Social & Groups

Worlds

Online play runs on worlds, and each world is a separate place with its own players. You pick one from the World List before you play, and every row shows how busy that world is right now, from Low through Medium and High up to Full, or Offline for a world that is not currently up. Low means plenty of room, High means plenty of company, and a world that has reached its limit shows Full and turns new logins away until someone logs out, so pick where your friends are or where there is space.

What you do stays on the world you chose: your characters, your friends list, your guild, and the Market all live there, and the guild and player boards you open in game rank that world alone, while the board on the website gathers every world together. Each world also keeps its own daily raid reset, on its own local time.

Chat channels

The chat window starts with two views that are always there, one combined log of everything said and one combat log. Beyond those you add the tabs you want with the plus button, one per channel, and on a desktop you can drag them into whatever order you like (Alt with the left or right arrow moves the focused tab from the keyboard); right-click a tab to close it again, and your arrangement is remembered between sessions. Typing in a channel tab sends on that channel, and a slash command sends one line somewhere else without changing tabs. There is also a whisper tab that gathers every whisper you send and receive in one place, where typing simply answers whoever wrote to you last. These are the channels you can talk on:

• Say. Your default voice. It reaches players close to you and is the one to use while questing side by side.
• Yell. A louder version of Say that carries a bit farther, enough to reach across a camp.
• Whisper. A private message to one player by name, wherever they are. Use it for a quiet word.
• Party. Talk to everyone in your group, no matter how spread out you are.
• Battleground. Talk to every fighter in your battleground, both sides. Only while a match is running.
• General. An always-on realm-wide channel that reaches everyone online, good for asking a question or general chatter. Unlike World and Looking for Group, you never have to opt in.
• World. A realm-wide channel you opt into. Open its tab to join, and you will see and reach everyone online.
• Looking for Group. An opt-in realm-wide channel for finding people to run a dungeon. Open its tab to join.
• Guild and Officer. Channels for your guild. Guild chat reaches every member; the officer channel is for officers and the guild leader.

Your character can also speak without words: type an emote like /wave, /dance, /cheer, or /bow, add a name to aim it at someone, as in /wave Aleph, or hold X, the emote wheel's default key, to open the emote wheel for a quick overhead expression. The Emotes button in the rail of window buttons, or under More on touch, opens the same wheel.

More on the chat window and the rest of the interface

Calling the whole community

Start a chat line with an exclamation mark to make a community call: !lfg to look for a group, !wts and !wtb to trade, !recruit for your guild, !event to announce a raid or meetup, and !help to ask for a hand. A menu of the calls pops up the moment you type the mark. Each call is broadcast in the world and echoed to the community Discord, so it reaches players who are not even logged in. Community calls are part of online play.

The Discord panel in game goes the other way too. Link your Discord account to it and the community roles you hold there follow you into the world: a colored name over your head, and a tag on the chat lines of the staff roles, so you can always tell a real moderator from someone borrowing the name. Linking also tracks a status that climbs as you take part. None of it grants any power in the game.

Handy slash commands

A few everyday commands are worth memorizing: /w Name sends a whisper and /r answers the last one you received, /invite asks someone into your party, /follow falls in step behind a friend, /roll casts dice for the group to see, /who shows who is online, and /afk marks you away. Type /help in the game for the full list.

Forming a party

Invite another player by right-clicking their name and choosing to invite. A party holds up to five players, and one of you is the leader.

Group members near each other share kill and quest credit, so questing together is faster, never slower. A party is also how you step into a dungeon as a team.

Once you have a full party of five, the leader can convert it into a raid of up to ten, for the endgame raid.

Finding a group

You do not have to shout in Looking for Group to fill a run. Open the Dungeon Finder, choose the run you want and the roles you are willing to fill, and join the queue on your own, or have your party leader queue the party you already have (only the leader can put a group in). The finder waits until it has a full set of roles, then offers the group to everyone at once: a popup asks each of you to accept, and the party forms the moment the last person says yes. Turning an offer down, or letting it run out, drops you, and any party you queued with, out of the queue and puts you on a short cooldown before you can join it again; everyone else in the offer keeps their place, unless they did the same or queued with someone who did, so the line keeps moving.

The finder also keeps a board of premade groups. A leader posts a listing with tags saying what the run is for, from a first visit to a straight full clear, and you apply to it for the leader to approve. The automatic queue fills the dungeons and the endgame raid, each at normal and heroic, while the board can also carry the solo attunement run, which the queue never fills for you; delves and open-world outings are yours to arrange. Either way the finder only builds the group: walking to the door, setting the difficulty, and agreeing the loot rules are still yours.

See what is inside each dungeon

Ready checks

Before a big pull, the group leader can type /ready to poll the room: everyone else gets a Ready or Not Ready prompt, and once all have answered, or 30 seconds run out, the whole group sees a single summary of the counts. Nobody is singled out; the point is the count, not the culprit.

Target markers

In a party, target a hostile creature and right-click its portrait on the target frame (long press on touch) to crown it with one of eight raid symbols. Any member can mark, each symbol lives on one target at a time, and reapplying a symbol to its own target clears it. Kill order, crowd-control assignments, or a plain "this one first" all travel faster as a symbol than a sentence.

Party loot

When you group up, the party leader sets how loot is shared. The rules cover coin and items separately:

• Coin. Money from a kill can go to whoever loots it, or be split evenly across the party.
• Items. Ordinary drops can take turns around the party or go to whoever loots, while better drops are put up for a roll so everyone gets a fair shot.
• Need, Greed, or Pass. When an item goes to a roll, each eligible member chooses Need if they want it, Greed if they would only take it spare, or Pass to bow out. Need beats Greed: if anyone rolls Need, the item goes to the highest Need roll and the Greed rolls do not count; otherwise the highest Greed roll wins.
• Master looter. The leader can instead take charge of the better drops, handing each one out to the member who should get it. It keeps prized gear from going to a stray roll, the way an organized group runs a dungeon.

Friends, ignore, and block

Add players to your friends list to see when they are online and where they are, so you can group up the moment they log in.

If someone is chattering more than you want, add them to your ignore list and their public chat stops reaching you. Ignoring is a chat setting only, and it never removes anyone from your friends list.

Block is the heavier tool, for a player who will not leave you alone. A block cuts their invites, their whispers, and their mail as well as their chat, makes the two of you invisible to each other in /who, and drops them from your friends list if they were on it. Block from the right-click menu on their name or with /block, /unblock lifts it again, and /blocklist shows who is on it.

Guilds

A guild is a lasting group of players you belong to between sessions. Founding one costs the founder a one-time fee of 1 gold, or you can simply accept an invite to join, and you can be in one guild at a time. Members hold a rank: a leader, officers, and members.

Belonging to a guild gives you a private guild chat channel and a shared roster of your guildmates. Newer members wear a Recruit chip and long-standing ones a Veteran chip in place of the plain member label, while officers and the guild leader always show their rank, and you can hide the offline names when you only want to see who is on right now. Officers and the guild leader can also pin a short billboard message to the top of the Guild tab, and it is read out in your chat log the next time you log in, which is how most guilds post the week's plans.

Guilds are ranked too. The Leaderboard window keeps a Guilds board beside the player boards, ranking guilds on what their members have earned together, so a busy guild can see where it stands.

The guild bank

A guild also keeps a vault of its own. Step up to a banker in one of the hub towns, open your bank, and switch to the Guild tab: there you will find a treasury of coin and a pooled store of items the guild owns together. Every member can open it and look at what is inside, and the pane says plainly who can do more. Only the guild leader and officers can act, putting coin and goods in and handing them back out, and every deposit and withdrawal is written into a log the guild can read, so nothing moves without a record.

The item store starts closed. An officer opens it out of their own pocket, and the guild can pay from the treasury to widen it later. Quest items, anything soulbound, and gear the Market will not take stay out of it, the same as the mail and the Market, so the bank is for goods that can still change hands.

The event calendar

Press I to open the event calendar. It marks the realm days worth planning around, the weekly Raid Call, Market Day, Arena Clash, Double Honor Weekend, and Fishing Derby, plus the monthly Delve Day and Moongate Communion, and it is where guilds keep their schedule: the guild leader and officers can book events on it, and every member sees them on the same page. The realm days are a prompt to gather rather than a bonus, with one exception: all through the Double Honor Weekend, Thornhollow Fields Honor pays double and a played-out loss pays like a win. Nothing else about your character changes because a day is marked.

Grouping etiquette

Grouping is a choice, not a chore. Say hello when you join, roll Need only on gear you will actually use, and let the group know before you head off. A little courtesy goes a long way, and most players are glad of the company.

Reporting a player

If a player is out of line, right-click their name and choose Report Player. Pick a reason, from harassment to spam to cheating, add a line about what happened, and send it: the report goes to the moderators to read. A report is a note to them, not a punishment in itself. Sending one does not silence, kick, or jail anyone, and no reply comes back telling you what was decided. Blocking them stops the bother while you wait.

Moderators and the jail

Moderators keep the peace, and a player who will not let others enjoy the game can be moved to a jail cell. A sentence always has a set length, though a moderator can end it early, and it runs on the clock whether or not you stay logged in.