Noob Questions GALORE!!!!

Hi guys,
Am an avid RPG fan from India. Aloha to everyone out here!!!
Ive got a mouthful of questions hope someone can shed light on it.

1) Since Im playing from India, I did a tracert 2 GW servers and found a latency if 449 ms. The GW gms tell me its cool to play with it but i'd like the REAL peeps opinion on this. Is it REALLY playable on this ping ? Any suggestions to around it etc?

2) What are the best character classes in GW? I'm a general Palladin Fan in almost all rpgs and play as palladin/holy knight mostly. Is this character good or ar their better and more powerful class/subclasses/genres that I can choose in the SAME class as palladin?(or if the question is too lame..plz imrpovise and lemme know).

3) Whats the cost of additional chapters of GW? Are they downloadable? (GW doesnt ship to india so I gotta go the downloadable way. If i CANT download, no point in purchasing is there??? )

Hope someone can help me out!!!

All Hail!!!
Balrog

Don't know much about your PINGs !!!

If you like being a Pally..as in Everquest etc.. I think your best character would be a warrior / Monk.

Hmm,
K thx for that dude. Guess its WARRIOR for me then.
Anyone can help me on the ping thing????

Balrog

for mmorpg games ping doesnt make much difference unless u get a ping of about 800 or something around there. so u will be fine

I thought pining only happens in like Cs, i mean, i play on 56k dial up... jus pick a location ur close to. and with the classes, paladin would most likely be a w/mo, for the melee smite type

PINGs? dunno.

best class? there is no best class. but if you like paladins then go for the W/Mo. warning about this you will be called a n00b by many players who believe it to be a totaly useless class.

Downloadable? i think you can download the game from certain sites (for the same cost as the disks) so if this is indeed the case then i should think that GW chapter 2 will be the same.

Hmm,
Thanks for the feedback guys!!

Just one gotcha on the pings. Am on a 512 kbps line.I play a game called A3(a Korean MMORPG with a server in India). I get a latency of 500ms - 600ms on it(dont ask my WHY..the GMS never respond..dats y im moving out). That means 1.2 seconds round trip. Basically, i MOVE 1.5 seconds after i click anywhere on the game world. Also, I hit (swing my sword) once ever 1.5 seconds while my adversary would've plummelled me 2-3 times in that same time span. Basically mounts to me being a back stage player coz i cant even pvp with such unfair odds.

My point is, Is any of this familiar 2 u guys??

If NOT, then Im probably heading towards the BEST friggin' game in the globe

The sufferers(if any), plz put in ur comments.

Balrog

A latency of 500ms on a land connection indicates a problem or congestion, you need to find if the bottleneck is your ISP or elsewhere because they may be able to help. Run a tracert to commercial websites such as CNN or Google in India, America, Europe and other parts of Asia and see if anything is fast or what is slow this may help you pinpoint the problem.

Of course if this is a satellite connection those times are normal.

Hmmm,
I can see hops :- India->Atlantic Backbone->Usa(San Jose)->London. Looks like Im being given a world trip i didnt pay for .

I guess there's not anything much I or my ISP can do here.
Will I last long in GW with 500ms???

a 500ms ping is not good, but should be OK. For some reason, I've had 300-400 recently, and the game didn't feel much different. I didn't do any PvP at the time, though.

This game's balance is good, so no class is better than the other. You have to choose a primary and a secondary profession, so you'll probably go Warrior/Monk, commonly reffered to as Paladin by GW players. As you'll see, there's a lot of room for fine-tuning, so you can build your own 'paladin'.

I'll second Ann though : most people are convinced that a sword-toting Wa/Mo is a noob running a pre-formatted build. I'd say most of those are not worth playing with anyway, but you won't always feel welcome...

As long as u are not playing a interupting build it shouldn't be that much of a problem.

you could try monk warrior. i have seen a lot of those lately toting weapons and doing pretty well with them.

But many posts say that Monk/Warriors are usually attributed as noobs who are usually not wanted much except for healing and stuff. I'd rather go as all combat!!!!

Any suggestions where I can weild melee weapons AND have arcane attributes?

That would be either warrior/monk, warrior/necro or warrior/elementalist.

The warrior/monk is, in my opinion, a pretty good profession combo since you can keep yourself alive for along time and dish out some melee damage at the same time. However, I don't like using them since they're so overused and I can't stand being like everyone else.

The warrior/necro is a pretty cool combination, as it allows both life stealing, which is very useful for a warrior, and cursing which boost your damage and effectiveness in different ways. The drawback here is that the necro doesn't have many attacking spells, which I believe you're looking for? And the ones the necro has are based around exploiting corpses and most of them have high energy usage. And while we're at it, necro's aren't your prefered style, considering you're a paladin right?

Warrior/elementalist is good for the warrior who likes to dish out major magic damage alongside smashing enemy skulls. The elementalist offers some great attack spells and some of them are extremely cool and some might even be a little... holy-ish. Firestorm, for example, could resemble the God's raining fire upon their enemies, if you're into that. The major drawback here is that most of the good spells require alot of energy and as the warrior only has 20 base energy and you won't have access to Energy Storage (the elementalist's main attribute which gives you more energy. You can't have this since elementalist is secondary in this case), you might have some trouble if you don't use some energy boosing equipment.

Warrior/mesmer is a possibility but the mesmer isn't really a useful secondary for a warrior. The mesmer can hardly deal any damage on it's own, and although mesmers is fantastic as a support character, the mesmer skills don't offer much to a warrior primary. But again, if you feel like being adventureous you could try this out but I wouldn't suggest if for new players.

But really, it doesn't matter much. After the new update (which you download automaticaly), you can change you're secondary profession once you get to s certain part of the game. The drawback here is that it's pretty far in-game before you can do this so you'll have to hold on to one profession combo till then. Also, once you change profession you have to bye all the skills you want again and each skill costs 1 platinum (1000 gold) and that can be very expencive if you try out every profession there is. But it's fun so be adventureous! My main character started as a warrior/ranger but changed to warrior/necro before ending up as warrior/elementalist, which he is now.

Yea if u want paladin you should go with W/Mo and use a hammer since paladins use hammer since they heal go with healing or protect or maybe smithe cause u can change ur attributes however u want man.

1. Well ur ping can jump around a bit :P happens to me all the time so 1 sec u cd have 999, the other 50.
2. No paladins ere ur best bet would be W/Mo. I say u shd get to know the classes before u state anything :O
3. Lol. The game's out for 4 months and u want a new chapter? Loool.

Next time PLEASE with due respect get to know the game before playing/buying it.

Tip: www.guildwars.com

1) you'll be able to play. 449 ms is actually kinda low for what i've seen people playing at.

2) no one class is any better than another class. They are all balanced(for the most part) it's all about what style of play you enjoy. Though playing as a Warrior/Monk makes you dumber over time.

3) additional chapters will more than likely have the same price tag the first edition did. and yes you can download them.

Thats a TON of information.
Andy dude, I HAVENT bot the game yet, this was all pre-pre-buying salvo!!

But am gonna download it tonite!! U guys have all been terrific!!
Tnx a lot.

Look around for a temporarily clueless LordAlador in the game.

All Hail!!!
Balrog

Your ping should be OK.

I usually play over a cable connections, but I've played GW over a dialup and it works fine. (Though load times for new areas can take a while!)

I think the client/server technology used in GW helps to alleviate the lag problems. The client software on your computer updates your movements almost instantly, but then updates the server to your new location. This way, when you click somewhere, you instantly start moving.

If you're connection is unreliable, your character will sometimes appear to "teleport" to a new location a short distance away. This is the server updating your client software to your "actual" position. It is trying to resolve a difference in your location as reported by the client and the server. I think this effect has been coined the term "rubberbanding". On my cable connection, I almost never see it.

Anyway, you should be fine.
Enjoy the game!

Dwig

I c.
I'm on 512 Kbps so hopefully this wont happen to me too!!!