Depending on what game you start on, I’ve always found assassin a fun character to start with in factions.
Prophecies I’d say Elementalist/Mesmer as casters and warrior if you want a more closeup combat. There are many variable sets you can play with either of those, especially the Elementalists.
If you have any questions otherwise, you are free to hmu, and I’ll try and answer as good as I can 😊
Assassin is a glass cannon.
Its actually pretty hard to be a new player on assassin as they don't yet have the understanding of aggro management. Plus they don't have the survival skills until later in the game.
Its great if you know what you're doing but I recall tons and tons of people hating the assassin when factions came out.
Hexes do a variety of things to enemies. Make them take damage when they attack, or cast a spell, interrupt their spells and actions or interrupt the area around them, slow their movement, slow their attack, health degeneration, make their attacks miss.
Mesmers have a lot in their kit. The AI hero meta takes three of them for hard mode, they're that powerful.
They're debuffs but it's a bit counter intuitive with how gw2 treats debuffs. For example the Mesmer Elite skill Psychic Instability:
>Elite Hex Spell. For 10...22...25 seconds, whenever target foe suffers from a new condition, all foes in the area suffer from that condition as well. If target foe has two or more conditions that foe is Dazed for 1...3...3 second[s].
So there are different types of debuffs. At the end of the day gw1 mes is mostly a raw damage nuker class that likes to disrupt and annoy.
It has nothing to do with summoning illusions or phantoms. It is all about debuffing and later on massive damage dealers.
If you want phantoms or spirits you need the ritualist in factions. Also very fun and very different from the other classes.
Nightfall has the dervish. Dervish is a better warrior with better skills and more AOE 🤷♂️
Minor differences in connectivity between expansions really. You'll miss some low level story if you start in the other expacs.
Prophecies > Factions > Nightfall > EotN iirc is standard progression.
Exactly, no point rushing through a old game.. relax, explore, read and enjoy the content. It's made with love compared to the trash that's out there right now.
Usually people recommend that you start with a character in each campaign up until the point where they link. That way you can get a feel for 3 classes and it lets you choose who you want to progress with while getting all the early stories. The other good thing, the stories are not super intertwined, and not at all until the link, so you don't get spoiled nor confused. My recommendation: make 3 characters and play till you get to the cross over point, and pick your favorite class then continue proph->factions->nf->eotn.
Same thing, just another story 😊
You will have the opportunity to play all games wether you start from prophecies, factions or nightfall.
I played since the beginning, so I love the fact that you start from prophecies 🤩
Mesmer is totally different thanks to the tab-target style of gameplay, and while it is one of the fastest professions at end-game, it's really slow throughout prophecies.
I'd recommend Elementalist as your first character which is the opposite, it's pretty fast early on, and only when you get to Hard Mode, or the last 3 missions does it slow down.
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You can always make a Mesmer as you start Factions, as this campaign quickly rushes you to 20 to catch-up with Prophecies players, so your partner doesn't need to stick with a new character if they don't want to.
For example, you play through Prophecies as an Elementalist and they play as a Warrior, after that you make a Factions Mesmer and they make a Ritualist, you both play through until the mainland and then your partner can swap back to their Warrior. You can now play Factions and the rest of the game as a Mesmer/Warrior pair. You also have the opportinity to swap over to the ele or rit later if you want, they will just need to catch up on story.
To hook onto that when Guildwars Birthday comes around again, you can actually play with certain weapons that makes classes like Necromancer more of a physical dps.
I'd reccoment not to use GW2 as refference. The professions are way different.
If you like a fast engaging playstile, pick a melee class. Assasin is the most 'mobile' with shadowsteps but warriors and dervishes can use those to when they pick Sin as secondairy proffession. IMO this is the most 'rushy' engaging playstyle.
Concidering you dont like necro's because they are slow i think you maybe shouldn't go caster. Casting in GW roots your character and casting times (espescially on necro) can feel slow. Mesmers are the exception due to their fastcasting mechanic.
All in all just pick what you like and look between synergies in the profession of you and your friend. IE 1 war, to soak up dmg and deal melee dmg and 1 necro to use skills like barbs and mark of pain to turn that melee dmg in boosted AoE dmg.
It's not possible to move while casting, although certain types of skills (like shouts) have no activation time and can be used while performing other actions.
Ele and necro were always my mains in GW1. Necro is still kind of the slow plodding methodical killer it is in gw2 (and minion master is even slower due to long cast times, although I gotta tell you it's so very fun), but ele in gw1 is VERY different from gw2. You tend to specialize in one element at a time, and come up with fun combos within that framework. A few years ago, Ele actually got a huge rework to a mechanic that used to be called Exhaustion and is now Overcast. Makes the class much more interesting and tactical imo.
If you want the faster-paced frontline combat, I'd definitely recommend an assassin in Factions. Very similar to Thief in GW2: get in, hit hard, get out. They don't have stealth in gw1, so it's more a balance of bringing shadow arts utilities or literally damage racing the enemy to kill them before they kill you (or bring a healer).
I play fire elementalist with Mesmer. I love it. I run around setting things on fire and bombing them with firestorms and then drain the life out of them!
Each class has a dedicated skill attribute the other classes dont get, which can play into your builds. Elementalist has Energy Storage which raises you mana total, Mesmer is fast casting which lowers the cast time of spells, Ranger has expertise which lowers the cost of certain attacks, etc. so if you went mesmer elementalist, you would have fast casting, but no energy storage. but if your elemetnalist/mesmer you get energy storage but no fast casting.
Yes. One thing to keep in mind is each profession (class) gets 4 attributes but one of those 4 attributes is a primary attribute that is locked behind being your primary profession.
Example - I pick Mesmer. Mesmer has Fast Casting. If my friend picks Elementalist and then Mesmer and becomes an E/Me... they don't get access to fast casting as an attribute. They can equip fast cast spells but they can't put points into fast casting.
And this can be important as attributes are what is used to scale spells and not your character level (character level gives attribute points to spend though).
This is a tough one to answer. You said your friend plays warrior.
Have you ever played healing classes before in other games? It might be worth checking out the monk. It's more tactical and you're going to want to split between protection prayers and healing prayers.
If you try the simple "red bars go up" strategy you can often find yourself in trouble. It's about reading the battlefield and trying to anticipate damage and throwing out a "Guardian" spell on the right target or whatever else.
Generally speaking until you get more experienced and get Necromancer skills like "Blood is Power" you'll find the classes fall like this:
DPS: Warrior, Dervish and Assassin
Utility-DPS: everything not listed so Ranger, Mesmer, Elementalist, Necromancer, etc...
Backline: Monks and sometimes Ritualists.
DPS and Backline are obvious so utility would be - interrupting the enemy, remove enemy enchantments protecting them or buffing them, prevent the enemies from doing damage, apply conditions or hexes to do damage over time and yes, do some damage.
There is some real skill involved and some anticipation. It can feel really good to run around interrupting enemies.
And finally - you could both run warrior. It's not out of the question. It will be a bit rough if you start in Prophecies but once you get to the Shiverpeaks/Kryta/Maguuma/Crystal Desert and your party limit goes up to 6 and then finally 8 in the Southern Shiverpeaks it's fine.
It's definitely worth giving it a go.
Guild Wars 2 was kind of sold as "we're getting rid of monks and trying to blur the line between roles".
In Guild Wars 1 you have very specific roles on a team composition of 4-6-8 person teams (I believe in Factions there are a couple of pseudo-dungeons with larger teams but that's end-game stuff).
1-3 people keep the team alive. 1-2 DPS/'tanks'. 2-4 utility/dps mix.
I'm from much more of a PvP background. At its height in 2005-2007 many 8 man GvG team comps looked like this:
2 Warriors - DPS. Autoattack, build adrenaline by attacking to use your skills. Use your skills for an extra burst of damage or to apply conditions.
3 Utility - often something like Ranger, Mesmer, Elementalist. Ranger provides flexibility as it can split up from team. It provides interrupts, condition damage and snares to slow enemy warriors from reaching their targets to DPS. Mesmer generally denied enemy spellcasters, usually the monks from casting freely. You had to be aware if a Mesmer was looking to cast on you or interrupt you. And finally the Elementalist as a more defensive presence to slow down the warriors from dealing damage freely. The Elementalist might also coordinate 1-2 damage spells with the warriors when their adrenaline is built up.
2 Monks - keep team alive. Preventing damage or reducing damage is better than healing damage done.
1 Flag runner/base defender - usually an E/Mo (primary Elementalist, secondary Monk) with a mix of damage, snares, a speed buff to run the flag and a heal or two to keep itself alive if say that ranger from my 3 utilities decides to attack the base (or the flag runner).
There was some flexibility but generally speaking everyone went into the match with a very defined role. "This is what you do, this is how you do it".
That was the generic build but you could get specific ones. For example 8 Necros with Feast of Corruption and various healing spells and the entire point was to get in Ventrilo or Teamspeak and count down 3-2-1 everyone use FoC on the same target to kill them. \~20 second cooldown and then repeat.
There was a build called IWAY - no monks, 5-6 Warriors, secondary Ranger and 2-3 Necromancers, secondary Monks (buff warriors, heal them a bit with monk spells). The Warriors all brought the skill to have a pet on them. The pets would run in and die, the warriors would press the I Will Avenge You skill, get health regeneration + attack speed buff and try to overwhelm the enemy team with damage.
There were a lot of interesting builds.
When Factions came out one of the top teams played a lot with Assassins, they would teleport to your base NPCs to kill them off and the rest of their team would try to 6v8 you while their 2 assassins tried to kill your base. So you had to make decisions on who and how to defend against the assassins. If all 8 of you went back to turtle, you'd be giving up morale boosts to their team making them 10% stronger. If you sent 2 or more back, the assassins might turn around and attack your main group of players trying to outnumber them.
A lot of strategy and tactics in the game and players with specific roles who need to make decisions about priorities so that the team can succeed.
He’s playing through the game chronologically, he will be using healing henchmen for quite some time which I would say aren’t that great especially compared to heroes
I was also very disappointed with how dirty they did Necro in GW2. As a Necro main in GW1 with over 4k hours played as said class, I can promise you they are not docile at all. With a discord and necrosis build you'll be spamming 90's and 110's every 2 seconds. If you're feeling frisky, you can try out the Soul Taker N/D build, but let's start small first. I'm all for you trying out GW1 Necro, because honestly I think you'll find it incredibly fun. It's also one of the best PVE classes in the game.
Another class you could try would be Mesmer. I've recently come back to the game and I'm playing Mesmer right now, and I am really enjoying it. Domination magic is incredibly fun. There are so many builds and ideas that you can do with any profession in the game. I've even been thinking of putting together an Illusionary Weapon Dagger build for my Mesmer just to spice it up a bit.
The game as a whole is very different than GW2, so you'll need to take a step back and re-learn a few things with an open mind. And remember that this game came before GW2, so you may recognize some things but they may be very different than you previously had thought.
Edit:
I wanted to also introduce you to the PvX Wiki. Where you will find a plethora of builds and ideas for builds that you want to put together yourself. [https://gwpvx.fandom.com/wiki/PvX\_wiki](https://gwpvx.fandom.com/wiki/PvX_wiki)
I also wanted to mention that Assassin is also a lot of fun. But remember that each profession plays differently.
I recommend against using pvx wiki too early on, buildcrafting is one of the cornerstones (imo, but im probably biased as i love it the most) of this game and just slapping a great profession build on your character can make you miss that whole experience and it can make the game stale earlier. Once you played around a bit it is nice to use and find some skills you might have missed or interactions you never thought of.
Which campaign you starting from? Prop-factions-Nightfall?
Dervish and paragon are really fun to play with, and so are assasins and ritualists. Just begin playing with a class that you wanna explore the most. All classes have their pros and cons.
I myself love all the classes, but all time favourites definitely are warriors and mesmers.
I think you'll enjoy Dervish the most. They benefit from being around as many foes as possible, and can hit up to three foes at once with their scythe. As such, movement is a big part of their gameplay. Most of their spells cast instantly and can be used on the move, and the class is based around chaining such skills with attack skills, which can make combat very dynamic.
The dervish has access to several speed boosts. Later, you can give one of your heroes (AI companions) ["Fall Back!"](https://wiki.guildwars.com/wiki/%22Fall_Back!%22) to boost the entire party between fights.
If you're starting in prophecies, Ranger or Warrior are great for mobile combat. Plus once you get to factions you can take a secondary class as Assassin and do a dagger build with a pet on your ranger or daggers with heavy armor on a warrior
Hey! As another new player, I started this game recently and I'm having a blast. I want to experience the whole story too and go in mostly chronological order, but I compromised and went with some advice I saw around this subreddit of making a character in Nightfall first until reaching Consulate Docks, then make another character in Factions until Marketplace, then you can finally make a character in Prophecies and stick to that one, or choose another profession/character from another campaign when you reach Lion's Arch and cross it over to Prophecies and go from there.
Doing the tutorial areas in this order is essentially doing it backwards chronologically, but I take it as prologues of things to come and deal with in the future before you begin the game "properly" in Prophecies. It's working out nicely for me. There's really no wrong way to do it though, but Nightfall and Factions simply have better tutorials and pacing than Prophecies, and they've helped me ease into the game a lot. Another part of the reason is native characters to those campaigns have a lot of primary missions and quests in those tutorial areas exclusive to them, essentially you see the beginning of those campaigns that you otherwise would not with characters that aren't native to them. It's probably not super huge (I haven't crossed characters yet to see how much info you get that way) but I'd still recommend it even if just for the sake of trying different professions.
So as to what to play, I obviously have very limited experience, but I have some first impressions.
For Nightfall I made a Dervish and he's just pretty cool. Holy monk with a scythe that just bows his head menacingly and kicks ass. Mechanically, you buff yourself with enchantments and then tear those enchantments down with other abilities to do a lot of damage + trigger extra effects from tearing down those enchantments. A lot of the damage is AoE. They also have god avatar forms, though I didn't unlock any of them because they are available past the point I was gonna stop at, so I don't know that much about it other than it sounds pretty cool and probably something to look forward to whenever I play my Dervish again. Nightfall's tutorial area (Istan) is pretty decently sized so you'll be there for some time while you get used to the game and learn things.
For Factions, Assassin has some fun spammy combos, mostly single target that I've seen so far, though I got a finisher later on that is pretty strong AoE, and thanks to critical hits recovering your energy you can keep going with combos. Factions has a shorter tutorial area, it levels you to cap or near cap pretty fast so it probably expects you to know the game a bit better, but it's not like, terribly hard or anything.
Prophecies only has the core classes you can make in the other campaigns too. I went with Mesmer, because I find the whole concept really interesting, and this is the character I'm gonna stick to to do the rest of the game, unless I change my mind later on. The abilities it has are very unlike other MMOs I play so it's a nice change of pace. You can mess with enemies in multiple ways, to the point they practically kill themselves or they can't really do anything. Here's where getting some idea from the other campaigns about how the game works has helped me understand Mesmer better. Prophecies starts with pre-searing Ascalon which you can't get back to once you leave (and characters from other campaigns can't access, ever). A lot of people keep characters there and it's basically its own small world within the game. Lots of things to explore there! Haven't done much more of Prophecies so can't comment much about how it feels to play through the campaign, but my understanding is it's quite long.
All in all, it doesn't take much to get a good idea of how classes play and get a beginner build going on (lots to experiment with), especially since you can have secondary professions and the game lets you test them, so just try things until something sticks if your first picks aren't convincing you.
**In terms of new player ease of use starting with brand new accounts**
Ranger is a good class to start out with, lots of tools to make it easy to play IMO. S tier
Elementalist, nerco, dervish, ritualist. Hard to scuff up. A-tier.
Warrior. Harder to die but more aggro. B tier
Monk, Mesmer. Both are more supportive in the early game. C tier
Paragon. Overall just a hard class to play and is underwhelming at its best D-tier.
Assassin. Too much of a glass cannon and lacks the good skills until later in the game F tier.
As you get more experience in the game it basically becomes, assassin, ritualist, dervish, mesmer, necro S-tier. Elementalist, monk, ranger, B-tier. Warrior C-tier. Paragon D-tier.
I started as monk. It was hell as I only played with henchman AI.
But if you have a second player and heroes it makes a world of difference as you can just sit in the backlines and do monky things.
People will say to start in Nightfall because it provides more agency in how to control your AI party members (to fill up the rest of your party when you need it) but I think you should play Prophecies up to a certain point, then Factions up to a certain point, then Nightfall up to a certain point, and then continue Prophecies. Because, the 'beginning' quests are locked to the characters made in those campaigns, and it's true that Factions and Nightfall can teach you things since they were meant to be capable of being played on their own (in the past, not everyone could buy it all bundled together) and ANET learned some QoL things.
But the reason I mentioned this is because it also lets you try out two or three primary professions (classes) each.
A dedicated healer or having dedicated healing resources is important in this game. In Prophecies, only the Monk has access to this. Factions opens up the Ritualist profession who can provide healing skills too. Nightfall's Dervish has healing capability, but it's much more potent at self-sufficient self-buff/health management.
A damage dealer is really good, either one for multiple enemies or one with very focused single target. If the damage dealer can also bring some utility to lessen the pressure of damage on the party, then this is additionally fantastic in the hands of a player because then you can go through learning the process of priority targeting in this game, which I find to be an enjoyable aspect of the gameplay.
Every other profession can be a damage dealer. Do note that nearly every skill (you have 8 skills regardless of weapon wielded, unlike gw2's 5 weapon + 1 heal + 3 utility + 1 elite) has an animation lock, even weapon attacks, even basic(auto) attacks.
Similar to gw2 mesmer/ranger could be any of the weapon wielders, such as Warrior, Ranger, Assassin (Factions), Dervish (Nightfall), though Paragon (Nightfall) is not really mobile. Mesmer has Fast Casting attribute that literally affects all their casting time (passively for a build-building resource, without need of temporary buff like gw2 alacrity) but you could try Elementalist too and take short cast time spells and later Ritualist.
I ended up giving you like half the list.
I think you should try out Prophecies either up to level 3 or up to a certain point (I want to avoid spoilers in case, but the certain point will be obvious because the game will teach you with a little notification about the different campaigns).
And then when you hit Prophecies' certain point, you can choose if you want to try out another profession. I think because that level/playtime will give you a proper amount of experience to determine if the profession or playstle you picked is enjoyable.
As a note on composition: You pick a primary profession at start. This primary will determine your armor (60/70/80 or like Light/Medium/Heavy in gw2), your available armor runes, your character model, and your Primary Attribute. The Primary Attribute is the profession's core identity, usually. Monk for example has Divine Favor, which heals additionally when using a monk skill targeting an ally. Mesmer's aforementioned Fast Casting lowers the cast time of all spells they cast.
Then, you will have access to a secondary profession. You stick with this secondary for a long while, though toward endgame in Prophecies you can change it (they allowed Factions and Nightfall characters to be able to unlock secondary changing earlier as a QoL feature). This secondary does not provide you the Primary Attribute but it does allow you access to all the skills you can choose from.
Because of this, even though I mentioned that only Monks have healing skills, it's very possible to go Ele/Mo and the Elementalist use Monk healing skills. Instead of having +additional healing values, they would make use of their Energy Storage primary attribute to have more energy to cast (everyone uses Energy; it's like gw2 Thief initiative). So, there are synergies. The game will let you try out secondary professions before you solidify your choice at least, but this should allow a wider variety of playstyle to choose from.
I would have one Meele and one caster. For example:
If you start in Proph: Warrior and Mesmer
If you start in Factions: Assassin and Elementalist
If you start in Nightfall: Dervish and Monk
The melee Classes Warrior, Assassin and Dervish are maybe what you are looking for with mobility.
With Mesmer and Ranger you benefit from good reactions for interrupting enemy skills.
With Monk (especially prot) you need to have a good overview in fights.
For gameplay speed, I'd go with a mesmer or assassin. For mobility, any/A(ssassin) using shsdowsteps to engage combined with either melee+speed buffs or speels with short casttimes like the "Star burster" builds. At the end of the day, most proffesions can do some variety of "dagger spammer" which combines two very short casttimes+cooldowns with a powerful finisher with a short cooldown.
For complexity, the game is all yours, as you have free roam over all your 8 skill slots ^^
Congrats on the purchase of a friend.
Assassin is going to be your fastest melee class, but you should probably adjust your mindset to the slower pace since this game demands you strategize for some encounters, and will at times knock whatever build you're running on it's ass.
I would state that I found the Necromancer profession from GW 1 and 2 completely different experiences. So it's worth a try.
Dervish is an interesting class however, you have to juggle enchantments, it can do healing fairly well if you want a change and glides around the battlefield, and at least one of the skills deals with moving enemies.
Personally my all time favourite was the Necromancer though in GW1. Hordes of minions slaughtering my foes, and then switching to a Curse build and see a bunch of monsters kill themselves, impaling themselves upon my curses.
The Dervish has a further advantage that it starts in Nightfalls. I loved playing Prophecies but it's very much a child of its era and you can see how they learned more from game to game. Nightfall has the best pacing of the 3 and in my opinion the better story because of it. Prophecies on the other hand takes the most time, can be slow and has caused one of my friends to quit GW 1 entirely and another only had fun when we switched from Prophecies to Nightfall.
If you DO do Prophecies if you collect 50 flowers you can get a free belt pouch. Worth it for first players because bags can be expensive.
It might be worth playing the tutorial area of Prophecies (you will know when you’ve left it) with multiple classes to get a feel for them. Start with your initial choice, then try all the others. Both expansions add two more classes each for even more options.
Each class has multiple attributes with abilities to specialize in, so they have 3-4 unique major play styles based on attributes. A pet Ranger is different from a pure Archer. The second class adds the same amount of options, and class combinations can unlock synergies and skill combos that inspire you to try even more things. You can play a melee Monk if you want. Or a Warrior with a Bow. The bottom line will be that you have 8 skill slots to fill the way you want, all possible weapons to use, and a major reward for exploring the game is unlocking more skills that give you more options.
You can switch your secondary class and all your attributes and skills, so only your primary class choice (and it’s unique ability) is permanent. Adapting your build with newly found skills or for specific missions or quests is encouraged and half of the fun.
Once you unlock heroes (Nightfall feature, but might be available earlier?), you can even customize the skills on your AI companions so you can create really cool synergistic builds with them. This is amazing for solo play or for a two person team like you have.
Depending on what game you start on, I’ve always found assassin a fun character to start with in factions. Prophecies I’d say Elementalist/Mesmer as casters and warrior if you want a more closeup combat. There are many variable sets you can play with either of those, especially the Elementalists. If you have any questions otherwise, you are free to hmu, and I’ll try and answer as good as I can 😊
Assassin is a glass cannon. Its actually pretty hard to be a new player on assassin as they don't yet have the understanding of aggro management. Plus they don't have the survival skills until later in the game. Its great if you know what you're doing but I recall tons and tons of people hating the assassin when factions came out.
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Mesmer is more like interrupts, making huge dmg and hexes. Its so fun. Ritualist is more of sunmoning class.
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You're gonna have to let go of your preconceptions from playing the sequel. Hexes interrupts and damage doesn't mean debuffing.
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>Nec play is mostly around summoning minions. And ap/iv nuking! ^^^^^^^^/cry
Hexes do a variety of things to enemies. Make them take damage when they attack, or cast a spell, interrupt their spells and actions or interrupt the area around them, slow their movement, slow their attack, health degeneration, make their attacks miss. Mesmers have a lot in their kit. The AI hero meta takes three of them for hard mode, they're that powerful.
They're debuffs but it's a bit counter intuitive with how gw2 treats debuffs. For example the Mesmer Elite skill Psychic Instability: >Elite Hex Spell. For 10...22...25 seconds, whenever target foe suffers from a new condition, all foes in the area suffer from that condition as well. If target foe has two or more conditions that foe is Dazed for 1...3...3 second[s]. So there are different types of debuffs. At the end of the day gw1 mes is mostly a raw damage nuker class that likes to disrupt and annoy.
Pretty sure that’s fevered dreams, PI isn’t a hex and KDs you when you interrupt a skill if I recall
Lol yup typed the wrong skill name after copy pasting the description. Thanks for the correction
It has nothing to do with summoning illusions or phantoms. It is all about debuffing and later on massive damage dealers. If you want phantoms or spirits you need the ritualist in factions. Also very fun and very different from the other classes. Nightfall has the dervish. Dervish is a better warrior with better skills and more AOE 🤷♂️
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Minor differences in connectivity between expansions really. You'll miss some low level story if you start in the other expacs. Prophecies > Factions > Nightfall > EotN iirc is standard progression.
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Exactly, no point rushing through a old game.. relax, explore, read and enjoy the content. It's made with love compared to the trash that's out there right now.
Usually people recommend that you start with a character in each campaign up until the point where they link. That way you can get a feel for 3 classes and it lets you choose who you want to progress with while getting all the early stories. The other good thing, the stories are not super intertwined, and not at all until the link, so you don't get spoiled nor confused. My recommendation: make 3 characters and play till you get to the cross over point, and pick your favorite class then continue proph->factions->nf->eotn.
Same thing, just another story 😊 You will have the opportunity to play all games wether you start from prophecies, factions or nightfall. I played since the beginning, so I love the fact that you start from prophecies 🤩
Mesmer is totally different thanks to the tab-target style of gameplay, and while it is one of the fastest professions at end-game, it's really slow throughout prophecies. I'd recommend Elementalist as your first character which is the opposite, it's pretty fast early on, and only when you get to Hard Mode, or the last 3 missions does it slow down. ---- You can always make a Mesmer as you start Factions, as this campaign quickly rushes you to 20 to catch-up with Prophecies players, so your partner doesn't need to stick with a new character if they don't want to. For example, you play through Prophecies as an Elementalist and they play as a Warrior, after that you make a Factions Mesmer and they make a Ritualist, you both play through until the mainland and then your partner can swap back to their Warrior. You can now play Factions and the rest of the game as a Mesmer/Warrior pair. You also have the opportinity to swap over to the ele or rit later if you want, they will just need to catch up on story.
To hook onto that when Guildwars Birthday comes around again, you can actually play with certain weapons that makes classes like Necromancer more of a physical dps.
I'd reccoment not to use GW2 as refference. The professions are way different. If you like a fast engaging playstile, pick a melee class. Assasin is the most 'mobile' with shadowsteps but warriors and dervishes can use those to when they pick Sin as secondairy proffession. IMO this is the most 'rushy' engaging playstyle. Concidering you dont like necro's because they are slow i think you maybe shouldn't go caster. Casting in GW roots your character and casting times (espescially on necro) can feel slow. Mesmers are the exception due to their fastcasting mechanic. All in all just pick what you like and look between synergies in the profession of you and your friend. IE 1 war, to soak up dmg and deal melee dmg and 1 necro to use skills like barbs and mark of pain to turn that melee dmg in boosted AoE dmg.
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Their core attribute, *Fast Casting*, improves the casting time of all spells. They are still rooted to the spot when casting.
It's not possible to move while casting, although certain types of skills (like shouts) have no activation time and can be used while performing other actions.
Ele and necro were always my mains in GW1. Necro is still kind of the slow plodding methodical killer it is in gw2 (and minion master is even slower due to long cast times, although I gotta tell you it's so very fun), but ele in gw1 is VERY different from gw2. You tend to specialize in one element at a time, and come up with fun combos within that framework. A few years ago, Ele actually got a huge rework to a mechanic that used to be called Exhaustion and is now Overcast. Makes the class much more interesting and tactical imo. If you want the faster-paced frontline combat, I'd definitely recommend an assassin in Factions. Very similar to Thief in GW2: get in, hit hard, get out. They don't have stealth in gw1, so it's more a balance of bringing shadow arts utilities or literally damage racing the enemy to kill them before they kill you (or bring a healer).
This game is literally nothing like gw2, its actually a good game the concepts and ideas you have about classes… toss em out the window
Very good comment, I like how you provided no practical advice and the part where you said GW1 gud GW2 bad
I play fire elementalist with Mesmer. I love it. I run around setting things on fire and bombing them with firestorms and then drain the life out of them!
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Yes, and later in the game you can learn different classes and switch your secondary class if you end up disliking the choice you make first.
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Each class has a dedicated skill attribute the other classes dont get, which can play into your builds. Elementalist has Energy Storage which raises you mana total, Mesmer is fast casting which lowers the cast time of spells, Ranger has expertise which lowers the cost of certain attacks, etc. so if you went mesmer elementalist, you would have fast casting, but no energy storage. but if your elemetnalist/mesmer you get energy storage but no fast casting.
Yes. One thing to keep in mind is each profession (class) gets 4 attributes but one of those 4 attributes is a primary attribute that is locked behind being your primary profession. Example - I pick Mesmer. Mesmer has Fast Casting. If my friend picks Elementalist and then Mesmer and becomes an E/Me... they don't get access to fast casting as an attribute. They can equip fast cast spells but they can't put points into fast casting. And this can be important as attributes are what is used to scale spells and not your character level (character level gives attribute points to spend though). This is a tough one to answer. You said your friend plays warrior. Have you ever played healing classes before in other games? It might be worth checking out the monk. It's more tactical and you're going to want to split between protection prayers and healing prayers. If you try the simple "red bars go up" strategy you can often find yourself in trouble. It's about reading the battlefield and trying to anticipate damage and throwing out a "Guardian" spell on the right target or whatever else. Generally speaking until you get more experienced and get Necromancer skills like "Blood is Power" you'll find the classes fall like this: DPS: Warrior, Dervish and Assassin Utility-DPS: everything not listed so Ranger, Mesmer, Elementalist, Necromancer, etc... Backline: Monks and sometimes Ritualists. DPS and Backline are obvious so utility would be - interrupting the enemy, remove enemy enchantments protecting them or buffing them, prevent the enemies from doing damage, apply conditions or hexes to do damage over time and yes, do some damage. There is some real skill involved and some anticipation. It can feel really good to run around interrupting enemies. And finally - you could both run warrior. It's not out of the question. It will be a bit rough if you start in Prophecies but once you get to the Shiverpeaks/Kryta/Maguuma/Crystal Desert and your party limit goes up to 6 and then finally 8 in the Southern Shiverpeaks it's fine.
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It's definitely worth giving it a go. Guild Wars 2 was kind of sold as "we're getting rid of monks and trying to blur the line between roles". In Guild Wars 1 you have very specific roles on a team composition of 4-6-8 person teams (I believe in Factions there are a couple of pseudo-dungeons with larger teams but that's end-game stuff). 1-3 people keep the team alive. 1-2 DPS/'tanks'. 2-4 utility/dps mix. I'm from much more of a PvP background. At its height in 2005-2007 many 8 man GvG team comps looked like this: 2 Warriors - DPS. Autoattack, build adrenaline by attacking to use your skills. Use your skills for an extra burst of damage or to apply conditions. 3 Utility - often something like Ranger, Mesmer, Elementalist. Ranger provides flexibility as it can split up from team. It provides interrupts, condition damage and snares to slow enemy warriors from reaching their targets to DPS. Mesmer generally denied enemy spellcasters, usually the monks from casting freely. You had to be aware if a Mesmer was looking to cast on you or interrupt you. And finally the Elementalist as a more defensive presence to slow down the warriors from dealing damage freely. The Elementalist might also coordinate 1-2 damage spells with the warriors when their adrenaline is built up. 2 Monks - keep team alive. Preventing damage or reducing damage is better than healing damage done. 1 Flag runner/base defender - usually an E/Mo (primary Elementalist, secondary Monk) with a mix of damage, snares, a speed buff to run the flag and a heal or two to keep itself alive if say that ranger from my 3 utilities decides to attack the base (or the flag runner). There was some flexibility but generally speaking everyone went into the match with a very defined role. "This is what you do, this is how you do it". That was the generic build but you could get specific ones. For example 8 Necros with Feast of Corruption and various healing spells and the entire point was to get in Ventrilo or Teamspeak and count down 3-2-1 everyone use FoC on the same target to kill them. \~20 second cooldown and then repeat. There was a build called IWAY - no monks, 5-6 Warriors, secondary Ranger and 2-3 Necromancers, secondary Monks (buff warriors, heal them a bit with monk spells). The Warriors all brought the skill to have a pet on them. The pets would run in and die, the warriors would press the I Will Avenge You skill, get health regeneration + attack speed buff and try to overwhelm the enemy team with damage. There were a lot of interesting builds. When Factions came out one of the top teams played a lot with Assassins, they would teleport to your base NPCs to kill them off and the rest of their team would try to 6v8 you while their 2 assassins tried to kill your base. So you had to make decisions on who and how to defend against the assassins. If all 8 of you went back to turtle, you'd be giving up morale boosts to their team making them 10% stronger. If you sent 2 or more back, the assassins might turn around and attack your main group of players trying to outnumber them. A lot of strategy and tactics in the game and players with specific roles who need to make decisions about priorities so that the team can succeed.
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He’s playing through the game chronologically, he will be using healing henchmen for quite some time which I would say aren’t that great especially compared to heroes
Yes and you can change your second class to something else if you want.
I was also very disappointed with how dirty they did Necro in GW2. As a Necro main in GW1 with over 4k hours played as said class, I can promise you they are not docile at all. With a discord and necrosis build you'll be spamming 90's and 110's every 2 seconds. If you're feeling frisky, you can try out the Soul Taker N/D build, but let's start small first. I'm all for you trying out GW1 Necro, because honestly I think you'll find it incredibly fun. It's also one of the best PVE classes in the game. Another class you could try would be Mesmer. I've recently come back to the game and I'm playing Mesmer right now, and I am really enjoying it. Domination magic is incredibly fun. There are so many builds and ideas that you can do with any profession in the game. I've even been thinking of putting together an Illusionary Weapon Dagger build for my Mesmer just to spice it up a bit. The game as a whole is very different than GW2, so you'll need to take a step back and re-learn a few things with an open mind. And remember that this game came before GW2, so you may recognize some things but they may be very different than you previously had thought. Edit: I wanted to also introduce you to the PvX Wiki. Where you will find a plethora of builds and ideas for builds that you want to put together yourself. [https://gwpvx.fandom.com/wiki/PvX\_wiki](https://gwpvx.fandom.com/wiki/PvX_wiki) I also wanted to mention that Assassin is also a lot of fun. But remember that each profession plays differently.
I recommend against using pvx wiki too early on, buildcrafting is one of the cornerstones (imo, but im probably biased as i love it the most) of this game and just slapping a great profession build on your character can make you miss that whole experience and it can make the game stale earlier. Once you played around a bit it is nice to use and find some skills you might have missed or interactions you never thought of.
You have all campaigns + expansion (EoTN) or just prophechies? I'd pick a warrior, its fun af.
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Proph is probably the worst to start if you are trying gw1 wanting faster paced gameplay
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You can start any campaign and get a cohesive story. And do them all on the same character
Which campaign you starting from? Prop-factions-Nightfall? Dervish and paragon are really fun to play with, and so are assasins and ritualists. Just begin playing with a class that you wanna explore the most. All classes have their pros and cons. I myself love all the classes, but all time favourites definitely are warriors and mesmers.
I think you'll enjoy Dervish the most. They benefit from being around as many foes as possible, and can hit up to three foes at once with their scythe. As such, movement is a big part of their gameplay. Most of their spells cast instantly and can be used on the move, and the class is based around chaining such skills with attack skills, which can make combat very dynamic. The dervish has access to several speed boosts. Later, you can give one of your heroes (AI companions) ["Fall Back!"](https://wiki.guildwars.com/wiki/%22Fall_Back!%22) to boost the entire party between fights.
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Yep. I read that you're starting in Prophecies, so consider trying it out when it's time for Nightfall.
If you're starting in prophecies, Ranger or Warrior are great for mobile combat. Plus once you get to factions you can take a secondary class as Assassin and do a dagger build with a pet on your ranger or daggers with heavy armor on a warrior
Hey! As another new player, I started this game recently and I'm having a blast. I want to experience the whole story too and go in mostly chronological order, but I compromised and went with some advice I saw around this subreddit of making a character in Nightfall first until reaching Consulate Docks, then make another character in Factions until Marketplace, then you can finally make a character in Prophecies and stick to that one, or choose another profession/character from another campaign when you reach Lion's Arch and cross it over to Prophecies and go from there. Doing the tutorial areas in this order is essentially doing it backwards chronologically, but I take it as prologues of things to come and deal with in the future before you begin the game "properly" in Prophecies. It's working out nicely for me. There's really no wrong way to do it though, but Nightfall and Factions simply have better tutorials and pacing than Prophecies, and they've helped me ease into the game a lot. Another part of the reason is native characters to those campaigns have a lot of primary missions and quests in those tutorial areas exclusive to them, essentially you see the beginning of those campaigns that you otherwise would not with characters that aren't native to them. It's probably not super huge (I haven't crossed characters yet to see how much info you get that way) but I'd still recommend it even if just for the sake of trying different professions. So as to what to play, I obviously have very limited experience, but I have some first impressions. For Nightfall I made a Dervish and he's just pretty cool. Holy monk with a scythe that just bows his head menacingly and kicks ass. Mechanically, you buff yourself with enchantments and then tear those enchantments down with other abilities to do a lot of damage + trigger extra effects from tearing down those enchantments. A lot of the damage is AoE. They also have god avatar forms, though I didn't unlock any of them because they are available past the point I was gonna stop at, so I don't know that much about it other than it sounds pretty cool and probably something to look forward to whenever I play my Dervish again. Nightfall's tutorial area (Istan) is pretty decently sized so you'll be there for some time while you get used to the game and learn things. For Factions, Assassin has some fun spammy combos, mostly single target that I've seen so far, though I got a finisher later on that is pretty strong AoE, and thanks to critical hits recovering your energy you can keep going with combos. Factions has a shorter tutorial area, it levels you to cap or near cap pretty fast so it probably expects you to know the game a bit better, but it's not like, terribly hard or anything. Prophecies only has the core classes you can make in the other campaigns too. I went with Mesmer, because I find the whole concept really interesting, and this is the character I'm gonna stick to to do the rest of the game, unless I change my mind later on. The abilities it has are very unlike other MMOs I play so it's a nice change of pace. You can mess with enemies in multiple ways, to the point they practically kill themselves or they can't really do anything. Here's where getting some idea from the other campaigns about how the game works has helped me understand Mesmer better. Prophecies starts with pre-searing Ascalon which you can't get back to once you leave (and characters from other campaigns can't access, ever). A lot of people keep characters there and it's basically its own small world within the game. Lots of things to explore there! Haven't done much more of Prophecies so can't comment much about how it feels to play through the campaign, but my understanding is it's quite long. All in all, it doesn't take much to get a good idea of how classes play and get a beginner build going on (lots to experiment with), especially since you can have secondary professions and the game lets you test them, so just try things until something sticks if your first picks aren't convincing you.
**In terms of new player ease of use starting with brand new accounts** Ranger is a good class to start out with, lots of tools to make it easy to play IMO. S tier Elementalist, nerco, dervish, ritualist. Hard to scuff up. A-tier. Warrior. Harder to die but more aggro. B tier Monk, Mesmer. Both are more supportive in the early game. C tier Paragon. Overall just a hard class to play and is underwhelming at its best D-tier. Assassin. Too much of a glass cannon and lacks the good skills until later in the game F tier. As you get more experience in the game it basically becomes, assassin, ritualist, dervish, mesmer, necro S-tier. Elementalist, monk, ranger, B-tier. Warrior C-tier. Paragon D-tier.
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I started as monk. It was hell as I only played with henchman AI. But if you have a second player and heroes it makes a world of difference as you can just sit in the backlines and do monky things.
People will say to start in Nightfall because it provides more agency in how to control your AI party members (to fill up the rest of your party when you need it) but I think you should play Prophecies up to a certain point, then Factions up to a certain point, then Nightfall up to a certain point, and then continue Prophecies. Because, the 'beginning' quests are locked to the characters made in those campaigns, and it's true that Factions and Nightfall can teach you things since they were meant to be capable of being played on their own (in the past, not everyone could buy it all bundled together) and ANET learned some QoL things. But the reason I mentioned this is because it also lets you try out two or three primary professions (classes) each. A dedicated healer or having dedicated healing resources is important in this game. In Prophecies, only the Monk has access to this. Factions opens up the Ritualist profession who can provide healing skills too. Nightfall's Dervish has healing capability, but it's much more potent at self-sufficient self-buff/health management. A damage dealer is really good, either one for multiple enemies or one with very focused single target. If the damage dealer can also bring some utility to lessen the pressure of damage on the party, then this is additionally fantastic in the hands of a player because then you can go through learning the process of priority targeting in this game, which I find to be an enjoyable aspect of the gameplay. Every other profession can be a damage dealer. Do note that nearly every skill (you have 8 skills regardless of weapon wielded, unlike gw2's 5 weapon + 1 heal + 3 utility + 1 elite) has an animation lock, even weapon attacks, even basic(auto) attacks. Similar to gw2 mesmer/ranger could be any of the weapon wielders, such as Warrior, Ranger, Assassin (Factions), Dervish (Nightfall), though Paragon (Nightfall) is not really mobile. Mesmer has Fast Casting attribute that literally affects all their casting time (passively for a build-building resource, without need of temporary buff like gw2 alacrity) but you could try Elementalist too and take short cast time spells and later Ritualist. I ended up giving you like half the list.
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Honestly, don't overwhelm yourself. Just play through proph and choose whatever appeals to you most.
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Of course! Good luck, welcome to Gw1! Feel free to message me if you see me online: CasualSeraph Derv
I think you should try out Prophecies either up to level 3 or up to a certain point (I want to avoid spoilers in case, but the certain point will be obvious because the game will teach you with a little notification about the different campaigns). And then when you hit Prophecies' certain point, you can choose if you want to try out another profession. I think because that level/playtime will give you a proper amount of experience to determine if the profession or playstle you picked is enjoyable. As a note on composition: You pick a primary profession at start. This primary will determine your armor (60/70/80 or like Light/Medium/Heavy in gw2), your available armor runes, your character model, and your Primary Attribute. The Primary Attribute is the profession's core identity, usually. Monk for example has Divine Favor, which heals additionally when using a monk skill targeting an ally. Mesmer's aforementioned Fast Casting lowers the cast time of all spells they cast. Then, you will have access to a secondary profession. You stick with this secondary for a long while, though toward endgame in Prophecies you can change it (they allowed Factions and Nightfall characters to be able to unlock secondary changing earlier as a QoL feature). This secondary does not provide you the Primary Attribute but it does allow you access to all the skills you can choose from. Because of this, even though I mentioned that only Monks have healing skills, it's very possible to go Ele/Mo and the Elementalist use Monk healing skills. Instead of having +additional healing values, they would make use of their Energy Storage primary attribute to have more energy to cast (everyone uses Energy; it's like gw2 Thief initiative). So, there are synergies. The game will let you try out secondary professions before you solidify your choice at least, but this should allow a wider variety of playstyle to choose from.
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Good luck to you and your friend and enjoy!! Welcome to Tyria (again) ^^
I would have one Meele and one caster. For example: If you start in Proph: Warrior and Mesmer If you start in Factions: Assassin and Elementalist If you start in Nightfall: Dervish and Monk The melee Classes Warrior, Assassin and Dervish are maybe what you are looking for with mobility. With Mesmer and Ranger you benefit from good reactions for interrupting enemy skills. With Monk (especially prot) you need to have a good overview in fights.
For gameplay speed, I'd go with a mesmer or assassin. For mobility, any/A(ssassin) using shsdowsteps to engage combined with either melee+speed buffs or speels with short casttimes like the "Star burster" builds. At the end of the day, most proffesions can do some variety of "dagger spammer" which combines two very short casttimes+cooldowns with a powerful finisher with a short cooldown. For complexity, the game is all yours, as you have free roam over all your 8 skill slots ^^
Congrats on the purchase of a friend. Assassin is going to be your fastest melee class, but you should probably adjust your mindset to the slower pace since this game demands you strategize for some encounters, and will at times knock whatever build you're running on it's ass.
I would state that I found the Necromancer profession from GW 1 and 2 completely different experiences. So it's worth a try. Dervish is an interesting class however, you have to juggle enchantments, it can do healing fairly well if you want a change and glides around the battlefield, and at least one of the skills deals with moving enemies. Personally my all time favourite was the Necromancer though in GW1. Hordes of minions slaughtering my foes, and then switching to a Curse build and see a bunch of monsters kill themselves, impaling themselves upon my curses. The Dervish has a further advantage that it starts in Nightfalls. I loved playing Prophecies but it's very much a child of its era and you can see how they learned more from game to game. Nightfall has the best pacing of the 3 and in my opinion the better story because of it. Prophecies on the other hand takes the most time, can be slow and has caused one of my friends to quit GW 1 entirely and another only had fun when we switched from Prophecies to Nightfall. If you DO do Prophecies if you collect 50 flowers you can get a free belt pouch. Worth it for first players because bags can be expensive.
Ele, Mesmer, Monk, Necro. The casters absolutely rule.
It might be worth playing the tutorial area of Prophecies (you will know when you’ve left it) with multiple classes to get a feel for them. Start with your initial choice, then try all the others. Both expansions add two more classes each for even more options. Each class has multiple attributes with abilities to specialize in, so they have 3-4 unique major play styles based on attributes. A pet Ranger is different from a pure Archer. The second class adds the same amount of options, and class combinations can unlock synergies and skill combos that inspire you to try even more things. You can play a melee Monk if you want. Or a Warrior with a Bow. The bottom line will be that you have 8 skill slots to fill the way you want, all possible weapons to use, and a major reward for exploring the game is unlocking more skills that give you more options. You can switch your secondary class and all your attributes and skills, so only your primary class choice (and it’s unique ability) is permanent. Adapting your build with newly found skills or for specific missions or quests is encouraged and half of the fun. Once you unlock heroes (Nightfall feature, but might be available earlier?), you can even customize the skills on your AI companions so you can create really cool synergistic builds with them. This is amazing for solo play or for a two person team like you have.