for your first character. That is a common misconception. You can get by just fine starting off with any character (well, maybe not mesmer, that is a tough class to learn). Don't play a character you don't want to play just because somebody else said you should. I didn't make a warrior until a year after I started. By then, I had already beaten the game with several other classes, including necro and ele, just fine.

Amen, It's all I do when I'm monking to watch the health bars - heal and make sure the crazy tank doesn't drag me into the middle of a mob! That being said I do love my monk but I wouldn't suggest either Monk or Necro as a first toon. Probably a warrior is the easiest to start with although a ranger is also a good choice. I have found the Ranger to be rather versatile.

As far as guilds, yes there are some that will help newer members learn the ropes. You might want to research some here but you can always move around until you find a good fit.

Pretty sure elementalists don't have the highest armor in the game...I'm also pretty sure that they can't take more hits than warriors. If your talking about using skills such as stoneflesh, etc., well doesn't that just make that build a "specialized build" as most ele's in pvp and pve don't carry skills to "tank" enemies. There's a reason why warriors and not ele's are considered as "tanks".

To the OP, just play all the professions as you'll have more than enough character slots to try them out. After that, just play whichever one you like the most more often. For my account, while I have pve characters of all the professions, I mainly play the characters I enjoy playing the most, which are my warrior, monk, and ranger.

I agree with Hawk. The only thing you really should do as a newbie is buying Prophecies (the first chapter). It is the one with a slower lvling, though it is nowhere like in MMOs. Plus, you seem to like core classes which you can get in all chapters, Prophecies being the cheaper.

However, classes are very different from the ones in MMOs.
Pets are usually bad, except if your build is based on them, and not mandatory at all. In fact, they make you lose a skill, so a lot of bow-based Rangers don't use them.
Eles are not the best damage dealers. They can be good at DD, but they can also tank like hell. And you will never oneshot a mob/player of your lvl, no matter which class you have.
Necros are really good in two roles in PvE : hexes and minion masters. Blood is bad. I know it, I played it for a long, long time.
As a minion master you will be needed in most missions, but others won't have flesh bodies (yeah you need dead, fleshy mobs to create a minion). So you will have to switch to hexes. But hexes aren't only for PvP : in fact, they can be really powerful in PvE, especially for a certain build which is based in "you attack/use a skill, you lose life". Since mobs are stupid and continue to attack, they can die really easily.

And never forget that X class doesn't mean it will be easy to play or not.
You can have Warriors builds which need a lot of attention.
You can have Elementalist builds which only ask you to spam your spells.
Only Mesmer is hard to play at first, because you need to know your enemies' weaknesses. And the best way to do that is to play as the enemies' class.

[QUOTE=hellyea526]Pretty sure elementalists don't have the highest armor in the game...I'm also pretty sure that they can't take more hits than warriors. If your talking about using skills such as stoneflesh, etc., well doesn't that just make that build a "specialized build" as most ele's in pvp and pve don't carry skills to "tank" enemies. There's a reason why warriors and not ele's are considered as "tanks".

Warriors and Paragons have the highest armour rating at 80 I believe.

If you do make a ranger with a pet, dont worry about him dying, you as a ranger have the ability to just raise him again a few seconds later. So if you like the ranger play style, dont let having to worry about the pets health stop you.

If you want elementalist, theyre good at nuking things, therefore often wanted in pick up groups. They are also good at a variety of other things, but get into that later.

Necros are also very flexible as a minion master (having lots of minions get in the way of bad guys, cursing (hexing) bad guys so they hurt themselves, and using vampiric health stealing skills.

All are very fun, but if i started, id have to say ranger is easiest due to survivability, but elementalists are most fun.

I think that you will find over time that you will want to not only try multiple characters but will want to have a stable of characters of different professions. A max level character of each profession will allow you to play what your party most needs in any given mission. Not to say that you will be expected to play what others want but there will be times that a party will get together and discover that eight of the same profession usually equals failure. feel free to message me in game for suggestions about builds and the like. Welcome to GW, remember its always about having fun!

You will find a lot of helpfull people right here on Guru, try to PM some of us online if you really need help.

GW is a very easy game to learn the basics, the higher end of play is mostly PvP and can take a bit of effort to break into.

My best advice, just play the game and try everything. You can't make any mistakes that are unfixable so just have fun for a bit and go wild

New question. I just got the free 10 hours try out for GW Factions, can I make a toon on it, and after 10 hours move her to "ch1" after I buy the regular GW "ch1" not Factions? Or can I not ever change where my toon starts out of chapters once I pick on the select screen. ie; you can only pick once for all toons.

Once you decide on the "land of origin" for a char (toon) you can not change it.

However, by following the storyline in any campaign you will eventually find an NPC that will offer to "take" you to one of the other campaigns. Just understand you have to own/install the campaign you wish to journey to.

That last part is probably pretty obvious but I don't want to make assumptions.

So if you make a character in Factions on this 10 hour trial and then buy only prophecies and add it to your trial account, you will NOT be able to play the trial character at all because you haven't bought Factions. The character would sit on your character select screen and unable to be accessed (but can be deleted). Anything you put in the storage SHOULD be able to be accessed by another character created once you buy (I believe).

That said, doing the 10 hour trial will at least let you try the game so you can decide if you like it.

Well my 10 hours it up and I am somewhat confused. From what I could tell aside from humans in the few city's I came across, all explore maps where just myself and loads of NPC's. Whenever I did quests I never saw another human. I read theirs 20 coop missions, but for the other 250 must I do all them solo? And even of thats a "no" why would anyone want to help a low level player do low level quests for low level rewards? I'm somewhat baffled theirs no explore maps with loads of monsters to grind on (none I found) I understand its not a grind game, but if I wanted to make some fast gold, that hinders me. Half the time I did the quests I didn't even read it, I just accepted, whent to the location, killed everything along the way and got my reword.. Not very exciting, but again, maybe I was missing something. Also everyone talks about makeing more then one toon, but why would you want to have to replay those missions again to level up to gain new powers? I would assume it's better to just stick with the one toon and level it up more high then have a bunch of low levels running around. Also is their an auto goto location? Some of these quests where so expansive it was a boar, I came across very few monsters and was just sitting at my kitchen table with one hand on the WASD and the other eating a hotdog while talking to a friend, waiting to get to the end point. I was playing Factions, so maybe thats not the best for PvE I'm guessing, never the less, wow. Is the whole game like this?

What about other low level characters playing at the same time? Just try looking for a party with intent to do a certain quest. Besides that, you don't even need to do the mission Co Op, just you might prefer it. If you party up with someone, then you can enter the explorable areas too.


It's explained in 'An Audience with Master Togo' but anyway, press M to bring up the map, then click to travel to any outpost you have unlocked.
Generally, your PvE experience is enhanced if you join a guild that has similar interests to you.
Making more than one toon is completely optional, some people prefer to branch out - maybe because they want to 'farm' (kill monsters for rare items/gold) using that class, or because they just want to play through the game again.
Factions is vaguely linear until you get further into the plot line, but it really is worth persevering IMO. (Then again, you're on a GW forum, the odds of getting something unbiased are about 50 to 1 )

When you leave towns, your party gets a private copy of the world. You don't have to do everything solo though - if you team up with other players while in a town, they will join you when you leave town. And you would be surprised; there are people who are happy to help lower level players find their feet. If you check out the Riverside forum here, there's a sticky thread with a list of people who have volunteered to help newbies with the game.

There isn't an "auto go-to" function, unless you're using the mouse for movement. WASD is good for more precise movements, but for long distance walking in explorable areas the mouse is your best friend. For travelling between towns there's an even easier way; press M to bring up your overworld map, click on the town you want to travel to and you'll be transported there instantly (the catch is that you can only map-travel like this to towns that you've visited before).

Factions is also not the best game to start with for PvE. It's very fast-paced and the difficulty level increases very rapidly (though if you can handle that, the other GW games will be a breeze); though in my opinion Factions is a perfect crash course if you want to get into PvP quickly.

Uggh, I know what you mean in the early quests for factions. Go here talk to someone, then go there talk to this guy, then back to the old guy. Some of the main city (Kaineng Center) quests are like this. It gets better later, and prophecies GW1 has less tedious ones. I only completed all quests on my main character, my other characters those quests are still active. You only NEED to complete the cooperative quests, you dont NEED to do the others (side quests). Many people just ignore the side quests.

yeah look for a guild it will help alot also dont do any secondary quest at all they are boring only primary will make you like the game

edit: press your L key for the quest log

And aside of quests, can you group explore for really good things or group grind? After doing all 20 coops wouldn't you not have anything left to do?

Even after you complete all the missions, there's still more to do. There are elite missions with bigger rewards, hard mode with tougher monsters and bigger rewards, character titles to work on, prestige armor sets to collect... The odds of you ever running out of things to do is very slim.

I came to GW after Silkroad too. Dont worry about getting bored with the game. Tons of things to do (Tittles, Tomb of Primeval Kings, vanquishing...) and most of all NO KS

What server where you on? I was on olympus (yes one of the worst) and left coz i could no longer grind without having these huge urge to kill every bot around me.

The community on GW is about ten times nicer then on SRO. Find yourself a good guild, read a lot of what's posted in here and in no time you'll forget about SRO.

Also if you get Prophecies, the side quests give free skills (you dont have to buy them), so the side quests there are recommended. However in Factions, the side quests give a good amount of experience and you can level to 20 really fast, also once in Kaineng Center the side quests give Imperial Commendations (just like Monastary Credits) which you can trade in for Superior Salvage kits (2k value) for 5 of them. Although those quests area tedious the reward can save you a good amount of $$ in those salv kits.

Have fun.