Originally posted by: manveruppd
Like with most recent MMOs, death doesn't really mean a thing. In GW, there's no permanent XP loss, no item looting, no wear and tear on weapons/armour, nothing. Just a small penalty to your max health and energy, which is wiped as soon as you go back to town. When you die, someone from your team (whether it's AI henchmen or real people) will usually resurrect you immediately, and you're back in action with just a 15% penalty to your max health. If nobody can res you or your party is wiped, you'll respawn at the nearest health shrine. In some pve missions and some pvp scenarios there are no res shrines, so a party wipe will mean you lose, and you respawn at the nearest outpost. But, again, there won't be any penalty: no item decay, no XP or money loss, your death penalty gets reset, and you even get to keep whatever loot you picked up before you got killed!
Can my character be killed by other players?
That you're asking this question suggests to me that you haven't really gotten what GW is:
GW isn't a "proper" MMO. All areas are instanced. When you're doing quests and missions in pve, you will not be playing in a persistent world. You walk out of the outpost, and you're on your own in an instanced explorable area full of monsters. The only people who'll be with you are the people in your party (which can be real people, AI henchmen who are basically bots, or heroes, who are henchmen over whom you have more direct control). There's also no "friendly fire" on attacks and spells, so if you get caught in the blast radius of your friend's fireball you won't get hurt. As such, there's no chance of another human player just walking up to you and killing you out of the blue. PvP in GW is structured, team-based PvP. This means you go into the arenas, you team up with 3 other people, the team leader clicks "enter battle" and you're transported in an instanced arena and pitted against some other team of 4 people. Or, you and your guildmates gather in the guild hall, you make a team of 8, the leader clicks "arrange guild battle", and you're transported in an instanced version of your guild hall (or the enemy guild's guild hall) and pitted against an 8-man team from another guild (can be random, or you can issue a friendly challenge to a specific guild). Again, your guild hall is not persistent, so there's no chance of another guild "invading" you while you're all offline and taking over your guild hall! (although I'm looking forwards to doing that in Age of Conan!
) So PvP is not "consentual" in the way it's consentual in, say, Warcraft, where you put up a flag over your head that ssays "you're allowed to attack me". You actually have to GO to the outpost the PvP starts from (don't worry, travelling in GW is instantaneous, you just click on the map), join a team, and enter a match. Notice I use the term "match" rather than "fight" or "battle", because that's the correct term: it's more like an organised team-based sport than a random online brawl against other people's RPG characters.
There's lots of types of PvP apart from the two I've mentioned (arenas and Guild vs Guild), but they're all based around the normal FPS archetypes of capture the flag, king of the hill, or team deathmatch, and sometimes combinations of them.
Each GW chapter is stand-alone (except for Eye of the North, the latest one, which you need to own one of the previous chapters to play). Each has its own PvE storyline in areas specific to it, and the second and third chapters each have a type of PvP unique to them: Factions has Alliance Battles, which is kinda like a multi-node King of the Hill match, and Nightfall has Hero Battles, which is basically 1v1 (1 person with 3 AI heroes against another person with 3 AI heroes).
Now, it might seem to you from my rambling on that GW really IS pvp-centred. Well, yes and no. The game mechanics are balanced for PvP, and the interface and gameplay streamlined for it. Over the years, the devs have made it even easier for people to get into PvP, and now you can spend all your time PvPing without needing to do any PvE at all. (It used to be that the only way to unlock skills and items was through your PvE character learning or acquiring them. Now you can earn points which you spend to unlock these things just by playing PvP, so you no longer NEED to play a lot of PvE before you can even get started in PvP.) Over the years, though, they figured out that most of their customers were mostly interested in PvE, so they started improving and enriching that side of the game a lot more, to the point where it's pretty good now, even to someone like me who joined for the PvP.
As to whether it's too late to start, I'd say yes. There's just so much content right now that the remaining active population is spread pretty thin, so unless you have your own group of friends to play with you'll be spending quite a lot of time on your own. And it's not a nice feeling when you start telling off your AI henchmen for standing in the wrong place as if they can hear you, trust me on that!
There's plenty of large, noob-friendly guilds that'd take you in though, and I'm sure you'd find guildies who'd be only too happy to join you for some missions, if only for nostalgic purposes. But part of the joy of playing an MMO is exploring and discovering new areas in the company of people sharing that experience, and if the people you're playing with are a bunch of jaded vets who have (literally) been there, done that, got the t-shirt, and came back to get another one when the t-shirt wore out, it won't be the same feeling.
Also, one of the things I enjoyed while I was a young and tender noob was trying out new skill combinations. I think back on some of the ridiculously inefficient character builds I used to run and laugh, but it was part of the process of discovery. Now it's been over 2 years, and, as with all MMOs, all the best and most efficient character builds have been discovered, catalogued and analysed to death. You'll still get to experiment in PvE (although most PvE areas are so easy that you won't really need to tweak your character much except for your own fun), but, if you want to join PvP and be competitive, your teammates will tell you exactly what they need you to do, exactly which 8 skills to put on your skillbar to achieve the required effect, and exactly how to use them. I'm not saying that's the whole story, as it's a pretty deep game which will take you ages to get good at (in terms of speed in skill activation, movement and positioning, reflexes, battlefield awareness, and communication with your teammates). Knowing which skills to put on your skillbar is about as useful as knowing how to switch to the railgun in Quake: it's a small start, but you still need to learn to aim the damn thing!
But, for me, the process of discovery and trying out new builds, some whacky, some stupid, some awesome, was a big part of the fun of it, and you won't get it to the same extent. Some of my fondest memories are of trying out a new, extremely gimmicky team build with a bunch of guys, and watching the enemy go down in flames, not because it was any good, but because it was so absurd that they just stood around watching us in confusion! Or arguing with my guild leader about a GvG build that he said was absolutely idiotic, and then going onto observer mode and watching the #4 ranked guild use something almost identical to what I suggested!
They were simpler, more innocent days, and now the people still playing GW are jaded and have seen and tried everything. I still enjoy the game, and I think I'm having more fun now than I was back when I was a clueless noob, because now I don't get the frustration of trying out a billion stupid ideas before figuring out the one idea that works, but I yearn for the day when it was all new and exciting... maybe in part because everyone else was as clueless as me so my lack of skill wasn't a factor!
But, in any case, if you have friends who are also just starting out then go for it. If you're on your own I don't think you'll enjoy it that much.
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