Just bought trilogy pack - Best way to group with friends?

Hello everyone, i recently bought the trilogy pack off steam. I played the original guild wars and then stopped mid way through. I wanted to play all 3 story lines and eventually the EOTN expansion before guild wars 2 came out. I have actually gotten a friend to purchase it with me. And possibly 2 more to get a full group going.

I was wondering i know in MMOs you can get out of sync with quests which really sucks. Whats the best way to group with someone in this game so you are always in sync together?
Do we have to be the same class so we can share the same class specific quests or is that not a big deall?

Is it just really a matter of just making sure of just not playing those characters that we grouped with when each other is not online or is it easy to catch up if one plays ahead?

Thanks for any tips

First of skilzygw, just want to say welcome back to the game.

First off if you didn't know already as you progress through the game, the size of your party will increase from 4 up to 8 (there is an area with 12 but I can't remember the name). Since you played the first campaign I'll assume that you never got the chance to play with heroes, which we're introduced in nightfall. So even with 4 or 2 people playing, the presence of heroes makes the game extremely easy with some of the builds the community has come up with.

Like other games, guild wars does have quests which you can complete for your specific class, but for the most part they don't require much grinding. Unlike other MMO's I've played, guild wars have unique outposts known as mission areas. These are areas where you can join up with friends/guild members/PUGs in order to complete the mission together. Usually there are primary quests that lead to these mission areas, but besides completion of the primary quests to advance the storyline everything else is optional. For instance let's say you play a warrior, and your friend decides to play a ranger, and we'll say that you guys started these characters in the prophecies story line. In post searing you will each have side quests which will unlock skills and experience that are different from each other, but the completion of them is not required for you to participate with your friend in the first mission area, The Great Northern Wall.

As for catching up, it shouldn't be too hard to catch up if you haven't done more then one or two missions. For the most part guild wars low end PVE is extremely easy to complete, when I first played through the game a few years ago all I did was follow the green marker.

Anyways hopes this rant helps, cheers.

In Towns/Outposts u can form/join a Party.
Make sure u r in the same district.
Then u can end up in the same Party.

There r few class specific quests, so not a big deal.
Missions r repeatable, so if u or one of yer friends already has done one, it can be done again, with each other.

Quests (most quests at least) arent repeatable, for u.
But u can join a Party that is going to do the quest (that u have done already).
The important part is that the Party Leader does the quest, and u tag along for support.

Form your own guild to make it easier to keep track of everyone, communicate, see who's online, etc. It's easy to do, check the wiki if needed.

Or all of you join the same guild if you'd rather have others to hang out with.

I suggest the best way to keep a group of friends in sync would be to have several characters.

One you each have that you only play when your together, that's your team.

Want to play outside of that then use another character and even play a different start game.

You would be unlocking skills and resources for your account learning to play but still have a character you could keep for team play.

Form a guild as suggested make sure you list each other as friends so you know when your all online.
Download a voip program so you can talk in real time while playing.

Thanks for the great advise. I think thats the route we are going to take as far as having 2 sets of characters. 1 we will use for group questing and the other for when one of us doesn't want to play that day.

I read about the heroes you get in nightfall but i think we are going to do the game linearly. We will start with prophecies and finish the main storyline. Then move onto Factions with new characters and do the same until nightfall.

Thanks for the guild advice ill look to start one as well as the voice chat, I think he already has a vent server so we should be good there.

You don't need to create new characters for Factions or Nightfall after completing Prophecies. You are able to travel between campaigns with any character who has reached the port city for that campaign. http://wiki.guildwars.com/wiki/Campaign_Travel

That character (who will be level 20 if he/she has finished a campaign) will join the storyline after the beginner area. You will be able to visit the Factions and Nightfall beginner areas and do the Missions, but not the quests.

This allows you to get a special title, Legendary Protector, for completing all missions and bonuses in all campaigns with the same character.

Its a good idea to start a few characters initially since its possible you will not like the class you choose.

I played several in the first couple of days to see what I liked, this was good because sometimes our idea of what a class is like comes from fantasy films and books and this may not be what that class represents in the game.

I wouldn't start a new guild either. Join an established one. Then you and your friends will have other allies to play with when you're on individually.

This isn't the place for guild recruiting so I won't tell you to look into getting a guest invite to[nite] or mention www.noblehonor.com or anything like that.

IMHO best way to enjoy the game with friends is to do quests and the story missions together, evolve together. Generally just take things slowly, explore, have fun. Don't ignore the side quests, try to find and complete as many of them as possible. Talk to the NPCs you meet, listen to their conversations. Try to immerse in the story as much as possible, at least for the 1st play-through.

Doing these things for the first time carries a unique feeling (the planning, the thrill of the action, enjoying success and supporting defeat together, the story development) that you will NOT get on later replays. And it's best to do it with friends of roughly the same level as you.

When you redo things later you will mostly rush things to get to certain goals. And joining a high level character with a low level one is not fun for either of them: for the high-level it's just boring and the low-level doesn't learn or get to enjoy anything. This is usually best left for when you've already beat the game at least once and you want to "rush" another character to full status.

You may be in an area with a party size of 4, but for most of the game the party size is 8. Of course, you'll use henchmen or Heroes to fill out the group (or humans, I suppose ).

There are no special considerations. The main consideration would be how well you sync with your friends as far as when, how long, and how often you play. If there's not a lot of difference, you can do side quests while waiting to do the primary quests and missions with your friends.

Not a big deal.

Well, of course, you can always play a different character if you run out of other things to do. But I wouldn't recommend getting ahead/behind in the main primary/mission storyline - but that depends also on your group's willingness to repeat things, re-watch cutscenes, try for bonus/masters, etc.
I know from experience that it's really easy to find yourself 3 or 4 missions ahead.

Simply put: you can team up with anyone, regardless of class, level or if they have already done a quest/mission. As long as 1 person in the group has not done the quest, you will be able to go through it with the group. However, at the end, only the person who has not done the quest, will be able to get the reward for it (unless it's a repeatable quest, in which case all group members can take the quest again).
So as Quaker already indicated... it's not really a problem to get ahead or fall behind, as long as the people in the group don't mind doing content again (and possibly not getting rewarded a second time).
Then again, if you really intend to go through the entire game with this group, then it doesn't make much sense to get ahead, as you know you'd need to do everything again anyway... so yes, if you want a bit of freedom to explore elsewhere, creating an additional character is the recommended way to go.