Getting started in Guild Wars 1 (Trilogy / Collection)

Introduction

My collected tips for getting started in what I still consider the best RPG of all time.

So… Guild Wars 1 came out in 2005. It doesn’t have running, jumping, climbing, swimming, riding, falling, or flying; it needs less than 1 GB of RAM; and you can run it on almost any graphics card made in the past 10 years in Ultra quality and still get at least 60 fps. So why are people still playing this ancient game in so many numbers?

Apart from all the reasons above (which are pluses to my mind, not minuses), it’s still got probably the best ever combat system in a fantasy RPG. And there’s no stupid levelling grind (max level is 20), and almost no crafting grind either, so you can get to max level and be decently well geared up in a couple of days if you really want.

And best of all if you like multiplayer: standard group size is 8, so if you have a lot of friends you like playing with, nobody needs to be left on the sidelines. Conversely, if you don’t have a lot of people around, you can fill the empty slots with NPCs and have them fight with you. This all adds up to a very flexible multiplayer system so you can run dungeons all night long if you want and not worry about having to deal with some asshole in a PUG.

What to buy

There are 3 Guild Wars full campaigns: Prophecies, Factions, and Nightfall plus 1 extra expansion: Eye of the North. You can buy all of them in the Guild Wars Collection directly from ArenaNet. Or if you are a Steam user, you can get the 3 campaigns collected as the Guild Wars Trilogy, plus Guild Wars: Eye of the North as an individual purchase. I recommend going the Steam route, it’s a lot simpler. Get all 4 of them, trust me on this, you’ll need them (and they are really cheap if you grab them in a Steam sale).

Setting up

If you have any kind of halfway decent gaming PC at all, you’ll probably be able to run this on the highest quality graphics settings. Here’s mine:

On my mid-range 2024 gaming laptop I can easily get 140 fps with everything maxed out, so most people should be able to just turn everything up. Alternately, even if you have a 10 year old potato PC it will still run comfortably and look great.

Other platforms

Guild Wars predates the console era, and as such it’s PC only, and completely keyboard & mouse driven. You could just about get it working with a controller via Steam, but I wouldn’t advise trying.

Unfortunately even though it’s listed as being supported by GeForce Now, it actually is not, so you’re stuck with PC. However you should be able to run it on a Mac or Linux machine (or even a modern Chromebook) using Steam’s built-in Proton emulator.

If you can’t get it running with Steam on MacOS or Linux, you should be able to run it via WINE, Lutris or Crossover — it’s listed as Platinum compatibility, so should work pretty much perfectly with any of those systems. More detailed info here.

Where to start

When creating a new character you will get the choice of either a Role Playing character or a PvP one. In general you’ll want an RPG one. Then you have a choice of starting in either the Prophecies, Factions, or Nightfall campaigns. Which one to pick depends on your playstyle…

Choose to start in the Prophecies campaign if:

• You mainly play solo or with a significant other
• You are new to RPGs
• You like an immersive story experience
• You don’t mind levelling slowly
• You want a character from a medieval European cultural background

Choose to start in the Factions campaign if:

• You intend to play with a group of friends or a Guild
• You have some experience with RPGs
• You want to level up rapidly and experience all of the content as soon as possible
• You want to play an Assassin or Ritualist
• You want a character from an Asian style cultural background

Choose to start in the Nightfall campaign if:

• You mainly play alone
• You have considerable experience with RPGs
• You want to be able to immediately use customizable NPC Heroes in your party
• You don’t mind taking some time to learn extra mechanics
• You want to play a Paragon or Dervish
• You want a character from a North African / Middle Eastern cultural background

Characters started in one campaign can eventually travel into the other campaigns and do those quests so you aren’t limited in any way there.

Professions

Or what is generally known as classes in most other RPGs. You have 10 choices in total:

• Warrior
• Monk
• Elementalist
• Ranger
• Necromancer
• Mesmer
• Assassin (Factions campaign only)
• Ritualist (Factions campaign only)
• Paragon (Nightfall campaign only)
• Dervish (Nightfall campaign only)

Best starting profession

If you want to tank, play Warrior or Paragon.
If you want to heal, play Monk or Ritualist.
If you want to be a melee DPS, play Assassin or Dervish.
If you want a pet, play Ranger.
If you want to be Goth, play Necromancer.
If you want to be a girl with hardly any clothes on, play Elementalist.
If you want to be an asshole to everybody, play Mesmer.

Secondary professions

Before you leave the starting area you get to choose a Secondary class and use their skills as well. This can be any class you like, from any DLC (once you unlock it). If you aren’t sure which Secondary you want, don’t worry, you aren’t locked into it. You will be able to change it later.

Recommended Secondary professions:

• Ritualist: Ranger or Necromancer (your Spawning Power also affects Ranger spirits and Necromancer minions).
• Monk: Mesmer or Elementalist (both good for Energy management).
• Warrior: Ranger, Assassin, or Paragon will each give you skills that can enhance your base Warrior skills.
• Ranger: almost anything, but Ritualist and Warrior are both very viable choices, depending on your play style.
• Mesmer: always Monk, don’t even think about anything else. And carry a Monk resurrection spell 100% of the time.
• Elementalist: either Mesmer for energy management, or Monk for a resurrection spell.
• Necromancer: Ritualist synergises well, and gives you a choice of good resurrection spells. Or Monk if you don’t have access to Ritualist.
• Assassin: Warrior or Ranger are solid choices for extra survivability. The Ranger pet can be a fun addition too. Or Mesmer if you want to annoy your enemies even more.
• Paragon: 99% of the time Warrior is the best choice here, especially in a team; but if you want a pet, Ranger would probably also be viable.
• Dervish: Warrior for survivability or Assassin for shadowstep are probably the best choices here. Or Ranger for the pet.

If you still don’t know what Secondary to pick, choose Monk because that class has excellent resurrection skills. You will definitely need to have one of those equipped, because Guild Wars can be pretty punishing and your party members will die during a fight (sometimes multiple times). Or pick Ranger if you really want a pet, it’s always fun.

Starting out

Bonus items

First thing you should do once you are in-game is open the text chat box on the bottom left and type

/bonus

This should automatically drop some nice gear into your inventory to get you started — press I to open your inventory and find it. Note that you may get weapons that require a level in an attribute that you don’t have — you can still equip that weapon if you wish, but it will only do 1/3 of the listed damage until the requirement is met.

In particular, note the Igneous Summoning Stone you are given. This gives you a Fire Imp companion who will accompany you and aid you as you level up — he will save your ass many times. So remember to use it each time you enter an Explorable Area.

Getting quests

Look around for an NPC with a green mark above their head — they will have a quest for you. Pick it up, then check on the minimap on the top right of your screen for a green arrow or green asterisk that will show you the way you need to go. Go there and try not to die (too much).

Tip: if you are following your Primary quest line and end up in what seems like a dead end outpost (e.g. Minister Cho’s Estate in the Factions campaign), look in the Party Formation box for a button marked Enter Mission (available to the Party leader only). That will take you to a special mission to progress your quest.

Skills

While in an outpost or town, press K to access your skills list. There are over a thousand to choose from if you unlock them all, but you can only equip 8 at any one time. To equip one, simply drag it to a slot in the skill bar at the bottom of the window. Your 8 skills can be chosen from any you have learned for your Primary or Secondary profession, and you can change or rearrange them on your skill bar any time you are in a settlement. You can trigger a skill by either clicking on it in the skill bar, or by using keys 1–8 on the keyboard.

You will generally want a combination of 3–5 attack spells, a couple of enchantments to keep you safe and/or recover health or energy, plus a Resurrection spell. Unless of course you are taking on a healer role, in which case you will have probably have a skill bar full of healing or protection spells of some type.

You learn new skills automatically as a reward from some starter quests (especially in the Prophecies campaign), but later in the game you will mainly buy your skills from a Skill Trainer — most settlements have one, and each one has a different selection of skills available. So always check that out every time you come to new outpost.

Resurrection skills

In general, keep your last slot for a Resurrection skill, because your team will die during quests. Don’t skip out on this, because being able to res your team during a fight can be the difference between completing a quest or being sent back to the nearest shrine after a party wipe.

As mentioned earlier, Monks and Ritualists have multiple Resurrection spells to choose from, and some other professions (e.g. Paragon, Dervish) also have skills directly available to them. If you don’t have access to any of these spells, Resurrection Signet will do if there’s nothing else to choose from — everyone can use that. But the rule of thumb is that at least 2/3 of the party need to be carrying some resurrection ability, particularly the support classes like Mesmer, Necromancer, or Ranger.

Good choices include:

• Resurrection Chant, Light of Dwayna, or Rebirth (Monk)
• Flesh of my Flesh, Lively Was Naomei, or Restoration (Ritualist)
• “We Shall Return!” or Signet of Return (Paragon)
• Eternal Aura (Dervish)

Elite skills

You can have one Elite skill on your skill bar at any one time. These are special skills with a golden frame that are considerably more powerful than normal skills. However you can only equip one of these at any one time and you can’t learn them from a Skill Trainer or quest.

How to get an Elite skill:

• Wait until you are a fairly high level and/or with a group of high level friends
• Buy a Signet of Capture from a Skill Trainer
• Press K and equip it to a slot on your skill bar
• Go to an explorable area
• Find a boss with the same professon as you
• Kill the boss
• Use the Signet of Capture on the dead body
• See the boss’s Elite skill appear on your skill bar

Equipment

Weapons

Weapons come in various different qualities:

• White — useless, sell or salvage it
• Blue — lower quality bonuses, but can be decent, especially when starting out
• Purple — very good quality, usually worth keeping and using
• Gold — Superior quality, almost always worth keeping and using
• Green — Perfect quality, definitely keep this one!

Yes, this is different to nearly every other game where Green is usually one of the lowest quality levels. So be careful you don’t scrap your Green weapons by mistake!

Weapons are usually not “bound” to your character and can be freely traded with other players. However if you go to a Weaponsmith and have your weapon customized for you, it will do 20% more damage but now cannot be traded. So it’s definitley worth doing if you have a weapon you know you want to keep using, but do not customize a weapon that you think you might want to trade later!

Armor

Armor comes in 3 categories:

• Light (used by spellcasters i.e. Monk, Ritualist, Elementalist, Mesmer, Necromancer) — max Armor Rating 60
• Medium (used by martial DPS professions i.e. Ranger, Assassin, Dervish) — max Armor Rating 70
• Heavy (used by tanky professions i.e. Warrior and Paragon) — max Armor Rating 80

You should try to get armor with the maximum possible protection for your profession asap, it makes a huge difference to the damage you take. Roughly speaking, every 10 points of armor reduces your damage taken by around 15%, which is a lot.

Armor has 5 slots, and most pieces of armor can have an Insignia attached (which gives it its prefix, such as Survivor or Prodigy), and a Rune attached (which gives it its suffix, such as Attunement or Spawning Power).

Note that armor suffixes do not stack, so if you use 2 Runes that are the same you will only get the benefit of one of them (exceptions: Runes of Vitae and Attunement do stack).

Also note that Major Runes give you a +2 Attribute bonus but come with -35 Health; and Superior Runes gives you a +3 Attribute bonus but come with a whopping -75 Health. So you have to decide if the extra power is worth the tradeoff of significantly reduced Health. In general, don’t try to stack too many high power Runes, you’ll just die the first time an enemy sneezes on you.

Combat

Target an enemy by pressing the TAB key — keep pressing to cycle through all available targets. Then press either SPACE (to auto-attack the target), or use one of your attack skills. That’s pretty much all you need to know.

If you are playing in a group, you can hold down CONTROL and double click on a target to announce to your other team members who you are targeting — this can be extremely useful for enabling your whole team to focus down on the same target.

Tactics

A good basic tactic is to focus on the enemy healers first — usually either Monk or a Ritualist. They have only light armor and will have to spend a lot of time and energy protecting themselves, meaning that they can’t keep healing the rest of their team.

Alternately, if the enemy team has a Mesmer or Elementalist, focus on them. They can lay down a lot of hurt, but are also squishy, so taking them down quick can put a real dent in the enemy’s capacity to fight you.

Tanking

Guild Wars has no “Taunt” skills to force the enemy to attack the tank, so grabbing and holding the attention of enemies can be difficult for a frontline tank character. In general, enemies decide who to attack based on a complex formula that includes:

• Who attacked them first
• Who is closest
• Who is doing the most healing
• Who is doing the most damage

That means that well armored tank characters should always be allowed to run close to the enemy and attack first, and lightly armored spellcasters should stand well back and use ranged spells.

Fast Travel

You can automatically Fast Travel instantly to any settlement you have discovered in your current campaign. Simply press M to open the map and click where you want to go.

However you can only travel to other campaigns once you have discovered your own campaign’s central travel hub.

• Prophecies: Lions Arch
• Factions: Kaineng Center
• Nightfall: Kamadan

Playing in a team

When you first start out, party size is small — just 2 members in a team; but as you progress party size increases too. Once you get past the starter areas, party size maxes out at 8 — which is huge compared to most modern MMOs, but which I really like.

If you don’t have 7 friends, you can fill out missing party members with NPCs, so you never have to worry about not having a tank or healer or whatever. The base NPC Henchmen aren’t that great, but they are good enough to get you going.

Party composition

In an 8 person party you normally want at least 1 or 2 Warriors or Paragons to tank and buff the party, and 2 Monks or Ritualists to heal (maybe even 3 depending on their setups). Everyone else is on damage, except your Mesmer who is there to basically screw up the other side’s skills and res people when things go south (and they will).

The classic party has a 3 row structure:

• Frontline: melee tank and DPS characters — usually Warrior, Assassin, Dervish
• Midline: ranged DPS and support characters — usually Ranger, Paragon, Necromancer
• Backline: healers and other squishy spellcasters — usually Monk, Ritualist, Elementalist, Mesmer

Note that this is just a basic structure, depending on build you might get significant exceptions, but for starting out it’s a good solid basis to work from.

Guilds

It’s called Guild Wars after all…

Press G for the Guild panel. You can either start your own Guild or join another one. Given that this is an older game, there aren’t too many Guilds around, but if you go to one of the main game hubs (American District) you will see several people running around with Guild capes and Guild tags after their names. Simply ask one of them if their Guild is recruiting (they probably will be). Or press N to open the Friends list and add one of my characters (Amicus Pan) — I’m always happy to hear from people.

Once you are in a Guild you will gain the ability to teleport to their Guild Hall, which can be extremely useful.

Tips and tricks

How to get from one campaign to another

If you started in the Factions campaign, once you have finished the missions on Shing Jea island and arrived in Kaineng Center, pick up these quests:

• Chaos in Kryta (gets you to Tyria)
• Sunspears in Cantha (gets you to Elona)

Each quest is pretty short and not too difficult, and once you have done them you can use the ship icon on the map to travel freely to the main hubs in the other continents: Lions Arch and Kamadan. It’s worth doing even if you don’t want to start those campaigns yet, because each of the hubs has a Skill Trainer with different skills available, so you can skill up faster.

If you want to unlock more skills for your Heroes:

1. Press M to bring up the map, click on the ship icon, and choose to go to Embark Beach.
2. Go to the Great Temple of Balthazar and enter the Isle of the Nameless. At the foot of the entrance ramp to your right will be the Master of Paths. Speak to him and you will be offered the chance to go to the Training Arena, which is a “fake PvP” arena battle against NPC opponents.
3. Alternately, bring up the map again and choose to go to Zaishen Challenge. This is another “fake PvP” 4x4 training arena where you fight against AI enemies. If you don’t have 4 players on your team, you can fill the empty spots with NPC Henchmen.
4. Fight some battles. You will earn Balthazar Faction (maximum 2000 per day).
5. Go to a Priest of Balthazar and use your Faction points to unlock whatever skills you need. Note that these skills will not be usable by your main RPG character, but they will be available for your Heroes to use.

How to download the entire game in one go…

Guild Wars only downloads a minimal install when you first run it, with the resources it thinks you need. So the first time you go to a new area, it will pause to load any other graphics you haven’t already downloaded. Don’t worry, it only does this once, so next time will be much faster.

If you want to download all of the graphics, you have two choices:

• Leave it running in the background and it will download the whole game eventually
• Or download the entire game image at once using the -image command line key

If you want try this, do the following (carefully!):

• Find your Gw.exe app (if you use Steam this will be inside your Steam folder)
• Right click on the Gw.exe app and choose Make Shortcut
• Right click on your shortcut and select Properties
• In the Target Area field you will see the location of your Guild Wars executable file: “<…>\Guild Wars\Gw.exe”
• Write the command line argument after the quote marks like this:
  “<…>\Guild Wars\Gw.exe” -image
• Double click the shortcut and the game will start downloading everything. Once it’s done downloading you can delete the shortcut and play as normal.

How to improve the graphics

I have been playing around using Reshade with Guild Wars and with some small tweaking you can get massively improved graphics with it:

1. Download Reshade from https://reshade.me/ (choose the basic version, not the add-on version)
2. Run it and when it asks what app to add it to, choose Gw.exe
3. Choose DirectX 9 as the graphics setting
4. Run Guild Wars
5. Press the HOME key to bring up or put away the Reshade control panel
6. Turn on the option for HDR
7. Marvel at the new brilliant looking Guild Wars! Note that if the results are too bright on your screen you may need to go to Guild Wars Options — Graphics and move the Gamma slider to a lower setting. On my system I have the Gamma set to about 30% and that looks perfect.

Note: for optimal stability you may need to set your Guild Wars Options-Graphics to:

• Windowed Fullscreen
• Disable V-sync
• Disable post-processing (Reshade does its own post-processing).

That seems to give me a stable running game with greatly improved visual quality.

For even better looking graphics you can also use the AMD Fidelity and DPX options in Reshade, but be aware that these may cause system instability.

More info

The Guild Wars Wiki is an excellent and very complete resource, so if you need more detailed info on anything, go there.