We all have things we love about Guild Wars 2, places that make us cheer out and say “yes, this is my ultra-mega place!” We all have classes, abilities, and features we’re passionate about, either negatively or positively. This is a place to share all that. A couple times a week I’ll be raising a Guild Wars 2 question to the community– hopefully an interesting one– and we’ll share our opinions. I’ll start off with my opinion just to get the ball rolling, but these questions will not have any right or wrong answers, so feel free to argue with me to your heart’s content!

Early on during headstart, I noticed quite a few players questioning their order choice (you know, that whole Vigil, Durmand Priory, or Order of Whispers choice). The decision comes fairly early in the personal story quest line, and interestingly enough, affects a large portion of the nature of the story quests that follow the decision.

Durmand Priory characters, for example, are given some quests that require the player to make use of gadgets while continuing the storyline. Vigil characters, naturally, are given quests that follow the whole “shoot first– ask questions later” philosophy. Order of Whispers characters follow a more sneaky route, but still get the job done. The three orders also gain access to different armor sets.

Last week we explored some of the flora and fauna of the Maguuma Jungle. We went over some of the monsters you’re likely to find there and how the Asura and Sylvari survive in such a harsh environment. Then, at the end of last week’s column I let out a bit of a teaser about what I’ll have going on the next few weeks; The orders of Tyria.

The orders are a design decision by ArenaNet that helps bring the races together to the common goal of defeating the elder dragons. Where the lower level story missions are almost exclusively race/background specific, the higher levels will be based off of the player’s choice of order (I say almost because I haven’t seen one, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t there). This serves a dual-purpose design wise. This enables the developers to reduce the content needing to be written from 5 races and multiple backgrounds down to 3 orders and multiple backgrounds. Subtracting two might not seem like very much until you realize they aren’t additive; they’re multiplicative. The second purpose is to bring the players together regardless of race to help each other as the difficulty of the content ramps up. This will effectively increase the player density in the higher level areas where it will be more needed. The more players having epic battles at the fringes of civilization give the player a sense of epicness and character progression.