What about the race for warrior? It doesn’t really matter right? I started with charr
And what about the items dropped from monsters, they are not worth picking up early right?
Race doesn’t matters in terms of stats: all have the same ones, and the same movement pace (which means that larger races as Charrs and Norns seems to walk slower that Asuras, but mts/second are all equal). Race skills are weak and remain mostly unused. The main factors to chose a race -and size- is how much you like the animations, how cool they look and how much they cover your vision in jumping puzzles. Personally for Warriors I would go big (all my 2 Warriors and 2 Guardians are Norns).
Crafting is useful for 2 purposes: gives you experience (you can rise from 1 to 80 just crafting is you have enough materials, which probably will not be your case) and gives you the chance to equip yourself at cheaper cost than the Black Lion market. I would suggest you to rise at least armorscraft to 400; weaponsmith and jewelery could be also useful -although at level 80 youy probably will equip yourself with ascended amulets, rings and erarings traded by laurels-. Anyway: the two top tier stats in this game are ascended and exotic, and you will do fine in full exotic at 80 in both PvE and WvW (PvP uses a normalized gear system: you can play with your level 1 character in PvP in equal terms -despite you must unlock a few sigils and runes-).
For leveling in PvE the best way is to pair a longbow with any other weapon you want. Longbow provides excellent AoE damage, good single target damage, both candition (burning) and physical damage and (with traits) condition cleansing. Gretsword provides mobility and burst damage, hammer and maces gives you a ton of crowd control, the axe has a huge sustained damage, swords are hybrid weapons with mobility, defense and conditions… The best you can do is to try out all of them.
The good news is that this is a game in which you reach top level in no time and then you have a ton of not mandatory things to do (dungeons, fractals, WvW, PvP, high level crafting and fractals, etc.). Also, experimenting with builds and gear is prety cheap compared against some games in which making a mistake in the gear selection means wasting a tons of time and resources.
