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If one were to purchase Guild Wars...
deadonthestreet
Registered User regular
Registered User regular
...would one want to buy the expansions right off for the best experience? Will you be locked out of certain choices if you start out with just the vanilla version? Or is the standard game a good starting point?
Also any other general info about the game would be good. I'm considering a purchase, and there's no info here at PA because everyone that plays exiled themselves to another forum for Guild Wars talk. So yeah, any help would be appreciated.
Also any other general info about the game would be good. I'm considering a purchase, and there's no info here at PA because everyone that plays exiled themselves to another forum for Guild Wars talk. So yeah, any help would be appreciated.
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Instead of thinking of them as expansions, think of them as three separate inter-connected games. Each works fine on its own and each has roughly the same amount of content as all the others.
Like do they have different classes in the different games?
Don't listen to this guy. Guild Wars is a perfectly viable alternative to the pay to play MMO games out there. WoW might have a richer gaming experience, but for me the $15 a month just isn't worth the difference. I would recommend playing the original game first, then add the expansions later on. The expansions add new classes and environments, but the experience isn't "incomplete" if you don't have them right off the bat. And yes, you can use the same character throughout all the expansions.
I've heard Nightfall is more soloing-friendly.
The standard game is good for starting too (like, duh), but I'd probably hold off on Factions for a while. The other two packs have a far better campaign than it does.
Factions has a steep learning curve (so I hear. I owe it but haven't played it yet), but I'm enjoying my time in Prophecies. Took me... Let's see bought it at launch.... Ok, I FINALLY got out of Ascalon (the starting country) last week, and I'm really enjoying the single player campaign.
I'm not sure about Nightfall, as I've yet to pick it up, but Factions is very solo friendly. It's also much easier to level up compared to the original.
Either way both expansions are so much better than the original that it's almost unbelievable. "Guild Wars" blows hard. It's generic, too difficult and entirely unfriendly to new players. Oh and its graphics are ugly and bland compared to expansions. Factions and Nightfall offer much better experience since they actually went through and corrected some of the main problems.
This is all very true. BUT I must say I do love Prophecies, probably because I spent so much time playing it. But I would recommend getting Nightfall first because it does seem to be much friendlier to newer players.
nightfall is the most pve-friendly considering gameplay mechanics.
prophecies -> nightfall -> factions seems to be the logical order of purchasing for me, but if you only want to get one then you have a prophecies vs nightfall dilemma ahead of you.
also, prophecies is generally the best in regard of useful skills for pvp.
and finally, if you are planning on serious pvp you will need all 3 chapters anyway in order to be competitive.
Anyway, IMHO the best way to do GW is to buy all three and start a Prophecies character, and take that character to the other campaigns. You get all the benefits that way. Failing that, I agree that Nightfall is the best if you have to buy just one box. Heroes (customizable AI party members) are fantastic, and can be used in other campaigns. Remember that you get access to a large number of good "Core" skills no matter what campaigns you own.
Also, remember that in all GW campaigns, the level cap (20) is irrelevant, since skill selection and intelligence are the key factors for success. In Factions and Nightfall, the main part of the campaign starts at 20. Prophecies starts slow (leveling-wise) compared to the others, but you get a lot of free skills from quests.
> turn on light
Good start to the day. Pity it's going to be the worst one of your life. The light is now on.
There's something to be said for the original campaign, as it's damn long, at least in the beginning kinda makes you care about the story a little, but I would say get Nightfall first, as I've heard it's basically the same thing but better. The original game is really enjoyable if you have friends to play with, but it kinda sucks to solo.
I would say that Prophecies is the most friendly to new players in terms of holding your hand through the vast number of skills. Factions is by far the worst as it just dumps you out there with 150 skills and says here you go. Nightfall is in between.
Also, if you use your brain every single mission in all three campaigns is doable with henchmen.
I would still say to get Nightfall first, as it is the most recent campaign there are more people playing it and thus able to help you while in prophecies some more remote outposts may only be populated at peak times.
Uhm, I'm very sure the Nightfall does in fact have pretty useful PvP skills and arguably better than Prophecies. I can't see many monks using anything other than Nightfall Elites. Same with Eles. Not to mention you get 8 classes to choose from in Nightfall, and only Six in prophecies.
Serious PvP I think is pretty much a bullshit myth except for a very small minority. If you want to RA/TA or HA you can get buy with pretty much the faction you earn whilst playing very easily.
No-one should be buying prophecies first, the game is just shit compared to Nightfall. Shitty voice acting, terrible story, lame setting and boring as sin missions. Versus quite good voice acting, sub-par story, fairly interesting missions and a good bout of humour (two legs). + Hero's which make the game 1000x better.
If by "content" you mean WoW's constant class "rebalancing" (read: NERFING) then screw that. I'll take a more reliable, stable game over the bloody mess that is the everchanging World of Nerfcraft any day.
or Brawl. 4854.6102.3895 Name: NU..
No, I mean a game that isn't on rails like GW is. In GW, you get forced down a linear path, and after probably 20 hours you're done with it. There's no replayability, unless you want to farm for pretty armor/weapon skins which give no ingame advantage. And the PvP community is almost dead at this point.
:?
You just can't wait to find another topic to shit all over WoW in, can you?
It's about dead. A ton of people have left, and the only thing that's making them even remember GW exists is the hope of another tourny.
Also, to clarify about PvE: at this point, it's single player in a group of you + 7 AI henchmen. Grouping with other players is unheard of except in the super difficult zone, or for farming in a 2 man party.
If you mean by dead, there's only 10,000s of players out there every day taking part in pvp then yeah. I mean I guess it's pretty dead.
And yeah, there's no grouping in PvE apart from the people that make and form groups to play the PvE stuff. Apart from those guys in groups. No one groups.
Dude, you are crazy if you think the stuff in your last few posts is accurate. 20 hours for each campaign? Double that. For each character. And it's surprisingly replayable with different character classes. And both Factions and NF have branching campaign missions, so the campaigns aren't entirely linear. And grouping happens all the time. I can think of only a few times I've had to take an all-AI team. Sure, NF's heroes have made some folks over-reliant on AI, but heroes are also excellent supplements to human teams and have basically eliminated the dreaded "GLFM need 2 monks" situation. And there's no lack of PVP players that I can see.
> turn on light
Good start to the day. Pity it's going to be the worst one of your life. The light is now on.
well, the prophecies skill set is considered "standard". there are lots of builds relying on prophecies' exclusive (non-core) skills.
yeah, there is a bunch of overpowered nightfall skills but they will be tuned down in future balance updates.
and i don't really care about the story or anything but pre-searing ascalon certainly has its charm. and while it lacks heroes the slow leveling pace of prophecies seems somewhat better for new players.
not quite true.
actually quite a lot of old top players are returning to the game.
so there is a movement in both directions - in and out.
people are mostly waiting to see how the new tourney scheme will turn out.
I'd hate to accuse anyone of being overly self important. But do you really think the average guy going out to buy GW really cares what the top 0.1% of players thinks or does? It's like not playing CS:S because of the elite that won't migrate over from CS 1.6. It really doesn't affect you on your little pub server.
The point is that the people most experienced with PvP are upset with it and quitting, and that's a sign that it's not worth the investment. Speaking of investment, if you want to PvP, you'll need all 3 chapters. Prophecy only characters are not viable, but Nightfall chars can be, so that's a factor in favor of NF > Proph.
Also, who's come back besides Trex and Bob in Te?
And yeah, pretty much everything is hinging on the new tourney setup. If that launches as poorly as last weekend's public test did, it'll be pretty ugly.
I'm going to assume that many of the pro-players that only play CS1.6 have a ton more experience than me. Does that mean they're right and I should stop playing CS:Source? Fuck no.
And you really have to stop making generalised statements. Saying you need all three chapters to PvP is just fucking BS. If you want to say you need All 3 chapters to be in the top 0.01% of players, fine. If you think that a prophecies only character just isn't viable.. that's bullshit. If you want to get into the top50 guilds, then yeah, you might be looking at a couple of chapters (oh and about 500 hours of experience)
If you want to play PvP and just win some HA here, a few GvGs there then you'll be fine. If you want to play PvP and dominate the entire world. Then yeah, be prepaired to put in some extra effort.
(from the department of the bleeding obvious)
No, it's not BS. How are you going to find a group when you can't play any roles? Let's examine standard proph bars which you can play:
Shock Axe without Crit chop so it's a worse spike than c3
E/mo w/o extinguish.
Crip shot w/o natural stride, mending touch, or shadow of haste.
Yeah, you'll get a huge amount of groups with that-or wait, you'll actually never play with anyone good. To win in PvP you have to form contacts, and no one's going to waste their time playing with someone who's incapable of adapting to different skillbars. PvP isn't 'ok we need a warrior, let him run what he has', it's 'we need someone running these 8 skills with this item setup, can you do that?' If you can't, you get to go PvE some more.
In short, this game can be fun, and has the coolest class in any RPG ever made (Mesmer *drools*), a great PvP system, but really...buy it and try it out, it's a hit or miss for most people.
This is where you completely fail to understand the 80-90% of people out there. You want to beat some people in pvp? Go AB, that's PvP, run whatever the fuck you like and you'll do fine.
Want to win HA? Fine, grab 5 mates and go. Look at this screenshot http://img64.imageshack.us/img64/5732/gw900az3.jpg it's a healing Wammo, in fucking Halls. Now you're either saying that didn't happen, or that it doesn't count. Either way, you're being an idiot. You want to go top 100 guild. Fine, learn the game properly, spend the 500 hours grinding your skills (as well as personal skill) and give it a shot. You just want to win a GvG, grab people and go. PvP is not about being better than everyone else is ever going to be. It's about winning your match, on the day.
You may need your 'contacts', the rest of us do fine with friends. And we go out, and we have fun and we still win. We don't cryfoul and quit because we can't beat the top 10 guilds out there.
acid, conzpi, a bunch of reno guys from the [viki] times. also, eun jong is said to be coming back in a few months, etc
bout the builds: there were lots of good proph only builds for more than a year. the same can't be said for nightfall-only builds.
Pretty nifty to me.
or Brawl. 4854.6102.3895 Name: NU..
My vote would be to get Nightfall.