Guild Wars 2

This might sound like a mundane question that everyone knows but I cannot find an answer. Is there an advantage to playing all races? If I played 5 classes to 80, would I get anything extra from having one of each race to, say, having 5 Norn?
I am asking because I would quite like to play multiple characters to get a feel of classes and to keep the game fresh. It would also mean that I could have a character for dungeons and another for WvW and another for sPvP etc.

I would imagine that having 5 different races would mean that I get 5 different stories? I heard there are 6 stories per race (I think?), so technically I could have 5 different Norn stories? I guess another thing would be achievements? How useful are these achievement points and is it worth rolling different races for?

Thank you for your help guys.

What is an advantage?

If you’d like to play the story of every race because that is more fun to you, than that is an advantage on itself. And you should definitely play each race.

The different stories part is correct, but within races that’s less of a difference than playing different races. I have played each race too, because I get bored if I’d had the same storyline every time again. Do realize that past level 30, every storyline is the same, regardless of race.

Achievement points do give you rewards, although no truly stunning/gamechanging ones, so if that’s your only reason then I wouldn’t do it.

You don’t get anything extra for playing all 5 races. You’ve covered most of the reasons in your post.

The racial storyline is the level 10 and level 20 chapters. There are 3 options for each and which ones you get are determined by some of the choices you make during character creation. There are also choices you make during the story which will change it slightly. So it is possible to have characters of the same race with different storylines. For example a human noble whose greatest regret is never finding their parents will have a different story to a human commoner whose greatest regret is never joining the circus.

But there are unique stories for each race too, and only characters of that race will get to see them.

The level 30 story (choosing an Order) is based on your race as well, and again there are variations based on the choices you make within it, although the overall story is the same for all characters of that race.

The achievement points are nice to have, but not a big deal. You don’t get unique rewards for different achievements, only for your total number of achievement points and there are lots of ways to get points.

The only other differences between races are a few skills (which most people don’t use) and how they look.

Actually you DO get a bit of advantage, finishing some Personal Story steps gives you a bit of AP, and 3 of those are locked for each race, so if you only play 1 race you can get just 3 of the 15 possible achievements in the “Hero” tab.

I have all 5 races to try out all the racial skills. I don’t use many of them now. No Norn or Sylvari utility skills, don’t currently use the human’s elite dogs any more, love the little Asura cube that emits poison and one of my Asura uses the attack golem and my Charr has the warband elite.

There are some achievements for the racial storylines, but, trust me, the AP gained is completely negligible unless you’re a hardcore achievement hunter who needs every. Single. Point.

Just play whatever appeals to you. If you want to get a broad experience of the world, you can try a storyline from each race, centered around their home cities. If you find you really like, say, Norn, you can make three different Norn characters before you start repeating storylines. Each race has some unique armor skins, and unique skills, but you don’t need those skills to be effective at any given class. Most people seem to ignore them.

(Personally, I really like some of the racial skills, but they’re not enough to make me choose one race over the other at character creation.)

I have played all races for the ap from the personal story then deleted them and now I have only humans XD

Ten 80s here, at least one of each race. Only benefit to doing it is the additional AP from doing each race’s story up to level 30 (as there are achievements tied to them), as well as AP from getting each race’s cultural armor. If you don’t care about AP then there is no benefit to doing it.

Silvia.9130:

I have played all races for the ap from the personal story then deleted them and now I have only humans XD

I did the exact same thing!

Though now that I have made one human character of every class, I am making a character of each race to keep and experience their story fully and slowly, and maybe get some cultural armors for the AP – after all, who does not want to be The Emperor?

I’d say it’s worth it to play all races if only just to experience their stories, they have very nice bits. Not necessarily on main characters, since you might not like the looks or how they move, but I’d say it’s worth it.