Just starting Guild Wars, what character type

Well I just ordered the game online and was wondering which character type was the easiest to start with, I am thinking about being a Ranger but from the guides I have read they are complicated.

If anyone has any info or help to choosing a character please post it on here, also tips for playing would be great, thanks.

Well for me, the melee class is the easiest to start, so Warrior. Classic hack n slash.... target and attack..

Imho Ranger is a great place to start as they are arguably the most versatile class, particularly as a starting block for the game. However it also depends on which chapter you have bought and the style that most fits you. I played necro first and it really didn't suit me, then tried mesmer and played that one for about a year without trying any of the other classes because I just loved the class. If you want to ease yourself into the game slowly pick Warrior, Para or Ranger.

HTH and welcome to GW

i would suggest if u like ranger you go that route,besides rangers get pets they can tame nice extra tankage especially at lower levels.

Elementalist is also a great class to start with, they can be quite versatile too

The two easiest professions to start out with are probably the Warrior and the Elementalist. Both of them are very straightforward to learn to play and are quite newb-friendly, making them excellent choices for a first character.

That being said, the Ranger is also fairly easy to pick up and learn the ropes of the game with. The basic techniques of playing a Ranger are easy enough to pick up, and the sheer versatility of the profession gives you a huge number of more advanced strategies that you can experiment with as the game goes on.

Although bear in mind that you will always have a minimum of 4 character slots, so feel free to experiment with the professions until you find the one that's right for you

Rangers are a very good profession to start with, it was my first, and I finished Prophecies with non-max armor. :x

Another good choice would be Elementalist nice and straightforward, warriors are a good starting profession as long as you stay away from PvP until you learn the ins and outs by heart.

Rangers aren't bad, are fairly easy to start off with. They can get complex eventually, but getting started at least they are fairly straight forward.

Warriors aren't bad to start with either, and are fairly simple and straight forward, as are Elementalists.

Monks are actually pretty straight forward, but they are hard to start because a good monk is rarely offensive minded, and early game it's generaly easier to be offensive minded till you learn a bit about the game.

Necromancers aren't hard, but they are different, and probably not a good starter class.

Mesmers are just odd. I love them, but they are fairly intimately tied into understanding how other classes and skills work, so are probably not a good start.

Beyond that, if you have Factions or Nightfall, there are the 2 other classes those have, but those probably aren't good starting classes either.

Still, you get 4 character slots, so you can fool around with multiple characters.

I started the game a few days ago and am playing Elem/Mesmer. Elem is pretty easy atm. Mesmer is very interesting and adds that slight tinge of difficulty into your character. I like it.

First start a Warrior or Elementalists and go wild. Then play a Monk, so you know how stupid Warriors gone Wild are. Then play a support character, with heroes and minions and summoned creatures and spirits and Ebon Vanguard Assassin, and play it like a RTS.

Warrior is easiest as you can just hit stuff and it looks like you know what you are doing :P

Just play the game and try any class that seems interesting to you, don't just go for the generally considered easiest. Imo, all of the classes are simple to learn and difficult to master.

Learn for yourself, it's the best way.

Ok, here's the truth so you can get the most out of your chars...

You're going to play the game. You'll eventually "beat" it. But there's much more to do after that.

For the end game elite areas, classes are favored in this order:
Monk
Ele
Necro
Warrior (i've done probably every area and every mission without a "tank" simply due to the crap agro system that makes tanks, for the most part, useless)
Ranger
Mesmer


There's also solo farming to consider. For that:
Monk

Other classes can do it too, but not as well as monks can.

Then you have Ursan teams (you'll find out more about these later).
Monk
Warrior/Ranger/Necro (tied for 2nd due to either armor or energy regeneration ability)
Everything else.

Personally, I don't have a monk. Will never roll one again. But that's my personal choice. I enjoy my mesmer.


Now, what character you'll actually enjoy, I can't tell you.

I like caster classes. Ranged shutdown/damage/healing/protecting/etc.

Some people like martial classes (war, para, ranger, sin, derv). They like to be up in the fight smacking people with metal. To be honest, I feel that sins are a very versatile class. More so than warriors, paras, or dervs. With critical strikes and a few other skills, you can utilize any weapon and make it scary. Though most people will shun assassins in pve for the most part.

Rangers have a number of roles, but you'll mostly see teams asking for either BHA/Epidemic or Splinter/Barrage.

If you are used to the so called holy trinity then a Warrior (tank/melee), Elementalist (nuker), and Monk (healer) will be the easiest. GW doesn;t really have the concept of a tank, but one can learn how to mostly manage aggro if the try and figure out how GW's aggro system works.

The rest are different classes. A Ranger is one of the "Jack of All Trades" character and can easily loose too much focus with a new player (my first Range definitely suffered from this). However, it is also quite easy to play if you focus on one part and can easily give you a decent taste of many of the classes out there.

Since you appear to have guildies I would suggest taking their advice above ours simply because you will play with them quite a bit.

Rangers are definitely a good class to start with for the very reason mentioned above: that they're Jacks of All (well, Most ) Trades and are definitely not complicated.

They do a bit of just about everything from damaging, defense (blocking attacks, healing themselves (and their pet), and some condition (blindness, poison, that sort of thing) removal), placing conditions on their foes or interrupting their spell and skill use, plus a few other things that are unique to them - like their pet (if you're playing Prophecies, keep the pet you get from the Ranger tutorial quest 'til you meet Ranger Nente again after moving out of the tutorial region) and setting traps to lure their enemies over (mainly to place conditions on them and help keep them bunched up).

How good Rangers are later on in the game really depends on how good you get as a player, especially with interrupting skills/spells (takes timing and a fair bit of knowledge and experience to know which monsters, or players in PvP, are worth disrupting, other than the one that you've been targetting with damage), trapping (and the related player skill of pulling apart groups when multiple groups of monsters congregate in an area), and pet mastery (there's a huge difference between taking the skill that lets you have a pet and, as standard, the skill that lets you heal and resurrect your pet, and actually having that pet be useful as more than just a minor distraction, at least later on).

One thing that hasn't been mentioned about Rangers, though, is that (once you can add Henchmen to your party) they tend not to be a priority target for monsters. Since Rangers aren't right in the monsters' faces like Warriors, Dervishes (Nightfall) and Assassins (Factions) are, and their armor is significantly better than a spellcaster's (especially if monsters take into account the bonus armor rating Rangers get against elemental damage), monsters will mainly go for the other players. Still a good idea to bring one of their blocking and escape skills, of course.

/disagree, at least with Nightfall. Dervish wouldn't be bad to start with, they're essentially warriors with enchantments for their blood.

Let me tell you my story.... Gather round Children
I always thought necros were awesome mainly cause they could summon minions and had THE best armor, but i also thought ranger were cool cause they could have pets so i though why not and just combined the awesome-ness of Necro armor with the arrow slinging abilty of a ranger. so now im a backliner and use a longbow for that bit of extra grunt.

The aggro system is easy to figure out...

Here's how the AI works...

*looks for monk*
"finds monk"
*attacks monk*
*switches targets to another squishy class*
*attacks new squishy class*
*switch back to monk*
*attack monk*
*switch to other monk*
*attack other monk*
etc

=P

Rangers are sexy. D-Shot ftw.

ele is easy to play with