Best Starting Zone?

[Celestial Tesla]

So between the 4 starting zones. Iam wondering what everyone's preferences on them are. I started out in First Light, and while the zone as a whole seems pretty good for resources, however all the heavy concentrations of resources seem to be far away from the settlement and possibly even more important all the faction quests seem to spawn far from the settlement as well so it makes running factions quest take a longer time, so while I like the looks of the zone, it doesn't seem the most practical of zones.

So how do yall feel about the starting zones you played in.

[Nukyo]

They are all very similar and it doesn't matter which one you choose. You should play in the zone controlled by your guild/faction and help improve the settlement if you are into that.

You need to move to the mid-game zones very soon anyway. So keep that in mind. I started in windsward and move to monarch at lvl10 and am about to go to brightwood.

[Kiti]

Agree, they are all similar in that each starting town has it's own quest line, side quests, town board, faction reps, etc. There isn't a "best" town at this point. As Nukyo said if you reach level 7-8 and pick a faction you may want to run to the starting town of your choice (Monarch's Bluffs, First Light, Windsward, or Everfall) and help your faction keep control of their town. Note that in the beginning all towns are unclaimed and not owned by any faction.

Another thing to consider is that each starter zone (surrounding area around town all the way to the territory border) has unique materials. While every zone has young trees, mature trees, rocks, iron (to varying degrees), herbs, etc it is also true that each zone has something unique to that particular area. A good way to earn starter money is to find what the rare zone resource(s) are, gather them, then travel to a zone where those resources don't exist and sell them for lots of gold at the town's trading post :).

A last thing to consider is where your friends are located if you all created characters to play together. Since the starting zone assignments are random, you may all decide to quest together in one area. In that case, you'll want to skip your starting zone entirely and literally run to the zone you pick as a group. There isn't a penalty for starting in one zone and then doing quests in another - it's all the same xp and same types of quests.

As a personal preference I like to start in Everfall. Not because it is any better resource or quest wise, but because it has consistently tendedd to have the highest number of auctions posted out of the four starting spots.

[Gilmore]

Wait... How do you choose a starting zone? I never got a choice.

[Kiti]

You can't choose where the game spawns you in initially. It's randomly one of the four starter zones, but you can physically run to any one of the zones that you feel best suits you and do the intro quests there.

[Horrorscope CC97]

Originally posted by Gilmore:

Wait... How do you choose a starting zone? I never got a choice.

The game picks it for you randomly, you would have to know which one you want and then keep making a new character and running the opening part and see where you land. The ONLY reason I would do that is for you having a party you want to group pve all the content with, which to me is pretty big. You should be able to group in the first part and then all in the group goes into the same area. It took me I believe exactly 4 tries to get the same as my duo partner, so I hit average, if my luck was bad I could see doing it 8-10 times, not fun.

They all seem the same since going to a settlement in each territory is roughly the same thing over and over, some minor minor differences.