Guild Wars 2

Everyone around me seems to have MUCH higher movement speed than me. How do I make my character go faster?

Post what class you are using and we can be more specific in our help. In general, a lot of people use a passive trait that gives them 25% increased movement speed. People often use a skill that grants Swiftness (33% movement) as often as possible. There are also runes that go into armor that can grant increased movement speed.

That depends on which class you’re playing. Every class has at least one or two options to give a speed boost, even if it’s only a temporary one. Warriors, for example, can use a trait to run 25% faster while carrying melee weapons, use Signet of Rage or Balanced stance to briefly get Swiftness (+33% speed boost), use a warhorn to get swiftness, etc. Engineers have a trait that grants swiftness when equipping a kit. Necromancers have traits that give +25% while carrying a dagger or by being in death shroud, a signet to give a +25% boost, and Spectral Walk to give Swiftness.

On top of that, there are certain runes that also help.

I was hoping this was generally addressable since I have multiple characters (thief, elementalist, necromancer, warrior).

https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Movement_speed
https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Swiftness

There’s a wiki article giving you a list of traits and skills that boost movement speed. And the second is the article for which skills, traits, or items grant swiftness.

If you are in a city, a mastery introduced with HoT also grants increased speed.

An alternative to traits or runes is the Sigil of Speed. It makes it pretty easy to keep a couple minutes of swiftness up all the time while doing your normal adventuring… and it’s still relatively cheap on the TP.

~EW

Your question has been pretty thoroughly answered, but I’ll just add that it’s not entirely having the ability. You need to either consciously think about moving faster at every opportunity, or just be really experienced with it and do it subconsciously as many vets do.

For example, rangers with the skill Lightning Reflexes often do an about face and then hit the skill, which will move you forward rather than the normal backwards. That’s something that takes some practice, but if you want the speed, it’s there. (If you do it badly it will actually slow your character down.)

Every single profession has these weird little movement speed quirks like I just described. You can either take the easy route and just rely on swiftness, or you get into the habit of eking out every little bit of speed. That is critical in PvP and WvW.

For PvE (both open world and instanced), I prefer to carry an Executioner Axe Toy in my Shared Inventory Slot. It offers a great mobility skill on a short cooldown. It’s only usable out of combat, but you’re trying to avoid getting into combat anyway since it diminishes your speed. Remember you can also swap weapons out of combat, so you can rotate between using mobility skills on your weapons (thief, ele and warrior all have pretty good options for that). That combined with the suggestions above allows me to move at a reasonable pace even with slower classes.
Managing your inventory and quickly rotating skills might not be easy at first and takes some getting used to, but it’s well worth it and becomes super-easy after you do it for a while. I highly suggest to have a close look at all your weapon skills (for all weapons available to your class) and see which of them might be useful to you. Carry them around all the time and practice swapping them on fly.

Edit: If you wanna see some usage of these things in practice, you can watch YT videos with dungeon record run attempts. Since people need to move really quickly to the next boss, they try to take advantage of every mobility option their class has. An example that comes to my mind is a pretty good usage of ele’s mobility skills in this video. Do note that the same methods are available everywhere, not just in dungeons. Hope it helps.