New to GW and have a few questions...

Greetings all. I am fairly new to Guild Wars. I found the entire set, including Eye of the North for a very reasonable $40. I have heard great things about the game and came to investigate. I will be honest with you though, as much as GW looks interesting, GW2 is my goal, as I am sure it is for most of you out there. In my reading, I have found there are things you can be doing in GW to prepare for GW2. Pardon if I dont have the exact information, but I presume it is a dungeon run or something of the like, to obtain gear and achievements that carry over into GW2. I wish to enjoy the journey of GW but ultimately want to get in to that place.
So my first question is, what would be the most sensible route to get to that place? Which release should I start in? I have read the original is best because of its learning curve, but others have less quest lines, etc. So it could be a toss up.
Secondly, is the time frame reasonable? I know the cap is not all that high (comparatively, as I come from WoW at lvl 85), but the growth rate is different I imagine. I know GW2 is "supposed" to be released in June of this year, which only allows for four months of leveling and running. Is it doable on a reasonable gamer schedule (hour, maybe two a night, skipping a night here or there)?
Lastly, I am huge on reading, trolling forums for answers before I ask redundant questions, but since I am here posting, can anyone suggest a good, informative, starting guide, not necessarily a walk-through, but something to give a new player a base to hit the ground running? I will continue to read the forums here for answers which may be all I need, but found no harm in asking for time sake.
So, I think that is it for the moment, I am sure other things may arise if people answer this post, but will cross that bridge...

Regardless, thanks in advance for reading and/or posting.

- Rae

The place you are thinking of is the Hall of Monuments (HoM). This is where you put things like armor, weapons, etc. You obtain the things that go in in the campaigns. Don't worry too much about the HoM to begin with; start by finding a profession you like, get some playing experience so you get an idea for what to do and what not to do, and then try looking at some of the things you need for the HoM. A lot of the stuff you need for the HoM requires you to have beaten a campaign or have a large chunk of money to spend. Don't get ahead of yourself.

Again, don't worry about the HoM to start with. Regarding campaigns, I generally recommend starting in Prophecies because it tends to introduce things to you at a slower rate and gives you a lot of skills for free (by doing skill quests). Factions and Nightfall start faster and are harder; though they're definitely possible to start with for a new player if you have some MMO experience and pick things up quickly. Other people have other opinions.

The level cap in GW is 20, and the time it takes you to reach it depends on which campaign you start in. If you start in Factions you could potentially be level 20 in a few hours. GW is not about having lots of levels or awesome equipment; it's about obtaining useful skills and using them well. As such, GW is designed to get you to level 20 somewhat quickly so that there is not much statistical difference between you and other players (not to say there isn't any, though).

GW2 will not be out in June. The beta will be sometime this year. GW2 might not be out until next year. You'll have plenty of time to get things done.

Ok, some links...

GuildWiki (tons of good information here, just type something in to the search box and it should have something): http://www.guildwiki.org/Main_Page
Quick access links: http://wiki.guildwars.com/wiki/Quick_access_links
GWPvX.com (for builds): http://www.gwpvx.com/PvX_wiki

Other than that, have a look through the stickies in the various forums on Guru.

Coming from WoW at level 85, with apologies to Marty think you can easily enough start with Nightfall. Has good starting area. Finish Nightfall and you will have a good set of heroes put together. Then go to Eye of the North and get even more heroes! You cannot start with Eye of the North because it has no starting area.

Ranger or Warrior is good first character, but play what you like. You have the experience.

You will find The Eye soon after you enter EoTN. The Hall of Monuments for your account is inside the eye. Playing through Eye of the North will give you tapestries to hang in your HoM. These are the different categories of accomplishments that count towards goodies in GW2. Don't stress those too much. None of them give you any game advantage. Just show you are a vet.

Played a lot of WoW myself. This is a different world. Give yourself some time to get used to it.

Check out the forums here for each profession to gain a little bit of knowledge on builds and how to set up an entire party as well.

I am rather partial to Prophecies myself but starting in any chapter will work as you will want to move through all of the chapters and Eye of the North at some point.

While the HoM is account wide it can be much easier to max just one character stats in certain things. That being said I would recomend you play each profession for a while before you pick one to be your main and then push that one through all chapters, completing at the very least the main story lines.

Have fun, that is the key to enjoying any game!

8-)

Go to wiki... Roll a sin in Factions... Begin the grind. My opinion is study up on the Titles.. Find out how you obtain each one, then start going into the game. You wanna try to eliminate as many titles as you can as you go through the game the first time. This means capping skills, vq's, mission+bonus nm+hm, cartographer. This will get you a huge chunk of titles out of the way in your HoM. Assassins are good because they are basically in every major team farming build out there...

Go go.. Make a sin, and welcome to the time vampire of GW :P It's quite a lot of fun.

If getting ready for GW2 in a short time-frame is your goal, I recommend starting your character in Nightfall.
Determine which profession best fits your playstyle. There are no bad choices, though the elementalist class is currently lagging in power and not a great choice for someone who's goal is to fill the Hall of Monuments in a short time frame.

Once you start, try to join a PvE oriented guild that is helpful. It would be better if you have RL friends who can help, but the GW community as a whole is always happy to help newbies.

Concentrate solely on the Nightfall campaign going start to finish. You can take the quests to travel to the other campaigns, but your best bang for buck will be to focus on NF start to finish.

At the end you'll have a stack of heroes (customizable AI teammates) and should have good progress towards 4 titles. (titles are important for your Hall).

Go ahead and play and enjoy the other campaigns, Factions being the quickest to complete and EotN having the most benefits to playing and completing.

You will progress to most of your goals just by playing and exploring the game.

As for questions you have while playing, guildmates, the wiki site, and here on Guru are good places for advice and answers.

GL & HF

capping=capturing skills. we use signets of capture in this game to capture elite skills from various bosses in the game world.

vq= vanquish. since this is an instanced world, you can clear an entire map in Hard Mode(you won't be able to access this til you beat a campaign on a character and then it will be accessible by any level 20 on your account. When you vanquish all maps in 1 campaign, you get a title.

mission+bonus hm+nm= completing all missions in nm(normal mode) and hm(Hard Mode).

Cartography= finding every nook and cranny in every explorable map that is seen with the U-Map(accessible by pressing "U" in the game). If a map appears as black, you don't need it.

hope this helps.

This paragraph, particularly the part I've bolded, makes me think that you may have misunderstood what you've read...

In the Eye of the North expansion, there is an outpost (also called Eye of the North) with a private chamber exclusively belonging to your account. This is called the "Hall of Monuments." You could get to the Hall of Monuments within a few hours of beginning to play if you started a toon in Factions, got it up to lvl 10 and did the short (and relatively easy) quest which ties the Eye of the North expansion pack to each of the three campaigns (Prophecies, Factions & Nightfall).

Getting to the Hall of Monuments is only one step of a multitude of steps which will earn you bonus gear in GW2. The Hall isn't like a dungeon or end-game instance which unlocks things in GW2... it is nothing more than a device for basically recording a multitude of accomplishments and goals met across all campaigns & the expansion.

In order to earn that bonus gear in GW2, yes, you need to get to the HoM at some point - but you could literally not go there until you've already achieved every goal necessary to get 50/50 on the HoM Calculator, and it would make absolutely zero difference. The Hall of Monuments is really only used to record accomplishments. Those accomplishments still take months for the average player to achieve.

Nearly everything in your Hall of Monuments is earned through playing through all the other areas of the game... statues for completing elite dungeons, for completing all campaigns with bonus rewards in missions, mapping every pixel of the map, killing every foe in nearly every explorable area in every campaign in Hard Mode, etc. And you don't gain access to Hard Mode for each campaign until you have completed that campaign in its entirety. This is in addition to earning enough gold to buy things like mini-pets or elite armor upgrades to dedicate at the Hall.

There are short-cuts you can take if you have enough gold (such as paying someone to "run" a mission or vanquish for you while you AFK)... but since real money trading is a bannable offense (and ANet is pretty good at catching people engaged in it) you still have to earn that gold to start with. That takes a lot of time, too.

Expect to devote several months to filling up your Hall of Monuments. Whether you arrive there tomorrow or don't bother going there until you've met all the goals, it's irrelevant - because "getting" there makes no difference, it's nothing but a place to record what you've done everywhere else in the game.

Since the OP is coming from WoW, I thought it might be important to mention that all the rewards for GW2 you earn by filling your Hall of Monuments are cosmetic only. There will be absolutely no play advantage from these items/titles. And at the rate that so many people are getting them, there's not much of a show-off factor anymore either.

So blowing through the game to get your HoM points as fast as possible might not be to any substantial benefit. Work on your Hall, by all means (and remember that you'll be able to continue to do so after the GW2 release), but I think you'd be best off taking a bit of time to get to know the game, the world, the stories and characters, so you can appreciate how they carry over into the next game.

Welcome to Guild Wars. Have fun!

just where did you see this? anything you see out there is more than likely a placeholder or just speculated dates. no official date or even any rough timeline has been given. at the earliest people are expecting late this year. so that seems like plenty of time to really get the feel of guild wars no matter how much you tend to play each day.

Though not from WOW, I am coming from a level grinding game too, and I found Guild Wars to be refreshingly different from everything I played before. It took me a while to fully understand the concept - we (the players) are supposed to have fun, not to grind as if it were a job. You can have your level, armor and weapons maxed after just a few hours of playing. At this point, the real fun begins...

Using gw1 mainly as a stepping stone to gw2 would lead me to give different advice than if someone was out to get the best game experience in gw1.

Begin in nightfall because it has the fastest character progression access to the most heroes as well as a pretty good storyline.
Coming shortly is an update to let you run a full party of heroes great for when people are in short supply and your ready to play.

Get yourself to lvl 20 with max armour etc check on the wiki for what this means.
Get your heroes to lvl 20 too, begin with the ones you think your going to use the most.

Follow the mission thread to eye of the north and check out the hall of monuments.
Start doing the missions there to achieve status with the four factions, as each mission gains you items for opening up your hall of monuments ie tapestries.

Check the GW2 web page for what you need to do to fill your hom.
30 points gets you all the material rewards weapons armour etc 31 to 50 gets you titles you can show off in gw2.
30 points can be achieved without grinding any titles in gw1 at all and its titles that take a huge amount of playing time.

Your biggest limitation is finding minipets for your hom as these come as birthday gifts after each character is around for a year.
You will have to buy these for the most part.

Welcome to Guild Wars, enjoy your stay

I think nobody has linked the Hall of Monuments calculator yet: http://hom.guildwars2.com/en/#page=welcome

Here you see at one glance your achievements to be transferred to gw2 and what remains to be done (on your whole account). Not sure if it works until you actually reach the Hall ingame.

As said, all the rewards are cosmetic. As you see, after 30 points only some cheesy titles are awarded so if you are just for skins, it´s a good goal. 30 points can be reached pretty well just by playing through the content without giving too much thought to HoM. It requires couple of months of active playing (say, few hours a day). You have something like 9 months for this so no need for rushing.

Finding a pve guild is great help, find one if you don´t have RL friends to help. There are also guilds consisting only of people whose goal is filling HoM but I´m not sure if they are the best option for a new player.

And most importantly, have fun!

EDIT: about dungeon runs and speed clears: They can speed up the process of filling HoM awarding some titles and bringing quite a lot of cash for expensive armor you need for it. They are not always fun in particular (some can be) and if you enjoy playing through dungeons in 'normal way' they are not needed at all.

Yo,

Welcome to GW! I just started GW ~3 months ago..I think I'm kinda like you...playing GW for/waiting for GW2...now I find myself not being able to play anything else

Here are my tips from a newer player:

- Start in Factions IMO. It's the quickest way to get to level 20. Then you can easily go to Nightfall (and in Factions too) to get maximum armor/weapons (you might be able to get max armor in Factions that early as well, I forget). If you do a search on yahoo/google for "how to get to level 20 fast in guildwars", the guide should come up in your search...should take ~6-8 hours of straight game play (I think the record is like ~30 minutes? lol)
- Get familiar with the Wiki & PvX...I think people have mentioned it already so the links should be there. So much help on missions, items, skills, builds, etc...
- Don't get discouraged by the ELITISTS in-game and here on these forums (people making DoA groups, the forum nazis)...there are a few around...they don't have time for noobs and are set in their ways...forget them and have fun.
- Don't be afraid to PUG! This game has the best PUG groups...although you do get a baddie here and there
- If you want to PvP, there are a lot of solo & 4man group options which are easy to get into starting day #1 - Random Arena, Codex Arena, Jade Quarry, Fort Aspenwood, and Alliance Battles...Guild v Guild and Hero's Ascent are tougher to get groups (b/c of elitists and you need a guild for gvg) but is very fun and challenging if you can get a group/guild.
- Find a guild with a good size alliance to get into...great resource for help, questions, etc...

GL and have fun!!

There are things you can do that will give you some titles and cosmetic things in GW, but quite frankly, it's not worth playing GW for that. There is no actual gear that carries over.
From what we know about GW2, I'd say that GW1 is no better a lead-in to GW2 than WoW, LOTRO, etc., would be.
Given what I said above, it doesn't matter which campaign you start in with regards to leading into GW2. To carry anything over to GW2, you will need to get to the Hall of Monuments in Eye Of The North. You need to get to a certain point in a campaign before you can get to EotN.
I would suggest starting in Nightfall if you want to get the current state of the game soonest.
You get to level 20 very quickly in GW. Instead of the continual increase levels, leading to increasing monster level, GW skips the increasing player level and just makes the monsters harder as you go on.
First time I've heard that.
http://www.guildwiki.org/Main_page
http://wiki.guildwars.com/wiki/Main_Page

Gosh...people are so misleading on forums...here's what the gear you can get, can and will do for you in GW2 (by getting HoM points):

The rewards that your Guild Wars 2 characters earn are exclusive to the Hall of Monuments and can't be picked up or earned anywhere else. Depending on your Guild Wars characters' history, you can unlock:

• Special Hall of Monuments titles
• Animal companions for your ranger, like the Black Widow Spider and Rainbow Jellyfish
• Miniatures such as the Red Servitor Golem or Orange Tabby Cat, that any profession can use
• A wide selection of weapons, like the Living Shortbow and the Fellblade
• Armor pieces for your light, medium, and heavy armor sets
Your new Guild Wars 2 characters will be able to use these low-level items and armor right away, and we'll provide you with the means to use these special items as you advance to higher levels.

link: http://www.guildwars2.com/en/the-gam...-of-monuments/


Will it be a huge bonus? Probably not, but it will be an "upgradable" bonus and every little bit or a head start or saving of a few gold helps...

Hello everyone. I am grateful for all the input, answering my questions and very direct opinions. A few things I should clarify after reading all these comments, if I may. I would hate for you to walk away from this post thinking I wanted to bum rush GW as if it were unimportant. That is not the case... more from being misinformed, possibly.
As stated, coming from WoW, as previous posters agree, it is a bit different. WoW is not so much about the journey that it is about the end game. Heroics, raids, epic gear and achievements. Any game can be anything you want it to be, but in a competitive situation for guild status and achievements, well, you know how it goes... so I apologize if I applied the same principles to Guild Wars. I personally prefer the journey over the destination.
Also, my "dealer" at my local GameStop told me that GW2 was meant to be released in June of this year when I preordered it, so my "point A to point B" question is primarily based on that information. I figured the boys and my local addiction house would know their business and know what they speak of. So I felt I needed to get on the ball to be prepared for GW2.

That being said...
Thank you all for your posts and taking the time to correct my misunderstandings...

The HoM makes a lot of sense. I thought it was a place to get to, not a place to store what you achieve on the journey there. I stand corrected and that takes some considerable pressure off of getting somewhere. So very un-WoW like.

Marty - Good advice. "Do not get ahead of yourself". I am a planner. Good in life, could be bad in gaming. WoW has trained me well in that regard.
Thanks for the links, they are very helpful.

Wilebill - Looked at Nightfall and Prophecies. Good suggestion on the ranger. The closest thing I come to tanking was DK and that got put on the back burner after 80. I am a caster at heart. So I made one on both to test differences. I think each have their own merit. The curve on Prophecies is definitely easier. Cake in some ways.

Crom - I think that is sound advice too. Dabbling with professions. The only problem I see is getting spread to thin in experimenting. I can definitely see over the course of my GW experience, trying different professions. Right now, getting the game mechanics down outranks my curiosities to dabble. But once I do... I think I might go crazy for a little while. The combos that can be done are quite extensive.
And to have fun... most definitely. That is why I am not raiding in WoW anymore... it lost its joy. After that, what is the point?

Chuckles - titles... thanks for pointing out the importance. I probably should have warned GW... but I am the biggest achievement 'ho. I got stoked when I read that post. A great addition for me personally.

Jazilla - thanks so much for the translation.

Gizzy - it is actually more misunderstood what I was told but thanks to all you guys, it is very clear now and has changed the perspective of the game or my own anticipation, I should say. I was concerned it was going to be a repeat of WoW and very pleased that it is not.

Turbo - as stated above, my local crack (i.e games) dealer told me June. I just figured he would be an authority on the subject. Silly me.

Samarin - love the name

Everyone else, thank you again, you have given me a great deal to think on, read and ponder, which I will most definitely do. You have taken a game that was impressed as a good game, but you want to be "here", to a "relax and enjoy the journey" situation. Thank you for that.

Typing this as I am on a quick break from work. I apologize if I missed anyone or any key points they wished to impress, I do plan on keeping this thread marked to refer to for awhile, so do not fear your welcomed input has been missed.

In game, my first character is Sanura Rae if you are interested in speaking more or have other things you wish to share. I am not shy and welcome conversations.

Thanks

- Rae

My main character is Crom The Pale. Feel free to place me on your friends list and if you see I am online go ahead and whisper me and ask any questions you have.

It's only a grind with the sin. I've enjoyed every minute with my ranger.

It's great to see someone who has realized that ArenaNet's goal is to make the game fun. There are difficult parts, there is optional grind, there can be frustration with the 'leet crowd, but overall this game is great fun. By the way, it can become very addictive.

There are two things to consider here.
1. These items are not "carried over" from GW1 in a direct sense. That is, you don't get them in GW1 and pass them on to GW2 through your HoM. Rather, you get them in GW2 as a result of things you've done in GW1.
2. These items are no "better" than what you can get in GW2, they are just "different" (skins). Personally, I'd be more interested in getting GW2 items than in being one of the many, many, many ex-GW1 players with the same old stuff. These GW1 bonus items will be more common than Chaos Gloves and have even less e-peen.

@OP - So, again personally, I wouldn't play GW1 with the idea of playing it just to get the junk in GW2. Play GW1 for the fun of GW1.

Agree 100%! I'm a very casual gamer and found that going through Proph at my own pace and soaking in the story and the environment is a lot of fun. Sometimes I log in as a new char just to roam around pre-searing again for the nostalgia of it!

Prophesies and presearing was a great gaming experience first time through it and yes the game was and is a load of fun.

I like the idea that I am getting better because parts of the game I thought either too long or just too difficult are now a lot easier and don't seem to take nearly as long to play through.