Creating Your Hero

Heroes are male or female, large or small, and are made up of any one of 56 potential combinations of the eight professions: Warrior, Elementalist, Monk, Ranger, Mesmer, Necromancer, Ritualist, and Assassin. Individual heroes can eventually learn as many as 150 unique skills per character. The most important choices you must make for your new hero are first a primary profession, and soon thereafter a secondary profession. These choices determine not only armor, skills, and fighting style, but your overall gameplay experience.

You can create four heroes per unique Guild Wars account, gain two additional hero slots with Factions, and purchase extra slots if needed. You can delete and create new heroes at any time and switch up your skills and attributes whenever you’re in town. Experiment with profession combinations until you create the hero that suits you best.

Attributes

Every profession possesses up to five attributes. Attributes are specific to the professions you choose, and your hero’s pool of attribute points derives from the combination of your primary and secondary professions. The first attribute listed is available only to a character that chooses that profession as a primary. For example, a Warrior/Monk would have access to the primary Warrior attribute, Strength. A Monk/Warrior would get Divine Favor as a primary attribute. Either combination would possess the three normal Monk attributes and the four normal Warrior attributes, but the primary attribute will make each one play differently and serve a different function in the adventuring party.

Most skills are tied to a specific attribute; improving an attribute automatically improves those related skills. Each profession’s attributes make for distinctive battle strategy, and the specific attributes you choose to improve help you to create a fighting style all your own.

Primary Attribute

Each profession has a powerful primary attribute available only to characters that have chosen that profession as their primary profession. For example, when chosen as a primary profession, the Ranger possesses Expertise, which reduces Energy cost for using certain skills; while the Mesmer can put points into Fast Casting, which increases spell casting speed. The secondary profession you choose will not have access to this primary attribute, so it’s important to note each profession’s primary attribute when considering which profession will be your first choice.
 

Attribute Points

For each level you gain, you receive attribute points to improve the effectiveness of your skills. Allocating points to an attribute increases the power of skills and weapons tied to that attribute. Increase the attributes tied to the skills and weapons you think you’ll use most often. You can adjust your attributes at any time as long as you are in a town location. This flexibility allows you to adjust your gameplay to adapt to new situations and effectively harness new weapons and spells. For instance, if your Warrior finds a rare sword but you have trained the Warrior in axes by pumping up the Axe Mastery attribute, you can simply go to town, reallocate the attribute points you have in Axe Mastery and put them into Swordsmanship instead.

Leveling Up

As you travel through the land and accomplish the heroic tasks set before you, your character will earn experience points and gain character levels. With each level comes an increase in maximum Health (which makes you harder to kill) and an increase in Energy (from which you draw power for many skills). The highest level your roleplaying character can reach is 20, which is, not coincidentally, the starting level for a ready-made PvP character.
 

Improving Attributes

Each level awards you attribute points to spend improving your attributes. Your primary profession determines your primary attribute, such as the Elementalist primary’s Energy Storage, which permanently increases maximum Energy, allowing you to use more skills more often. The number of points you receive when you gain a new level increases as you gain more experience.
 

Skill Points

With experience you’ll gain skill points, which entitle you to train new skills from your primary and secondary professions. With each skill you learn, your skill arsenal becomes more versatile and overall more powerful in a wider range of situations against enemies of various types.

Quest-giving NPCs (non-player characters—the computer-controlled people that inhabit the game) can also sometimes be seen as de facto skill trainers, since a new skill (or set of skills) is often included in the quest’s rewards. In this way you can learn plenty of extra skills without spending a single skill point, and you will likely unlock most skills earlier in the game in this fashion. Skill points are valuable and rare—you will earn one for every level you gain, and from certain important quests and missions, but you should not spend them frivolously. If you see an NPC offering a skill as a quest reward, and the same skill is for sale from a trainer, you’re better off hitting the quest.
 

Customized Heroes

You can create six very different characters for your Guild Wars account, each taking advantage of a unique set of resources including skills, attributes, weapons, fighting styles, and strategies. Your Warrior/Elementalist can hit the enemy hard with distance spells, and then rush into combat where you’ll then knock them down with a hammer blow. A Ranger/Necromancer can use both beasts and the reanimated dead to pummel foes while battering enemies with ranged arrow attacks.

The professions, skills and attributes you choose to learn and improve over time result in a unique Guild Wars experience for each hero you create. You can further customize your hero by choosing the character’s sex, appearance, and make your armor set unique with dyes that you might find as loot or purchase from a dye trader. And don’t forget, you can delete a character at any time to free up space for a new one.