newbie

Good Morning Folks. I’ve had a bit of a fraught relationship with Guild Wars 2, given that I resigned from the alpha program initially… and then later came to terms with exactly the sort of game that it was. That understanding became a deep love of its quirky systems and wholly unique community. The challenge however… is that on-boarding new friends into the game is a bit of a pain in the ass. I went through a lot of this with my friend Zarly, and quite honestly… she is what has prompted me to sit down an attempt the impossible… creating a starter guide. I’ve been playing this game since 2011 in one form or another and there are just aspects to the game that are so ingrained in me… that it is sometimes hard to realize how wildly different it is than the archetypal “World of Warcraft” norms for MMORPGs. As such I am going to attempt to set out to explain some of the core elements. This will of course be woefully incomplete… because I am effectively setting out to do the impossible which is to try and cram fourteen years of already incomplete knowledge into a single blog post.

Character Creation

The beginning of any MMORPG journey starts with Character Creation. This is also the point at which the true analysis paralysis begins, because Guild Wars 2 in particular asks the player a lot of questions… and at the same time does not really explain what matters and what does not matter. Basically the only elements that have lasting ramifications are your race and profession. Those are locked in and unchangeable. All of the questions that you are asked after that first decision, are mostly flavor shaping how your personal story is going to play out. There might be later calls back to these elements, but they will not drastically change the game after the first thirty levels. Essentially the Core Guild Wars 2 story can be divided up into three segments:

• Your Racial Origin Story – Levels 1 – 30
  • This is largely centered around the race of your choice and will start with a tutorial mission and then follow forth with you being mentored by one of the members of Destiny’s Edge.
• The Orders Story – Levels 30-70
  • At level 30 the Racial aspects of your story stop and you are asked to choose one of three orders, and from that point until around level 70 you will be largely following a preset story arc centered around that group. The three orders are:
    • Durmand Priory – Researchers, Scholars, and Archivists
    • Order of Whispers – Spies, and Assassins
    • The Vigil – Soldiers
  • There are no hard profession requirements for each of these, but it is just more the vibe of the order. If you have any doubts I highly suggest Order of Whispers because it has the best story overall.
• The Pact Story – Levels 70-80
  • Leading up to level 70, some major world events start happening which require the three orders to tightly coordinate together and form a brand new group referred to as the Pact. Any choices that you made during the Racial and Order story segments might be name checked in the future, but from this point on you are largely part of this group until the primary story arc of the game completes with End of Dragons.

There are reasons to make all of the different choices that you are given… but effectively I would say just choose something and move on with your life. Any impact that they might have are VERY short lived, and you have so much game ahead of you especially once you factor in all of the Living World Seasons and Expansions… so any option is going to be fine.

Combat and Leveling

The first core difference between Guild Wars 2 and other MMORPGs is that it is not a purely tab target and spam spells sort of gameplay. You can move while you are attacking and by default you are firing your attacks in whatever direction that your cursor is pointing. So in order for me to hit this griffon on the above screenshot with my ranged attacks, I need to be pointing my cursor at the target. Generally speaking you have your first skill with any weapon as an auto attack, and then the rest of your skills do different things and have longer cool downs. The most effective combat is to weave together profession abilities and weapon skills for both of your weapons. You can make it through MOST open world content in the game by just spamming your auto attack, but it will be less than optimal game play. Hitting every ability on cooldown is also not necessarily optimal gameplay. You need to understand what every skill does, and the best scenario to use it.

The game uses a pretty familiar friend vs foe system. Anything highlighted in Red will attack you if you get close enough to it. Anything that shows up as yellow is neutral but will turn red if you take a hostile action towards this. Usually this is attacking it outright, but occasionally this will involve taking some action that the target does not like. For example there is a common trope during collection quests where there will be a bunch of neutral mobs in amongst the things that you are collecting and if you pick up one of the items… it turns anything near you hostile forcing you to run back to the objective with monsters trailing you. Anything that is Green is considered an ally and cannot be attacked and will not openly attack you. Occasionally part of stories and events Green mobs might turn hostile but will change their color to Red before doing so.

There is a concept that is extremely important and that can often determine success or failure in large events. However please note… that this is also something that you will not encounter super often until you reach the end game and later expansions. That concept is the “Break Bar” or more correctly termed Defiance Bar. Essentially it is a row of grey shields that appears below the health bar on some bosses, and occasionally on very specific normal encounters. When this row is present it means that the mob is taking much less damage. However occasionally that grey bar will turn blue which means you need to do anything you can to lower it giving you and all of the other players a “burn phase” to deal extra damage to the boss. Certain skills will say that they deal “defiance damage” and you want to largely hold these in reserve when you are encounters with a break bar. After you have “broken” the bar it will turn orange and start filling up again indicating how much longer you have on your current burn phase. Once it goes back to Grey shields, you are back to dealing lowered damage again. Like I said this is something that you will not encounter for awhile, but it is important enough that I am highlighting this functionality so that you at least know it exists.

After you kill something in game, you are going to want to loot any items that drop. This is a bit of a quirk of Guild Wars 2 in that looting is not clicking on the corpse, but instead getting in range of it and then using the default interaction key of F to vacuum up anything in the area. If there is loot available there will be little sparkles showing up over the corpse. I zoomed in closely so that I could give an example of what that is going to look like. The above screenshot also shows the AOE Loot interaction popup. Eventually given enough time you can earn the Advanced Logistics mastery on the Pact Commander track which allows you to have everything you kill automatically looted into your inventory. In World vs World it works a little differently but there is a Provision Master skill line you can invest points into in order to get the same auto loot functionality.

Every time your character levels up you will be presented with this screen showing you what just unlocked. Guild Wars 2 tries to roll systems out to you slowly, as not to overwhelm you. However I feel like this sort of has the opposite effect given how quickly levels roll past… it seems like you are constantly having new things thrown at you. After you hit accept on this screen it is going to give you a preview of what abilities unlock for your next level, giving you a bit of a heads up from how far away you are from various systems. I get what the game is going for… but I also feel like to a brand new player who has never played a game like this… that it probably feels like an overload of information. If there is something that you want to know more detail about you can click the information icon out to the side of each element and it will pop up an explanation of what that item is. For example if you click on Conditions it not only pops up a paragraph of text explaining it but also highlights where in the user interface that information shows up.

Another system that you are introduced to pretty quickly is the Adventure Guide. This is essentially a series of Achievements that are designed to walk you through the basics of learning the game. Completing each objective will focus on a single concept. This is definitely a positive step forward, but also… players don’t really read dialogs anymore. This only really adds to the information overload aspect of having to learn too many things at once. These are absolutely worth doing however and will count towards unlocking various achievement rewards. This also familiarizes the player with the existence of Achievements which in other games would be though of as side quests. This is the first of many cases where Guild Wars 2 is using a word that lots of other games use… but applying a wildly different meaning towards it. In World of Warcraft most achievements are essentially stretch goals… a way to flex on others because you have done something in a manner that is outside of the ordinary. In Guild Wars 2, this is how you unlock a lot of optional side systems like all of the most interesting mounts.

The User Interface

One of the first challenges that will face you… is learning how to read the user interface. There is a heck of a lot going on there, and there will be things flashing at you trying to get your attention. In order to dive into the process of writing this guide, I started a brand new account so that I would be able to see again what this looks like to a brand new player. I applied some color blocks to the user interface screenshot and labeled these and am going to talk about each of the elements. If you want more information I highly suggest spending time on the excellent Guild Wars 2 Wiki, and more specifically they have a page devoted to the User Interface. The problem with the Wiki is that you have to know what you need to know… before you can find it… and it is also an awful lot to throw at a brand new player.

1. The Menu Bar
   • This section of the UI is located in the upper left-hand corner of the screen and gives you access to some of the basic systems like the Game Menu, Contacts, Hero Screen, Inventory, Mail, and Guild interfaces. It also grants access to some of the game modes like World vs World and PVP as well as giving you the ability to sell things on the auction house from anywhere in the world via the Black Lion Trading Company. There are shortcuts that you will likely learn to get into all of these systems, but when in doubt you can always just hit these icons.
2. Group Interface
   • This is where all of your party and squad related information will be shown. I am not in a group in the screenshot but once you are in one, several icons will be shown descending down the left side of the screen. When you are in a squad you will see a large block of small icons indicating every member with their profession icon. For folks used to other MMORPGs, squads are effectively raid groups, with the key difference here being you have to have purchased a Commander tag in order to create them.
3. Objective Pointer
   • I legitimately have no clue what this is actually called, but essentially it is a little window that points you in the direction of your next objective. If you have a quest set as active it will show you the direction you need to go for that. If you do not have a quest active, it is going to show you the next undiscovered element in your current zone or the nearest event that is happening.
4. Quest List
   • Again I have no clue what this element is actually called but in common MMORPG verbiage this is the quest list. This shows you what step in a given story quest you are on and also shows you any achievements you are tracking. The thing that took me forever to realize, is that in this game… Achievements are essentially what side quests would be in any other game. The only “quests” that show up by default are the story driven quests. However there is an almost infinite amount of content that can be unlocked by browsing through the achievements interface. These can be everything from Kill X Mobs of a Specific Type in a Specific Zone… all the way to multiple hundred hour system unlock grinds like Legendary Weapons.
5. Interaction Dialog
   • This is a little pop up window to the side of your character in the center of your screen that shows you what the current interaction element would be when you hit F the default interaction key. For example in the above image, the interaction option is Talk, but it could be gathering nodes, picking up items, using gadgets in the world… basically this is how you navigate your way through objectives by finding objects and doing the thing highlighted with the F key or whatever you have rebound this to.
6. Awards and Notifications
   • As soon as you get into the game for the first time… there are going to be a bunch of bouncing icons above your mini-map. This is essentially where the game sends you any notifications that require you to interact with them, and it also is where an rewards you have been given show up. When you level up, you will be able to access the level up dialog here outlining what you just got for that level. Later as you complete events or renown hearts, they will show up here giving you any rewards that you have gained from them. You are going to be clicking this area an awful lot.
7. The Chat Window
   • This is extremely straight forward, and works more or less like every other chat interface does. You type in the box and it sends it out to other players in the world. Chat is divided up into various channels and you can filter what shows up in the box. Additionally you can create various tabs of specifically filtered chat that you can flip back and forth between to limit the amount of information you are seeing at any given time. These are the channels that you will have access to:
     • Say/Local – This sends a message and can be seen by anyone standing near you and within 2000 range of you.
     • Map/Yell/Shout – This sends a message to the current map/zone instance that you are in. Essentially everyone can see this. Often used during events to communicate between groups of players not in parties or squads.
     • Party – This sends messages to your active party or squad subgroup. This pretty much works like every game that has this functionality.
     • Squad – Sends a message to the squad you are in. This is essentially raid chat from other games.
     • Team – This is a unique channel mode that only shows up when you are in a PVP game mode which is either structured PVP or World Vs World and sends out a message to everyone that is on the same PVP faction that you represent.
     • Whisper/Tell/Reply – This sends or replies to a message from a single user and is essentially a private message that works much the same as similar concepts on MMORPGs.
     • Guild – This will send a message to the guild that you are currently representing. Guild Wars 2 is a little weird in that it allows you to be a member of six different guilds, and representing is the process of showing that you are actively a member of that guild. It sets your guild tag to that specific guild. You can send messages to any guild regardless if you are representing them or not by typing /g1-/g6 which is the order in which they appear on your guild screen.
8. Profession Mechanics
   • This is a short hotbar of abilities that are default to your profession. They can change based on which Elite spec you are using if you are using one, but essentially are skills that are baked in and are often times the core mechanic for that profession. For example Ranger has pet abilities that show up on this bar which gives you direct control over what your pet is doing. This is going to be different for every profession… which I keep wanting to refer to as your class.
9. Endurance Pips
   • This shows how much endurance your character has and is essentially how many times you can dodge. By default you will have two pips that show up in yellow on this interface that sits on top of your health globe. Various things might change how this works, for example some mount masteries can give you three pips instead of two while riding that mount. Basically if you have a full pip showing up, you can actively dodge something or use abilities that consume endurance.
10. Mini Map
    • Its a small representation of the map. It shows whatever happens to be around you and can be zoomed in and out. Clicking on it will bring up the full map, and if there is some objective that you are tracking or have set a user defined way point… it will show up on the edge of the mini map in the direction that you need to travel in order to get there. If there is a Commander or Mentor active on the map it will show which direction they are located in relation to your current position. I will talk a bit more about those two situations later when I talk about the full map view as understanding the map is SUPER important.
11. Weapon Swap
    • This widget allows you to swap which set of weapons you are actively using. Normally you would be doing this through your hotkey, but if you are more of a clicker… you can click this widget to perfect a weapon swap.
12. Weapon Skills
    • This is where Guild Wars 2 really begins to differentiate itself from other games. If you think of a traditional 10 key MMORPG hotbar, the first five slots are determined by what weapons you have equipped. Every profession has specific abilities that it gains from equipping each of the weapon types that it can equip. If you are wielding a one-hander and another one-hander or off-hand the first three slots will be determined by your mainhand, and the last two will be determined by your offhand. If you are using a two handed weapon, then all five slots will be determined by that one weapon. Swapping your weapons… will produce a different set of five skills. You will have to play around with what each weapon does for your profession because sometimes it is less than obvious. Necromancer Axe is a ranged weapon, so is Greatsword for Mesmers… both a non-standard interpretation of what a traditionally melee weapon might do. Basically equip every weapon at least once so that you can fiddle with it and decide which you actually like using.
13. Health Globe
    • It’s a Health Globe. It shows how much life you have and also shows if there is an over-shield on you. Not sure what else I can add of value here.
14. Trait Skills
    • I said the first five skills on you hotbar came from your weapons, and the second set of five skills are chosen from a pool that is based on which three traits you have chosen for your character and how much you have progressed them. The first skill in this second set of five will always be your healing ability. You can choose from several different ones, and they all have their edge cases as to which you might want to use them. The next three skills are referred to as Utility Skills and can be chosen in any order from a massive pool of skills that you gain from your profession and the traits you have equipped. The last skill in this batch of five will always be your elite skill. This is a special extra powerful ability inherited from whichever trait you have equipped as your elite trait or one of the ones associated with the core profession.
15. Mounts
    • Once you have gained a mount, either through completing the mastery track that unlocks it… or reaching level 10 and unlocking it through the new player progression it will show up in this menu. Whichever mount you have selected from this menu will be the mount that you use when you hit the active hotkey or press this widget.
16. Experience Bar
    • This shows how much experience you have gained and how far from the next level you are. Once you have hit level 80, this turns into your mastery bar and shows how much experience you have gained towards the next mastery objective that you are working towards. This bar will also show what your current level is and whether or not the zone you are in has down-scaled you to a lower level.

There are a few other user interface elements that can show be situational… but really I am focused on the core elements that every new player will see rather than things that may show up given time. If you want more detail then once again I highly suggest you spend some time reading the wiki page about the Graphical User Interface.

The Map Screen

Almost more important than learning how to interpret the default user interface of the game… is understanding the map. Guild Wars 2 is a game that gives you an immense amount of information in a very condensed form, but you have to be able to interpret it. Most of your time you are going to be roaming around maps and interacting with various elements. There is a whole side goal of getting 100% world completion which unlocks items needed for crafting Legendary Weapons. Before that however… doing things on the map are going to be your main way of gaining experience and progressing from 1 to 80. Later it is going to be through the map, and meta events that you progress endgame systems and navigate your way through unlocking various aspects of the game through achievements. The wiki is once again the best source of information about this… but I am going to do my best to explain the things you see on the map so that you can interpret them more easily. Everything has a purpose.

Map Markers

	This is a Renown Heart, and is essentially an in map side quest. There will be an NPC indicated by the heart and a number of side objectives will be indicated in the quest list. Completing any of those tasks will fill a progress bar and once filled you will gain a large influx of experience, a specific currency called karma, and often times unlock a new vendor on the map.
	This is a Waypoint icon. When you move close to this icon on the map, it will discover an Asuran Waypoint and the center of this icon will turn light blue. At any point you can click on a discovered Waypoint to teleport to that location. Generally speaking I consider finding all the waypoints to be one of the higher priorities in a map because it will make your travel much faster after that.
	This icon indicates a Scout. Scouts will give you a report about the current area, and will flag objectives nearby and unveil areas of the map from the default fog of war state. These are skippable but will tell you a good deal of lore about the region which can be fun.
	This is a Vista. These are often hard to get to but reward the player with a really cool cinematic. You get experience for completing them, but otherwise these are mostly just for map completion objectives.
	This green starburst indicates a location associated with your currently active story quest. Initially this will be your personal story quest, but later will indicate the active expansion that you are working on.
	The skull and crossbones icon indicates a downed player or NPC and resurrecting them will give you experience. If it is an NPC associated with a renown heart it will also likely give you progress towards filling the bar. It is always a good idea to resurrect your fellow players. Sure you get experience but it is also the right thing to do.
	This icon indicates a vendor. They will usually sell necessary equipment like gathering tools or salvage kits. When you fill a renown heart it will often turn that NPC into a vendor selling unique items that are exclusive to that area.
	This is a point of interest. These largely associated with map completion goals but occasionally can be the marker for some really interesting stuff. For example there are some really interesting underwater cities associated with Hylek and Quaggan that you might not ever see were it not for the POI markers.
	This is a Hero Challenge icon. Generally speaking these will trigger some sort of battle against a Veteran or greater encounter that will then reward Hero Points, which are used to level trait lines and unlock elite classes. Sometimes these will simply be channeled abilities that will reward you the points, other times it might be a looted item that you then need to use from your inventory. You will absolutely need to seek these out to progress your character.
	Once you reach the expansion content and have hit level 80, you will start to see Mastery Insights showing up on your map. Essentially channeling at this location will unlock Mastery Points that are then spent to unlock the various mastery tracks for that expansion.
	These little dots indicate that path you have traveled on the current map instance. Mostly this is just a neat aspect of the map, but can occasionally be useful for tracing your steps.
	This is a Commander Tag and represents the way structured content happens in Guild Wars 2. They come in nine different colors that you commander can set for themselves and represent that someone is running a squad on that current map. Generally speaking you can click on the tag on the map and choose Join Squad to get into whatever activity they are doing. Unfortunately in WvW there are a lot of folks who close their squads… which I feel like is a bit of a dick move. There is a variant referred to as the Catmander which instead looks like a little Cat Head. Regardless of which version it costs 300g and serves as a pretty significant commitment of resources to be able to “tag up”. Players tend to run a specific color, for example when I tag I tag up as the Purple Catmander.
	Similar in appearance, but lacking a lot of functionality is the Mentor Tag. These are gained through completing the Pact Mentor step on the Pact Commander Mastery track. Unfortunately they do not bestow the ability to create a squad, but players often use them as a way of making themselves show up on a map for the purpose of other players finding that location. These are often referred to as “Apples” because the icon that appears over the head of the player prominently features an apple.
	This indicates the beginning of an event. Often times these are NPCs that are just sort of waiting there for you to talk to them before kicking off a larger event. I am going to go into further detail about events next, but wanted to treat this icon as part of the larger map discussion instead.

Events on Maps

Events are very much the secret sauce of Guild Wars 2. They are reoccurring events that either cycle in a rotation of available events, or fire at specific times of day. For special events and zone metas there is even this handy timer schedule that shows what events are active at that very moment and what ones are about to fire soon. They are always fairly rewarding and almost always worth your time to stop whatever you are doing and complete them. They also offer this wonderful impromptu grouping activity where you and other player can temporarily collaborate in order to finish an activity together. On most nights I set out with a fixed goal, but then end up roaming around from event to event because I get easily distracted. Events never encourage player conflict, and as such… it has helped to build the unique community that Guild Wars 2 has. These have their own set of markers associated with them that explain what the goal of a given event is.

	These are easily my favorite type of event and represent a boss of some sort. These vary wildly based on the zone but are usually at least a Veteran level encounter and will drop some pretty decent rewards once completed. These are generally fast to complete.
	Another very common event type is marked with the shield icon and this will either indicate that you need to protect a specific NPC or protect some other objective at that location. Often times this will involve escorting a group around the map between two specific locations where you will be ambushed several times along the path.
	Another fairly common objective is the crossed swords, which means you will need to kill a bunch of monsters that spawn at a location. How this actually plays out varies wildly but it will involve killing a bunch of relatively normal spawns. These phases can also be chained with other phases.
	The last of the four that I am going to cover is a collection event. This will involve you either picking up items and returning them to a location or harvesting items and returning them to an NPC. Sometimes this will be combined with the crossed swords so that you are killing monsters which drop something, that then needs to be deposited somewhere.

There are other event types, but these four are the most common and if you understand them it is going to get you most of the way towards learning how to interpret events as they spawn on the map. Occasionally you will encounter events that are red instead of orange. These are generally associated with World Bosses, Zone Metas, or some sort of player summoned event like a Rift Hunt. To be completely honest… some of the color coding of things in Guild Wars 2 has been an evolving process over the course of the last decade. Not even meta is colored red… sometimes they are colored yellow… or have unique icons associated with them. However once you learn to interpret events as a whole, the rest of the details can be figured out on the fly. Basically I want you to feel comfortable enough that when you see an event going on… to tag along and have fun. Throwing yourself into random events is quite possibly the best aspect of the game, and you should never feel afraid to do it. Players are generally fairly forgiving of failed states… and only the most hardcore and newest meta events really have any friction associated with them.

Future Discussions

At this point if you truly are a brand new player… I am certain I have completely overloaded you. At some point I will probably pick up this discussion because I have yet to talk about buildcraft in any fashion. I’ve only covered some of the quirks of Guild Wars 2 Combat and Leveling, and then gave you a bit of a primer on how to interpret the user interface and the game map. There are countless other systems that I could talk about in length, and I think the next time I do one of these it will be focused on how to understand a written guide and then translate that into recreating it in game. You can essentially get through the core story without having any clue what you are doing. You can and should pick whatever you think is the most enjoyable and then just do that thing until you clear core Tyria. As you dive into further content in the expansions however… what is acceptable and viable starts to narrow a bit and you will probably want to find a build.

Anyways… hopefully someone out there in the future will find this nonsense useful. Further adventures down this whole path of “Bel Writes Guides” will probably be a bit more bite sized. I only dove this far down the rabbit hole because it is the Memorial Day holiday and I had the time to spend a few hours knocking this out. I am by no means an expert in this game. There are aspects that I am still learning myself. However I did find a gap in the content that was available, in that none of it seems to really be targeting someone who has zero to twenty hours in the game. I am sure someone will show up in the comments telling me how wrong I am about various elements, and that is okay. However it is also my hope that someone out there finds this helpful as they begin their journey to understanding this extremely rich game.