Returning player: confused on proper henchman use, strategies, lvling up builds, etc.

play what is fun to you, when i first started i bought all the games at once. it took me like a couple days of casual play to get 8 different characters to lvl 6 or 7, and out of the beginning zone in prophecies. giving me a quick overview of what each character is like, in the end.. i ended up leveling all of them to 20 and i don't really have a main char cuz when i get bored of one i just switch. all are equally fun to me, and have different play styles.

I see. So as I advance the main story, eventually the trainers will just have more skills? Is that based on my lvl or my point in the story?

RIGHT! I need to try that tonight. I read I can do the vs. NPCs version for up to 2k pts per day? I assume against NPCs its easy to win the scenario?

But I should wait until I have "maxed" armor, right?


I don't mind farming at all. I just need to know what to farm, where, and where the collectors are. I thought I found a list on the wiki once but I can't recall if I bookmarked it (I am not on my desktop pc at the moment).

How expensive is maxed armor? Obviously with only a bunch of noob characters I'm not rolling in money. Do I buy maxed armor from players or from an NPC?

So since I don't have much experience, should I maybe go with a monk henchman instead of the monk hero, for example?

Is that really a good option, or is that a square peg/round hole type thing? If paragon/warrior is better than war/paragon, I certainly don't mind switching characters.

The skills offered by skill trainers are predetermined; the further along in the campaign they are the more skills they have. Your level is irrelevant. However, all unlocked skills will be available from all trainers in the campaign that the skill is from. For example, Flail is a Nightfall skill and isn't usually available until the end of the game. If you unlocked it you would be able to buy it from Kamadan.

Yeah, 2k/limit for Zaishen Challenge. Don't worry about the other arenas for now.

Winning is fairly easy because the opposing teams were built based upon what was popular in 2005/2006 with only skills that existed then. You've got access to a lot more and better skills so they should be easy (trivial once you get the hang of it). I find the Illusionary Weaponry team to be the easiest.

I wouldn't fully set up a non-max armor set with runes and insignia. Maybe a minor rune of your most important attribute (sword/axe/hammer for a Warrior) if you can afford it. Save up cash now so you can get max AL armor and fully upgrade it later.

You can never buy armor from other players. All armor that is wearable by players is customised, which means only that character can use it.

To find out how much armor costs, see here. Click on a set that interests you and look at the 80AL section.

If you don't have a lot of skills unlocked the henchman might be a better option. They fall behind heroes pretty quickly though.

I wouldn't say P/W is better than W/P. P/W seems better for what you want to do though. Make a Para and see how you like it. As I mentioned earlier however, if you want to join groups with other people they will expect you to run one exact build all the time. Most people find this mind-numbingly dull.

http://guildwars.wikia.com/wiki/Trainer_locations

In the normal Zaishen Challenge you can choose the team you're fighing against, so if you figured out a build and tactic to win against one team you can fight this team over and over until you got 2k.

Yeap, replace "level 20" with "max armor".

http://guildwars.wikia.com/wiki/Non-player_character
A list of all NPCs, the link to a list for collectors is at the top.

http://guildwars.wikia.com/wiki/Category:Armor_crafters

Recently the builds of henchmen were revised, they should be more than enough for normal mode now. I assume a newbie will get overwhelmed quickly when he has to manage 4 characters instead of 1.

A Warrior was designed to be a damage dealer, the Paragon was designed to be a damage/support hybrid; if you exclude PvE skills a Warrior will deal more damage, but will never have the kind of support a Paragon can provide, if you include PvE skills a Paragon will deal more damage because a spear Warrior cannot cope with the energy cost of Asuran Scan.

Warriors do more damage than Paragons. My Warrior can deal 140+ damage per hit (186DPS) fairly easily. AScan isn't hard to manage with a zealous weapon. Also, this is considering single target damage. Paragons cannot even remotely produce the same amount of damage as a 100B Warrior.

I was comparing spear Warriors to spear Paragons; I haven't been able to create a spear Warrior build that can beat the damage of an all-out damage spear Paragon.
But both will lose against a melee Warrior (or melee Paragon).

So my paragon/warrior is level 14 now. Skill trainers still have the same crap skills.

What do I have to do to get some decent skills unlocked? I have like 1 or 2 from the "end game" build suggestions.

Don't worry about skills until later on. They will come in more abundance soon . P/W is a good combination, if you want some build advice, drop me a PM and I'll be happy to help you, my Paragon is my main character so I feel I can be very helpful.

Also take into account that trainers only have skills from that campaign. So you won't have skills from other campaigns until you go there youself.
Starting in prophecies gives a lot of skills with quests, factions a bunch (and almost all the rest is avalaible fast from trainers), but as far as I remember nightfall gives you a very poor choice, and being the story pretty long you have to wait a bit to get to the final trainers, but don't worry too much about it

And if you decide to unlock skills through zaishen challenge, I agree with Marty saying Illusionary weaponry team is very easy (I repeat that many times when I need balth factions though it gets very boring soon).