When you start the game for the first time you are welcomed with the character creation, and what seems the most important choice of your life, what race are you going to be playing as.



In reality you are just making an aesthetic choice, each race has its own tutorial zone, each own personal history (only till level 30) and some skills exclusive to each race that are bad compared to the ones you unlock with your class.

Also after choosing.race, gender, class and aspect you will have to chose 1 class specific starting skin of a piece of gear, your personality (that no longer affects anything) and your personal background (that affects the history)

There are a total of 9 classes, but you can only choose 8 (the last one is unlocked with the Heart of Thorns expansion).



Each class is divided into 3 types of armor: Light, Medium and Heavy. They don't mean that a heavy armor class has more protection than the Light one, they just mark the kind of equipment they can use as armor. The weapons you can use aren't affected by this since they are class specific.

It's important to know this basic information from each class to get you to know what to expect, choose what you feel you will like the most since you can later make more characters or delete characters to free one character space.


Warrior: It's a heavy armor class and one of the sturdiest classes in the game, warriors use both melee (mosty) and ranged weapons and their special ability gives them one special attack depending on the weapon they are using.
Warriors have both high Crowd Control (Slows, Stuns…), buffs in the forms of shouts, damage abilities and one of the most useful buffs in game, the banners.

Guardian: It's a heavy armor class, guardians use both melee and ranged weapons and their special ability grants them passive buffs and active abilities that both help yourself and others around you.
Guardians have a high number of support and healing skills as well as a high number of utility as blocks and condition removals while having good damage options and one of the best condition damages in the form of burns.

Ranger: It's a medium armor class, rangers use both melee and ranged weapons (almost all of them are ranged), and their special ability gives them control over Pets, there are a large number of pets with different abilities and uses, and they can be unlocked all around the game.
Ranges are mostly specialized in dealing damage and giving buffs, the spirits are one of the best buffs in the hole game, it also has a good quantity of Crowd Control

Engineer: It's a medium armor class, Engineers have the least amount of possible weapons but they have a tool belt that gives them a special ability depending on the abilities that you have equipped, they also have “Kits” that are abilities that give you different weapons such as a flamethrower and others.
Engineers are a middle class, they have CC, buffs, damage and utility but they aren't as powerful as others and adding the turrets and kits make them a class with lots of versatility

Thief: It's a medium armor class, Thieves use both melee and ranged weapons and their special ability allows them to steal from enemies a wide range of abilities having lots of movement abilities.
Thieves have high damage, a good range of cc abilities, the best mobility of all classes and is the only class that can maintain a permanent buff of invisibility but lacks support for others since most buffs only affect you.

Mesmer: It's a light armor class, Mesmers use both melee and ranged (mosly) weapons and their special ability allows them to spawn clones that fight with you.
Mesmers have a good number of CC skills, good movement skills as well as a really useful portal, and they also have many utility skills.

Necromancer: It's a light armor class and one of the sturdiest classes, Necromancers use both melee and ranged weapons and their special ability allows them to enter a shroud that charges while you defeat enemies.
Necromancers can spawn minions to help them in battles as well as abilities based on condition damage that can be spread to others. It's a really good class for all modes as well as for playing solo.

Elementalist*: It's a light armor class and one of the weakest classes to the point it's a meme in the community, Elementalist use ranged weapons and their special ability allows them to tune to attune to one of 4 elements, Fire, Earth, Water and Air, each one changes the 5 attacks on the weapons making it the most complex class in the hole game.
As I have already said, elementalist is the most complete class in the game, apart from the weapon attunements they also can spawn weapons as well as elementals to help them, they also have other utility skills and buffs to their use.

*I don't recommend Elementalist as a first class, it's cool, it's good and it has lots of uses, but I heard from many of my friends that they made one and later deleted it to create another because it was too much for them. You can try it and maybe you like it, the same can happen with other classes but the Elementalist has always been a special class.

History is probably ⅓ of the content of the game and the game guides you to do it from the start. Each chapter is unlocked each 10 levels and can be played at any time at any level once unlocked, but can only be finished once per character since your choices do matter (kinda).

Each race has its own history till level 30 where you finish the plot of your background and join the main forces of the game in order to save Tyria.

Each time you make a choice the personal history will change but will eventually end in the same path so if you made characters of the same race and did every single combination the history will change but not in that much of a meaningful way to the overall picture, so pick what you like and don't feel that the other options were better.

Map completion is another important part of the game. Once you have finished the tutorial you are given a giant world to explore, and you will have to explore anyways. Each zone has 5 things for you to do:



Waypoints that are the teleport sistem of the game.


Hero points grant you 1 skill point for future use.



Vistas are cinematic views of the zone you are in.


Interest points are places with names that get marked in the map.


Hearts are zones where you have to complete objectives to fill it.

Once you complete all the objectives in a zone, it will give you a chest reward with some materials, xp and other things as weapons.

Once Tyria has been explored to a 100% you will gain 2 Gifts of Exploration used to make legendary weapons, but take in mind this is the whole map.



NOTE: You are going to be doing this a lot at the start since you will need to level up your character, don't force it to get the rewards since they are not that important apart from the black lion keys, so don't get tired of mapping too fast.

Just play the game, they give you xp by doing anything other than breathing.

• Killing Mobs
  
• Map Completion (Everything provides xp: vistas, hearts, hero points… + bonus with each completed zone)
  
• Events
  
• Gathering Materials

Almost all of your xp will come from Map Completion, events and killing mobs and you are basically just from advancing in towards your history missions, leveling early game is pretty easy and you won't have to really bother since it will come organically.

Gathering doesn't grant a lot of xp but since materials can be used later or sold for gold it's a good idea to buy the best recolecting tool you can from a merchant. If you see some near or in the way of your path you can just collect them and keep going.

Did i need to make a part in the guide just for this? No but i can so why not

The Guild Wars 2 skill is based on Hero Points, these things are earned from Hero points Challenges all over tyria and as some level up rewards, there is a total of 612 hero points, way more than you need for your core game and you will have enough for a part of the expansions right from the start if you buy them in the future.

If you press H there is a panel called training with the Hero point symbol, there you have 2 parts, Skills and Specializations..



The first one's are the Skills , and they are divided in 3 types : Healing (First one you can unlock), Utility (Ones in the middle) and Elite (the last One, although some branches don't have an ultimate like the wells on necromancer). You have at any time equipped 1 healing skill + 3 utility skills + 1 ultimate skill in your hotbar, except for the heal all other slots are unlocked at levels 1,1 15, 19 and 31 respectively.They can be swapped out of combat and almost all are affected by Specializations.

Then we have the Specializations. There are a total of 6 branches you can unlock but only use 3 each one unlocking at different levels.



They can be equipped on the build panel that is on top of the hero one, each branch has 3 base passives that you cannot change and 3 columns where you only have 1 active at a time. Each passive or trait can give either a passive buff for everyone or yourself or upgrade one of your skills or profession skills



The first Specialization unlocks at level 21, the second at 45 and the third at 71, the third one is also the only place where you can equip the Specializations of the expansions.

One of the most important things in the game are stats, each piece of equipment you obtain gives stats (some need to be chosen as they have various options).

There are a total of 13 stats that come from equipment, they can be seen on the right of the equipment tab on the right as attributes.



The can be grouped in 3 types: Damage,.Healing and Tankiness.

Damage:
There are 2 kinds of damage in Guild Wars 2:

The first is Power (or physical) which is based on direct impact hits. There are 3 stats that affect this: Power (in red) that increases the base damage, precisión (on orange) that increases the critical change, and ferocity (yellow) that increases the critical damage.

The second is Condition which is based on damage dealt each second from the conditions you do to enemies. There are 2 stats that affect this: Condition damage ( Darker green)that increases the base damage, expertise (on light green) that increases the condition duration.

Power stats can be seen on the left while condi stats can be seen on the right

















Healing(and buffs):

The first stat is Healing power (light blue) that increases the base healing and (darker blue) concentration that increases the duration of the boons.



Tankiness:

The first stat is Toughness (gray) that increases your armor that reduces the damage you receive and the second is vitality (white) that increases your max health.



All the other stats on the right (except healing power, magic find (the 4 leaf clover) and the class specific stat) will see the final stats converted from the other ones previously mentioned.

When you start it doesn't really matter what stats you use since none of the content you use will be difficult, but it's recommended to go with full power stats and when reached end game look for something that suits you better.

Lastly in the achievement tab on the lower right you can see the account bonuses

The account bonuses are the stats you account has gained by playing, there are 4 total stats: Gold Find increases the number of coins you obtain from enemy drops (worthless), karma gain gives you a + X% on the base karma you gain (for example an event gives 100 karma you gain 110 if you had a +10% gain), XP gain works the same way as karma and magic find affects some bags and chest and can be leveled up 300 levels by consuming “Luck” (it's also almost worthless). Take note this account bonuses come from my main account with all expansions and quite a bit of playing.

Dungeons:
Dungeons are your first major content in the game. Dungeons are instances where you either do a story run or an exploration run:

When you play history mode you will do a history mission as the ones in your personal history but in the dungeon, once completed you will unlock FOR THAT CHARACTER the option to start exploration mode (You can join any exploration without the history made in that character if another person has opened the instance).

Exploration mode follows the same base but instead of being one history you are given the option to choose between 3 paths except on (The Arah dungeon with 4 exploration paths, and the twilight arbor that has 2 base path plus a level 80 path that was added with living season 1)

Once you reach level 30 you unlock the story mode of the Ascalonian Catacombs Dungeon and at level 35 you unlock the exploration mode. Then you will unlock more dungeons each 10 levels being the only exception the arah story mode that is a part of the personal history and the level 80 dungeon path on twilight arbor:

Don't be afraid, once you unlock them you can start doing them, press Y and you will open the LFG (looking for a group) , go to dungeons and look for a group or make it yourself. There aren't a lot of people doing them but you can probably find a group.

Dungeons awards 20 dungeon currency + and extra 80 daily per path, but they can be done infinitely.

World Bosses are “Massive”(some of them) events that occur all over Tyria, they all have an established start time that can be seen on:

https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Event_timers

There is 2 types of bosses + Anomaly:

• Normal World Bosses: 1 Spawns each 15 minutes, their reward is only given once a day. Each 2 hours the cycle repeats meaning if you wanted to do X word boss and missed it arriving just at the end of the event you would have to wait approximately 1h 45 minutes to be able to do it. Each boss has his own mechanics but they are often simple and you just have to follow others.
  
  
• Hard Word Bosses: There are only 3 bosses Tequatl, Karka Queen and Triple trouble, they also give a reward only once a day but they are more spaced between them,.their rewards are better and require more people to be done. Tequatl and Karka Queen are often done but Triple Trouble usually fails unless enough people do the event in a coordinated way.
  
  
• Anomaly: This is the other “World Boss” . Each 2 hours in one of 3 maps a big anomaly will spawn randomly in one of the predetermined spots and run around the map till its CC bar is broken, once it breaks, wait a minute and then kill it. This boss is really popular since it gives a daily Mystic coin that is really valuable.

At this point leveling up will slow down but here is a quick guide of what to do if you want to go a little bit faster:

Your first option is doing dungeons, each time you complete an explorable path you gain 70% of your experience bar + the xp from mobs and events inside the dungeon.

The second one is doing daily missions, now since you should have explored a decent amount of maps you can access you can start completing some daily missions easily. Each daily mission gives you a Writs of Experience, with 20 of them you gain 1 Tome of Knowledge that grants 1 instant level up. Dailies can ask you to do 4 events, mine/chop/gather 10 materials on x map, do a jumping puzzle…

The last one is leveling up a crafting discipline, you can have 2 crafting disciplines on a character (and it's recommended to not do the same twice since it's a waste). Jeweler (about 6 gold to level 400) and Chef (about 2 gold to level 400) are the cheapest and grant about 7-10 levels. It's an easy way to level up for a bit of gold that can be easily farmed by doing dungeons for a couple of days, To level up any discipline you can just follow the NORMAL guides (that are cheaper than the fast ones): https://gw2crafts.net/index.html.

Also at this point you will have some boosters and other things that will help you level up, an in depth explanation down bellow.

Crafting Disciplines:

There are a total of 8 crafting disciplines for regular people and then there is the gold sink that is known as scribe (Seriously don't even think about leveling up an scribe they are both useless and a gold waste)

For armors: Taylor (Light Armor), Leather Worker(Medium armor), Armorsmith (Heavy Armor)
For Weapons:
Arificer (Staff, focus, tridents scepters + potions and crystals)
Huntsman (Short bows, longbows, pistols, rifles , harpoon guns, torches, and warhorn + oils)
Weaponsmith (Axes, daggers, swords, greatswords, maces, hammers, spears, and shields + sharpening stones)
Jewe: For trinkets but nobody uses them
Chef: For foods and there are actually some that are actually useful + the level 500 chef grants ascended foods that overpowered 1h foods that can be taken by anyone that passes by for 5 minutes.
If you are using them to level a character, use Jeweler and Chef, otherwise use two professions that compliment your character or that you would like it to have, like thief leatherworker and huntsman.

Buffs, Boosters, Food and Utility:

[This part serves for when you reach level 80, start another character or just want to use boosters to gain the buffs for like leveling up or more magic find so the explanation will have things you cant obtain in your first play]

As I already said on the previous point you would have started to gain some items called boosters, some are given by daily rewards, others by achievements and you most likely will save them and never use them because “you may need them later”. Well you are not wrong you should save some of them.

They only affect the character they are used on, they don't affect all your characters so if you use some boost and want to save it don't log into that character till it's needed since the boost timer only gets used if you are logged in the character.

Consider we are not taking into account event related buffs or festival buffs.

The most important buffs are the following:

Foods, oils and sharpening tools: They are the most basic buffs you can obtain, almost all of them grant a boost to:

• A boost to one or more of your stats as Power or Condition damage.
  
• Damage to X kind of enemy or buff after doing some action (Food, oils and sharpening kits)
  
• Experience from Kills, magic find and karma gain.

Unless you are gonna use expensive ones have always one food and one utility item on use since they grant you alone an xp buff that helps a lot to gain xp (aS in more competitive things like fractals, there specific foods and oils are often used to make it easy)

Other “Food” and “Utility” Boost:

There are only 2: The first one being the Candy Canes from Wintersday that grant extra karma for 1 min, and the rockets or fireworks from New Year that want a +% bonus xp from kills and +10% magic find.












Banners*: They are gained from either random server wide events (rarely), crafted by scribes and placed by guilds, bought with a guild mission exclusive currency and in the case of the spirit banner bought with spirit shards on the mystic forge. The best banner is the Guild Hero one since it gives all the buffs from the lower ranked banners.

Banners are usually placed by guilds or other people so you should always use them when you see them if you see them and only place them if you are going to farm something in specific or need them.











NOTE* THEY ARE NOT THE SAME BANNERS AS THE WARRIOR, WARRIOR BANNERS DO NOT GRANT THE SAME BONUS, JUST A +100 STATS (AS POWER)

Boosters: They are the most important ones and the ones you should actually always save a couple of them just in case. I will just go over the most useful and when to use them, for full list go to https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Booster

• Communal Boost Bonfire: You place a fireplace and can choose between 3 buffs: Experience Booster, Magic Booster or Karma Booster. It lasts 15 minutes, gives a 1h buff and can only give one buff at a time from the same.
  
  
• Experience Booster: Grants a +50% xp boost and the kill streak that grants up to a +100% bonus from enemy kills. Save for when farming xp, the halloween festival is a good time to use them while farming the Labyrinth since a lot of enemies appear there.
  
  
• Item Booster: Grants a +50% and a 33% extra mining strike chance + other 2 minor things (you can read them on the item itself). Recommended for when opening a high quantity of magic find affect items as the new year lucky envelopes.
  
  
• Karma booster: Save for the wintersday festival, it's the best time of year to farm karma.
  
  
• Birthday and Celebration Boosters: Grant a 100% boost to magic find, WvW rank gain, experience from kills, and gold from kills and a 10% bonus to PvP and WvW reward track progress. They last 1 day and 1 hour respectively. Save it for when paying PvP or WvW to gain more rewards in less time or important framings.
  
  
• Crafting Booster: A boost for when you are leveling a profession as hunter or armorsmith.
  
  
• Gathering booster: Grants a 33% chance at extra resources when gathering, only recommended to use when farming expensive materials but it's not that much of an important boost.

Ascended Trinkets Enrichments : They can be equipped only on ascended trinkets, are bought with laurels and grant a +20% on magic find, xp gain, gold from monster and a 15% karma gain. Also a WvW xp gain and a WvW reward track enrichments can be bought on the laurel vendor on any WvW map.



Guild Enrichments: If a guild has them unlocked they can be bought by a vendor on the guild for free. ONLY IF YOU HAVE HEART OF THORNS


Gobblers: Gobblers are items that can be bought on the Black Lion Gem Store for gems on their respective festival or in random sales over the year. They are worth quite a bit of gold for any new player but they are pretty useful and worth the money.

• Candy Corn Gobbler:For 3 candy corn the gobbler can grant one of the following buffs (from more common to more uncommon) Experience Booster,Item Booster, Karma booster, 15% Speed Bonus, Damage Reduction Bonus or Healthful Rejuvenation or transform you on a random Halloween Monster
  
  
• Snowflake/Zhaitaffy Gobbler: For 5 Snowflakes or 25 Zhaitaffy candy respectively, either a gift or chest from their festival or a buff that grants a 25% buff to experience from kills, gold from kills, and reward track gain in PvP and WvW.

Great now you have reached level 80 and you have reached the max level for your character you will most likely get the best gear that you can but before that lets start getting your character ready for the farm.

What you should do is this:

• Buy some level 80 Exotic (Orange) gear from the trading post and fill your armor (Since it's much cheaper than the rest). Try that all of them have the same stats for example Berserker for a power warrior, don't do mixes of random stats like power and condi.
  
  
• Get 6 runes of the same type and equip them on your orange armor (if your armor already has the one you want there is no need to buy it again), there are some runes that will give you better buffs and are not all that expensive.
  
  
• Get orange trinkets, this don't really have to have the same stats as your armor since they are going to be more expensive and they can get obsolete fast, here is a list of the trinkets you can buy for karma on heart and karma vendors: https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Exotic_karma_trinkets. (If you just can't get yellow ones are good enough don't force yourself to get them)
  
  
• Get orange weapons, this is going to be a bit harder since orange weapons are usually close or higher than 1 gold and you might not want to buy them so buy them at your discretion.

Okay if at this point in time you are fully equiped with Exotic tier equipment you are officially a level 80 player and you have done the best you can to start the end game of the core game.

Basic Info:
Since you are level 80 and now you have decent gear it's time to do some fractals. Fractals are the end game of the core game, they can be considered like shorter dungeons, like them once you can only access them after you reach level 80. The gate for fractals can be found on the lion's arc.



Once you reach the portal just by standing there you will see this menu.



There is a lot to unpack so let's start with how fractal works:

• There are a total of 4 tiers, each tier has 25 fractals.
  
  
• There is a total of 21 different fractals meaning they repeat (for example Nightmare, Shattered Observatory and Sunqua peak are always the last 3 of all 4 tiers while the volcanic fractal can be found on 1, 19, 28, 52 and 92 but they are all the exact same only changing the difficulty)
  
  
• Tier 1 has no added difficulty while tier 2, 3 and 4 add one, two and three Mistlock Instabilities respectively and the Instabilities change daily. The higher the tier and the number of the fractal the harder it will be but the better the rewards are.
  
  
• You have a personal fractal level, each time you complete a fractal equal or higher than your current fractal it will progress by 1 (If your fractal level is 47 and you complete any fractal from 47 to 100 it will change to 48, the increment is always by 1)
  
  
• Fractal personal level is shared between the party, if someone has level 100 all people will be able to enter any fractal ignoring their personal level, that means that if you want to play the fractal 50 but only have a 40 one you don't need to level yours up just have another person with higher fractal level join your party.
  
  
• The purple emote in some of the fractals is the daily fractal and recommended, that fractal will give you one extra chest at the end of completing it.
  
  
• The personal agony resistance is your agony, agony will shield you from agony damage in higher level fractals (How to get it and use it later)

Hub:

Now that we know the basic of fractals let's go into the fractal hub:

Right after you spawn on your left you have the level selector, if you want to change the fractal you are doing just go there to change it.



On the center there is a “pool” if you go in there a window will appear where if everyone is ready after pressing yes the selected fractal will start.



If you go to the right from where you enter you will see an island bellow, to get there you just have to either jump down there or get onto the cog on the floor that will teleport you there.



When you get down there you will see a lot of npcs, the important ones are:

• Banker and trading post (for obvious reasons).
  
• Infuz-5959 (He lets you upgrade better Infusions)
  
• Buy-4373 (He sells fractal keys and other useful things)
  
• Alchemist (Later since potions aren't that important at the start)

You can just go to them and read all that they sell yourself to get familiarized with them.

Loot, gear and Agony:

Let's start playing our first fractal once you complete it, remember to collect the final chest and then you can leave.



At the end you should have looted this, from left to right, Fractal encryptions, agony infusions and a daily chest (if its a daily mision)



Agony can only be equipped in ascended gear so just remember that the most effective/cost is the +9

Fractal encryptions need a key to be opened, they can be obtained from the daily fractal rewards or bought on the vendor, they have really good loot giving both gold and materials so open as many as you have since you get more than what you invest.



You will also get from time to time some ascended gear and materials that you can use.