Guild Wars 2

new player here, have leveled my Norn revenant to 80, but cannot use my heraldic abilities, or gain more experience. Cannot equip shield either. please explain to poor noob what I’m doing wrong.

You need to select Herald as one of your specialisations – as it’s an elite, you can only select it in the bottom spec slot. Once you do that, you’ll be able to use a shield and the Herald skills.

If your problem is that you don’t have enough hero points to unlock it, you need to complete hero challenges, which are marked on the map – levelling to 80 only gives you enough points to complete the core specs. Hero challenges from the original maps give 1 point each, and those from Heart of Thorns give 10 points each. You’ll need 250 points to fully unlock Herald.

you need 250 hero points to unlock herald fully. you need to unlock herald and put it in your build panel in the 3rd slot to use a shield (you can only use the shield as a herald).

to get those points you can go through normal maps and collect them from hero challenges, they are worth 1 each, or you can go into HoT zones (Verdant Brink, Tangled Depths, Auric Basin, Dragon’s Stand) and grab some there, they are worth 10 each in those zones.

thank you for quick response. another question if I may. cant use masteries until HoT story line, correct? So should I skip there, or do Scarlett and living world missions first?

Yes you need to do the first mission in hot to unlock masteries, do what you feel is right for you, you will most likely get stuck not gaining more exp due to lack of mastery points afew times in the future anyway.

I will still be able to go back to the other story line missions if I skip ahead to HoT?

sinister.6780:

I will still be able to go back to the other story line missions if I skip ahead to HoT?

Yes. You can pick up any storyline at any time as long as you have it unlocked. So working on the HoT storyline won’t prevent you from going back and working on earlier storylines.

The only down side to doing them out of order is that you won’t have any idea what’s going on. How much that matters is up to you. I decided not to wait and went straight for the jungle. It’s a pretty awesome place, and I was fine with going back and catching up on the parts I missed later. But do it your way.

Conversely, if you care about story spoilers, the first HoT mission (all you have to play to unlock Masteries) contains a few pretty significant spoilers for Living World season 2.
You can see them as spoilers, or as teasers – all up to how you relate to being told a story out of order.