First, let's get this useful feature out of the way. Where most games make you run about everywhere with only rather limited insta-teleport type traveling, and sometimes will give you a mount after you hit some insanely high level, GuildWars is more than slightly different. See, once you enter a town, you can travel there for free from anywhere else in the game at any given time. All you have to do is press M to open up your world map, find the city you want to go to, and just double-click it. If you want to choose a specific server or district in that town, just click once instead to open a window that will let you choose that. If you want to close the map again (even with the town window district-choosing thingy open), just press M again, or the "Close" button.

This system of travel was very exploitable in the Prophecies campaign (which this guide covers), and was subsequently fixed in later incarnations of GuildWars (i.e., Factions, Nightfall, Eye of the North). The "exploit" of sorts still exists in Prophecies, however. What it entails is you joining a "runner"'s party, and they "run" you to different towns or mission outposts. Thus, you could pretty much run your way from post-searing Ascalon City to the fourth-to-last mission in the campaign in about half an hour (depending on how good your runner is). Not that this is recommended, but runners can also take you to towns that lie outside of the general path of the storyline that may have a specific armour set you might want, or certain skills at a skill trainer. Also, runners are far more common in the Prophecies campaign and still exist (to a much lesser extent) in the other GuildWars games, so I am mentioning them so you know what they're talking about. The way running works is generally the passengers can just stay put wherever they spawn, and the runner does all the work because once anyone in your party goes through a portal, your entire party goes through as well, even if you're all in different parts of that area. Some runs however involve the passengers to kill themselves or lure a nasty mob near the beginning of the run away from the runner, so if you do decide to get run somewhere, make sure to follow any directions the runner gives you, lest they (and the rest of the passengers) get pissed off at you for screwing things up. Please note that, unless you find a very nice person, a run will cost you money, and the aforementioned "run to practically the end of the game" would probably cost somewhere along the lines of 30k, give or take a couple thousand gold, and also depending on what route is taken (i.e., the straight route or the scenic one).

You can also travel between the different campaigns using the map (if you own them/have unlocked travel to that campaign on that character already (campaign travel and how to unlock it is discussed in the FAQ linked at the top of this and every other walkthrough page). Just click on the boat (pictured to the right) and choose where you want to go. This is also how you can travel to the Great Temple of Balthazar mentioned on the previous How To page (although to get to GToB from anywhere other than the guildhall you need to have gone there from the guildhall once first, for whatever reason). It works just like the other towns on the map, allowing you to choose specific districts and servers (and towns, if you have more than one campaign installed. It will only take you to the port town of the corresponding campaign, though).

Moving about is rather easy, yet pretty limited. You can use the standard WASD keys to move forwards and backwards and to turn around, but the arrow keys work in exactly the same way, so use whichever set of keys you want. I find it a bit more natural (and easier) to play this game using the arrow keys to move about, since that uses my right hand while my left hand is targeting or attacking or holding my sandwich. (What? You don't play the same game for more than five years without learning how to eat at the same time)Q and E are used to move sideways (strafing), and R is your auto-run key. You can also use your left mouse key for what is known as click-to-move, which is exactly what it sounds like: click once with the mouse, and your character automatically moves there (unless you stop your character by clicking somewhere else or hitting the Escape key or using the WASD/arrow keys). Note that this won't work if there's no path to that location. Also, there's no jumping or swimming (let alone flying) in this game (besides the /jump emote, which has no directionality and thus is useless for movement), so if you can't reach an area by walking, then you can't reach it at all. The X key lets you do a 180 so you can quickly turn around, and the Z key lets you look behind you without changing the direction in which your character is facing (in case you're running away from something and want to check where they are and forgot about the radar I suppose).

Well, with a title like that, I'd better just get the "Can I kill NPC's and loot their bodies?" questions out of the way with a resounding NO. (you also can't loot other players' corpses when you kill them in PvP or if they fall in battle while in your party) As a matter of fact, in some cases an NPC dying will mean quest or mission failure. Now, moving on to NPC's in general. GuildWars has lots of NPCs, although many of them have absolutely nothing to say, and others will just have a set of maybe five (or less) word bubbles which they'll cycle through whenever you or anyone else talks to them. You can "talk" to an NPC by left-clicking on them. If you're far away, you'll immediately move to the NPC, which is important for merchants and quest givers, etc., as their dialogue boxes won't open if you're not close enough to them. As soon as you reach them, the dialogue box opens and you can interact with the NPC.

NPC's who have important information for you will have a variety of glowing things above their heads (in most cases it will either be a green floaty exclamation point or a floaty green arrow. Anything else will more than likely be a competitive mission starter, which don't exist in Prophecies). Exclamation points mean they have a quest for you, and arrows mean they either continue quests you already have or will give you a reward for a quest you've already done. If they're relevant to more than one quest, you will generally be given the option to choose which quest to talk to them about first. These NPC's can be located in or outside of towns (and in one particular case, within a mission ^O__o^;; I guess that guy is just special).

There are also various merchant-type NPC's within the world of GuildWars, also in or outside of towns. The majority of these have the [Collector] tag after their name, because they will give you stuff (weapons, armour, whatever) in exchange for other stuff (crafting materials, or trophies (i.e., the one item that is a common drop amoung all monsters of the same species, like skale fins in pre-searing dropping from skales). The other merchant types are of a more traditional sort, taking money in exchange for their wares. Regular merchants ([Merchant] tag) will generally sell ID kits of varying sorts (depending on the location of the town/area they hang out in, salvage kits of equal variation, lockpicks, keys relevant to their location, and grey dye (restores armour to its default grey colour). Other merchants may sell additional items. There are also crafting material merchants, scroll traders, rune traders (explained later), etc. Not every single town will have every single type of merchant. One thing to note is that the [Weaponsmith] and [Weapons] NPC's don't always sell actual weapons. Most will just offer to customize weapons in your inventory. Customizing weapons adds a +20% damage bonus to them, with the downside of marking them with your character's name, so no other character (yours or otherwise) can equip them (so if you sell them to someone, they can report you for scamming, which can result in your account being suspended or banned).

You can tell when I'm starting to get annoyed with how long it's taking to write something when I start typing stupid things for section titles ^=__=^ Anyway. This paragraph will discuss weapons and armour. You can acquire weapons from monster drops, hidden stashes in pre-searing, chests in other areas of the game (chests require keys though, but you can find those as monster drops too or buy them from merchants), purchase them from some merchants, craft them from other merchants with crafting materials and gold, trade collector NPCs for them, or buy them from other players. There are many different types of weapons: wands, focus items, staves, scythes, daggers, bows, swords, axes, hammers, shields, and spears. Unlike in other games, you don't need arrows if you use a bow (they just kinda appear out of nowhere in unlimited supply when you're attacking with a bow), and you don't need to sharpen anything or repair anything. Generally, assassins use daggers, dervishes use scythes, casters (elementalists, monks, mesmers, necromancers, and ritualists) use wands and focus items, or staves, paragons use spears and shields, rangers use bows, and warriors use swords/axes and shields, or hammers. I say "usually," because there are some weapon skins that are very popular/expensive so sometimes people will be wielding really random weapons. The general "rules" on weapon usage by professions (primary or secondary) exist because all weapons except very low damage weapons come with an attribute requirement. So even amoung wands, which five different professions use, you have specificity. You can check on what requirement your weapon has by mousing over it in the Inventory menu. Doing so pops up a small window as in the example to the right. Here you will see all of the information about your weapon, including damage, damage type, and any mods on the weapon. In this case, this weapon requires 9 Healing Prayers. This does not mean that you will not be able to equip this weapon if you have more or less than 9 Healing Prayers. What it means is that if you do not have rank 9 or higher in the Healing Prayers attribute you will not do the full damage (in this case 11-22 dmg) when attacking physically with this weapon. The other mods on the weapon (such as Health +30 in this example) will still apply to you regardless of your rank in the required attribute. I'll go over mods in a sec.

The damage a weapon does also varies by weapon type. Max damage for daggers is 7-17, 9-41 for scythes, 11-22 dmg and +10 energy for staves, 11-22 for wands, +12 energy for focus items, 14-27 for spears, 16 armour for shields for any profession, 15-28 for bows, 15-22 for swords, 6-28 for axes, and 19-35 dmg for hammers. All daggers, scythes, staves, bows, and hammers are two-handed, and generally the lowest required attribute rank for any weapon (including focus items and shields) is 9, although I have seen some 8's or 7's, but this is very very very rare. Weapons can be modified in several ways for different effects. All weapons can be customised for a 20% damage bonus, as I mentioned in the previous section, but again this will customise the weapon specifically for your character, which means no other character anywhere ever, including other ones you own or even if you delete that character and remake it with the same name and same professions will ever be able to equip that weapon, although they can still be sold to merchants or traded to other players (so beware when you are buying things!). You can tell if a weapon has been customised by looking at the mouse-over description (in the example above, you can see at the bottom of the description a line that says "Customised for Zakuro Reiran"). You can also add mods to your weapons, up to two per weapon. You can tell just by the name of the weapon how many mods it has, if you don't feel like reading all the lines of text. An unmodded weapon will just say the weapon skin and weapon type, in this case it would be "Oppressor's Healing Staff." A mod adds things either to the front or back of the basic name, so in this case this weapon has two mods, a "hale" mod and an "of enchanting" mod. The extra text in the description will tell you what specific mods are on the weapon. In this case, there is an HP +30 mod and an enchants last 20% longer mod. Still not going indepth into mods yet though... One more thing you can add to certain weapons is an inscription, however, most places in the Prophecies campaign do not drop inscribable weapons. You can tell if a weapon can be inscribed if it says "Inscription:" in the description anywhere. If there is an empty inscription slot, it will say "Inscription: None," and if it already has an inscription it will list the inscription name afterwards (i.e., "Aptitude not Attitude") and what that inscription does directly under that (so, in this case, it is an inscription that halves cast time of healing spells by 20%). In some cases, weapons will come with an extra "mod." This isn't a mod in the true sense of the word, as even "base" weapons can come with one, but in the example above it says "Halves skill recharge of spells 20%" which was on the base weapon to begin with.

OK, mods, as promised! As previously stated, you can have up to two mods per weapon (not counting the inherant "mod" that some weapons come with) and one inscription (if applicable). Ah, one thing to note is that even though most of Proph does not drop inscribable weapons, many weapons will come with "inscriptions" on them. To explain this I first need to explain mods a bit more first. See, you can add mods to weapons, but you can't buy mods from any NPC (the Priest of Balthazar doesn't count since that's just unlocking them for PvP. You don't actually get the physical mod in your inventory). You can, however, remove them from weapons you've found using either an expert, superior, or perfect salvage kit. A regular salvage kit will not remove a mod from a weapon and will just reduce the weapon to basic crafting materials (more on this when I talk about armour). The only difference between the other types of salvage kits (besides number of uses) is that expert and superior kits have a pretty big chance of destroying the weapon after you salvage a mod from it, whereas a perfect salvage kit will never destroy anything you use it on. OK, so that's how you get mods (other than buying them from other players). You can get inscriptions the same way, as long as the weapon is inscribable. If it doesn't say "Inscription:" anywhere in the description then you cannot remove an inscription from it, even if it has a mod on it that does the same thing as an existing inscription.

So, because I am lazy and it kinda gives me a headache, here is a link to the mods and inscriptions page on the official Wiki. And by "lazy" I mean I'm not gonna list them all here or what weapons each go to (because some mods only apply to certain weapons and that's the part that gives me headaches). I will keep explaining them though. All mods and inscriptions have different levels of effectiveness, so for example if you scroll down near the bottom to the "of Fortitude" mod in the "Suffix bonuses" section you'll see that it says "Health +10-30." This means that the mod can come in a version that gives you +10HP or +15HP or whatever HP between 10 and 30, but as you can see in the example above it is a fixed number, unlike the damage range numbers. All mods have a range of possible values that they can be found in, and the most desireable are the max ones. You can also check that page to see what mods can go on which weapons. In order to add mods/inscriptions to your weapons, just double-click on the mod or inscription in your inventory and then click on the weapon you wish to upgrade. Also, you can only upgrade weapons that aren't white. What I mean by that is not the actual colour of the weapon but the colour of the text when you mouse-over the weapon (in this case, this weapon is gold). The colours only really mean how "rare" the weapon is ("rare" here doesn't really mean what it should, because here "rare" is an arbitrary thing designated way before the game came out by Anet, and doesn't really apply to the rare skins thing I mentioned earlier. For example, there is a weapon called a Crystalline Sword which is pretty rare, but I've seen blue text crystalline swords, and I even own a purple one, so... the colors are kinda irrelevant (besides whites not being moddable, and only blue or higher will come with mods on them) but they exist and people always ask about them so I am mentioning them here). Anyway, the "rarity" colours, from most common to most rare, are as follows: white, blue, purple, gold, and green. Green weapons are almost exclusively dropped from bosses (some can be traded for at NPCs, besides being bought from other players :op ), and the only place in Prophecies where greens drop are in an area called Sorrow's Furnace, or the surrounding area called Grenth's Footprint. Greens are also called "unique" weapons because they drop from bosses and generally have the boss' name in the weapon name (such as Villnar's Glove only dropping from Villnar Painforge, or Koosun's Fire Staff only dropping from Star Ancient Koosun). Also, please be aware that, while all of the Prophecies greens have max stats, all bosses in Factions, Nightfall, and GW:EN drop greens, including level 2 bosses ^<__<^ so not all greenies are good weapons (although low-level greens can be really good for low-level characters). Oh, one more thing: Any weapon that you find that is blue or higher (except green) will say "Unidentified" at first. You need to use an identification kit (a.k.a. "ID kit") in order to see what mods this weapon you've just found actually has. And no, there is no difference between the ID kits except number of uses and cost (so a more expensive ID kit will not get you better mods).

Alright, on to armour. Different towns in different areas of the game will have different armour sets and AL (armour level, or armour rating) available for purchase. The AR available correlates with the level of the enemies in that area, so the higher level the area, the higher AR available for purchase. Also, even if the different cities have the same armour skins (which is sometimes the case), the AR may be different so it's worth it to check each armour trader you find. The max AR for each profession is also different. For casters, the max AR is 60, for assassins, rangers, and dervishes it is 70, and warriors and paragons have a max AR of 80. ... it all made sense until Nightfall came out, honestly. Casters and rangers tend to stay in the back so they don't really need higher AR, whereas warriors are frontliners. So that makes sense. Then assassins came along with 70 AR like rangers, and people were like, "Why? We are frontliners!," but those were the people who didn't understand how to play assassins (they have "teleport to enemy/ally" skills for a reason: teleport in, stab stab stab, and GTFO before you get hit, duh). So that still made sense. Then NF came along and you've got dervishes (frontliners) with 70 AL, and paragons (ranged weapons) with 80 AL. What in the name of cheese... so yeah, don't ask me why that is cause I honestly have no bloody clue. Anyway. Armour can be purchased from NPCs with the [Armour] or [Armourer] tags using crafting materials and gold, or traded from collectors for crafting materials or monster trophies. You CANNOT buy armour from other players. Well, OK, you CAN but armour is automatically customised for the character who buys/trades it from an NPC so even if you buy armour from another player you CANNOT wear it. This is a common scam, so please be aware of that. Anyway. Crafting materials can be dropped by monsters, salvaged from random weapons and other loot, or from monster trophies, or bought from NPCs with the [Materials Trader] and [Rare Materials Trader] tags, or from other players. Regular salvage kits will only produce regular crafting materials, while salvaging with any other salvage kit (EXCEPT perfect) has a chance of salvaging rare materials. Some weapons will come with an "inscription" (again, some aren't actual inscriptions but still do the same thing) that says "Highly salvageable" which means it will give you more crafting materials than other weapons that don't say this. The armourer's menu will tell you what materials you need and mousing over the armour in the list will tell you the AL.

Armour can also be upgraded with "mods" called runes or insignias. You can have one rune and one insignia per piece of armour, and each set of armour has four pieces (although some will have five). All professions can wear five pieces of armour (headgear, chest piece, legs piece, gloves, and boots) but some headgear are not attached to a specific armour set. In the past, different armour sets for the same profession had different bonuses, but this was eventually removed and insignias were added to the game to replace inherant armour bonuses. Soooooooooo... basically what this means is that, barring differences in AR, different armour sets only exist for cosmetic purposes. So yeah, basically just to look different. You can also mix and match armour sets with no penalties, like my ele pictured right. She actually doesn't have even two pieces from the same set... hey, it's not my fault there is no full set of female ele armour that isn't hideously ugly. ^=__=^;; So yeah, 1k Stone Aura headgear, 1k Sunspear top, 15k Luxon gloves, 15k stormforged skirt, and 15k Canthan boots. Which leads perfectly into my next point. You'll notice that some of the pieces say 1k and some say 15k. This can happen with armour that sounds like the same skin type, which is why people will differentiate by saying 1k/regular or 15k/elite. Thing is, some armour sets in GuildWars have "elite" versions which cost 15k per piece (plus crafting materials) instead of the regular 1k per piece (plus crafting mats) for max armour. And yes, this does mean that "elite" armour is still max armour, so no, elite/15k armour sets are not somehow "better" than regular 1k max armour. They are purely just for looks, and yes they do look pretty different. So don't think that you have to drop oodles of cash just to get the most protection out of your armour. So yeah, buy whatever armour you want, mix and match pieces as you like, since it's really all just for looks anyway.

OK, back to runes and insignias.