Play whatever class is your favorite. The choice isn't so restricting as in traditional MMOs, you'll see why once you get into it.
I picked Ranger and have played a bunch of different bow-based builds as well as two melee builds, Ranger/Necro "Touch" and Ranger/Assassin "Daggerspam."
If I was rolling a new character now I'd probably pick Elementalist, just because it was recently updated and I'd be interested to see how it plays. (As in, maybe it reflects on their Ele philosophy for GW2?)
There are no separate server types. You're probably seeing the option to create a PvP character or a Roleplaying character. A Roleplaying character can go through the whole game, that's what you want for Hall of Monuments. A PvP character bypasses everything and just PvPs.
You'll need Eye of the North to access the Hall of Monuments. Nothing wrong with saving your money until you finish one of the campaigns, though.
I strongly recommend starting with the Nightfall campaign. It has a pretty cool newbie experience, and gives you a lot of different heroes to work with. (Heroes give you HoM points later on, and allow you to build a stronger & more flexible party for tackling hard mode.)
Other advice, stuff I missed as a newbie:
- Remember to upgrade your weapons and armor as you level, and especially when you hit 20.
- You can call targets with CTRL-space.
- You can use the flags under the map UI to tell your heroes where to go, if you don't want them to follow you.
- Archer heroes tend to be overzealous about pulling things -- set them to guard mode and they'll only attack when you do.
- When you get into hard modes, remember that you can keybind some of your heroes' abilities to trigger them manually. You don't need to do this very much at all, but there are certain spells that the player can use much, much more effectively than the AI (e.g.
Ray of Judgement).
I started playing late last summer, and hit 30 points around Thanksgiving.
Click to see my HoM. I did have to farm some platinum (which I spent on armor sets and cheap miniatures), but I didn't have to PvP, master hard mode, or really group at all.
Of course, I *did* PvP some, and did a lot of vanquishing, and dipped my toe into the Domain of Anguish (high-end PvE) for the fun of it.
So if you're *only* after HoM points you can probably get them faster.