Guild Wars 2

Hey, just started GW2 recently and wondered if I should finish areas (get every last thing in them) or just skip them when I reach the next areas level like I’d do in WoW. Does EXP scale if I do them at a higher level?

You get rewards for 100% completion, some random items and extra experience and such, so that’s something to keep in mind.

As for experience, all experience gains in GW2 are percentage-based regardless of what level the content is. So killing an enemy, finding a vista, completing a map heart, mining a resource node, all of it will always get you a certain percentage of progress to your next level, no matter if you’re level 10 or level 70. So you’re basically free to level however you want (you could in theory level all the way up to level 80 doing nothing but starter zones, or you can rush ahead and try to “keep up” as far as areas and your own level), and no matter what you do you’ll always be progressing your levels.

Electro.4173:

You get rewards for 100% completion, some random items and extra experience and such, so that’s something to keep in mind.

As for experience, all experience gains in GW2 are percentage-based regardless of what level the content is. So killing an enemy, finding a vista, completing a map heart, mining a resource node, all of it will always get you a certain percentage of progress to your next level, no matter if you’re level 10 or level 70. So you’re basically free to level however you want (you could in theory level all the way up to level 80 doing nothing but starter zones, or you can rush ahead and try to “keep up” as far as areas and your own level), and no matter what you do you’ll always be progressing your levels.

Great incentive for me to finish areas then, and a great way to do leveling in general really. Thanks for the detailed post, appreciate it.

Upon fully completing almost any zone you also get a free transmutation charge that you can use to change the look of your armor with skins you’ve unlocked. If you make sure you complete a fair amount of zones (or maybe even go for 100% across all) you can save those charges up and completely customize your looks when you have your lvl 80 gear.

And also..if you are planning for legendary weapons, you will need the gift of exploration which is granted as you achieve 100% world completion.

Sidenote:
There is an completion achievement which you can reach for exploring all of the areas present…this is however a different completion then the world completion.
(http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Explorer)

Keep in mind killing is the least efficent way to get EXP, so go for it.

If you think you’re likely to want to make a legendary weapon in future, you want the title and star next to your name for getting 100% map completion, or you simply want the individual map rewards then it’s a good idea to finish them (or at least do everything in the area of the map you’re in) as you’re going along.

That way doing the stuff you missed later on will be a lot less frustrating than if you need 1 vista at one end of the map, one heart in an out of the way patch on the side, one point of interest at the far end and one point of interest you just cannot find anywhere.

It’s not the end of the world if you do have to run around later collecting the bits you missed, but it does take longer.

Paulus magintie.7432:

Keep in mind killing is the least efficent way to get EXP, so go for it.

That is not necessarily true if you use boosters and know where and what to kill. It certainly wasn’t true this last weekend (with double XP bonus).