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Dunno if this goes here as I have never posted in this area before buit feel free to move it if I posted in the wrong place.

Well I'm a fan of mmorpg games but I stopped playing them when I picked up table top wargaming again. Now I'd like to start them again but I don't want to pick up the ones I played before (WoW, Warhammer online) because I played them so much I am sick of them. I have been trying a load of the smaller free mmos but I end up being lower than the people who spend 100s of pounds on stuff.

So I was looking for other games I hadn't played and I noticed Guild wars. I can't find anyguides about what the gameplay is like as I get the impression it is different from normal online rpgs. Is there anyone who plays this game who could run over what the game is like.

Cheers
4M2A

Isn't everyone who still plays that max level? I mean, I thought it died out years ago... That and isn't 2 rumored to be around the corner?

Yeah GW 2 is being worked on curently.

Well the game is pretty much set up between PVP and PVE:

PVP: basically, it's just standard (almost substandard) PVP. The most common form is RA, or Random Arenas, which pits 4 random people against 4 random people, which means your never exactly sure what your going to get. You may get 2 healers, you may get none at all. Another form is GvG, or Guild vs Guild, which allows you to choose your team make up amongst your guild to fight other guilds. I do not have much experiance in this department, however, so can give you no further backround.

Then, you have Faction Battles, which are 2 objective based battles. The Khurzick (Poet Emos, basically) defend a base from the Luxons (Coral Pirates), or both sides fight over mines. While these are fun, it usually takes like 15 minutes to find a match in them.

PVE: The game is set up where you find your group in outposts, and then you get your own world as you go out exploring, so there is no spawncamping, no ganking, and no kill stealing. The max level is 20, but you usually get to level 20 before you are out of the "Newb" part. It is set up more along the lines of builds, not time played, and as such People are very pecular about the builds they play with. You will even find people who almost demand that you play builds they specify.

If you don't want to play with people, there are Henchmen, who are NPC's who do the jobs of their classes quite well, and their are Heroes, which are Henchmen you can equip, set up their build, and control to a modest extent.

The game has 4 campains, which you have to buy seperately, which have unique skills, so if you want to "stay competative", you have to buy all four and play through them all. Dungeons are few, except for in the expansion, Eye of the North (you have to own one of the other campains to even have access to it).

Equipment doesnt make a build, either. It is nice to have, but I have seen someone do something naked that others have hard times doing fully armored.

you need a run down on all the classes?

Dear god im not alone

Im guessing you have read the site? if not you should probably read that.

Each campaign is stand alone in that you buy one and you can play it without any others, the original is prophacies which has the 6 core classes (warrior, monk, necromancer, mesmer, elementalist and ranger) and is probably the best place to start (also the cheapest at the moment), next came factions (where i joined) which has an asian theme and added the assassin and ritualist (think shaman) classes then lastly came nightfall which had an african/middle eastern theme and introduced hero's which are customisable AI players for you to control (so you dont have to find PUGs all the time) and another two classes (dervish and paragon, dervish is a spellblade with lots of area of effect damage and paragon is alot like a bard).

sorry for any garbled english its around half 1 and im tired

PM me if you need any more information or help
Also here is a link to the main forum for the sequel.
http://www.guildwars2guru.com/forum/

Well I have read the site, but it isn't very clear to people who have no idea what most of the stuff means.

What mainly gets me is builds. If the game is less level based than other games, how do builds work?
Can I play ok without all the extras. I am happy to get them but it seems easy to start with the first one.
How long does the game last? Is it game that ends once you get to the top levels or can you continue to have fun on it?
Finally (for the time being), is it worth getting GW as the second game is coming out soon? When guild wars 2 comes out will people stop playing the first game?

Thanks Slarg and corpsesarefun for such helpful info.

Builds are set up around two things: Attributes and Skills.
Taking the Warrior primary into consideration

Attributes: Attributes usually don't do anything for you except increase your skills tied to that attribute, and raise damage with that weapon. If your Axe Mastery is high, Your axe will hit harder, have a higher chance of a critical hit, and your Special attacks will increase in damage and condition duration. You can still use a sword if your Axe mastery is high, but your DPS is substantially lower. Other attributes effect your character, like Strength, the warrior-primary-only attribute, increases Armor penetration per hit.

Skills: Are directly effected by attributes. Hammer Mastery moves keep opponents knocked down for longer periods of time, and some skills have a chance of failure if your attributes are not high enough. You can only ever have 8 skills equiped on you at one time, which forces players to define their character into a set role.

Professions: After choosing your Primary (in this case, Warrior) you get to choose a secondary. While you can not raise the secondary's Primary Attribute, It gives you access to their other Attributes and thier skills, so if you wanted, you could make a Warrior Monk (W/M) who would have access to the Healing, Smiting, and Protecting prayers of the Monk, but still have the CC focus of the warrior.

You get 200 attribute points which you can divide amongst your attributes as you wish, and any time you enter a town or outpost, you can switch your build however you want. Once you get far enough in the game, you can go out, try a mission as a W/M with a sword, fail, go back to town, switch to a Warrior Necromancer, and use a hammer if you want to.

Each campaign is fully functional by itself, but if you go to PVP, you would never want to go show people your build with only one campaign, you would get laughed out of town, so to speak.

One campaign, without including Farming, PVP, and other such things, would probably take you 4 days, or 3-4 weeks, depending on your time, your guild PLing you, or anything like that. Missions usually take anywhere from 15-34 minutes, though in Prophecies, there are 20 some missions, Factions has 13, and NightFall has around 20 too. After you complete it the first time, you can go through the missions again on Hard Mode, in which all enemies are stronger than you, attack faster than you, cast spells faster than you, and generally need a good group to kill it. This is also not including the titles that take 167 hours to complete, like the Drunkard.

Prophecies: probably going to last you the longest, it is the longest campaign, and also the slowest. Your going to need to farm, grind and everything else if you start here. European theme
Factions: The fastest to complete, but it has two dungeons that can be completed, and they just kinda hand you skills and gold. Chinese theme
NightFall: strikes a balance between the two. African theme.

And I do not know the exact date in which GW2 is coming out, but yes, people are going to drop GW like a bad habit when the next one comes out, though that may be because ArenaNet has nerfed most of the well-known builds for doing things down to nothing, which kinda pissed people off.

Guildwars two is to be released very late this year or early next year, so i would say its worth it to purchase now especially if you buy the eye of the north expansion as if you buy that as well as lots of new and interesting things, a new storyline and an introduction to the races of GW2 you will get a method to reserve character names and get some bonuses in gw2 for your acheivements in gw1

Im not on much these days as my computer cant run it at a decent speed (broke a ram card ) but if you start feel free to add me as a friend my main character is Zara Silverblade.

Oh and just adding to what slarg said, you can change your attributes and skills whenever your in a town (press M to open up a world map and you can instantly travel to towns and outposts you have been to by clicking on their icons) by pressing K which will open up a menu displaying your proffesion and secondary proffession (with a dropdown to change your secondary to any of the secondaries you have unlocked on that character), attributes which can be changed using the little arrows next to them, then a list of all the skills you own (sorted into the attributes they belong to) and finally the skills you have equipted at the time are on a bar at the bottom.

Its quite easy to pick up and play due to its lack of subscription fee's or much grinding (well theres a tiny bit in factions and a bit more in eye of the north).

Start with prophecies even if its purely for pre-searing ascalon, damn thats a beautifull place

Oh and remember not to rush the game, just take it slowly and have fun.

Ok this is looking interesting.

I wanted to play PvP properly, so do I need to get all the expansions?
How does PvP work? Do you do PvP to get things or is it just for the fun of PvP? If you do PvP for soemthing how long does it take to get it?
As you can probably tell I am a PvP fan so it matters a lot to me.
I am probably going to get the at least one of them as I want to try out the game to see if I want to get GW2 when it arrives. I usually play games very fast but I guess having no subscription means I can pick it up whenever I like.

4M2A wrote:Ok this is looking interesting.

I wanted to play PvP properly, so do I need to get all the expansions?
How does PvP work? Do you do PvP to get things or is it just for the fun of PvP? If you do PvP for soemthing how long does it take to get it?
As you can probably tell I am a PvP fan so it matters a lot to me.
I am probably going to get the at least one of them as I want to try out the game to see if I want to get GW2 when it arrives. I usually play games very fast but I guess having no subscription means I can pick it up whenever I like.

There are two kinds of PvP, competitive and for fun.

In competitive PvP is it basicly an online sport and you will need to have as many skills as possible unlocked so you can change your build to combat the current metagame, if you want this I would advise buying the 3 campaigns (prophecies, factions and nightfall). this kind of PvP normally consists of 2 teams of 4, 6 or 8 fighting eachother (sometimes capture the flag style, sometimes killpoints).

The other kind of PvP is just for fun really and are mostly from the factions game, they have much larger amounts of players (around 16 on each side) and tend to focus on capturing objectives (allience battles) and obtaining resources (jade quarry).

On character creation you can choose to make a PvE character or a PvP character, I would advise you make a PvE character first to learn hte ropes of the game before making a PvP character to play around with the different skill combinations.

PvP characters have access to every skill unlocked on that account, skills can be unlocked by gaining them as rewards from quests (pve), buying them with gold (pve) or buying them with balthazar faction points (PvP) which you gain by playing the various kinds of PvP.

PvP characters also start out with maximum level armour and if you press J you get a menu that allows you to customise your equiptment's colours and enchantments to suit your whims or current build.

and to add on to what Corpses just said: Your PVE characters can still PVP once they reach a certain point and have leveled to 20. Also, your PVP-only characters do not have access to any weapon/armor skins that are not basic. One last thing, is that if you spend the time grinding out your PVE character, you will be very slightly stronger than your PVP-only counterparts. This happens because in PVP-only, people can build a shield which requires rank 9 attributes with 16 armor, but PVE characters can find (rarely) rank 8 armor 16 sheilds, which frees up points to spend on other, offensive areas.

Well I had a look for it online because I couldn't find it in any of the local games shops, so I am going to but the complete collection which I think has all the expansions, although i'm not entirely sure.

4M2A wrote:Well I had a look for it online because I couldn't find it in any of the local games shops, so I am going to but the complete collection which I think has all the expansions, although i'm not entirely sure.

The complete collection will either have all 3 campaigns or all 3 campaigns and the 1 expansion

Online tends to be cheaper anyway.

Right, ok now I am confused. I have been searching for the GW game and I can't seem to find anywhere that sells all the expansions or even lists their names.

Any chance you could list the games and explain what they contain? It would really help me as I want to get them all but I can't find them.

Thanks
4M2A

p.s. When I get the game I will add you as a friend. It will be good to be able to talk to someone who knows the game already.

4M2A wrote:Right, ok now I am confused. I have been searching for the GW game and I can't seem to find anywhere that sells all the expansions or even lists their names.

Any chance you could list the games and explain what they contain? It would really help me as I want to get them all but I can't find them.

Thanks
4M2A

p.s. When I get the game I will add you as a friend. It will be good to be able to talk to someone who knows the game already.

The 3 campaigns are:

Prophecies, the original, has a european setting and is a great intoduction to the game but is the hardest.

Factions, has an asian setting and is easier than prophecies, it introduces some more casual PvP modes.

Nightfall, has an african setting and introduces lots of new pve elements such as hero's.

You can get it from the NCsoft online store

pl?dnv=3674609304&action=toggleCategory&
category=4" target="_new" rel="nofollow">https://secure.ncsoft.com/cgi-bin/Store.pl?dnv=3674609304&action=toggleCategory&
category=4

On that page is also the pvp access pack which you can buy to get access to all forms of pve without buying the rest of the campaigns, i would advise you get the full games though.