Guild Wars 2

Ive decided I want to go back and play GW1 to do the Hall of Monuments, but ive never played GW1 before, but im not sure about what basic choices I should make prior to beginning.

Does it matter what profession I choose? Ive been debating on choosing Necromancer for my GW1 character, because I main Necromancer in GW2, and i’d quite like see where my Necromantic brethren came from 250 years ago.

When I unlock subclasses/secondary class, is there any good way to tell which one I should select?

Should I do the campaigns/expansions in any particular order? Or should I just take the obvious route and go in the order in which they were released?

1. It doesn’t matter which prof you have in GW1; there’s no connection between your toons from (1) and those in GW2 (unless you roleplay it to be so).
2. Think of GW1 as a single player game (using ‘heroes’ in your party), with the occasional option to add other players to fill out a mission/dungeon party.
3. You can pretty much run most any combination of professions. (Only a few are terrible.)
4. In terms of Lore and order of release: ‘Prophecies’ → ‘Factions’ → ‘Nightfall’ → ‘Eye of the North’. In terms of ease-of-play, ‘Nightfall’ → ‘Eye of the North’ (which gets you the most heroes quickly). In terms of content length, ‘Factions’ is usually considered the fastest.

Be sure to make use of that game’s wiki, which is very comprehensive and includes a number of guides. Also the game’s original wiki (before ANet provided the server and technical support for a wiki), which has even more guides. If you want build help, try pvx wiki:

• Official: http://wiki.guildwars.com
• Original: http://guildwiki.org
• PvX: http://gwpvx.gamepedia.com

Argon.1563:

Ive decided I want to go back and play GW1 to do the Hall of Monuments, but ive never played GW1 before, but im not sure about what basic choices I should make prior to beginning.

Does it matter what profession I choose? Ive been debating on choosing Necromancer for my GW1 character, because I main Necromancer in GW2, and i’d quite like see where my Necromantic brethren came from 250 years ago.

When I unlock subclasses/secondary class, is there any good way to tell which one I should select?

Should I do the campaigns/expansions in any particular order? Or should I just take the obvious route and go in the order in which they were released?

Your own profession does not matter that much, what matters is your team composition. Since it is no longer easy to find people to play with, having heroes is pretty much mandatory. You can get those by playing Nightfall and Eye of the North, so this is where you should start. It will make all other stuff much simpler and faster. The 7 Hero Player Support composition is great for almost all content. You can run any class with it. Personally I ran a ritualist with this build, since the heroes were already managing spirits. Also, you can eventually unlock every secondary class and swap between them in outposts.

Your profession really doesn’t matter. Play what you like, as said above the team composition is more important for completing most content. Specific player professions only really matter for speed runs or specific farming runs.

The game is very much “build wars”, so a very useful reference to builds (though it will take some time to unlock all the skills and heroes needed) is at http://gwpvx.gamepedia.com/PvX_wiki

For secondary professions, you have to select one in or just after the tutorials. Choose one that will either benefit your leveling process, or one in your desired final build to start. You can unlock others to switch to once you reach a certain part way through your storyline. You can either pay an NPC to gain access to that secondary, or do a selection of quests about 2/3rds through the Prophecies storyline to swap for free. Assassin, Ritualist, Paragon, and Dervish secondaries are only able to be unlocked through payment to an npc. Heroes can always swap for free. See http://wiki.guildwars.com/wiki/Profession#Secondary_profession for more information.

For the base six classes, it doesn’t matter where you make your character. Assassin or Ritualist primary requires you to start in Factions, and Paragon or Dervish requires you to start in Nightfall. Prophecies has the easiest learning curve, but is the slowest to level up in, make money in, and get through the storyline.

Factions gets you to 20 quickly, but dumps you into some very challenging missions quickly as well. While a Ritualist is often recommended by guides due to easy farming builds to make money, it’s much more difficult for a new player to get situated in Factions.

Nightfall is in between. You level up a lot faster than Prophecies, but you have a much less steep learning curve than Factions. Nightfall also gives you heroes quickly.

You can temporarily pause a campaign and go start (part-way through) another campaign once you reach a certain part of your primary campaign’s storyline. You can also start Eye of the North once you reach your campaigns primary port city, and reach level 10 (this is easiest in Nightfall). Eye of the North also provides heroes, including three really useful ones right at the beginning of the Eye of the North story. This is probably the best way to get established, as you can get access to a wider variety of skills, access more heroes, and get more experience if you still need to level up.

I’ve done only enough to get 3 HoM points so far, and it’s involved blindly following guildies and shooting what they’re fighting. But I’ve garnered the impression that at some point you’ll want Ranger as a class (possibly ok to make it a secondary class) so you can get pets because leveling pets is one way to get an HoM point or two.

Donari.5237:

at some point you’ll want Ranger as a class (possibly ok to make it a secondary class) so you can get pets because leveling pets is one way to get an HoM point or two.

Good point. I completely forgot about that. And yes, secondary ranger is fine for that.

I’ve only started playing GW1 myself about two months ago, and since I was totally clueless about the game, I started out by following the new player/HoM guides on reddit and took a ritualist in factions as my first (and main) character.

The game overall reminds me of the old single player rpgs of the 90s much more than modern-day games. It turned out to be a welcome change of pace, going back to juggling different builds (both for my character and the whole team of heros and henchmen) and equipment sets to tackle different situations, rather than relying on action and quick reflexes.

The ritualist was a good fit for me to learn the game, and factions turned out to be a campaign that fit me, too. Like others have said, it is rather short compared to the others, but I didn’t find it overly difficult. There are a couple of missions mid-way that I had to try a few times to get full rewards, and one towards the end I ended up getting the help of friends, but mostly there was no obstacle I couldn’t overcome with a bit of thinking and re-arranging skills and equipment.

I currently am sitting at 10 HoM points, with a few more already within reach, and have really only played what the game has thrown at me so far, not gone out of my way to farm or grind anything yet, and very much looking forward to what else the game has in store for me.

I have by now started a couple of alts in nightfall and prophecies, too, and have to admit that I’m not that fond of leveling in prophecies. While pre-searing Ascalon is stunningly beautiful and a great tutorial, the stretch of maps and missions that follows it weren’t the most captivating to me, so you may be better off starting in one of the later campaigns if you have them.

Ultimately, I’d suggest to try out different classes and different campaigns before committing on a combination for your first play-through of the game. If you have all the campaigns and the expansion, you have 8 character slots to fill, so lots of room to experiment (and get some core skills unlocked that your heroes will be able to use later on, too ).

One more comment about heroes: While it is nice to have them available, they actually are of limited use for your first character. There are a lot of interesting hero builds out there, but unlocking all of the required skills either takes a serious commitment to pvp or quite a lot of game time. I have three core heroes outfitted to the point where they are a serious improvement over taking henchmen, but am far from done unlocking skills on most classes. Just starting out, you may want to concentrate on what path unlocks desired skills above what path gives you heroes most quickly (as they are mostly useless without decent builds).