Q:
Most fun way to level (PvE)?
What you are asking is quite troublesome to answer, PvE is PvE grinding is it major feature and you can’t avoid that.
If you want more challenging then do dungeons but its still grind or stay in a map that has higher level than you, Otherwise i cannot suggest any better way to get rid of your boredom.
If you already bought HoT then just use the boost. After that you can join WvW, this is large scale battle so don’t be afraid if get killed just stick with other people and commander if we die, we die together. Recently WvW changed has grant us quite nice amount of reward by playing it. Use your lv 80 do WvW > get Tome of Knowledge > use it on low level char.
Another suggestion is you pick a class with fun gameplay like ele, engi or thief. There are also some world boss at low level zone can get you some good reward too.
If all that doesn’t help then may be someone with better experience than me can help you with your boredom.
It should not be a grind to level. Dungeons are not a grind, just do any and you will level up substantially. Playing content once is not a grind….?
Also you can do anything and level up. Just run around getting vistas or etc. Killing enemies is the literal worst possible way to level.
Leveling basically means aquiring experience points. Most of the heart quests are boring or repetitive. They do give several options to complete, but there are usually only one or two which are half way decent. Except you have done that specific heart for several times and know the locations of the other things out of your memory. People mostly just look for the "killl ..." option in the quest discription, as it is the easiest/fastest ^^.
Here are a few reasons why doing heart-quests can be useful:
- you gain karma*
- you gain gold*
- you gain experience*
- you get a karma-vendor, which sells unique items. In several cases you have access to nice armor/weapon skins, that would cost a fortune to aquire from TP or crafting. You also gain access to certain recipes for your crafting professions. The shared recipe book finally allows us to consume recipes with any character and use it later on the correct profession. So you do not need to do the heart with the specific character with the specific crafting profession any more.
What gets me through the leveling process are mostly the events. Aside from the hearts, they usually give you real tasks with tougher opponents, more experience*, better gold* and karma*. Also some of the events trigger other events when finished or grant you access to special vendors. Those are only temporal available, but usually sell very cool stuff, which you can not find in any npc-store and ofcourse not on TP. The events are usually connected with the area, tell a story and make you feel more of a hero, because you see the changes after completion.
Exploration is a big chapter, but can also be a little boring one. If you are in a guild that does weekly guild-missions, you may know the value of a character which has access to nearly every waypoint in the game. If you are roaming arround solo, get into a pve-guild. It is always more fun to explore together than alone. Guilds also grant access to certain boons* and usually have some veterans arround which offer plenty of information about completing exploration, reaching vistas/JPs or lend a hand killing a very powerful boss.
If you do not like the idea of mapping, go to your options menue and deactivate the event guide. Now you can walk where you want and don’t feel any pressure. A quick way to gain fast experience is exploring only waypoints and points of interest. To trigger those, you only need to walk close enough to them, no interaction required. I made more than 20 levelups just with that method and in the end the character was able to travel wherever I wanted. Once you have the waypoints, it is rather easy to get to all the events. Just keep an eye on the mapchat and you see people linking waypoints where events currently take place.
* What does that mean?
You can boost your loot by using food and with the guild-buffs. If you talk to an npc vendor who sells food, you can literally pick anything you want. Each food gives at least + 10% exp from kills. If you want more, you can go for the Bowl of Candy Corn Custard it gives you +15 % experience from kills and you can get it easily from TP. For another +10 % you can get some utility buff by consuming e. g. Apprentice Maintenance Oil, which you can craft yourselves or also purchase from TP. The guildbuff, obtained from a guild with a tavern lasts 24 hours and can grant you up to another 10 %. So just with that you can get a +35 % increase in experience from kills. If you do random events only, which usually attract tons of enemies, you get your exp-bar filled in no time.
Another useful thing can be the survival-bonus. When a monster/npc spawns a timer begins to run. The longer it survives until being killed the more bonus-experience it gives. When you kill a npc, you sometimes see two rows of experience below. The lower line is the bonus exp. If you use the above described buffs you can easliy get loads of experience from npcs. The ones that usually survive the longest, are the passive ones with a yellow name. Also try to walk off the roads/treks, get into corners and deadends. These mobs get rarely killed.
Also start to gather materials. That also gives exp and you can either store the materials for your own crafting or make money by selling them. Iron Ore for example is still a good source for money, as it is used on many highlevel recipes in huge loads.
& what the others said above.
dulfy-effect: Knowledge is power. But without fame, you are just a freak.
Yeah, events give much bigger blocks of xp than just kills and hearts do, so focus on that! The Personal Story also gives decent amounts.
If you’re looking for xp from kills specifically, use food and utility buffs (they increase xp as well as add to stats) and kill the wildlife (yellow named mobs), for the survival bonus mentioned above.
But mostly – aim for events; especially chains of them!
Maybe visit fields of ruins and blazeridge steppes. Plenty of events there. You can get to it from a portal in Divinity’s Reach. The ebonhawke portal.
In my opinion the zones above caledon forest and metrica province (I even forget the zones names) are really boring.