New GW player :) Needs advise

Hi Guild Wars players!

I am an ex WoW player who is tired to death of it and I am giving GW a go and I can't wait!! I just had some questions that I hope you guys can answer, I hope I'm on the right forum.

1. I have bought the Prophecies CD and I am busy updating it as we speak. How big are the updates that I need to download?

2. I have done a bit of research and was advised by some posts that I should start with prophecies for learning curve purposes. Do you agree with this? or shall I buy all the games?

Any other info you guys can give I will be very grateful.

Get all campaigns, sorry but having prophecies only is the equivilent of missing out on 2/3 of the good skills. You're also missing out on heroes.

Factions campaign is quickest to max level.

NF campaign gives heroes and is by a far the easiest for a starting player.

Prophecies doesn't fit a starting player at all really. Everything is slower, harder, buggier and more tedious. You don't get max armor early and it's hard to come across the skills you need.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lCAdzCB5eRM

Watch this video to download the entire game.

Prophecies is a good place to start imo for Pre-Searing. It does a good job of introducing you to the game and helping you learn how to play it well. I thought Prophecies did the best job introducing new players to how GW works when compared to Factions and Nightfall. Those I felt as though they were geared more towards veteran players to jump in to.

As Gabs88 pointed out, the rest of Prophecies, after the Searing, is more difficult. It would be easier to start from a different campaign, Nightfall being the best option as Gabs already said. If you want an easier time start with Nightfall, get all the heroes and max armor then go back to do Prophecies. Will make your life a lot easier.

Yes, you should get all the games.

Prophecies is the best campaign to start in for brand new players, Factions the worse one, and nightfall is in between prophecies and factions.

Ignore the advice about people telling you to get heroes as they will be only as good as the henchmen you can get in outposts since you have no skills unlocked at all as a brand new player.

Skill wise, starting in prophecies and playing through the prophecies campaign will get you alot of free skills for your primary profession and your secondary profession.

Lastly, http://wiki.guildwars.com/wiki/Main_Page and http://www.guildwiki.org/Main_Page will be your best help, also ignore the PvX wiki for now until you get more experience in guild wars.

Thanks very much for the replies guys, you have been most helpful.

I will buy the other 2 games tomorrow then.

Anyone else able to advise on how many updates I'm going to be downloading? With buying a new game I would have thought it was at least almost updated. :P

Wish the down-loader would say which update I'm downloading, that would help. xD

Hey man, I'm a new GW player too. PM me and lets do some quests together if you want.

IGN Doctor Ore Oz

The current gw.dat is 3.85GB with everything in it. However, you don't need to download nearly that much. After just a few hundred megabytes, it should let you into the game and then download just what's needed as you go from zone to zone (so you'll eventually get everything, but zone transitions'll be slower 'til you do).

Awesome stuff I'm glad to hear that! thanks for the reply ogre_jd!

@kidochipark that would be great as soon as I'm up and running I'll PM ya, thanks all again for the help.

Just do this. By default, every time you load an instance, the client will download any missing files. You can instead use the image command to download everything, and never download again until any updates. The gw.dat file is about ~4 GB. See also:

http://wiki.guildwars.com/wiki/-image#-image

Side note: aspect ratio in that video is incorrect. That annoys me.

I've got to 2nd Gabs opinion here; as a new player myself, only playing about 3 months and just about to do my Ascension Quests I'm not that far ahead of you, but I've had a good look a Prophecies and it is pretty slow to start; and I've banged around Factions and the level of Challenge is considerably Higher; and definitely kick started my game.

While I have not explored Nightfall so much I would seriously consider starting there if I were you; When I was researching Henchies and AI I soon found all the Henchie threads were years old.

Henchies are really a Legacy Item; and while they make great models for Mercs. The game is focused on Hero's now so if you don't start in Nightfall you'll be making a side trip soon enough to get them just because all the online content you encounter is focused on Hero's.

I'm working up a PC Necro in Factions just now just to peek around the Newbie Island Map, and Farm Skills for a Merc and that’s working out just fine. So I'm not so sure I agree with the conventional wisdom that you start out in Prophecies to Farm skills, (BTW Mercs are just custom Hero's.)

If you do start in Prophecies and if feels like its tooo slow post searing and the story is dragging its feet start a 2nd Toon in NF and I think you'll find the level of Challenge closer to your overall skills as a gamer.

Oh consider buying the Trilogy; you'll get a really powerful Hero called MOX to Unlock (not day one) who you can keep back for particularly difficult Quests; and it will probably save you a few bucs over purchasing Fac and NF Separately.

Trust me. Downloading will take a while; it depends on Anet's server status and your own internet, but generally takes around half an hour on mid-range connections during normal server times.

On your campaign choice; personally I found Prophecies the longest and worst campaign to start in, although it does have a VERY long learning curve; you can be sure you are able to beat what you encounter in the entire storyline.
Like someone noted before; having one of the campaigns limits your ability severely, but seeing how you just got this game, I'd advice you to play it for a while and then find a full-campaign high-tier player to complete Sorrow's Furnace; if that is to your liking, be sure to get ahold of the rest.

Edit: Just saw the post above me, mercs are heroes modelled after your own characters, including class, and they cost extra money to acquire; not to mention they're pretty much useless if you take the effort of getting the normal heroes (which requires : complete NF and EotN, and do some Brawling Tournament).
If you need help, catch me (IGN: Arazel Kingslayer) online and I'll help you if i can.

It's true Merc's cost Extra Money, and they don't confer any huge advantage; I think describing them as useless is unfair. For myself the ability to customize the look, and classes of the party so I can run a Unique crew was well worth it; I picked up my first Merc about 3 days after unlocking the First Group of Hero's in NF and have never run a single standard Hero since. Its all a matter of Taste. BB.
------------------------
BTW Some missions require including this or that given hero; but thats later days yet. BB.

PROPHECIES is the best place to start and learn the game. FACTIONS was a pita and many people quit the game after it was released. Poor storyline... Lots of tedius tasks. Nightfall offers heros and that makes it ideal since the majority of pve will be done solo (with Heros) nowadays. At least until you get to end game content. Which is where, arguably, the most fun is to be had.

Play through Prophecies to learn basic mechanics and how to play your chosen profession. If you enjoy it and want to further your characters add NF and Factions for the skills, heros, and extra content. To do end game content well, you will also need EOTN skills. You probably should have just bought the trilogy. Goes on sale for like 20 bucks all the time. There should be deals on the expansions so no worries.

Find a noob friendly guild or just a decent active guild to help you along and for people to run with.

Welcome to Guild Wars! Don't worry about picking the wrong starting campaign or the wrong class. There is no one right answer. <3

Just do one campaign at a time and enjoy the storyline, don't get overwhelmed like my husband did trying to do everything at once.

first of all welcome to guild wars.

second you said in one of your posts: "I will buy the other 2 games tomorrow then."
there's actually 4 games (just thought i'll point that out)

based on my experience you don't need to buy them all too early tho. just take your time, play at your own pace and you'll get into it easily and won't feel forced to do anything.

also feel free to PM me with any questions ingame (i don't really check my messages on forums here) IGN: Tichi Geekswad
but before you start asking questions remember that guild wars has a very useful "/wiki" command which will take you directly from the game to the official wiki page (i'm sure you don't want to make a fool of yourself by asking obvious stupid questions )

If you are unaware of the answers then the questions will not necessarily be obvious. Wiki is a good source for answers to a lot of the question you may have. You could always join a guild as well, many are still recruiting and helping new players.

From a continuation point of view, the story order is Prophecies->Factions->Nightfall->Eye of the North->GuildWars Beyond(Free extra story bridging to GW2 but don't worry about it until you finish the other storylines)

I would recommend on your first play-through to do it in this order as there is some linearity to it.

As for the downloading, GW was designed with gametime in mind. It will download enough to get you into the game world and the rest comes down as needed. Major updates happen in the background while you play and if something is missing when you move to a new area that will be queued next.

Just go out there and enjoy the game story and figure out how it works. It is very different from WoW but as was said, the wiki is full of useful information describing pretty much every aspect of the game. Enjoy :-)

Given you're a WoW player, I assume you're fine with wikis and such.

If you're not, Prophecies is probably the best place to start because it introduces new elements at a rate you can easily absorb them at. The problem is that this severely gimps you since there are no heroes available. Of course, you can always get a run to Lion's Arch to open campaign travel and get the EOTN heroes.


Factions will make your head spin with how fast it throws everything at you, and you will die, a lot, as a newbie. Outside of late game NF and EOTN in general (not counting WiK and WoC which are "post-game" content), the mobs in Cantha are amongst the hardest in the game, especially as you'll be facing them without decent builds or equipment.

It's not so bad, actually. The henchmen have definitely improved since that big update back in '09. Without Heroes, it just means you'll want to find real people (preferably a decent, friendly guild - though personally, even with 7 Heroes, I prefer to skip this one and just walk to the Henge of Denravi) for Aurora Glade (a huge PitA to do the main part of the mission without being able to split the party), the 3 Crystal Desert missions (and maybe for the Dragon's Lair), Thunderhead Keep, and the Ring of Fire Islands missions.

WoW updates and launchers etc are MASSIVE compared to GW so you're safe with us Once you have the first inital post-install download done, you never find updates taking more than a few MB to download...they're totally insignificant.

It's not like WoW where you get 2GB patches on a regular basis LOL.

Welcome!
As you've seen everyone has a different opinion on the best starter campaign here. I personally always suggest Prophecies (and always begin new chars there myself as well) for it's very forgiving, it gives a lot of free skills (factions only gives a bunch and nightfall almost none), and it gives you time to understand the game before throwing you in hard stuff (the second half on nightfall has probably the hardest missions in the game, and factions , despite having nothing crazy, starts right from difficult).

Aurora Glade is very easy even alone if you know how it works, just a bit time consuming. And Thunderhead Keep is so much easier now, that the highest chances to fail it are if you lose stupid Jalis from sight and he goes all fearless by himself. For the rest I agree that you may want some help, but that even if you have heroes, often. And being social it's not bad.

download the entire game before you play, being stuck at loading screens after every zone/cutscene makes it tedious and boring to play.

I'm a linear kinda guy, I like it when I read a book at it follows a story. Because you know, when you are reading say Harry Potter 1 and all of a sudden "Turban Teach IS LIKE SO THE FINAL BOSS" Well shit son, that such.

P.S I never read harry potter, but I'd be mad if someone told me that shit while I watched the movies.

In short, play the games in the order they came out in, if you care about story at all.

Eh. The big chunk of continuity is Prophecies -> Eye of the North -> Zinn's Task (the missions in M.O.X.'s Golem User Manual) -> War in Kryta -> Hearts of the North.

For story continuity, Factions (beyond Winds of Change basically being its epilogue; don't really need to do Hearts of the North for it to make sense, even though that's where Miku is introduced) and Nightfall don't matter much to EotN and can be done any time, really.

I figured it would have been more like; Prophecies, Factions, Nightfall, GW:EN, Then all the beyond content; Zinn, WiK, Hearts, WoC(and what I'm guessing will be an Elonian beyond business...)

Oh, that's the chronology - but, as was said, Factions & Winds of Change, Nightfall, and Winds of Change aren't really part of the main story (Proph -> Sorrow's Furnace [forgot about that] -> GW:EN -> the golem quests -> War in Kryta -> Hearts of the North), and aren't at all needed for comprehending the largest chunk of the storyline.

Familiarity with those three won't even be too useful for understanding the world of GW2, either (Factions not at all, and only a little for Nightfall to explain why Elona's cut off and who the Order of Whispers are), at least at the start.