I am struggling to understand this game.

    So I started playing GW1 Reforged in Prophecies and I decided to start with a Warrior and make my second class an elementalist. I was told there is a lot of build variety in the game but from what I can gleam most of it is classes synergizing past eachother rather than with eachother? I went this combo hoping to infuse my weapons with flame in order to burn enemies to ash. It was already bad finding out that Swords are only one handed and there is no great swords but the fact that fire is mostly offensive spells and the element that has the most synergy with Warrior is Earth to buff my armor and make me tanky? Idk I feel like I was sold on the game's diversity of synergies created from using two classes but the thing is there is no hybrid skills, no skills that you can only get by having those two classes, its more like one class is the main class and the other class just kinda fuels the main class with buffs? That doesn't exactly scream to me a lot of diverse synergies so maybe I am missing something and there is more skill options late game that fit the fantasy, but I am practically considering restarting and taking another class with warrior hoping there are some skills that feel better to use than channelling firestorm inside a pack of enemies.

    The problem is that you are going into gw1 with the mentality of gw2 knowledge.

    Second is that this game is like 21years and from the beginning this game has been centered around teamwork with the classic team setup: dps,healer,tank. There are several skills that compliment each other that is good to use in certain areas. That is why there exists so many skills and elite skills.

    There is no hybrid skills that make you an OP player that by suddenly choosing 1 main proffesion and a secondary profession.. gw1 is all about human skills, and not the dps of a specific skill

    If you cant do that you should go back to gw2. Gw1 and gw2 is not the same games

    Before the time of heroes, ppl went pugging with randoms all over tyria. You change skills and elite depending on each area, each elite area,bosses, quests. There is no 8 skills that rule them all.

    After 3heroes were introduced ppl already started to pug less with each other, and it become much more solo,which meant you can do 8 man areas with 2ppl only. I'm not talking about elite areas yet.

    The real problem came with 7 heroes and metabuilds where ppl rather use OP teambuilds rather than playing with others, most players use 15 pcons with consets on anything related to gw, ppl use pcons/cons on the same page as using a skill on their meta skill bar.

    for each skill you need to understand the advantages and disadvantages that it brings with every type of mob in the entire game,you then need to expand that with each profession to understand how all the core professions play together. after thousands of hours you know what skills is the best against enemies. There are too many to name.

    you have 21years on catching up on, there is so much you need to know, not all skills are created equal. You wont wipe out high lvl mobs with firestorm, only low levels. Gw is about teamwork and using the right setup that goes well with together. You cant become OP by stacking buffs by yourself. This game was never meant to be played solo, yes you can solo farm certain places with certain skills, but fore more depth you need more players or OP metabuilds.

    There is a reas for gw1 has 20 levels and all weapons have max dmg and its not possible to enhance armors/weapons like other mmo does. In gw1 you enhance your armor by adding runes and insignias, from the start you only had runes available a few years.

    I dont want to or have the time to catch you up to 21 years of changes with skills, elites,nerfs,pvp, pve,heroes,henchmen, campaigns. you are starting in 2026 with all the access to everything in gw1,but the knowledge is at 0%.

    What I'm writing is the realist and the most brutal answer you will read your thread.

    In each sentence there are several hundred hours of experience

    Basically what I am getting from this is.

    "Uhm Acktually you GW2 pleeb the game works in this specific way and nananananana."

    You are not being brutal or real you are just being an ass.

    Next I have been playing MMO's since I was 8 years old, for reference I am in my 30's, I am more familiar with the holy trinity and tab targeting than I let on, the only new mechanic to me thus far is the class hybridization and the story structure. Except its not real hybridization its just two classes and if they happen to overlap in some areas yay good for me.

    As for being overpowered I couldn't give a dam, I just had a fantasy in my head, tried to make it by hand and not only did I find its not possible but the game just doesn't support it. For a game that has hundreds of builds and interactions I just happened to pick the thing that has the least synergy. Like I said, the game has skills that play past eachother not with eachother.

    And furthermore I am showing interest in this game trying to understand things and I am being patronized like a toddler, that's not nice bro.

    And yes I did come from GW2 but I didn't come here expecting things to be exactly the same, I came here expecting to build things I could never make in GW2 and instead I am here finding out that if I am not following some 100 worded essayed build guide I can't achieve anything worthwhile. If I wanted to follow a build guide I would go play Path of Exile. If I just wanted to be overpowered and get the class fantasy I want I would go play Catalyst in GW2, but I am here and I am trying to learn what makes this game tick.

    I have seen better class hybridization from Spellforce, an obscure German game thats an RPG/RTS hybrid and its built on a lot of the same pretences as GW1. So curb your elitism for 2 seconds and be rational with me so I can get this game to click because I have been around long enough to have the patience to know stuff isn't skin deep okay?

    It's ok that you came to this game with some misconceptions. "Infuse weapons with fire...burn enemies to ash" paraphrased. OS T's reply wasn't too far off the mark though.

    There are thousands of possible player builds and orders of magnitude more team builds.

    Finding your play style to approach single target enemies, balled up groups of mixed professions or one zone to the next is a journey. We all started simple and worked from there.

    GW is huge. Veterans remember how daunting it was to slog through early mid and endgame of Prophecies capping skills and failing missions hard.

    Then Factions came. Options opened...slowly. We pressed on.

    GW is a triple marathon not a sprint.

    When people say build diversity in GW1, they really mean combining skills, gear, and ultimately team compositions to produce effective if unconventional builds. My personal favorite individual builds are Yung Rocks' Mesmer/Warrior Psycho Thumper build (Mesmer knockdown into hammer spam; if you find an +5 Fast Casting mod for a hammer, you can probably do a Warrior/Mesmer variant if you wish) and Elementalist/Ranger Ebon Dragon (pet-based damage packet spam; you can probably modify it to have a PBAoE elementalist that follows you into battle and casts Double Dragon on you).


    FWIW, Warrior/Elementalist is kind of a bad combo because a lot of the elementalist skills have a high energy cost and warrior has the lowest energy pool and worst energy regen. So you're highly restricted to low cost energy skills, signets, or adrenaline skills.


    I don't played Warrior (in fact, I've pretty much only played a crap-ton of whacky builds for Mesmer and Elementalist), but for the most cross-synergy stuff in its toolbox, you should probably keep an eye on Warrior's Endurance and Flourish (and Seven Weapons Stance once you've reached the end of Factions + ask someone in Kamadan for the Proof of Triumph). They will all enable you (to varying degrees) to use energy-based attack skills from other professions. Or if you want to dive into the deep end, you can try doing hammer/dagger builds that use hammer to prime with a knockdown and swapping to daggers to use knockdown-target-only skils.


    For the archetype you described, I would go Elementalist/Warrior which has a lot of fun builds for all elements (I like alternating between Warrior and Assassin secondary on my iron man Elementalist).

    • I personally prefer an air axe Ride the Lightning variant that lets me spam teleports, covers my melee with Blind, and self-supplies Cracked Armor
    • Krshkr has a fire axe build that matches your fantasy (minus the sword) that looks pretty cool. You probably don't have the Engrave axe so you can drop a few points in Energy Storage to get enough Axe Mastery to meet your weapon requirement. Supplement with a Fevered Dreams Mesmer to spread the conditions and you've got a potent duo which a lot of burst and caster shutdown.
    • The general "problem" with sword builds that don't go all in with Swordmanship is that you skip out on the elite Hundred Blades which is a pretty darn good elite


    Some other miscellaneous warrior synergies/builds:

    • If you make it to Eye of the North, Symbolic Strike with a nearly full bar of signets hits looks pretty fun
      • Signets can be a mix of Warrior (to be tankier/juice your melee), Mesmer (for interrupts and general ranged AoE damage) or Assassin (if you have a team that supplies conditions, this gives you good single target ranged damage)
      • Also Tryptophan Signet is a decent snare
    • Fevered Dreams mesmer lets you do some fun things with sword (specifically with Crippling Slash and Gash with Reap Impurities or Crystal Wave)
    • Frustration mesmers lets you do some fun things with interrupt spam (usually sword but can use axe or daggers)

    Edited 4 times, last by geegee101 (June 17, 2026 at 4:10 AM).

    Got it, I will take my time with it and see what I can do till my options open up.

    You will end up finding a way to play with your original idea. Skills like Conjure Flame, Starburst, Inferno are all viable on a warrior if you’re not min-maxing. Want to burn lots of things? Grab Mark of Rodgort and an axe/hammer with cyclone axe/crude swing.

    It was mentioned earlier, but you have to just find the skills that address warriors low base energy compared to Elementalist skill costs. You will find warrior’s endurance in the desert - this will open some doors for you! Maybe swap your shield for a fire focus? If you want to spend big on some fire spells, make sure you take advantage of low cost adrenaline skills to fill the time between them.

    None of this is ‘optimal’ but who cares. The game isn’t so hard.

    I dont really care that you have been playing MMO's since your 8, every MMO is different so you cant have that ignorance when coming to a new MMO/old like gw. You need to let go if the words hybridization and synergy in gw1. Many from gw1 have been failing with teambuilds since we started playing. We had to constantly to try improve our own builds, our skills and what works with said profession. Players choose the secondary profession based on what benefit they will on certain skills. this might 10 skills out of 60 that is usable from your profession to your secodary. Take monk for example, monks have always struggled with mana, so we to find energy management skills from elementalist like Glyph of lesser energy, Before that we used mesmer as secondary and put points in inspiration. Monks also have certain ranger stance skills that is hugely good, think its called serpents quickness.

    in the beginning of gw warriors liked the ementalist fire skills,but they dont have the mana for it. Not even mana to click on 2 ele skills..

    Most players also had that daunting task of figuring out the uses of all 400+ skills to their advantage, but people learned what works and what doesnt. Even tho you have 400 skills across all professions,you cant just throw in random skills and think it works.


    Well,you are literally a toddler when it comes to experience and knowledge of gw1. Gw2 is just so vastly different that their predecessor. You should probably play gw1 for around 5000h and in that timespan you will figure out how to use skills,builds,which professions works with what and not and realize what I was typing your thread was correct.


    its not that you have to follow a certain builds, you actually can just get the most OP teambuilds from PVX and just blow through the entire game. But you really havent learned anything by doing that. If this triggers your go back and play PoE and SPellforce. Gw1 is NOT neither of those games. Things that works in spellforce but they are some what buiilt on the same foundation does not work here.


    Its like me trying to start to play gw2 and expect me to fast track all failures,experimentation players in gw2 had to endure. Their knowledge might be vast in gw2,but lackluster in gw1

    Quote from Jonast

    You will end up finding a way to play with your original idea. Skills like Conjure Flame, Starburst, Inferno are all viable on a warrior if you’re not min-maxing. Want to burn lots of things? Grab Mark of Rodgort and an axe/hammer with cyclone axe/crude swing.

    It was mentioned earlier, but you have to just find the skills that address warriors low base energy compared to Elementalist skill costs. You will find warrior’s endurance in the desert - this will open some doors for you! Maybe swap your shield for a fire focus? If you want to spend big on some fire spells, make sure you take advantage of low cost adrenaline skills to fill the time between them.

    None of this is ‘optimal’ but who cares. The game isn’t so hard.

    This game isnt so hard now in 2026 when you have 15 pcons,consets,summ stones, OP builds with 7 heroes that you can with 7 mesmers and a rit, you also have to many heroes, and there.But the beginning of gw1, this game was entirely different as you probably know.

    Glad to see you read everything and just continued to not change your tune of better than thou. I come here for help and your advice is just play more. Fantastic you have the same sandpaper attitude FF14 players have about the game getting "Good" post level 60.

    What you are telling me about the many skills of which only so many can be good I am basically gleaming that this game requires you to do almost a spreadsheet worth of planning into every build knowing exactly how to boost what skill for what, and I am not going to be able to understand that fundamentally unless I play the game for 5000 hours. Buddy if a game isn't clicking in the first 200 hours its not a good game.

    Maybe you have the perspective you do because you played the game at the start and had the privilege of not understanding the game and having to struggle to figure whats good and whats not. And thats great more power to you but fundamentally you are hostile and a pos. If you cannot explain to me what makes this game good in a single paragraph beyond just play it more, I think you are the wrong person to be giving out advice to anyone let alone me.

    And I won't drop words like Hybridization or synergy because those are the words that sold me on GW1. What sold me is the supposed sheer depth of builds this game has. Cool I was into that but now that I am here all you are telling me and admitting to me is that I am right that skills don't have synergy with eachother and work past eachother fantastic glad we are on the same page.

    There IS depth to builds in this game though. You have 8 skillbars/16 weapon slots/rune slots to fill out, you and your heroes. There are 1306 skills. At the start of the game, like any MMO, you are going to only get access to a fraction of a percentage of these options because the game is mostly trying to get you used to the systems and the style of gameplay. Guild Wars is an RPG first and MMO second, really. You're encouraged to spend time early with skills that counter or interact favorably with enemy types to make fights and missions easier. As you get stronger and access to more customization, you get to craft 8 man teams with tons of synergy.

    An example is Fevered Dreams, a mesmer Elite Hex that spreads conditions to other adjacent targets. You can pair this with burning from Avatar of Balthazar from a dervish hero, Bleed/Disease from necromancers, etc. Say you choose burning from Avatar of Balthazar. Now you're spreading burn, so "They're on Fire" the paragon skill gives your team a 35% damage reduction from burning foes. Tenai's Wind the elementalist spell does big damage and aoe interrupts burning targets. That encourages you to play Air Magic, so you might play the Thunderclap elite for the condition Cracked Armor. Spreading that gives you armor shred. Just combining these abilities means you have: 35% Damage Reduction vs burning foes, spread -20 Armor status effects, AoE interrupts, and the pressure on healer enemies mana from the Health Degen status effects. Sounds pretty synergistic to me.

    Quote from containmentbreach

    There IS depth to builds in this game though. You have 8 skillbars/16 weapon slots/rune slots to fill out, you and your heroes. There are 1306 skills. At the start of the game, like any MMO, you are going to only get access to a fraction of a percentage of these options because the game is mostly trying to get you used to the systems and the style of gameplay. Guild Wars is an RPG first and MMO second, really. You're encouraged to spend time early with skills that counter or interact favorably with enemy types to make fights and missions easier. As you get stronger and access to more customization, you get to craft 8 man teams with tons of synergy.

    An example is Fevered Dreams, a mesmer Elite Hex that spreads conditions to other adjacent targets. You can pair this with burning from Avatar of Balthazar from a dervish hero, Bleed/Disease from necromancers, etc. Say you choose burning from Avatar of Balthazar. Now you're spreading burn, so "They're on Fire" the paragon skill gives your team a 35% damage reduction from burning foes. Tenai's Wind the elementalist spell does big damage and aoe interrupts burning targets. That encourages you to play Air Magic, so you might play the Thunderclap elite for the condition Cracked Armor. Spreading that gives you armor shred. Just combining these abilities means you have: 35% Damage Reduction vs burning foes, spread -20 Armor status effects, AoE interrupts, and the pressure on healer enemies mana from the Health Degen status effects. Sounds pretty synergistic to me.

    That does sound very interesting, And puts things more into perspective that your team plays a bigger role in your build chain than your own rotation does. That does actually bring me back to ye olde Dragon Age Origins and other classic RPGS where you could have a squad in synergy with eachother by using skills that will directly benefit the next squad member. So that a rotation is now not just what you press on your skillbar but when your allies do at specific moments. Thats pretty cool imo.

    Well,you need to play more to get the basics down, if you can do it in 10 or 500hours is up to you. Every player started with Prophecies, there was limited skills and elites available to us, there werent any build sites like pvx, not even the possibility to make a template, that came later.
    I remember I was going around with inspired hex for e-management, healing breeze and different types of resses. We only had like 2-3 resses in prophecies, the options for better ress skills came later like ressurection chant. it took many hours and pugging to get better with our own builds. what worked and what not. even team builds for elite areas or missions we had to fail in order to try again until finished the mission. In 2026, you have now all skills,elite skill, pve skills, lb skills, new elites from anniversary, pcons, cons. And over 1000 skills to choose from,.but that doesnt mean all builds are created equal.

    There is certain skills that every profession needs. take monk f.example. You need a ress, a high heal elite that has low recharge, a few quick heals, hex removal, condition removal, pref a team heal like heal party and a e-management skill. Just finding the right and best skills took so much time, because each campaign had a few better iterations of skills than the last. We all started with the core profesions so that limited us alot,but many found which class we wanted to play

    When I started playing gw I never cared how many hours I played. this isnt like a game on ps5 or you binge a tv show where you need to be hooked within 2-4 episodes. 200hours in a mmo is not alot

    Every damn player struggled to play gw in the beginning, but that was what made it fun to play. To learn about gw and be better players. We were all noobs. And in gw as with many MMO's there several areas that you a noob in, like knowing what skills to counter with areas, missions,elite areas, campaign bosses, capturing elites. Hard mode makes things a lot harder, even tho ppl make it super easy with 15 pcons,consets, 7 OP mesmers, summ stones,specific elites that adds attribute points,reduces dmg taken.

    You cant put words on how good gw in a paragraph. I dont really care to try to convince you to play gw either,that is up to you. you have so much content available from all campaigns and everything that was added later there is no wonder you dont know where to begin.
    you need to do research on which profession you like to play, tanker,healer,dps. Start with prophecies and the skills that is available to you and progress and learn the basics.

    I have only tried 4 main professions in gw and I know which one I play the most. I know Im a caster and I love the support role. Im a noob with every other profession. and that is after 21years of playtime. If anything is pissing you off or I turn you away from gw1 then you probably should go back to gw2 and play that until gw3 is playable.


    and there is thousands of builds you can randomly put together as someone else earlier mentioned,but many will be bad and not work together. So the illusion you have such vast skills to choose from is not real. I as a monk can not take advantage of warrior skills in pve without limiting myself as a monk. There are certain areas and solo build that does take advantage like farming solo as warrior as a secondary. And there is PVP, but that is a different world.

    For you to play with over 2000 or 3000 skills, you need a vast amount of knowledge and master every proffesion with each skill to able to know.


    What sheer depth of builds? you mean that you have over 1000 skills? and dont know how combine that on a skillbar with 8 skills? that is impossible, even with primary and secondary, you have a few houndreds together. There some truth regarding what you meantion about synergies,but its what primary and secondary skills that boosts each other.


    I dont really know who sold you the idea of hybridization/synergies and the fantasy that gw lets you combine you into a OP player that lets you roll through the game, you wont come far when playing solo( I dont mean by playing with heroes). It's the entire team build setup that makes the whole team good. you have to chose which skills are good and what works the rest of the team. Or you can just ignore everything and unlock the normal skills and elites your team with heroes requires you and roll through with 7 OP mesmers for example and play the game how you like.

    Having read through the thread, I think you were starting to get into the right mindset for how GW1 actually plays. I just wanted to add a few thoughts on top of the advice others have already given.

    GW1 is fundamentally a game about team composition and tactics, you are the main character of the game however, if you treat your team like that you wont go far. Prophecies starts out very slowly, and it's really Nightfall and Eye of the North that begin to open the door to experimenting with different party setups, as that's when you gain access to your first heroes. Unfortunately, Prophecies was released at a time when the expectation was that players would group with other people rather than rely on henchmen.

    You absolutely can beat everything in this game with non-meta builds and without consumables, provided your team composition works and you play around its strengths. On the other hand, you can also run individually strong builds with poor team synergy and still fail to clear Normal Mode.

    The wiki is an excellent resource for looking through skills and understanding what they do. As you play, you'll also start to get a feel for how the AI behaves. A rudimentary example that you have probably encountered is scattering of mobs when firestorm is cast on them, which means other AoE skills are less effective. You counter that with snare, so something like deep freeze would help get the most out of fire storm. Containmentbreach's Fevered Dreams composition is a great example of this kind of synergy done well in a much more indepth way. Complement this with weapons, weapon mods, insignias and runes you get some incredible depth to gameplay. I could run all the same heroes, but have different weapons/mods/insignias/runes and get a completely different result (for better or worse).

    As for primary and secondary professions, your primary profession determines your primary attribute (in your case, Strength, which no other profession has access to), your maximum armour values, and your energy regeneration. Warrior/Elementalist does have some synergies, such as Conjure Flame and various touch skills, as mentioned earlier in the thread, but is lacking in the energy department, so if you wanted to use these kinds of things you would need to start looking at how to not be sat doing nothing whilst you wait for energy to regen (zealous mods, adrenaline skills, signets etc). The Elementalist skills you'd likely want are fairly limited in early Prophecies. It's also worth remembering that just because Elementalist is your secondary profession doesn't mean you need to use Elementalist skills on your skill bar right now. There are plenty of Warrior-only bars that work perfectly well, and later in the game you'll be able to change your secondary profession whenever you like.

    GW1 isn't a game that rushes you to the endgame it's a slow burn. Stick with it, spend some time theorycrafting your team composition, and you'll be well on your way.


    “They make it look so easy, connecting with another human being, it’s like no one told them it’s the hardest thing in the world.” -Dexter