Guild Wars 2

Hi, just picked up the game a week ago and loving it! I was wondering if there’s a benefit of getting my char to 80 if all I’m going to do is PvP. Since you can’t level through PvP I’m curious if I’m wasting my time.

You do NOT need to be lvl80 for PvE if you love and enjoy Competitive PvP matches!
PvP is a separate game from PvE, however, you could level your PvE character by just enjoying PvP since you love it so much.

1500 Glory = 1 Tomb of Knowledge = level up for PvE

The only reason to lvl up in PvE is so you can explore higher level areas, doing contents you already enjoy that PvE has to offer.

In the end, do what’s fun the most for you and progress that way!

You forgot about the 1 gold needed for the tome.

its 20 silver per tome and not 1g so almost 120k glory and 16g to level to 80…its actually less than this since coming out of your starter instance you are level two

There are two types of PvP: arena PvP and world PvP.

The first (SPvP) is entirely separate from the PvE leveling and gear progression. You can create a new character and go straight there, and be on a level playing field with people who have been playing the game for a year. SPvP is a 5v5 arena match with three capture points, controlling these points increases your score and the first to 500 pts wins.

The second (WvW) is intertwined with PvE leveling and gear progression but you can also level up and obtain gear in WvW. You can enter WvW almost immidiately after character creation, but you will be very weak and die quickly. Technically you can go from 1-80 without ever setting foot in PvE – however I don’t recommend this as it will be slower, less rewards, and you will miss out on important things like skill points. WvW is a large scale battleground where hundreds of players clash over towers and keeps.

Just grab a map online and hit all of the way points in game. Consider it a wonderful challenge to make it through high level territory to each point of each map. Also, it makes maps that are already a navigational challenge like the Orr maps even more “fun”. I do this on all my new characters, because even if I hit 80 focusing just on map completion, I still need the WPs for later on when doing guild or other things in game.

After that, if you still aren’t 80, you can easily do map completion of the lower level maps to bring you up the rest of the way. Just remember to do yourself a favor and spec talents that support swiftness, fall damage negation and escape.

Map completion on its own takes you most of the way to 80 by Timberline or Maelstrom if you are doing them in order from lowest to highest level. Use food xp buffs and mix in some personal story for a boost.

No, you dont need to level 80 however you will not experience 2/3 of what GW2 is to offer. That is PVE and WvWvW.

As a person who did PVP heavily (think 12hours straight) I got burnt out so did abit of WvWvW and had rude awakening (think getting stomp continuosly by 20+ people)

After I leveled to 80, prerequisite for WvWvW if you dont want to be rallybot, when I see 20+ zerg I just laugh and lead them a merry dance, I come up from behind and attack the backline then run then do it again. This type of experience is incomparable to PVP

NornBearPig.9814:

…snip…
The second (WvW) is intertwined with PvE leveling and gear progression but you can also level up and obtain gear in WvW. You can enter WvW almost immidiately after character creation, but you will be very weak and die quickly. Technically you can go from 1-80 without ever setting foot in PvE – however I don’t recommend this as it will be slower, less rewards, and you will miss out on important things like skill points. WvW is a large scale battleground where hundreds of players clash over towers and keeps.

Whoa! don’t rubbish WvW for levelling! (I know you don’t mean to )

I level my toons through WvW for preference every time.
The level disadvantage isn’t as great as all that. You just need to make sure your gear is up-to-level and you can do that by buying the WvW karma gear from the vendor in Citadel. Then both it and you get up-levelled to 80 while in WvW. That just leaves your traits being a bit weak.
Providing you stick with the karma-train you will be fine.
I start WvW levelling about lvl10

As for it being slower – I’m not sure if it is – but anyway, who cares? WvW is fun in the way that PvE simply isn’t.
Skill points are not an issue either – there are skill points to take if you want and after dealing with human opponents, taking a few veterans down solo in PvE to get a skill point is a piece of kitten.

The ONLY negatives are that you won’t get much map completion, there’s not a lot of ‘gold’ in it and ‘achievements’ are heavily biased towards PvE. Personally, I can live with it.

If you are not going to play PvE or WvW, then there is no point in leveling your characters. This will not benefit you if you are only playing PvP.