Guild Wars 2

So I’ve been chatting to some guild mates and RL friends about how they level a new character in GW2, assuming they didn’t have Tomes Of Knowledge of the level 20 birthday gift booster.

Most of them said either EoTM or dungeon runs with orginised groups. So what do you all think or do?

depends what you are searching for, if you want to learn the spells, make quests, fast lvl EOTM or use Experience Scroll+Tomes of Knowledge

Well since the medium crafting materials are sooo hard to replenish as quick as my 80s use them, I would suggest leveling your alts as slow as possible.

Cooking, jewelcrafting and artificing \o/. Cheap and fast 20+ levels. Some personal story too. Gives a bit of exp and black lion key. Buying/leeching dungeon paths. Or simple map exploring you will get few levels just by exploring starting cities.

I do hearts and clear zones because I really enjoy it, still, after all this time. I’m on my 8th class, but I get a 9th soon. I never use those auto-level books for anything. They sit in my bank for now.

Perosonally, I do all of my leveling through world completion. I actually enjoy going through the various maps on different characters, and it has the added bonus of getting me map completion rewards as well as skill challenges, which will be important for the upcoming specialization system changes.

What notebene and Electro said …

I have stacks of tomes and small xp boosts, but I’d rather learn the character I’m building. A level 80 class, that I know nothing about is useless to me.

Plus, with the new trait system, I can unlock many of the traits by world completion. World completion also often puts me in the ‘right place at the right time’ for those trait unlocks that require a specific event. In the long run, I spend less gold on the character, while learning how to play it.

I don’t view it as a race, I actually like playing in the GW2 world. Having said that, my last alt I leveled was a necro, and it took me just under a week. Taking it slow, really isn’t that slow at all.

Yeah, completing maps kind of has to be done anyway, so that’s a good way to do it. It is great at first but gets seriously boring really fast, IMO. I have world completion on 2 toons and my last one is taking forever as I do maybe one map per week or whatever I can do while having my coffee on Saturday morning. Problem with mapping is there is no money making while doing that. So, you can either level fast and then get back to making gold, or you can level slowly realizing that you are gonna get waypoints opened, skill points completed, and map completion rewards for your time instead.

Unless I’m in some kind of hurry to reach lvl80, I just make the character and play a little bit in the open, completing events, hearts and such.
In the current state of the Trait System and the Personal Story (which often sends you back to low level zones you’ve already explored), I usually open the wiki and let the trait hunting guide me around the world.

In the past I used to do the personal stories, crafting and also WvW to level up my alts.

Last 2 toons I made I used scrolls and tomes but if I had to do it without them I’d probably do the same but go into EoTM.

Tomes, Personal Story & Crafting shot my alts to 80.

I concur with most of these suggestions. Was able to get 7 alts done within 3 months pretty easily I might add (though farming SW helps in terms of funding that).

- Personal Story
- Crafting (cooking / jeweller) – obviously I made one of each craft already @ that point
- Doing dailies (even the ones not listed – even after doing completionist – you can see a list of ALL dailies in your Achievments) these give you writs of exp.
- Map completion in all major cities
- Conjure up your own swiftness build and run straight across maps (GW1 running style) running through wp’s, poi’s, get the vista’s etc..
- Run most especially to World Boss WP’s ( use gw2 boss timer ) do all pre-events + boss (easy mode)

You can set notifications on world bosses with some apps so this makes this easy. (you can do bosses about 10 lvls before and you’ll still get a ton of xp)

Oh I’ve seen someone lvl their toon in SW from like lvl 20+ (you’d need a friend for that) They used siege weapons and was able to stand in area in thrasher where poison/pustules don’t overlap I LOL’d when I saw that and commended them. Probably insane xp since you can keep swapping maps.

Your guildies are correct. If leveling is your top priority and you have the gold to spare, then crafting is by far the fastest/easiest way to level. And not to mention you’ll also have a crafting skill close to 500. I have used this method for one of my characters and I wasn’t a huge fan. For one, it did end up costing me gold. Secondly, I was now lvl 80 and with no clue on how to play the character.

Running dungeons is the best for leveling + making gold, especially if some of your lvl 80 guild-mates wouldn’t mind bringing you along. I can get 1 lvl about every 15 mins with 4 other 80s running it. And each path nets you 1g and change, so if you do 7 paths (I usually dow 1 CoF, 3 AC, and 3 CE) you are looking at easily 3-4 lvls and 10gold. It takes the most prep time though, because as a new character you wont have a lot of the waypoints, so you will want to venture out and nab a few of those before jumping into the LFG menu.

WvW, specifically Edge of the Mists is also about a lvl every 15mins. You don’t net yourself as much gold, but you earn badges and a fair amount of greens. This requires having a commander that really knows what they are doing. I’ve had a few who were very good at maximizing XP and we’d get a level every 10-15 mins, but most commanders will get you a level around every 15-20 mins, and it of course always depends on how large of a zerg you have going.

So in conclusion:
If you have guildies that are willing to bring you along for some daily dungeons runs, take them up on the offer; you’ll get a few levels and some gold. Otherwise, if you are running solo, WvW.

Old fashioned way, Personal Story, Hearts and Dynamic Events, I enjoy the world, and going back after several months of not doing a particular zone, especially if you also change races you see things you might have missed the first time around or just get to look at it all again. It’s a beautiful world, why not enjoy it, and it’s really all about making things fun yourself, level up an alt what ever way you find enjoyable, not what others do. My play style dictates that I won’t be rolling a Mesmer or Necro, so that’s two less classes I need to worry about. Only going to have to roll and level a Revenant, which I already have a back story on, as it’s going to be a descendant of my original GW Monk, so it will be my second human, I have two Charr characters, one each of the other races…and I’m good with that.

Hmmmm…leveling…

I do lots of stuff, just depends on what I feel like doing.

Sometimes I

• map clear
• craft
• use some of the ToK gotten from PvPing
• do personal story
• run around EotM or WvW
• swap in at the end of a dungeon run

I don’t really have a ‘routine’ for it

Well before tomes of knowledge i would
+ get 15/10% xp buff food
+ joint eotm zerg
done.

Now if its a new class that you dont know the mechanics i suggest completing the map zones, not only you get used to the skills but you get a hunge xp boost and some itesm worth some gold. See ya o/

All sorts of ways but mostly open world since I’m in no rush. I’ve levelled one character completely by tomes but only because I could. That character doesn’t really feel “solid” to me, though it was sort of fun to do it at the time.

I normally level alts much the same way I levelled my main: exploring maps and doing the story. The exception is I sometimes do the odd dungeon, when I levelled my main (who is also my first 80) I didn’t do any dungeons until I got to level 80.

The one exception is when I wanted to get to level 80 as fast as possible to do the new story, back when I thought Anet might fix it within a month of the NPE. Then I used a level 20 scroll and all the tomes of knowledge I had, then did EOTM for the rest of the levels. For me it was far more boring than map completion.

Leveling comes quickly enough I just do stuff and it happens.