Starting this game?

I would say in part, it does depend on who you play with in game and who you start the game with. I started playing alongside my real life friend, so we all got to do the grind together.

Some merchanters have never cashed in their life and make off just fine. There's dozens of guides on how to make money and even though the most popular merchanting guide has long since become outdated, alot of the principles remained the same. I farmed up alot of my gears with the help of faction mates, but I do come from an older era, so take that for what you will. Farmed mats, sold herbs, merched TT mats, was in a faction that had a very extensive DKP ecosystem (this is not usually a staple in factions, but I don't know what the bigger factions do nowadays)

Other things for money I see recently - Opening TT for players, Selling/Crafting Warsong molds into G16 gears or selling the R9S3 molds, farming Lunar.

Try it for a few weeks.

Recently started here (early september)

"Maximum being reached";
For gear and such, it all depends on the time you want to spend on it, and your ability to understand the market.

For leveling, it goes pretty quick, many gifts when you start the game, makes it really fast, so you can scale pretty fast and explore most of what the game has to offer.

Have to take into account that the game is being updated every once and then, and I believe some people are not even "maxed" yet due to those latest updates.



Other parts will, in fact, take your months (if not years, havent been around long enough).
Due to the fact that they are upgraded with daily quests.
Passive skills, some gear parts, etc.



So no, you wont be #1 this year.
But yes, you can manage to fit your way through and have fun with people/faction/squads without feeling totally useless for the whole time.

From what I experienced when starting PWI, you'll have a load of fun starting out and getting into the content. A character launching into the game for the first time is very fun. The biggest challenge you'll have is settling on the right character to play with. What class to play is probably one of the most frequently asked questions.

As for what is realistically possible, that's down to what you wish to do. With any MMO you play, you're going to have to spend a significant amount of time before you're going to be at the end game, regardless of whether or not the game is F2P or paid.

This is my opinion:

You can do anything without putting the money into the game. However it's going to take you a long time, like other MMOs, of farming and grinding to get it. The P2W aspect of this game is there for those who wish to get to the end game faster.

You can do the following in the normal time it would take on any MMO:
1. Level any number of classes, all the way to the end
2. You can enjoy the questing and a whole host of raids/dungeons
3. You can adequately gear yourself for all PVE content
4. Make a great group of friends and enjoy the content of the game

Now the honest bit. If you realistically want to compete at a PVP level, you're probably going to need to put cash into the game. That's because the game is old now and its population of PVP players have significantly advanced gears. And so coming fresh into the game you would have a lot of catching up to do. You could play for free, farm coins and save towards the armour, but it's going to take you quite a while.

So in summary, if you're after a great MMO, with good PVE content and to play the game with friends/new friends you'll make. Then definitely you can play this game, enjoy it and complete PVE content for free. You'll get hours and hours of enjoyment because if you get bored of one character, the experience is entirely different from any of the other classes you can play. But if you wish to compete in PVP, the timescale to obtain the required gear may be too long for you.

What I would recommend;
1. Download the game
2. Join a server that suits you (East, West or Europe)
3. Read about the classes and choose one that sounds good
4. Play the game and enjoy, worry about the rest later

Biggest tip of all - find an relatively active faction. An active, talkative and helpful faction truly makes this game great.

Depending on your server choice that works for you, there's a few guilds that are PvE oriented. We did have a faction masterlist running but alot of factions have come and gone or changed names and/or websites/links are broken. You might have to WC or ask around, but they are out there. Good luck, have fun and see you ingame!

Enjoyment is subjective, so it's best to try the game out yourself. Although PWI is very old, you can be certain the servers aren't going to close down any time soon. Our content comes from China (PWCN) where the game is still very popular, which means PWI will keep getting updates and new content always brings back interest to the game. It's no lie the game is declining, but there are still some new players joining in (like yourself) or old players who come back to check out the new content and stick around.

As others have said, it's possible to catch up and get yourself a decent set of gear for PvE without ever charging a cent. It does take time due to the daily quests, but leveling is fairly fast and you can start farming your gear even if you're not completely up to date with your passive skills etc. New players get a fair amount of goodies to help them out in their journey and we also occasionally get Arc Codes that give us quality-of-life items/consumables. That on top of various events that pop from time to time.

However, I need to emphasize this game is best played when you have a faction or a group of friends that can play with you. If you try to play solo, PWI can get boring fast and you can't solo all of the content anyway. On the upside, every server has a few PvE oriented factions that accept non level 100 players as well. It may take a few tries and going through a couple of different factions until you find one you like, but that's how it usually is. It's probably obvious, but it would be ideal if you can find other people in your level range so you can do things together. There are helpful endgame players out there, but they too have their own dailies and farming to do.

Make sure you pick the server that is closest to your time zone because PWI has a lot of events that occur during specific days/hours only.
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If you are a free to play player, u can top most people, but the super cash shoppers you will never be able to reach in terms of gear, as the best gear, keeps changing.

PWI does a lot of things to help new players along. You can farm gear in game that will almost give you the same damage, as the expensive stuff, but only PVE, not PVP. But that can help you farm the PVP gear.

Some classes role is to do dmg, other classes have alternative roles. So all classes don;'t need the same level of gear to be effective!

The best part of PWI in my opinion is the community. TW, 80 vs 80, faction vs faction, pride ownership and drama. Is what drew me in.​​

So I'm really the only one who thinks this is a troll post made by a PWI player that just made a new account?

Mkay

Many have already weighed in on leveling and pay-to-win and whatnot so I'm not going to rehash those comments too much. Suffice to say, there are plenty of methods to level up and plenty of gear options available, both for midgame and endgame.

One thing I would urge any new player to be aware of is gear elitism. You will run into people who demand certain levels/types of gear, even for PVE instances at endgame. To be frank, this is a PVP mindset, which is incorrectly applied to PVE by people who are simply impatient and only want to do blisteringly fast instance runs. The two "standard" endgame gear sets are g16/s3 Nirvana and Rank 9 S3 - the latter usually being considered the P2W set (though certain dedicated farmers might disagree). However, you can do most if not all of the game's PVE content with significantly less than these sets. There are limits to this (don't bring TT70 gear to a 100-level BH run, please :P), but mostly it's your skill with your class which determines how well you do in PVE. Don't let anyone tell you otherwise.

On a more specific note, venos have pets they can buy from the cash shop (or equivalent amounts of farming). It is my personal belief that these pets are overrated, particularly the hercules. Their base stats aren't much better than any other pet - their claim to fame comes mostly from the skills they come with. In the case of the hercules and phoenix especially, there are ways you can obtain these skills for any pet (look into Dragon Temple and/or base quests later on if you're interested). The Harpy is the only cash shop pet which is particularly special in PVE owing to it having AoE skills. The others, unless I'm missing information here, are generally PVP pets (e.g. monkey king). So the tl;dr here is you can use any pets you like (though focusing on the evolvable pets is a good rule of thumb).