Guild Wars 2

Good morning peeps,

I’m new to GuildWars2 and I’ve been leveling my Human Guardian for the past couple of nights (5-6 Hours overall).

Now, I’m confused. I’m currently level 9 and I feel like I’m leveling really slowly considering the’re 80 Levels. I try to be meticulous (Sp?) and do all of the quests I know off however I always find myself a level behind. Is there something I’ve missed? How can I be more efficient?

I always hear in the global chat (Is there a Train?) What is a train? lol Is it a group of people who go around killing some special mobs? (I don’t know).

I’ve managed to figured out the banking system and got myself some bags from the Trading post eeerhm.. and I’ve picked up Armorsmith and Chef I think.

If anyone has any insight or wish to give me any kind of tips or definitions on the various terms I’ll come across -Please don’t hesitate

Also.. I’ve been leveling up and I’ve been getting these blue tokens to spend on skills. The first set of skills cost 1Token, however I can only use one at a time. Should I be ‘baking’ these tokens to buy the more expensive stuff?

Also, don’t hesitate to bash me. I’m not whining because I don’t find it easy enough, I’m just wondering if it is a normal ‘grinding’ speed.

Edit: Thanks alot for any replies! Greatly appreciate it!

Regards,
LeZeb

Your leveling speed is quite ok. Although the first few levels are generally easier to level, it doesn’t take much longer to level at the higher levels. That is to say the rate of leveling is pretty constant. So you could probably reach lv80 in a few more weeks or so. Probably faster once you get used to the game.
The way i did it was to first finish map complete on all the starter cities (LA is currently dangerous though) then go to the starter zones 1 by 1. Map completion (hearts, poi, vista) give quite a bit of exp as do gathering( mining, logging and harvesting).

Since you heard train i assume you must be in queensdale. Train in this case means the champ farm. When players do this farm they tends to run from 1 point to another some faster than others so it looks like a line of players hence a train. At your level, if you choose to join them, your loot wouldn’t be great but exp gain might be faster. Probably more boring as well though.

You don’t have to save the skills points( blue tokens). You will have enough to learn all the skills if you so wish. But since supply at lower level is less you might just want to pick out the ones that you think are good first.

9 levels in 5 hours is actually really good! A really fast way to level up is to go into world v world and join a commander. Also, im guessing u started in queensdale? The train is a huge group of people who run together killing champions. The train is a great way to make gold but it can get extremely boring. If u hav any more questions, feel free to message me ingame (Weasley.5614)

Played a game before this in which lvl 60 (endgame) took more than 100 hours to get. Leveling speed in this game is much better, about a lvl/hr on average for me. I would recommend just exploring the world, running the champ train for a bit, then go on with personal story etc. 80 can easily be gotten in a few weeks playing a bit every day. Working on second 80 thief atm, just doing Personal story, living world has gotten me to 70 in a couple weeks time.

You can also consider going to Lions Arch and running with other people. You are up-leveled to 80 but your skills are still not the equal to a level 80. You will die more often but with the amount of activity there you will get a good amount of exp and karma (used for armour and weapons all through your characters development. The bags that drop also give tokens that can be traded in 100 for a level. I took a lvl 30 to 80 doing events and using the level up in the last living story.

For terms you might see in map chat or whatnot: dungeons are abbreviated AC (Ascalonian Catacombs), CM (Caudecus Manor), TA (Twilight Arbor) SE (Sorrows Embrace), CoF (Citadel Of Flame), CoE (Crucible Of Eternity) HOTW (Honor Of The Waves), and Arah (Ruined City Of Arah) Dungeons range from lvl 30 story mode 35 Explorable AC to 80 Arah. FOTM (Fractals Of The Mist) is a special dungeon that increases in difficulty as you get to higher fractal levels. EBG stands for Eternal Battlegrounds in WvW, SMC stands for Stonemist Castle in EBG. DBbl is Dragonbrand Borderlands. AR stands for Agony Resistance, which you need for running higher level fractals. No need to worry about that, can only get AR from lvl 80. LA is Lions Arch. GWAMM is a special title from playing Guild Wars 1 and unlocking a bunch of titles on that. All I can think of atm, add me Kingteranas if you need help getting into the game

Keep in mind, Guild wars 2 isn’t a normal MMO, if you have played other MMO’s you’d recall that as the game goes on the leveling is more and more difficult, this isn’t the case in guild wars.
Though the first few levels are generally faster, the rest doesn’t scale too much higher, so it won’t take that long to reach 80, a few weeks in general, it kinda depends on what you play.

Edges of the mists for instance can give massive XP if your just basically karma farming the crap out of empty towers, i did manage to get 3 levels in an hour before, though much depends on the comander.

Fantastic! Thanks alot for the replies everyone! It helps me alot in the understanding of the basics of the game. And I’ll also know what the hells going on in chat lol. Hehe, I’ll most likely reread this in a years time and think (God I was an idiot).

Kingteranas.1376: I know matey, I grinded a Character in StarWars Galaxies Pre-CU upto Master Jedi. It took me 9 Months of 14H a day grinding WHILE being chased by Player-Bountyhunters. (If you got killed by a Bountyhunter, you would lose the equivilent of 2months worth of grinding baring in mind that those players could send out drones and received your exact location)…. aaaah fun times… -when I had time to burn

Keep in mind that the level 1-2 and 79-80 take equal time, so it is frustrating early on you think your going slow (WOW levels scaled in difficulty). One thing to remember is use all the gathering tools, always good for EXP and even if you never use them they sell high. Complete entire map your on (vistas, POI, WP, Challenges). And early on I like to grab at least one other starting zone. I suggest Norn starting zone, pretty easy it is big, and you will unlock MAW WP which is quick and easy world boss you will be doing long into level 80.

Yeah, that felt weird. In a leveling system like WoW you start off fast then it slowly grind to a halt at level 60 (back before leveling was made easy).
In GW1 you basically created a character and hit 20.

I saw myself leveling to 9 and thought (wait wait wait.. if it isn’t like GW1.. then it’s probably like WoW. Which means later on it’ll take me hours and hours per/level. -I have to prepare myself mentally!).

I’ll concentrate on clearing the map on every level, switch to Norn and gather gather gather!

I love the game mechanics and the way the leveling works in this game.

Hey man! I start GW2 not long ago, and back when I started, which was only about 3 month ago, I was exactly like you, until someone helped me out a bit. I used to think leveling was slow, and neither did I understand the term ‘train’, but now I’m here with 3 lvl80s and a considerable amount of gold. So let me help u out here a bit.

Firstly, train is the term used to describe a group of players who run around on a map, in ur case, queensdale, to defeat champions in a specific order. Now, those champions are actually events, group events, which means that u gain a considerable amount of exp per champion. As the train goes from one champ to the next in like no time, u r constantly gaining exp, which can help out a lot. People may say it’s boring, which I totally agree, but back when I was a total noob, I actually enjoyed it, cos it was one of my most efficient and reliable way to level.

Now, as u have already picked ur crafting professions, I guess u know what crafting is all about. Crafting can get u a lot of exp, each crafting profession has its own individual level, if u lvl a profession from 1-400, this will give u +7 character lvls. However, crafting requires a large amount of materials, therefore, if u don’t have the materials, u would have to waste some gold to buy them. Now, some professions r much much more cheaper to lvl than others, for example cooking only costs around 3 gold to get to 400, and this would give u 7 lvls. http://gw2crafts.net, I use this website to lvl my professions, as they would tell u the cheapest way to lvl a crafting profession. Mind u, u can forget ur current professions and learn new ones any time u want, they r not fixed.

What I did was that, I followed the train, for exp and loots, then I sell the loots on TP for gold. Using the gold, I bought materials for crafting. If I ever get bored, I would do some personal story, which would give u a large amount of exp.

As for u blue tokens, u use them to learn new utility skills, the reason y u can only use one utility skill is that ur personal lvl is low, as u level up, more slots would open, then u can put more skills on. For u level, don’t hesitate to use all ur tokens, only start saving them after u have unlocked all the skills that u need.

Dungeons r a great source of exp, u get 75% of ur exp bar filled every run, no matter what level u r and what dungeon u r running. However, running dungeons do require some experiences as each dungeon has 3-4 pathes to choose from, and u need to know what to do for every path. I suggest YouTube it before running. But, some groups require 80s only, so it would be hard to join a group for dungeons at lower levels. But in the end, dungeons r fun and rewarding.

I don’t mind taking u to a few dungeon runs when u get to lvl35. Just add me in game and whisper me.

Cheers ThePlanez! I’ll take you up on that offer for the dungeon runs

Whatever you do, don’t do champtrains especially when this is your first character.

kokiman.2364:

Whatever you do, don’t do champtrains especially when this is your first character.

I agree with this completely.

kokiman.2364:

Whatever you do, don’t do champtrains especially when this is your first character.

Once a month for your monthly achieve is plenty. Beyond that I have gotten a lot more from map completion.

Also don’t rush to 80. Let it happen. There’s so much to see along the way and while there’s a couple of dungeons where you want to be high level, for the most part you can do all aspects of the game (not all areas) from the beginning. You won’t miss the special events because you get leveled up while in them (though at lower relative power than natural 80’s). Once you are 80 it’s all the same gameplay, and you can go back to lower level areas and be scaled down (though still find things much easier to kill than when you were actually that level, thanks to better gear and more skills).

This game is made for people with O’Shiney’s disease. If you’re heading one way, but over there looks interesting, go over there!

Yeah, don’t spoil the game for yourself. It’s not like most MMOs where you can’t do anything interesting until you get to 80.
All the fast levelling tricks are really for when you need to level alts.

Also, don’t get hung up on doing quests. Try exploring the other racial zones and cities. You get quite a lot of XP just from doing that.
The main levelling experience is the dynamic events rather than straight quests – they can be a lot of fun.

Map completion is still one of the best ways to level. If you don’t like doing the heart quests (which give a good chunk of XP) you can just run through maps and grab WPs, POIs, vistas, and SPs. All this will give you quite a bit of XP.

I recommend harvesting/mining/chopping all trees/ores/plants you come across. Not only do these grant you additional XP, the resources you gather can be used to craft and help level up or sold for some serious coin.

The most important thing to do when trying to level is find something you enjoy and do it. You gain XP from just about everything in this game so your options are wide open.

One thing I haven’t seen mentioned yet is to make sure you don’t miss Dynamic Events.

These show up on the map and on the UI with orange text and symbols. The actual activities are like traditional quests – protect this, kill that, collect 10 rats etc. but the important difference is they start, proceed and end with or without player interaction. (Without players helping they usually fail though because the NPCs are about as competent as in most games, aka not remotely.)

You can drop in and out at any point and as long as you’re on the map when it ends you’re rewarded for your participation, so if you see one already in progress feel free to jump in and help and if it’s taking too long or leading you away from where you want to be feel free to stop.

But they give very good karma (currency) and XP so they’re well worth doing. Unfortunately they’re also easily missed by a lot of players because they’re not sign posted like traditional quests (or the heart quests in this game), you just have to watch for them happening around you.