Guild Wars 2

I’d like some of your thoughts on fast ways to level up my low level characters. I want to be able to do dungeons with different classes but I don’t want to spend too much time exploring around zones that I’ve already previously been to.

Crafting and full exploration of city maps. Personal story missions also give a good boost, and that should be enough to push you into new areas to explore until you can dungeon.

From my understanding:

1) Crafting – requires gold and / or materials.
2) Renowned Hearts – Most XP on the maps.
3) Personal Story – Gives good XP.

for hearts and story, try and stick to zones/quests that are around 2 levels higher than your character level (not your effective level), after you get to a point where you can’t really progress (for me the difficulty curve spikes at claw island), you can then switch to clearing maps.

If you have the gold, you can craft to max level in a night.

Everything you do in this game other than PvP (WvWvW is fine) will net you XP. So basically the fastest way to level is just to play the game. Here are some things:

1. Hearts – also get nice gear upgrades from vendors)

2. 100% area completion (all hearts, vistas, waypoints, skill points and points of interest)

3. Daily quest – changes each day but usually involves doing a certain number of kills in a zone, gathering a certain number of materials from ore/lumber/herbs, participating in a certain number of group events etc…

3a. Every thing you do for the daily also gives it’s own xp (accept killing “critters”) so mine and chop trees as much as you can….and then you can sell or use to fund crafting.

4. Crafting – this is insane XP for your character and could get you some nice gear to quest with if you opt not (or cant afford) to max out through crafting alone.

5. Participating in group events and completing any “orange” quests that appear

Generally just head out and do anything you come across. Good luck.

A side note is that crafting will evidently not get you all the way to 80 right now.

Three of the eight crafting professions have been increased to 500 and the other five have not. The experience granted by crafting was reduced to spread out the intended 10 levels to the full 500 tier, but that tier is inaccessible for most crafting disciplines. Supposedly, doing all eight crafting professions will only get you to around lvl 65 at the moment.

I have not verified this in-game, I’m just passing along posts I’ve seen here on the forums.

As for crafting, I just did this with a level 14 mes, which I leveled to 80 only with crafting. However, it will NOT take one night, unless you want to “play” the longest night of your life. It will take at least an hour per discipline, and there’s 8, so… ya… I used up a whole weekend doing that basically. I finally gave up trying to figure out what I had in inventory and what I had to buy and just bought everything, because I got really sick of the whole experience.

I find that getting WPs and POIs add a lot more XP than most people think. Even without doing hearts, if you run around and get all the WP and POI and do a few dynamic events in between, you’ll level up pretty fast. A good thing to do if you don’t want to die a lot is do the major cities, as nothing in there is going to attack you but you’ll get lots of XP for hitting the vistas, WP and POI.

Each story mode dungeon gets you 3/4 of a level plus incidental xp the first time you do it. So in my opinion its a good way to get a nice xp boost while playing the game. Plus you can continue to do other stuff while waiting for the group to form.

I just gained three levels in a little under an hour, helping out with an invasion event. This isn’t really viable for lowbies, though.

If you don’t want to do a lot of open-world stuff, then I agree that personal story, city exploration, and crafting are all good ways of getting some levels fairly easily. City exploration is not as painful as open-world, as you have access to speed boosts in-city. Crafting for EXP can be pricey depending on the craft (try Chef, Jeweller, and Artificer first), so I usually space that out with other leveling methods if I’m short on gold.

- Keep an eye out for the invasion events. You’ll get get 1-2 levels easy from those.
- Use XP boosters, food, oils, crystals, banners…whatever you’ve got access to.
- If your aim is dungeons, make sure you can access them by exploring your way to the entrances. I leveled my alt 25 lvls from the invasions and now have to wander all the way up to frostgorge and fireheart to access the dungeon entances. Just running through the map to get those WPs will get you 1-2 levels.
- Personal story quests give good XP.
- Obviously, run the dungeons. If that’s your goal anyway, run em for great XP and loot.