Im Lost in this whole thing.

I am very new to GW and and VERY lost. so what is the MAIN thing to do in this game since the level cap is only 20? i know you do guild wars, but what and WHERE exactly do i do this at? and also when in PVP mode can u get any gears? or is it ALL Pvp? it seems to me that this will be a VERY short game. you cant pvp the WHOLE time u play or this just isnt an mmo. also how often can u attack another guild? and do u have to ask for a duel or just go and raid them over night?

please clear thing up~
thank you.

This is game will last as long as any other.
You will be playing GVG for a large portion of the game, you will also do many missions and quests. And you can't forget roleplaying!

why would u play roleplaying for that long? u can get to lvl 20 in a week. then GVG for what 1 month or 2? im not sure what to think at this point.

OK you play the first week or two leveling up(depending how much you play)

From then on you fight in GVG matches every so often and when your not your doing quests, missions, talking with buds, trying to get that cool sword, exploring new places and honing your skills.

the funny thing is, all you people think that the game somehow just stops at level 20. here's a simple graph someone drew a while ago...



|-{1-10}-{11-20}--------------{"Endgame"}-------------------------------------|

in other words (or actually... in words...), levels 1 through 19 are seriously just a tutorial for what you run into at level 20. most of the missions and things will be made for players who are levels 17+.


gear? since when do you have to have a level restriction on gear?

to craft armour, you just walk up to the town crafter (different towns have different crafters... the Ascalon crafter sucks compared to the Ventari's Dell crafter) and tell him to make you armour and hand over the materials and gold. You can wear any armour in the game but you must have gotten to the armour crafter to have it made for you personally (armour is customized for your guy and your guy alone).

Heres the thing, people need to get over all this leveling nonsense. The whole foundation the Guild Wars creators based this game on was an MMORPG that was dependent on skill not playing time. Yeah, obviously you can get to lvl 20 in a week, that doesn't mean you're done. It means you've maxed out all the "level ups" health wise etc. and now it's time for you to work with what you have to be a strong player (that's where all the skill comes in). Also, the original plan is for there to be a Guild Wars expansion available about every 6 months which will offer a wider range of things to do in the game. So not only do you have your PvP and GvG, but you also have a continuous amount of other gameplay features which will never fail to put your skills to the test.

Well I don't know alot about the game yet, but its my understanding that the Character at level 20 isn't done by a long shot, in many ways its just starting - they call it ascension or something like that.

Hopefully one of the regular posters will explain this.

But with the skills to find just for 1 of (is it 35) different combinations (even if you only do say 12 combos. That should take 6 months - then comes an expansion - so if they do what they entend. This game should have plenty of mid-long term playability.

i think i read that theres a 150 diff combos of skills you could have at anyone time for each primary/secondary char class... theres plenty of longevity... and remember the beta's arnt the entire game... lots more to come

A lot of places have describe Guild Wars as being completely reliant on skill - I would have to disagree.

I agree that there is far more skill involved but time spent is still important. I'd assume once you hit level 20 you are focusing on gvg battles, pvp battles, but you are still focusing on improving your character and you are still going to do missions fighting pvp, getting better armour and weapons, getting more gold. So you still need to spend time doing all that stuff to make your character better, it's just you don't go past level 20.

Also with the hundreds of skills, you can just start a new char

Weezer.. I love you for that diagram. Now I can just refer everyone to this simple little drawing instead of rewriting an essay explaining why level 20 isn't the end. O.o

Btw, to other people who are wondering, please just throw out every single preconceived notion that you obtained from all the online mmorpgs out there. You don't become an all-powerful demigod with the ability to squash entire populations with a single haughty, side-flung glance. The Shiverpeaks still kick my behind at level 20 if I decide to go suicidal and run around like crazy luring every single creature around.

Someone said to think of the trek from level 1-20 as a sort of extended tutorial on how to play the game. You graduate at level 20, and the game begins at level 20.

Remember what Jeff Strain said in Paris in that impromptu interview? This might not be entirely accurate/set in stone until Gaile confirms it, since the interview, I gather, was rather informal and more of a pick-up thing.. but according to the interviewer (credits to Cryo Akira).. Mr. Strain said that the final released version of GW will have 25 missions (we only see 14 in beta) and about 60-70 explorable areas (we only see 47 explorable areas during the BWEs.. someone counted ), as well as 9 total GvG maps (I'm not counting the already available Tombs/arenas maps which are team PvP, and separate from GvG)..

Even if the numbers do change, this still gives us a more or less general idea that we've seen only about half the total missions. And, well, most people are very very close, if not at level 20 when they reach Sanctum Cay (the last mission available in BWEs). That means we have half the world to discover as level 20s. This completely trumps the idea held by every other game that you will have already seen 90% of the world by the time you get to max level.

Anyways, I'm writing an essay. But, well, I know I'll definitely be busy for quite a while before I'm even close to uncovering all of the GW world (and that includes explorable areas).

As people have said, level 20 is simply when your character stops gaining health and attribute points- it's not the end of the game. Leveling isn't the goal of GW, it's just a way to progress your character to get to the endgame. Once you reach level 20, you still gain skills, can get better armor and equipment, and try to get through all of the high-level content- both PvP and PvE. You will reach level 20 well before the end of the missions- and to even attempt many of the later missions with a character who's under level 20 is pure suicide.... heck, attempting them with a full party of level 20 characters is pretty close to suicide.... for the people who've had problems with the Wilds, watch out!

In any case, PvP is also a very viable endgame.... did people quit playing Starcraft once they finished the single-player missions? PvP in GW is excellent, and coming from someone who has never really enjoyed PvP combat in other games, that's actually saying something. I can tell you that I've been in the Alpha, playing pretty much every day since October, and have still not exhausted all the possibilities of the game, and haven't even started getting tired of it- if anything, I'd say I'm still a noob in many aspects- I've played almost no rangers, and don't have too much experience with necromancers either- not to mention subclasses like hammer warriors, which I've never done, and takes very different skills than the sword/axe warriors that I have played.

Overall, there's a LOT of content for characters after they hit level 20, not to mention that each character is only exploring a small fraction of the possibilities in character builds.

That's one of the reasons I started playing this game.

The March BWE was my first and I was quite shocked to see that I could get lvl 11 easily with proper armor and some nice +7 staffs/wands. In other games that kind of char (decent lvld and nicely equipped) would've taken me months!Previous games demanded 24/7 lvling for months before you could even try to start a fight. And don't forget about the demi-god like chars that could kill you in one hit (I used to be one of them).

Since lvl 20 is the max, it all comes down to skill. According to what I've read, no profession can take out another with a single shot/cast/whatever. It's all about skills and teamwork. After getting lvl 20, you can walk around and RPG for a while. Or explore some areas for items, gold or other nice things that can be found.

btw, small question: next BWE Some friends and I want to use some PvP-chars (the lvl20 ones) to plvl the PvE-chars. Is that a smart thing to do? Cause we spent too much time getting to Lions Arch while being lvl 8 / lvl 11...

The game definitly doesn't end at 20, as the others said, getting gears, exploring places, getting skills, having fun with buds, ...
I presume there will be expansions too so whats the whining, I have little time to play so i won't get to lvl 20 in a week or so. But i try to enjoy the game, not rushing through everything to be as fast as possible. I don't play games worrying that it will be over fast, i just have fun...

It's not, at least by the traditional definition of MMORPG. The developers prefer the term CORPG. Some people like to call it an MMORPG anyway, and since the definition isn't set it stone, you could call it that, but it's as much an MMORPG as Diablo II. If you didn't call Diablo II an MMORPG, it wouldn't make sense to call Guild Wars one either.

You don't need to toss away preconceived notions of MMORPGs. You just need to consider GW's actual genre. GW ain't that revolutionary. It's, as the founder of ArenaNet said, essentially "BattleNet 2.0" -- the same ideas, just improved and refined. The chat rooms from Diablo II have been moved in-game to become towns, but otherwise it's pretty much the same -- pay for the game and expansions instead of monthly fees, actual play occurs in private instances that are not persistent, groups are 8 people at max, fast action, blipping instantly from place to place ("waypoints" on the map) rather than having to walk everywhere, and so on. I love the game, I think it's a wonderful improvement on its predecessors in the genre of online action RPGs, but I'm wondering what rock people have been sleeping under to call the game revolutionary rather than evolutionary. Virtually every feature everyone points to as revolutionary is straight out of Diablo II and BattleNet, with ladder features and PvP ideas from *Craft to boot. Did you all miss some of the most popular games in history?

bunny masterm there is no real way to power level a character in this game i dont think, becaude in order to be on the same map as the characters u want to p/l u have to be grouped, and when you are grouped you all spit XP equally among you, no matterwhat lvl you are, IE. i went hunting one time with level 12-14 char's and even tho we were all the same level fighting creatures that were around lvl 15+ we all only got like 16 xp a kill or less? so imagine if u r lvl 20 trying to p/l a levle 1? it would probably take more time than if u just hunted with another elvel 1 for a couple of hours, you would both lvl at the same time practically. i think this was impleemeted by arena because this game is all about grouping with players your own level and not just a rush to get to the almighty lvl 20...JMO

Actually there is a difference, I took my girlfriend out (shes level 3 and did all the kills myself at level 9 witha friend at level 9). We both got 12-16 xp, she got 32-40. Still not huge power leveling but that was only char

Lansing Kai Don

Well, the idea behind it was to get our lowerlvld chars safely to Lions Arch. The fact that they would receive some xp, was a side benefit.

I like to look at this game like a similar verison of counter strike with an RPG setting. It has the same kind of FPS gameplay that will pull you back because its not just attack/heal/attack. In a normal RPG you would get bored very fast if the lvl cap was 20, but because the game plays the way it does, lvl 20 is when youll really begin to have fun.

That sounds about right. You do split XP when you group but the amount of XP you gain depends on your level.

It's something like this: To gain XP you need to earn a share of XP. To earn a share you have to attack a creature, cast a skill on someone attacking a creature, or cast a skill on someone who's earned a share - this means Monks, healers, support characters, and others who don't actually hit a critter can still gain XP, you can have long, extended chains of XP sharing, but someone hanging back and trying to "leech" is out of luck. You don't fight, you don't get XP because you don't get a share.

The amount of a share depends on how many people have earned it.Now, let's say that share represents a fraction of 1. If you have one person earning a share they get a full share or 1. Two people each gets half a share or 1/2. Three people get 1/3 each. And so on, the more people earning XP the less each person gets but the larger the party the less you'll lose. 1 vs 1/2 is a much steeper drop than 1/7 versu 1/8, after all.

Now, when a creature dies it grants some XP. Let's call it, say, a "lot" of XP. That lot depends on the level of the creature, the higher the level the more that lot is worth. That lot is then divided amongs a party based on the shares earned. If, say, every level a creature has is worth 10 XP, a single character killing a lv10 creature gets a lot of 100XP. Two characters get 50XP. Three characters get 33XP. And so on.

But, it's not quite as simple as that because just as a creature's level affects XP so does the level of the character recieving a share. That seems to work as a percentile. If you're at the same level as a creature you'll get 100% of your share of the XP lot. If you're higher you'll earn less, until at a certain point you won't earn any XP, and if you're lower level you'll earn more. So, let's say that each level your character's off from that creature level is worth 10% of a share. If a lv12 character kills a lv10 creature they get 1 share but they get 80% of its value or 80XP. If they were lv8 they'd get 120XP instead. The same thing happens when that lot is split and it happens *by share* not by the total lot. If a lv12 character and a lv8 character combine to kill a lv10 creature then the lv12 gets 40XP and the lv8 gets 60XP - or 100/2 -> 50x80% and 50x120%. Not, say 120/2 or 80/2. The more characters, the more that happens. A lv12, lv11, lv10, lv9, and lv8 character would the appropriate percentage of 1/5th of 100XP or 16, 18, 20, 22, and 24XP respectively.

Of course, I made all those numbers up as I'm not really sure exactly how it all works. But the model - creatures give set XP decided by level, characters gain a share of that XP based on party size and modified by their own level - seems to fit. It's just somethign that requires data mining to get the appropriate base values. Kill something at, say, level 5 that's level 5, level 10, and level 15 maybe - solo. Make sure there's no varience in XP from creature type to creature type. Then kill things again at varying levels and then with varying party sizes to figure out exactly how the partitioning works. It's a bit much to get done over a beta weekend, in other words. Although someday it'll need to get figured out.

So a 2P-team (lvl 20 PvP and a lvl 1 RPG) kill a lvl 20 monster. The PvP does most of the work, while the RPG only hits it once. In your opinion, the RPG (low lvld) would get Y x Share XP (Y= bonus for killing monster above his lvl). He doesn't even have to hit the monster, just casting something on his teammate would be enough. If that's the case, then plvl seems quite possible.

Before we get way Off Topic here, I think the "hardest" work will be making an almost perfect build. Not lvling or crafting or hunting, like in most MMORPGS. Also different from most MMORPGS is the fact that you can't really make a super +7 armor with gems/inscriptions/runes that no one else can have. AFAIK you have the "basic" lvl 20 armor and some runes to add, that's it. It all comes down to the skills you've chosen to use during PvP / GvG. (please correct me if I'm wrong)