Mission

There are two very different types of mission in the game:
 * 1) Cooperative Missions (PvE)
 * 2) Competitive Missions (PvP)

Note that most people exclusively mean cooperative'' mission when they say "mission". For a complete list of all cooperative missions and guides on how to finish them please refer to the mission overviews guide.''

Mission Overviews
Each Campaign of Guild Wars has its own set of missions available:
 * Prophecies
 * Factions

Cooperative Missions
A Cooperative Mission is somewhat similar to a long shared quest, started by visiting any location with a yellow shield marker on your map, forming a party (which may include henchmen), then pressing the Enter Mission button in the Party List. Everyone in the party will then be taken to the mission area. To find out the details of the mission before going into it, speak to the NPC in the mission location (who is neither a merchant nor a Xunlai Agent) and he/she will explain what the story is. Each mission will make progress your character in the storyline.

Each Cooperative Mission has a primary goal and a bonus goal that are listed in the Quest Log. Achieving the primary goal will end the mission; you do not have to complete (or even unlock) the bonus goal. Since you can go back to a mission and re-enter it as many times as you wish (though you only get rewarded for completing either goal once), it is possible after you've completed the primary goal to go back and attempt to complete the bonus goal. However, if you plan to reach the primary goal and bonus within the same mission, make sure to complete the bonus before as you're usually teleported out once you reached the primary goal (some exceptions on timed missions). For the vast majority of the missions, you will be rewarded of 1,000 XP and 1 skill point for completing the primary goal and 1,000 XP to complete the bonus goal.

A Cooperative Mission is different from a regular quest in the following ways:


 * There is no Quest Giver per se. By simply going to the mission location and hitting Enter Mission you start the mission.
 * If your entire party is wiped out in a mission, there is no resurrection shrine; the mission is failed and you are returned to the mission location. For this reason, it's generally a good idea if everyone in the party has a method of resurrecting party members (like Resurrection Signet). All henchmen are equipped with at least one resurrection skill that works at least once.
 * Failing the primary objective (like failure to protect someone, or to do something within a specific amount of time) causes immediate death to the entire party.
 * The mission area is a closed space not connected to the explorable areas in the game. This means that if there is an item or monster you need to find in a mission area, you need to enter the mission and find what you're looking for while in the mission.
 * Successfully finishing a mission will almost always take you to the next location from which you can continue the missions. Some locations in the game (like the Crystal Desert and the Ring of Fire Islands) can only be reached by completing missions.
 * Leaving a mission area while doing a mission is not like leaving an explorable area while doing a quest. If you travel outside of a mission area, then all you have done up to that point is undone and you have to start the mission over. In a quest, if you have fulfilled some of the tasks of a quest, they are not lost if you stop working on the quest and go do something else.

There are 25 missions in Prophecies. Only five of them are compulsory to reach each major section of Tyria.
 * Sanctum Cay is necessary to get to the Crystal Desert.
 * You must complete Dunes of Despair, Elona Reach and Thirsty River in order to gain access to the Mesa and hence the area of the Crystal Desert containing Tomb of the Primeval Kings and The Dragon's Lair.
 * Thunderhead Keep is necessary to get to the Ring of Fire Islands.

Competitive Missions
A Competitive Mission is a mission in which players get to fight other players in an arena, tournament or guild battle.

For more details, see: Player versus Player