The five races: what the choice changes and what it does not

Start with the part that causes the most doubt: race grants no advantages. Not to stats, not to skills, not to available content. All nine professions are open to all five races.

So the choice comes down to whose story you want to live through and who you want to walk among for the first thirty levels.

What race changes

• Act one of the story, levels 10 to 30. Five distinct stories rather than variations of one.
• Your starting zone, where the first fifteen levels happen.
• Your capital and your home instance, your private corner of it.
• Appearance and the options available at creation.
• Racial skills. They exist, and they see little use, since they are weaker than profession skills.

After level 30 the story moves under your order’s banner and the racial line concludes. From there, race is looks and a handful of lines of dialogue.

Where each one starts you

Race decides two things you will look at constantly for the first twenty hours: the city you return to, and the zone you learn the game in.

Race	Capital	Starting zone
Human	Divinity’s Reach	Queensdale
Charr	Black Citadel	Plains of Ashford
Norn	Hoelbrak	Wayfarer Foothills
Asura	Rata Sum	Metrica Province
Sylvari	The Grove	Caledon Forest

Those five cities are not interchangeable backdrops. Divinity’s Reach is a walled human capital with a class problem. The Black Citadel is built from the wreckage of a human city the charr took, and it does not pretend otherwise. Rata Sum is a floating cube of laboratories. The Grove is a tree.

You will use waypoints in your capital for years. Pick one you like standing in.

Asura

Capital: Rata Sum, in the Maguuma jungle.

Tiny geniuses who regard every other species as intellectually deficient and see no reason to hide it. Their magic is engineering: golems, laboratories, colleges, academic feuds.

The story opens on your first invention and the attempt to steal credit for it. The wittiest of the five if you enjoy condescension as a comic register.

Charr

Capital: Black Citadel, in Ascalon.

A military race organised into legions and warbands. Family in the usual sense does not exist: your unit raised you, and your unit is your family.

The most heavily branched first act. Your legion, your sparring partner and what your sire was all visibly change who walks beside you and what about. The story is hard-edged and unsentimental.

Human

Capital: Divinity’s Reach, in Kryta.

The race that lost everything. Humans once held most of the continent; what remains is one city-state and the memory of better days.

The most classical line: an upbringing running from street rat to nobility, lost family, gods. If you arrived from other fantasy games, this is the familiar seat.

Norn

Capital: Hoelbrak, in the Shiverpeaks.

Giant hunters pushed south by the Ice Dragon. A culture of personal glory: what matters is doing something worth a song.

The lightest of the five in mood: drinking, hunting, rivalry, animal spirits. A good pick when you would rather not have drama.

Sylvari

Capital: The Grove, in the Maguuma jungle.

The youngest race. They grew from a tree and woke a few years ago, which is why they look at the world like children who happen to be good with a sword.

The strangest and most interesting line for anyone who wants something unusual: the Dream, Ventari’s tablet, and the vision your path begins from.

The racial skills, and why nobody slots them.

Each race gets six racial skills: a heal, some utilities, an elite.

The wiki states the position without decoration: they are typically less powerful than the equivalent profession skills, and they cannot be used in Structured PvP at all.

So the honest summary is that racial skills are flavour. A charr can call in a warband, a norn can turn into a bear, an asura can drop a golem, and none of it belongs on a serious bar next to what your profession already offers.

That sounds like a criticism and it is worth reading the other way round. Because racials are weak, race costs you nothing. There is no optimal race for any class, no combination that a raid group will ask about, no version of this game where somebody rerolls for a stat.

Very few MMOs manage that. In most of them, picking the character you find interesting instead of the one with the right passive is a small tax you pay forever. Here the question is entirely aesthetic and narrative, and you can answer it with “I want to be a giant cat” without anyone being able to tell you that it costs 3% of your damage.

How to choose

You want the most familiar fantasy story → human.

You want military drama without sentiment → charr.

You want humour and arrogance → asura.

You want lightness and adventure → norn.

You want something odd → sylvari.

Bear in mind that the first thirty levels go quickly and character slots are cheap. Most players end up with one of each eventually, purely for the stories.

What creation asks you, and what it affects, is broken down separately.

Nobody builds this any more.

Worth saying out loud, because it is easy to walk past.

Five races, each with roughly twenty levels of story that shares almost nothing with the other four. That is five times the writing, five times the voice acting, five sets of maps and characters, for content most players will see once.

No studio would sign that off today. The modern answer is one prologue, a cosmetic species toggle, and everything merging by level five. It is cheaper, it is measurable, and it is the sensible call.

You can feel the older instinct here: the studio spent that money because a charr should not wake up in the same room as a sylvari. Whether that was wise business is not for me to say. It does mean a second character is a different opening rather than the same one in a different hat, and there are very few games left where that is true.

So if you were wondering whether to roll one of each eventually: that is what the design is quietly asking you to do.