Guild Wars 2

Hi GW2 Community!

Although I’m not new to MMO’s, I am new to GW2 and need a little help understanding leveling.

My character is a level 8 human guardian. I normally get 1 quest at a time and ever since level 4, those quests have been higher than my level and now I’m having difficulty completing them.

What can I do to gain xp’s to help? WvW doesn’t interest me enough and I don’t have the mats to power level professions. Events seem cool but I don’t know how to find them other than walking around randomly and that seems like a waste of time.

Any tips would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks!

I level by doing map completions. Starting with all the racial city and LA. Then proceed to all the starter zones and so forth.

Map completion is the key to early levelling. As you are going around to find points of interest, waypoints, skill points, etc you will run across events that you can take part in. Many of these happen within easy reach of a heart quest – in fact taking part in dynamic events near to hearts will usually go a long way to completing the heart at the same time.

You can use the ‘level’ of the various hearts (hover over them and see the level in brackets after the heart description) to help guide your exploration around the map, so that you don’t head in the wrong direction and end up in the level 15 corner of the map whilst you are only level 8.

At the same time gather every node you see and bank the materials until later on when you might want to power craft through a few levels. Everything you do will gain you XP in this game and it quickly adds up to levels. Your early personal story chapters will be centered around the map that you start in so as you level and uncover the map you should quite naturally come across the next part of the story and be the appropriate level to undertake it.

A very important thing to remember is that those quests – they’re actually steps along your Personal Story – are really only a part of your leveling experience. There are so many other things that give experience, that actually the Personal Story may only be a small part of your leveling experience:

• DEs (dynamic events) really are your XP bread & butter while leveling, while…
• renown hearts give decent XP, and serve as a guide for what areas might be useful to visit next;
• gathering resource nodes gives you XP (more than killing a monster!) and materials for…
• crafting tradeskills, which give you XP as you increase the trade skill (skilling a trade all the way to 400 gives the equivalent of 10 character levels);
• exploration, particularly of the six major cities, is completely safe, relatively easy, and will net at least a couple levels.

So the fact that you’ve done a couple personal story quests, but now are underleveled for the next one, is by design. You’re meant to get out there and Do Stuff before continuing. What stuff? All the stuff!

The best tip I could give, however, would be this, if you’ve exhausted those: Go to another race’s starting area. To do that, go back to your main city, and find the portal to Lion’s Arch. Then take a portal to another main city, say Hoelbrak, and visit the Norn starting area. Repeat for other races as you desire. The level 1-5 zones typically have events popping all the time, and certainly have a fresh list of renown hearts for you to complete.

Like these folks said… Just by going to the different citys and starter zones and working on map completion you can get up to level 25 or higher pretty fast.