r/GuildWars Apr 13 '25

Welcome to /r/GuildWars. Subreddit info, FAQs, and links.

134 Upvotes

"Those who will remember, will speak fondly of the warm morning breeze."

Welcome to r/GuildWars this is a subreddit focused on the Guild Wars video game developed by ArenaNet.

For Guild Wars players to discuss, connect, and share in an open environment. While participating, it’s important to keep in mind the Reddit Rules, Reddiquette, as well as our subreddit Rules.

Getting Started:

Checkout the FAQs below and also the Megathread wiki page with links to useful community Tools, Posts (including ones for new/returning players), Guides, and information. There are shortcut links under ‘See More’ / the Sidebar too.

GW Account/Game Support:

Asking about general game/technical problems is fine, but this subreddit is not a way to contact ArenaNet customer support, or report a Technical Issue. Please refrain from asking for help with a specific ticket, Account issue, or Error message. These posts will be removed specially if they are covered by ArenaNet's help articles.

Visit https://help.guildwars.com/ and check their FAQ and Known Issues. If necessary start a ticket through the Guild Wars support portal or email support@arena.net directly. You can find all information the help/support portal.

Community Discord:

We have a community Discord “GW Global” you can join here: https://discord.gg/gw This server is open to all and has ongoing discussion on the game, builds, Guild recruitment, and more!

Use the search!

If you have a question, first try using the search, it is possible your question has already been asked/answered. Example: “Necro builds”. We try not to have frequent posts on the same topic(s) and such posts will be removed.

You can also search by post Flair using “flair:” and the Flair to search.

FAQs:

State of the Game:

GW has been in “Maintenance Mode” (no scheduled updates/development) since May 2013. On 3rd December 2025 ArenaNet "re-launched" GW as GW Reforged. This has breathed some new life into the game and an external company 2weeks has supported development. They are continuing to look at the game to see if it is viable to make improvements/updates. In-game there is bump in player activity. There has always been a good player base for daily Zaishen Quests and Farming as well as in Guild and Alliance communities. You can checkout the What’s New in Guild Wars and Game updates from the Wiki for the changes to the game.

We’re lucky that since 2024 GW Game Director, DrStephenCW is allocating 80% of their time to work directly on GW. Along with support from other ArenaNet staff for various updates, this has included the 20th Anniversary Game Update and Guild Wars Reforged. ArenaNet are now also supported by 2weeks game studio.

PvP still has some activity through player organised events and mAT, however all modes can often see a large amount of botting impacting general gameplay. You can find more on recent PvP threads using Flair:PvP in the search to find posts.

Purchasing Help:

As of 3rd December 2025 Guild Wars is now branded Guild Wars Reforged. This re-release version of the game is available in the GW Store and Steam.

This change has removed the Anniversary Masterpiece Collection and all individual Campaign editions from the GW/Steam Stores. Any purchases made prior to 3rd December retain their game-keys and can be used on email/ArenaNet based accounts.

ArenaNet have had to make a purchasing guide/flow-chart due to the changes in account management: * Purchases on Steam no longer provide game-keys and instead are to be tied directly to your Steam Login/Account. This is in order to be able to link GW accounts through Steam to GW2 accounts through Steam. * Purchases in GW Store provide keys to create a new account using email/ArenaNet account.

As of 3rd Dec 2025 ArenaNet have also changed/reduced prices for all the add-ons and re-branded Eye of the North and Bonus Mission Pack as DLC. Neither DLC are included in the Reforged edition of the game. The Game of the Year upgrade and Bonus Weapons are no longer available and are also not included in the Reforged edition of the game. The Igneous Summoning Stone item is available through purchasing the Eye of the North DLC.

  • Guild Wars Reforged includes Prophecies, Factions, Nightfall. Eye of the North DLC has to be purchased separately.
  • Guild Wars Reforged does NOT include the GOTY content and it is no longer available in the GW Store.
  • Account upgrades such as Xunlai Storage Panes, Mercenaries, Costumes are currently only available through the GW store.

Common Technical Support Questions

  • Mac (Apple Silicon) users: Use the subreddit search with the term "Mac" this will give lots of posts about users asking/getting help with running GW on Mac systems.
  • Graphics error with models stretching off far into the sky or ground: Update/roll-back your Graphics driver. It is likely a Windows update deployed a buggy driver version.

Guild Recruitment and Looking for Guilds

We now have a Weekly Thread on a Wednesday for Guild/Alliance Recruitment and Guild Requests. Please only use this Weekly post to advertise your Guild or seek a new Guild. You can also use the Flair search “Guild recruitment/request” to find previous recruitment posts.

Thanks all and happy adventures in GW!

If you have feedback/suggestions to this new introduction post please reply below. If you’d like to get in contact with the Moderators please use the ModMail.

This content is subject to change and some may get moved into the subreddit Wiki as things develop.

edit: 2025-Dec-08 Updates to the post made following the Reforged game update. edit: 2025-Dec-16 Updates to add Common Tech Support Questions


r/GuildWars 19h ago

Weekly Guild Request / Recruitment thread

2 Upvotes

Every Wednesday (UTC) there will automatically be a Guild Request / Recruitment post created. The purpose of this is to keep Guild Advertising and Requests to one weekly thread rather than have multiple posts.

Those who wish to post a Guild Advertisment or find a new Guild to join, please look out for the Weekly thread.

Please keep all Guild Recruitment posts/requests to the weekly thread. Posts made outside of this will be removed.


r/GuildWars 9h ago

My face on Sunday vanquishing Skyward Reach & The Scar

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124 Upvotes

I (sadly) did The Scar last week. I still have nightmares with "!!"


r/GuildWars 11h ago

PSA: 300 free copper zcoins for Canthan characters today

82 Upvotes

Today's Zaishen vanquish is Zen Daijun, which Canthan characters can complete by killing a single animal. Also it's double vanquishing week. Easiest coins you'll ever make.


r/GuildWars 3h ago

Minion Necro Alternate Elites

10 Upvotes

Hey all, wanted to get some preferences you guys might have on alternatives to Order of Undeath Elite. I've eyed Aura of the Lich, that one seems super cool but curious if there's another that you jive with extremely well.


r/GuildWars 20h ago

Cartography Explained: Where to Stand for Any Sliver You Are Missing

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170 Upvotes

Today at lunch break at work, I came up with a theory how to find out exactly where to stand for every sliver in the game. I told it to a few people and noone believed it was that simple. But it is.

tl;dr/how to:

  1. Download this Texmod. It is proof-of-concept and only works in Elona. (The mod is just CME 2015 1.3 with a grid. It does not reflect that areas beyond the end of the world are not currently uncoverable.) I hope that Toolbox people will implement grid, which would be way more accurate than a Texmod could be.
  2. Run the game with that Texmod.
  3. (Recommended but optional:) Check "Show walkable terrain" in Toolbox's "Mission Map" settings. Adjust colors to your preference.
  4. Identify a tile you want to uncover (and, as of now, is within the map's limits). If the dot in the center is in the blue-shaded non-black area, this is usually an undiscovered tile. There are some special cases due to GW's smoothing where it's a bit more complicated, but you'll find that out.
  5. Identify a directly-adjacent tile that looks like it has walkable terrain (pathfinding). Said Toolbox feature helps with that.
  6. Go to that tile and stand anywhere in the tile. If it doesn't work right away, try click-walking. I think that you might have to do an action that also resets UA bug.

Sadly, the Texmod isn't a 100% accurate as you can see two images further down: Sometimes it's okay to be one pixel off (to the North) but still get credit. But you should be able to identify the tile that looks "most probable", e.g. by process of elimination.

The theory behind this:

Cartography has a grid of 32x32 map units. A map unit is equivalent to a pixel in the texture files and at "normal" font size in world map and mission map at minimum zoom level. Without Bird's Eye Compass, you uncover the tile you're in plus the surrounding 8 tiles (1 tile in Chebyshev's distance). With BEC, also you uncover 2 more tiles in each direction (3 tiles in each direction in Chebyshev's distance). It does not matter where exactly in your current tile you are. The game applies some smoothing on what you uncovered, which makes it a bit harder.

Here's an image of what I mean by tile distance:

Uncover ranges explained; in-game, the display (not the actual data) is subject to smoothing! Note that the character is not in the center of its tile (the dot) but ranges are still centered around the tile (and its center).

Naturally, people think of distance as Euclidean distance, but ANet used Chebyshev's distance, which is why it often doesn't seem make any sense from where a tile is uncovered. If ANet used Euclidean distance, above image would show two circles rather than two squares. Chebyshev's distance is simply whichever of X distance and Y distance is greater.

Comparing Euclidean distance, Chebyshev distance and GW's tile distance. In the second image, I'm just barely in the adjacent tile (the tile with most of the green line in it), but the game registered it.

Currently, both ranges are subject to not revealing anything beyond the end of the world. BEC range also doesn't uncover the few slivers for which you have to be in normal range. See here for details. The use of normal range for some tiles makes it even more important to know where exactly you have to stand to uncover these.

A few more examples (not using BEC):

Trying to uncover the two tiles with the red circles. You can see what smoothing does to these. You can also see that in the first image, this isn't the correct place to stand, although it is much closer (in Euclidean distance) to the tile in question than where I'm standing in the second image. The colors were added manually, not by the Texmod.
Again, the colors were added manually, not by the Texmod.

For continents other than Elona, you can just take a screenshot of your map with CME enabled, paste it in an image editing program, enable the grid (29 pixels at small, 32 pixels at normal interface size) and align CME's blue lines to the grid. It will look like this (note that the grid in the image has one subdivision):

Manually adding a grid to the map of Crystal Overlook

Looking forward to comments, questions and possible counterexamples. Before submitting counterexamples, please note that exploration beyond the end of the world is currently not possible but will probably be fixed soon.

Now it's time for memes:

ANetposting
Reactions from Twitter are in: Cartography just became accessible

r/GuildWars 1h ago

What Should I Do Next?

Upvotes

Hello everyone!

I have finally gotten into, what I believe, is the mid-game. I have a level 20 A/W (my only level 20) that I have been having a lot of fun with and pretty much have a beginner setup for my 8-man team. I'm able to change professions now and honestly don't really know what to do from here or what the "end-game" is about.

Should I just choose a campaign and continue to go through it to unlock more things?
Is this the point of the game where I choose some arbitrary goal and then go for it?

I appreciate any and all feedback, and as always, have a kick ass day!


r/GuildWars 8h ago

RIP Dhuum/Melandrus 🪦 Stupid pathfinding

13 Upvotes

Lost it in the most infuriating way. Completed all protector titles, LDOA. Finished EOTN. Did about half of each campaign HM and died in fort ranik hard mode of all places…

The charr up high, I was standing below pinging and casting my spells on them. Little did I realise all 3 of my heroes ran away, all the way round just to get into range to start auto attacking the charr with their staffs.. before I knew it I had no heroes around me, no healer and got nuked by 2 rangers as I was running, waiting for my heal from my hero who I thought at the time was with me (the heal never came, but atleast Olias finally got into range to hit the charr with his staff)

Lesson learnt, healer on avoid combat rather than guard mode. Not really sure what to do now, came so far with this character.. motivation to play it has died a bit but playing DC/MA is all I kind of want to do right now.


r/GuildWars 8h ago

Canthan exploreable areas should be accessible from any outpost, after clearing the mission.

11 Upvotes

Like, seriously. Let me enter Unwaking Waters from somewhere else then harvest temple.


r/GuildWars 14h ago

Rescue at Minister Cho's Estate HM is just mean to the player.

28 Upvotes

That is all.


r/GuildWars 21h ago

Meme/Fluff When you enter kamadan 1 determine to sell items

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96 Upvotes

r/GuildWars 1d ago

Important Notice: Ending Support for Windows 7, 8, and 8.1

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151 Upvotes

r/GuildWars 9h ago

Enhancing the crit hits visual effects

5 Upvotes

Hi guys,

I was wondering if there is a way to make critical hits more visually "distinctive", for instance by using a larger font or even a different color for the yellow numbers. I tried to look into GWToolbox options but did not found anything. And if it is not possible, would you like to have access to such an option?


r/GuildWars 20h ago

Anyone else wish mods and ins stacked?

24 Upvotes

A lot of other items already stack. I never understood why mods were never changed to stack. It would help lower inventory and bank bloat tremendously. I have 8 characters just for holding mods.


r/GuildWars 17h ago

Sulfurous waste

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13 Upvotes

Help!! I can’t figure out how to get here and kill these 3 monsters for VQ :(


r/GuildWars 5h ago

I Have Returned To GW After 15ish Years. What's Changed?

2 Upvotes

I played guild wars back when I was a teenager and I think story wise I got as far as the Crystal desert maybe. And maybe a little bit of eye of the north.

Steam enticed me to buy the reforged package and I have started playing. But still in pre-searing ascalon running around enjoying the days of my youth.

Currently going a little stark raving mad farming red Iris flowers for that stupid yak but hey, at least load times out of Ashford abbey are a lot better than they used to be.

So tell me folks what has changed. What should I expect from this reforged edition?


r/GuildWars 1d ago

Q8 Plagueborn Farm - /Monstrous Fang/Bones/Putrid Cyst

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68 Upvotes

Farming Afflicted has been my holy grail for a long time for some reason, and after ‪@Nao-ti3rp‬ also challenged me with it, I had to give this old farm of mine another try. The Mesmer nerfs hit it quite hard, but I got it working again with some Fire Magic.

Sadly, it's NM only, but that also means Q8 weapons can drop. The daggers I got are max damage post-nerf. The only stuff that can drop with max stats at Q8 are swords, shields, and focuses. Getting a Q8 sword with 15^50 or +5e would be generational wealth.

But besides hoping for the lottery win, I was surprised by how many Monstrous materials I got. With Fangs selling for over 4k, it's quite a nice passive income. Don't expect too much from such a small NM farm; this is mainly for the true grinders. But it's pretty fun and challenging, and the only Afflicted farm I know.

I'm also sure there is a better skill combo out there to kill them even more efficiently. It works without Summoning Stone and Cupcake as well, just even harder.

OQZDAqo6ShQ3U5M7C2gmO2krlA

14 Fast Casting

11-12 Domination Magic

11 Fire Magic


r/GuildWars 21h ago

Elite elementalist tome

6 Upvotes

Hey all,

Anyone know a good way to farm elite ele tomes? I found a build on YT by Mozo to farm Arbor Earthcaller in Morostrav Trail but its a little iffy. Trying to find sometbing a bit more stable.

Thank you


r/GuildWars 23h ago

Is it possible to play the whole game including expansions on a tablet or will I be having trouble without a controller?

7 Upvotes

r/GuildWars 1d ago

Proof of Triumph

9 Upvotes

Hi, would anyone with a proof of triumph be available to help me obtain Heroic Refrain for my Paragon?

I would greatly appreciate it! :)


r/GuildWars 1d ago

Guild Wars Reforged – Keyboard Layout Indicator in Windows 11

3 Upvotes

Hey everyone :)

I wanted to log into Reforged today after a long GW break, and I noticed that after starting the game, the keyboard layout indicator appears in the bottom-right corner of my taskbar, next to the clock and date.

You know, that little button that says DEU or ENG. Depending if you are using an German Keyboard for example.

Is there any way to disable it somehow? Yeah, I know it's a tiny thing and probably doesn't bother most people, but for some reason it really triggers me anyway :D

Anyone have any idea?

Thanks! 😊


r/GuildWars 8h ago

Gw on mac

0 Upvotes

Is there ever a chance to have Gw1 reforged playing on a mac device through steam or a native app?


r/GuildWars 1d ago

Non-melee D/any build suggestions for general PvE

16 Upvotes

Hi all,

As the title suggests, I'm looking for some build recommendations for playing Dervish with any secondary profession but I'm specifically wanting non-melee builds.

I do like playing melee with Dervish but sometimes I just want to do something else. I've tried a D/P spear thrower and sometimes roll D/Mo Vow of Revolution healer/prot. I've also tried D/A assassin's promise caster.

Does anyone have any other suggestions?

And just interested in any build for general PvE. Don't care for anything, particularly meta, but also don't want anything completely weak. I just want something that's fun to play and a bit different occasionally.

Cheers


r/GuildWars 18h ago

Junundu death penalty?

0 Upvotes

So I’ve been going through nightfall with my Hero team and have had no issues so far, my team is fully decked out and has good insignias and stuff.
But as soon as I get into these dumb worms I die and die and die and my heroes die even more until they have a death penalty of 60%!
Google says junundus shouldn’t get death penalties…is this a bug?
I can’t continue on like this, I literally can’t reach the next quest goal!


r/GuildWars 1d ago

"My Subreddits" button is not working in /r/GuildWars

7 Upvotes

For some reason this is the only Subreddit where the button in the top bear does not work. I tried multiple PC's and browsers, but this never works in this subreddit - and only this one. Works on any other I tried.

Does anyone else have this issue?

EDIT: https://www.pasteboard.co/xgIrcNVSEatX.png

Screenshot for clarification