Work2006
Guild Wars Factions is a fantasy action role-playing game and the second stand-alone campaign in the Guild Wars series developed by ArenaNet, a subsidiary of NCSOFT corporation. I…
Read and enrich the people, organizations and context referenced in case files.
Explore the cases that include this wiki entry.
No case files include this entry yet.
Investigate this subjectBe the first to comment.
Guild Wars Factions is a fantasy action role-playing game and the second stand-alone campaign in the Guild Wars series developed by ArenaNet, a subsidiary of NCSOFT corporation. It serves as both a standalone game and first expansion pack to the base game, which is referred to as Prophecies.
Guild Wars Factions is a fantasy action role-playing game and the second stand-alone campaign in the Guild Wars series developed by ArenaNet, a subsidiary of NCSOFT corporation. It serves as both a standalone game and first expansion pack to the base game, which is referred to as Prophecies. Simply referred to as Factions, it introduces the continent of Cantha, inspired by East Asian cultures, where two warring factions, the Luxons and the Kurzicks, are locked in a global persistent war. Players are able to join in this conflict, assisting their chosen faction in claiming towns on the game map.
Factions introduced a new PvE campaign, two new professions in addition to the original six, new skills and armor for existing professions, new gameplay modes for both PvE and PvP, and gameplay modifications in response to criticism of the earlier Prophecies campaign. Most of the PvP content from Prophecies is available to Factions-only accounts.
A rerelease of the original game titled Guild Wars Reforged, which includes all content from Guild Wars Factions and Guild Wars Nightfall was released on December 3, 2025. The game will be released on mobile platforms on June 24th, 2026.
Factions is a standalone version of Guild Wars that shares the same gameplay mechanics and features a unique area and storyline.
Like all Guild Wars campaigns, Factions contains the core character classes introduced in Prophecies; it also adds two new classes to the game:
The Assassin is a master at getting in quickly, striking and getting back out just as quick. They are able to instantly teleport around the field of combat using their ability to Shadow Step. They are capable of dealing a great deal of damage to a particular target, especially spellcasters, in a very short amount of time. This is offset by their weak armor, making them relatively ineffective frontline fighters. They use self healing and can solo spike.
Source: Guild Wars Factions (CC BY-SA)
We label verified structured information, user opinions, and AI-discovered relationships separately.
Dervishes and Paragons can get to Cantha via Kamadan, the port city of Istan, but they cannot be created in Cantha.
Cooperative missions in Factions are different from their equivalent in Prophecies. In Prophecies, players complete a main mission and an optional bonus mission. Cooperative missions are easy to avoid in Prophecies as most areas are accessible without completing missions. Factions makes all missions compulsory for accessing new areas and completing the game. The bonus mission has been removed and replaced with a three-tiered reward system. Some missions' tiers are based on the time taken to complete the mission, others are based on completion of extra objectives (such as keeping a certain number of NPCs alive until the end). Gold, experience and a skill point are given at each reward tier. Several new concepts for co-operative missions have been introduced, such as missions with two teams of eight and missions specifically for killing a single boss.
The time taken for a new character to reach the maximum level of twenty is reduced and most of the areas are designed for level twenty characters. Experience, and therefore skill points, are easy to acquire once level twenty is reached. This means that the time taken to unlock skills through PvE play is reduced from Prophecies. Skill acquisition is modified also, most skills must be purchased from Skill Traders, rather than received by completing quests.
Boss enemies now do double damage and take half the time to use spells and skills instead of having shortened hex and condition durations.
Factions introduces two factions which players and guilds may side with;
Kurzick - respecting art, religion, and social order, the gothic Kurzick dwell in the Echovald Forests. The Kurzicks wear dark clothing to capture as much sunlight and heat as possible in their dark environment. The Kurzick culture seems to be more European than Asian, but the hairstyles of some of the Kurzick males and females do somewhat reflect East Asian style.
Luxon - respecting strength above all else, the Jade Sea dwelling Luxon are often compared to pirates, and are somewhat religion-less. They tend to wear light clothing to reflect the heat from the sun.
Neither faction is considered to be inherently 'good' or 'evil'.
Factions also introduces the concept of multi-guild Alliances. An alliance is a group of up to ten guilds aligned with the same faction who agree to join in an alliance under the name of a single lead guild.
Each faction has a number of towns which they own; the control of these towns is given to alliances with the highest standing with their faction. Alliances may earn this faction by means of donations from that alliance's member players.
A player may earn account-based Kurzick or Luxon faction points while they are playing Factions. Faction points are earned doing PvE quests for a faction, competing in Alliance battles, in Competitive Missions or in some Challenge Missions. If the player does not wish to donate faction to the alliance, or if they play for the faction which the guild isn't allied with, they can trade their faction points for armor crafting materials or skills that can be used in the PvE portion of the game. A player is considered Luxon or Kurzick by having a majority of unspent faction points for the faction they support. To change faction a player needs to acquire a majority of factions points for their new faction.
Factions provides PvE players access to two competitive missions, a new game type for the Factions campaign. In these missions, two random teams of eight compete to reach specific objectives. If a player dies they respawn in the base and are able to rejoin the fight to meet the objectives. When the match finishes the players are
