Which GW to start on...

I'm new to Guild Wars and wanted some advice on which of the three I should start playing? I play solo most the time and find that I'm a pretty casual player for the most part....is the very first part good enough for a solo player to start or should I just jump ahead and start the later games (are they better for someone new to the series?).

Thanks so much

Okay well your probley know you have 3 choices here, factions prophices and nightfall

now depending on what your looking for ill let you deside but here are the pros and cons

Propices, probley the best tutorial for new players and the story line is my favorite of the three, some missions will require you grouping up

factions, i always found this campain more suitable for the advanced player due to the difficulty i had with it, also the charaters look horrid

nightfall, my personal favorite, you also get heros at the very start which is perfect for the solo player and i would recommend it for any new player

While prophecies takes it slow, and is good as a tutorial, it's completely deserted.

It's an easy campaign to get bored and feel like you're not getting anywhere in.

I would suggest starting in Nightfall since that allows you access to heroes and also lets you play solo easier.

*sigh*

Heroes belonging to a new player with limited skills and no experience /w multiple classes < Henchmen

At such an early stage I'd just recommend keeping the hell away from heroes altogether.

I agree with Gennadios, a hero with no skills, no insignia, no runes is a pitiful sight. This stickied thread http://www.guildwarsguru.com/forum/f...t10102502.html will give you info on each of the campaigns. Asking the community won't work as we all have our favorites. My opinion of the three is:

Prophecies - slow but lots of free skills and time to learn how the game works.
Factions - fast-paced and difficult at times
Nightfall - pace is middle of the road, forces you to use heroes even if they are badly equipped.

If I am forced to start again, I probably play a Nightfall character first, and then Eye of North (with the same character of course)

Buy Guild Wars Trilogy and test yourself This game is free to play forever, the money is well invested.

Start with Prophecies because it's the slowest. There's a part at the beginning where you play mostly solo, which gives you the opportunity to play around however you like and see how each profession works.

Factions throws you in at the deep end. For a first time player, some parts of Prophecies, even at the beginning, can be challenging. I can think of a few quests in the beginning area of Factions which would be pretty much impossible for a new player. It's good when you understand the game better, but I'd leave it for now.

Nightfall isn't designed to get you to level 20 asap (unlike Factions) so once again you've got time to mess around. It does suffer from power creep though, so there are some quite difficult bits. Also, the biggest benefit of Nightfall, heroes, are probably no little to no worth* unless you've made significant progress elsewhere.

*In GW, there are henchmen available. Henchmen are AI controlled party members which you can take with you as is convenient. They have preset weapons, armor, and skill sets. Heroes are customisable henchmen. You can give them any skills you have unlocked and can upgrade their armor any way you want. However, unless you've got a bunch of skills unlocked and a chunk of cash ready, you won't be able to do either of these. At least not to a point where the heroes would be better set up than henchmen. There is also the issue that a new player barely knows how to put a half decent build together for his profession, let alone others that he's never played. Heroes=good, but not just yet.

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When I make new characters, I make them according to which campaign has the best looks. Past the beginning area, all characters are basically the same. Looks cannot be changed unless you pay real life money, so that's generally the only deciding factor.

People have brought up good points so I don't have much to add.

But if you have a little extra cash you could always buy the PvE skill unlock pack(s), that way your heroes would be really good, so my suggestion would be get Nightfall + Nightfall unlock.

I basically agree with what has already been said.
But I'd like to add, as my personal opinion, while Prophecies is newbie-friendly for being very slow and giving you the time to learn, Nightfall has got that nice training camp at the beginning which helps a new player to understand well and quickly many things a Prophecies player has to figure by himself in time (or with guides). The only compromise I can think about is doing the very start of Nightfall and right after start Prophecies with your real char (the one you really want to grow). Just my opinion, anyway.

I began with Factions and found it easy to learn on. I think the learning curve for Factions is great. I had no trouble at all beginning here. Even the henchies have personalities and something to say.

I still find Factions the best of all 3 because you level up quickly and the missions are fast paced, fun and take only a short amount of time compared to the other campaigns. Since I bought the other campaigns, still 85% of my characters are made here and I have a lot of characters.

I am never bored in Factions. It's humorous as well. Sure, there's some cheesy dialogue, but it's the only campaign where I laughed a lot, especially if you play a ranger and do the ranger insignia. This is with the exception of the Asuran side of Eye of the North where I laughed a lot also.

Nightfall is pretty dark and serious, but if you get into the story, it can be really engaging. The heroes have fleshed out personalities. The first time I played it with my partner, I found "The Hunger" actually quite frightening and the whole campaign intense and interesting. There was even a reference involving gossip about one of the ranger teachers in factions, which I appriciated. I found it really well done.

Prophecies...well...pretty good for a first attempt that was made in 2005. However, the story is somewhat fragmented into a couple of stories, so I didn't find it as engaging. In fact I found the whole campaign long and drawn out. Thank goodness you can run it for the most part, avoiding the worst missions in the game. These missions are (in my opinion) long and boring and you can get lost, run around in circles and get frustrated. I have not spent too much time here with any of my characters.

Eye of the North is connected to Prophesies, however, and this campaign is very enjoyable, with fleshed out personalities in both the NPCs and the heroes. It was great, but not enough of a reason to begin your story in Prophesies.

In conclusion, if you enjoy a fast paced, light story that includes a good laugh here and there, begin in Factions (and play a ranger). If you like a deep story that is serious and fluid, then Nightfall is a good place to start.

I tend to disagree. I started out in Nightfall as my very first campaign. I always used all hero slots as much as I could. I learned the hard way which heroes are able to do certain tasks. I learnt how better builds make a big difference. At some points I saw the need to improve my build and the builds of my heroes. Runes are not that important in low-level areas.

I went through Kourna and Vaabi and was forced to improve my heroes' builds and eqipment, otherwise I simply were not able to beat the quests and missions. This was much fun. I h/h'd all of Nightfall until I came to Varesh -and that was too hard for me at the time. This was the time where I first asked my guild for help and they helped me through the rest of Nightfall, teaching me the pleasure of group play and communication with Teamspeak.

In my opinion the perfect introduction and first walktrough of my first campaign. All aspects of the game one at a time, not all at once.

At the time, I only had Nightfall and its skills at my disposal. A friend told me how to cheaply unlock skills for heroes by farming Balthazar faction at Zaishen Challenge/Elite. Before that, I found out myself that I were able to provide my heroes with skills by changing my secondary profession and buying/capturing, but that was somewhat expensive.

This is all much better than never take heroes until you have surplus money and resources for equipping them, since you in fact never have surplus money until you have finished everything. I watch my guild friends - they who started in pre-Nightfall campaigns rarely equip their heroes. The triple necro team plus a monk perhaps, that is all what they do. If there arises the need to fill a team with specialized heroes, I am the person who provides them, since I equipped the most useful ones.

A lot of this depends upon your own playstyle and what you mean by "solo".

In some other games (WoW and DDO come to mind), much of the content is designed to be done by a single player. In GW though, very little of the game is designed to be done by a single player - it's mostly designed to be done by a party of from 4 (in early stages) to 12 (in some elite areas) players, with the "normal" party size being 8. In GW however, there are Henchmen and Heroes (AI players) to fill out the party with. So, in GW, going "solo" just means having 1 human player and the rest of the party as Henchmen or Heroes.

The rest comes down to playstyle - how you like to play the game. If you are more into the PvE aspects of questing and exploring without being concerned about the speed of your progression, than Prophecies would be the place to start. If not, than I would suggest you start in Nightfall for the Heroes.
In any case, the game is easy enough (in Normal Mode) that you can start anywhere and play "solo" comfortably (unless you are simply bad at it. )

I would agree with Silmar as far as Heroes are concerned. At the point at which you get a particular Hero, they are equipped well enough to be used in the appropriate areas. Naturally, Heroes do need to be developed along with your own character, so you do need to equip them with Runes & Insignias and better weapons and skills. So, if you are the type who wants to save your gold to buy fancy armor and weapons, then no, don't use Heroes. But if you want to have the best "solo" results in the most areas of the game, then spend the time and money to equip both yourself and your Heroes.
(Btw, Prophecies and Factions can be done just fine with just Henchmen.)

P.S. You don't need to equip all of your heroes. Just pick 3 or 4 that you think will fit your playstyle and work on those (at first). I still, after all this time, mostly have only 4 or 5 fully equipped Heroes on each of my 11 active characters. There's no real need to equip all of your heroes - and the ones you don't use make handy storage slots for weapons.
And, here's a tip - you can't destroy a heroes armor when removing Runes and Insignias, so don't be concerned about experimenting. If you want to change to a different Hero, you can simply take any useful R&I off of the one you no longer want to use and put them on the new one.