Suggestions and Tools for Starting GUILD WARS 2
Guild Wars 2 might be my favorite game. It is definitely my favorite massively multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG or MMO) and I’ve played my fair share of them. I think the story is fantastic, the mount system is incredible and is being copied to some degree in big MMOs, it’s easy to get back into if you take a long break from the game, and more. I could go on for a while. However, I thought I’d share some resources and ideas for getting into the game if you’ve never tried it or maybe it didn’t stick.
First, the biggest suggestion is also the simplest: just play the game. You can download the Guild Wars 2 core game for free and start playing. There are some limits, but they’re fairly minor, especially when compared with other MMOs. You can still reach level 80 (the max level in the game), play in player vs player (PvP), and play in World vs World (WvW). Of course, you can also always purchase the expansions and unlock a ton of features and content. No matter how you do it, playing the game is going to be the best way to see what it’s like.
My next suggestion is to check out content creators. There are so many people who make content and stream on Twitch that provide great guides to different aspects of the game. My personal favorite is Mukluk (YouTube|Twitch), but there’s also Mighty Teapot, Ayin Maiden, and many others. If you just want PvP, look up guides on PvP. Want to learn how to make gold? There are tons of videos about that. Here’s a quick video from Mukluk about some of the reasons one might play Guild Wars 2.
Third, engage with the community. Guild Wars 2 has an extremely active and extremely helpful community. You can almost always find people to help answer questions or even help you accomplish goals. A great way to engage is to join an in-game guild. There are always people trying to recruit members for their guilds and it’s a fantastic avenue for getting help. Plus, if you find a high level guild, they probably have gathering nodes that you can access daily for a small amount of crafting materials (sometimes every little bit counts!).
Below I’ll list some websites that you’ll probably find helpful as you go about playing the game.
This is a wiki with information about just about everything in the game. You can find out a ton of information here and then if you need additional information, someone in your guild or online can probably help you. You can also type /wiki followed by what you want to look up in the in-game chat box to pull up the wiki page for whatever you searched. Very handy trick!
These sites are full of community-submitted character builds for different aspects of the game. This is great if you are learning the game or just don’t care about experimenting with your builds and just want what others are finding to be very effective. I use them all the time, especially for PvP and WvW.
This website has so much information to help you as you play with information about efficient ways to craft, gather materials, an event timer for world bosses, how to get the most out of your different currencies, etc. Highly valuable and uses an API key you can get from the Guild Wars 2 website under your account to give you personalized information.
If you’re looking at leveling up your crafting skills, I highly recommend this site. I typically use it as a template while I level up my crafting disciplines, but you can use an API key to help show you what materials you have, how much it would cost to buy the missing ones, and what to craft to level up your skills in a step-by-step manner. It’s not perfect, but it’s extremely good.
If you’re worried about Guild Wars 2 not running great on your computer, I’ve got some good news. The game is 10 years old and was designed to not require a beefy machine. That being said, I’d still recommend a dedicated graphics card and a processor with good single-core performance if you can. I’ve been able to run it on low settings with my laptop that uses integrated Iris Xe graphics though. Here’s a video that talks about graphics settings a bit and my recommendations are to always adjust reflections, character model limit, and character model detail first as those seem to be the biggest contributors. Also, you can play Guild Wars 2 via GeForce NOW if you still struggle with running it.
There are some ideas for how to get into Guild Wars 2. There are several other tools out there and if you find them, feel free to share them in the comments section below. Should GeekTyrant start an in-game guild?