Order of Play Strategy--What Area to Pick Next?
For your first question, it depends on you. There isn’t any area that isn’t accessible to a player without having to cross a higher level area first from my knowledge. if you like doing your story and having it bring you to new places, then well and good follow your story. If you prefer to explore things randomly, then go wherever the wind takes you.
As for your second question, the places your story takes you is partly dependent on the choices you make. Of course it’ll lead you to the more well-known places, such as Lions Arch eventually, but some areas might be missed in certain choice combinations, I’m not sure. I haven’t exactly played out each story combinations (there’s a heck of a lot…) to know that.
If you want to reach lower level areas like starter areas, they are all accessible from Lions Arch (go through the Asuran Gate to get to the main cities and get to starter areas from there).
About the Story… I played (and still play, because I’m not yet in Orr) the game exactly like you. All low level areas, then next tier of areas, and so on. Anytime I was in a zone that had story line elements in it, I was doing the story until it was sending me in a higher level area, and then I was resuming the story when I was getting there through exploring. The good thing was that I was always overleveling the story line, so I had no major issues with it so far. The downside is the fact that the rewards were on the same level as the story line, so I had to vendor pretty much all the rewards because I was already having better gear from drops. Still, I found this downside not so important, and I’m glad I play the game as I do. When I’ll finally reach the end of the story line, I will most probably get 100% world exploration also, plus I’m not bored as other people who rushed the content seem to be.
I started out in Queensdale following my personal story for awhile. When I was lvl 20-something, I decided to start collecting all my ranger pets. The took me on a very long, extended tour through all the other race cities and lower level maps.
I did it in a similar way as others have described, starting with the lowest level maps first, and gradually moving on to higher level maps.
Fields of Ruin is an odd map. Unless you use the gate in Divinity’s Reach, you need to travel through the higher level Blazeridge Steppes to get there..
Lvl 80’s: Ranger; Guardian; Mesmer; Necromancer; Thief
Gandara Megaserver
I found the easiest way to level (without crafting) was to finish the cities, then the 1-15 areas, then the next tier and so on. This will put you well ahead of the targeted level for each area (after the first couple), and even down-leveled, you’ll have an easier time with it.
Personally: I did my race’s city then starting 1-15 area. Then I’d do another race’s city and starting area. Then I’d go back my race’s 16-25 area. Then a third race’s city and starting area. By the time I was through all the races’ starting areas, they were blending together anyway. While doing this, I would get to my Personal Story quest’s level and go back and do it. I did end up getting several levels ahead of the Story due to finishing an area before going back to it, but it evened out later on anyway.
Your Personal Story will not take you to all the areas. It will keep you close to home until you’ve joined one of the three groups (post level 30 story quest). At that point it will most likely have you running to/through other regions, so you might as well explore/complete them.
The Personal Story has an actual “go do this” step about every two levels. There’s a lot of “go talk” steps where not much action happens and the quest level doesn’t increase. If your character is level 50+ and your Story is at level 5, you’ve got a lot to catch up. :P
Your story quests occur about every 2 levels all the way to lvl 80 to give you an indication, if you are doing all zones the way you are now then there should be no problem. You will hit lvl 80 way before you will finish all zones though but that doesn’t matter much.
Personally I have 100% completion on my main and on my second character I basically decided to go from west to east across the map (starting southwest, moving north, east etc).
running through a zone above you to get to a zone your level isn’t hard to do. I have a level 54 toon who has been into pretty much every zone but orr. Quite frequently I just go for a random jog to fill up the last quarter of my xp bar by discovering new areas.