An Introduction to Guild Wars

I've decided that I will infact do most of this blog about Guild Wars and since I have nothing else to do i'll start now =P I'm not going to explain all the mechanics of the game in one blog, instead i'll just break it down into a series of blogs, with each one looking at a different aspect of the game (although staying within the pvp side) and then moving on to detail the progress of my current guild GvG Scrubs [prOs]. Yes, we are pro =D

Ok so, what is Guild Wars? Guild Wars is a Massively Multiplayer Online Roleplaying Game, which was released in 2004, it is made up of 3 seperate games, which can be combined to create 1 big world or just played seperately. There is also an expansion which you do need a previous game to play.

Guild Wars is not a conventional MMORPG though, it has also been called CORPG which stands for Co-Operative Online Roleplaying Game. This is mainly because the world which Guild Wars is set in, is not one persistant world, where all players play in the same map and can meet each other wherever they go. Guild Wars is mainly composed of areas called Cities/Towns and Explorable areas. Players can interact, trade and chat within a Town or City and can also form "Parties" which is essentially a group, this party can be a maximum size of 8 people in the higher end areas of the game, and 4 people in the starting areas.

Once a party has been formed the players go through one of the exits in the town where the explorable area is loaded just for the players currently in that party. If any seperate parties exit through the same way, a new map will be loaded for them, which will consist of the same enemies etc etc but will not involve your party. This is called an Instance and once within an instance you cannot change any of the skills you currently have with you.

This party formation essentially creates the core of Guild Wars, it is meant to played in a team, while there is nothing preventing you from forming a 1 man party, you will procceed to get owned =P Although in certain cases people can go out solo, but this is only done for farming gold (money), which I will not go into.

Now, onto the basics of the game.

Assuming you own all of the Guild Wars games (which I do) when you go to create a character you will have a choice of 8 different "Professions", these are the Warrior, Necromancer, Monk, Ranger, Mesmer, Elementalist, Assassin, Ritulist, Dervish and Paragon. I will explain each of these in depth in a future blog.

Once you have choosen your proffession you can choose whether to play a female or male character and then customize the visual appearance of your character and then you will be loaded into the first town of the game.

Each profession has a skill bar, this can be made up of a maximum of 8 different skills, including 1 elite skill (these are as the name indicates, better than average skills), this composition of 8 skills is what we call a "Build".

Now, there are 2 types of profession. Your primary profession and your secondary profession. Your primary profession is the profession you picked at the start and will dictate your visual appearance, the armour you can wear, the amount of energy you have and also your primary attribute (will go into this later). Your secondary profession, the options for which are the same as the primary profession (warrior etc etc), gives you access to all of that professions skills, but does not allow you to wear armour from that profession or use that professions primary attribute. This creates and absolutely enormous possible combinations for the 8 skills that you can take with you into an instance as each profession has over 100 different skills.

Most professions have 4 attributes (3 normal attributes and 1 primary attribute) however Warriors and Elementalists have 5 (4 normal attributes, and 1 primary), all of your chosen professions skills are tied to these 4 or 5 attributes. So if you choose to be a Warrior/Elementalist, you will have in total 9 attribute lines or if you choose to be a Monk/Ritulist you will have 7 attributes in total etc etc. You are given a set amount of "Attribute points" and so can raise the level of the desired attribute, this in turn will increase the power of all the skills attached to that attribute. So, while you may have access to the skills which are tied to the Elementalists primary attribute, you will not be able to increase their strength, as you can only access the Warriors primary attribute if your primary profession is a Warrior. As you only have a limited amount of attribute points you cannot raise all of your attribute lines to a reasonable strength and so generally most good builds will only use skills from 3 different attribute lines, as spreading the attribute points any thinner than this usually results in a less than effective build.

That was a longer blog than expected, but explaining the basics of the game is usually what takes the longest and once they are understood, most other things are easy to explain. So in the next few blogs I will start detailing what each of the professions strengths and weaknesses are and how they are used in competitive play.