More leveling tips?

I've looked at quite a few guides and I think I know the basics like getting the food, utility and gem store buff and killing mobs with a yellow name but I still don't feel like I'm leveling all that fast like I was 22 about five or six hours before I started to level her and I'm at 31 now. It might be normal but I just thought it would be faster from what I read.

Sorry I forgot to ask my question. Am I leveling at a normal pace or am I doing something wrong?

Killing things is very slow xp. It's still useful, but do it as part of completing things, not a task in and of itself. Your fastest xp will come from full exploration, including doing any events you come across. If you are comfortable PuGging or have some friends, then any dungeon path should get you most of the way through a level. You're at 31, that means you can do Personal Story up to the level 30 set (you get a batch of steps you can do each 10 levels). That should give you a good boost.

Also make sure to do the three dailies each day, whichever ones in PvE/PvP/WvW intrigue you, just get three total done. Not only does that give you 2 g, it also gives you xp writs, each one of which is, um, 10%? of a level when consumed.

And longer term, do achieves. The higher your AP, the more account bonuses you have to magic find, gold from kills, xp, etc. It won't make a difference for your current character, but over time leveling will just be faster and faster for each alt, assuming you don't build up tomes and just skip to 80 using those.

The above is if you feel it's too slow. I do not know if your pace is slow, medium, or fast, to be honest. I've been drowning in tomes for too many years, and have too many AP, to have any solid memory of how long leveling takes at the start. I do know that my first 80 took me a couple of months after launch, but I was definitely taking my time plus rp'ing a ton. Still, you are doing better than a level an hour, and by most MMO standards that's rocket speed. As long as you're having fun along the way, finding new things to do and see, I wouldn't worry about the pace :)

Not sure which guides you were watching, but none of them should have recommended killing enemies.

You kill enemies while on the way from point A to point B is useful, but it certainly is not the way you should be leveling (aka staying in 1 spot and killing enemies over and over). While looking for some guides to link I was amazed what nonsense some people put as good advice on youtube.

Here is the experience wiki:https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Experience

Take a note of the experience gained from killing an enemy: 0.125% of the foe's level + bonus (aka around 0.25% to maybe 0.3%)

Now compare that to:Completing an event: 5-7%Uncovering a new area:~1.05% of area levelUncovering a Waypoint:~2.625% of area leveletc.

You are literally getting 5 to 10 to 20 times the amount of experience from just running around and uncovering things and doing small events as you would from just killing enemies.

If you want to level fast:

• get your experience bonus buffs
• kill enemies in sight
• while you run around and uncover the map doing events and heart quests

Absolutely do not stay in 1 place and grind or farm away at enemies.

I do not know what guides you saw but in Guild Wars 2 you don't level the same way as traditional MMO's (aka quests and grinding mobs of higher levels).

The best way to level, if you want to still experience the full game (so not using tomes/booster) you have several options to do:

• Gathering gives exp (including levelling of character)
• Crafting gives exp (including levelling of character)
• Do hearts (this is similar to quests but you have more variation on how to complete it than traditional quests)
• Do events (if you see any orange circle, hop on and you will get exp when the event finishes (even if it fails)). Events can be random events, meta events, worldbosses.
• Personal story. Every 10 levels you will get a part of personal story. This gives quite nice exp and evolves your character story wise.
• Map completion (do vista/poi/hearts/waypoints on a map fully)
• Participate in dungeons/fractals (this can be tricky as it needs a group. You do get scaled on the level of the dungeon (and fractal you get scaled to level 80 but still get exp). Keep in mind that with fractals you may have an issue armor wise as it is level 80 and it needs Agony Resistance on higher levels and tiers but if you have some friends asking you along and they can carry you then you could give it a try. The exp gain is similar to open world howerever I think.
• Killing mobs always gives some exp but not the biggest amount I would say and it may get stale to grind for hours.
• Reviving players and NPC's gives exp too.

Basically just play the game and do whatever fancies you.

In about 2-3 week you can get max level no problem without any foods and boosts and rather casual play.

To buff you could grab the guild buffs from guild hall if you have one. You can also use any banner giving exp you see around (other players place them but everyone can use them). You can grab foods and utilities.

You can skip levelling by using Tomes of Knowledge / Writs of Experience or even the lvl 80 booster but I would not advise using those on your first character since it takes away the experience of the game and you will miss learning how your character works.

There are more zones in the game than needed when it comes to max level 80. If you complete the zones you are send to with your personal story, you will be level 80 almost streamlined with story.

Enjoy the game :)

P.s. The game has no kill steals and no exp steal either when you team up with other players so don't be afraid to team up with total strangers playing around you :)P.s. 2: If you see higher numbers on players characters it is not their level but their mastery level. This comes after level 80 when you have the expansion which basically gives you extra skills like gliding/mounts and other map specific skills like jumping mushrooms.

There's also diminishing returns in this game. The more you kill one mob, the less items it will drop. I'm not sure if this applies to XP as well, but the game is designed around exploration, hearts and events. "Grinding" enemies won't give you a lot of XP, especially not compared to just completing an event or something.

When I last leveled a char, I was just exploring maps (of course killing what attacked me and what belong to events and hearts), after around 30% of core-Tyria explored I was Lvl 80.

I think that's the best way of Lvling (lvl's as well as later masteries): Do something else you want to do anyway, lvling happens in the background without effort ;)

Just an addendum to add to others' advice here: there's no rush to max level or the endgame. Do whatever you enjoy, whatever helps you learn the game, whatever catches your interest at the moment. There is no "right" or "wrong" way to level. :) Take your time exploring.

Welcome to Tyria!

Thanks everybody for your advice. I played WoW for twelve years and this feels like a new home for me <3

Why guide say to kill yellow enemies is because they dont attack players and get a bonus experience the longer they been alive, it dont negate the fact that its very slow compared to everything else tho.

I'm going to play with a whole new mindset now. I wanted to level as fast as I can because usually mmos only get good at the end but this is like playing a console game.

@Fatalis.4368 said:I'm going to play with a whole new mindset now. I wanted to level as fast as I can because usually mmos only get good at the end but this is like playing a console game.

That's the spirit.

Just as a small addendum:I once level a character initially with the goal of not killing enemies and see as far as I could get, though I would tag events I ran past. I got to level 17 or 18 from just running around, unlocking POIs, Vistas, Waypoints, Hero Points and uncovering the map (no heart quests done). I think around close to level 19 I ran into the issue of having to transition to areas where enemies where a couple of level higher so I eventually leveled normally on (or used tomes can't remember, this was like character number 20+ or so).

Here you can literally just run around and explore and enjoy the world, at most often no loss but rather a gain to experience acquired.

The best approach, if efficiency is an issue, is to always keep enemies and the area at around 1-2 levels at or above your own, get new gear every 5 levels (for blue, every 10 levels for green) and supplement certain level gaps with crafting.

Have fun.

@Cyninja.2954 said:Not sure which guides you were watching, but none of them should have recommended killing enemies.

There's an achievement for getting a huge chunk of XP without dying, and I think guides recommend doing that by using boosts and killing yellow named enemies because there's basically no risk and it can be done at any time, even if you've already levelled crafting (which is the other easy way to get that achievement).

@Fatalis.4368 said:I'm going to play with a whole new mindset now. I wanted to level as fast as I can because usually mmos only get good at the end but this is like playing a console game.

This is definitely the best way to approach GW2. The game does not change significantly at level 80. It becomes more open-ended in that you can go anywhere and focus on whichever parts of the game interest you, but the new stuff which becomes available is variations on existing content. Also because it becomes open-ended there's very little that you have to do, so the game won't direct you to specific areas to complete, just give you lots of options. That means it's important to have tried different things and have a sense of what you like doing, because otherwise it can be overwhelming.

Between the two I think it's a good idea to approach it like a traditional RPG rather than what you might have seen from other MMOs. Focus on exploring the world and the story and finding activities you enjoy, rather than trying to get levelling out of the way so you can start some sort of different 'end game'.

Okay I've seen a lot of people in this thread saying killing mobs isn't a particularly fast way to level. My own experience is that I can get a level, with my buffs which are quite high, about every five minutes, just by killing. Mind you I don't recommend that as the best way to level, but it's definitely a way to level.

The idea isn't to kill yellow creatures. It's to kill creatures with high bonus experience. The longer a creature is alive in the world, the more bonus experience accrues. Killing yellow creatures that have been killed recently gives you no more experience than anything else. When you kill a creature, usually, 2 types of experience come up, The second experience that pops is your bonus experience. Buffs will increase the numbers, but that bonus exists even if you're running no buffs. If the creature has been around a long time without being killed, it'll give you 2-3 times more experience than killing a yellow mob.

A lot of people in my guild use this method to level fast if they just want a few levels. The trick is to keep moving, don't just keep yourself to yellows, but use a couple of kills as a litmus test. Kill a few things as you're running past and if the bonus experience is 2 or 3 times the base, kill everything in the area. Eventually you just learn to look for the high bonus experience. Is it a fun way to level? For some it is. For me it's fun sometimes, but not all the time. It's definitely good to work it into whatever else you're doing though.

When I was trying to level masteries in core Tyria, my wife and I stacked massive buffs (and we had a LOT of them), and then we went underwater in the cursed shore. There's a lot of stuff there people ignore. We were getting somewhere between 7 and 11 thousand experience per kill. And we were killing steadily. It's a very efficient way to level....but it's not necessarily fun.

Sometimes I want to be efficient, but not most of the time.

@"Vayne.8563" said:Okay I've seen a lot of people in this thread saying killing mobs isn't a particularly fast way to level. My own experience is that I can get a level, with my buffs which are quite high, about every five minutes, just by killing. Mind you I don't recommend that as the best way to level, but it's definitely a way to level.

Assuming you are getting 0.5% mob experience per kill (and that is a very high assumption because it assumes max bonus experience and nearly all bonus experience buffs). You would have to kill 200 enemies in 5 minutes. That's 40 enemies per minute, at max bonus experience (aka 1 enemy killed every 1.5 seconds). There is no respawn that fast in this game, nor any route you can consistently run where you will get this amount of reliable enemies with max bonus experience. Even at 30 enemies, thus 0.66% per kill, you'd be hard pressed to find enough enemies. My guess is your 5 minute estimate is highly subjective "remembering" of how "fast" you leveled. I doubt you used a timer or did not get any other source of experience.

Yes, grinding enemies CAN be fast, because it cuts out all the downtime which naturally occurs (which can be avoided to some extent IF one focuses on leveling asap). It is a terrible suggestion on its own given that it is even highly inefficient compared to say crafting, which can yield levels a lot faster if one desires to skip ahead. The time saved more than makes up for the couple of gold required (cooking is 2.5 gold to 400, jewelcrafting 7.5 gold).

That is why the suggestions made are:kill enemies when you can, but make sure to take as much of the available other experience along the way, most of it yielding a lot more than the process of killing the mobs.

@Fatalis.4368 said:I'm going to play with a whole new mindset now. I wanted to level as fast as I can because usually mmos only get good at the end but this is like playing a console game.

In this game endgame doesn't mean too much. Endgamers still do what you do atm due to automatical scaling of levels per zone (endgamers which is just level 80's still do worldbosses and metas, dungeons and fractals). Raids may be the only thing you don't do before reaching level 80 but that is because of organisation and knowing your class thoroughly. There is no need to hold back on PVP pre endgame btw. In pvp you get scaled to level 80, it doesnt work with gear (its based on traitlines, amulets and runes you set in a specific menu) and you have access to everything a level 80 has skills wise. This is since everyone is equal in pvp with only exception of maybe missing elite specialisation in case you do not have the expansion. WvW wise I do not know if you get scaled up (the wvw players could answer that) but there gear does matter so it may be a less good idea if you want to pull your weight (this does not mean that casual pve players do not enter the mode with pve sets and play a bit of wvw once in a while)

@Fatalis.4368 said:I'm going to play with a whole new mindset now. I wanted to level as fast as I can because usually mmos only get good at the end but this is like playing a console game.

Things do get more...interesting once you hit level 80. Heart of Thorns, Living World Season 3, Path of Fire, Season 4, then Icebrood Saga all open up at level 80. And, honestly, how you play your character changes a bit too because your elite spec's become available and they can massively change how your character plays. Take a little bit of time now and look at metabattle.com for builds and how they play - thinking about it ahead of time and getting your head wrapped around it and answering the questions you have before you get there helps. You don't have to run a meta build - especially not in PvE - but I find them a good place to start before I tweak a build to what I want it to do. And before you head into the expansions, learn your CC's and stunbreaks. When I run my warrior in HoT, between skills and weapons I normally have 5 CC's slotted for taking down defiance bars.

Last couple of thoughts - elite specs are 250 hero points. The hero challenges in the expansions are 10 points each (versus 1 point each in Central Tyria), so don't despair at never having enough - just getting to level 80 will give you enough for all your core skill and trait lines.

Oh, and for the ULTIMATE in slowest method of leveling, just park a toon at the potato farm in Metrica Province and farm potatoes and the few green wood trees that spawn around that every day. I created an Asuran mesmer and he's been sitting there since about level 10. Four years and 9 months later he's level 55 and still there. Someday I'll figure out what I want to change his name to so that I can play him... ROFL

@"Kaltyn of Torbins Deep.2946" said:Things do get more...interesting once you hit level 80. Heart of Thorns, Living World Season 3, Path of Fire, Season 4, then Icebrood Saga all open up at level 80.

And the forum is full of complaints of people going there to fast (i.e. before they are ready) that it isn't very interesting to be overchallenged and dead quite often. ;)So take your time.

@Cyninja.2954 said:

@"Vayne.8563" said:Okay I've seen a lot of people in this thread saying killing mobs isn't a particularly fast way to level. My own experience is that I can get a level, with my buffs which are quite high, about every five minutes, just by killing. Mind you I don't recommend that as the best way to level, but it's definitely a way to level.

Everyone is different. I spend a disproportiate amount of time in game helping people and one of the biggest problems people experience is their perceived slowness in how they level. I've shown this method, your math aside to dozens and dozens of people over the years and it's always fast. It's not as fast as I do it when I do it, but it's always fast. There's always mobs that have big buffs, if you stay away from heart areas. Always.

Then sometimes you can switch servers and do it again, because on your new server those mobs are back.

This isn't guesswork based on math, this is personal experienced based on actually doing it with multiple people. I should add that one woman in my guild leveled a character from 2-80 in 9 hours by only killing. It's emminently doable.

Eventually it would bore the hell out of me, but that's not the point. I've seen multiple people in this thread say it's not that fast to level by killing and that's just not true. I never said anyone should level that way, but that doesn't make it a slow way to level.

I'd prefer to see a video of an entire playthrough of someone leveling to level 80 in under 10 hours by killing just mobs only although there have been many people that have claimed to have done so based off some YouTube videos. One person claimed to do it in under 5 hours. Still, with how spread out mobs are, and how the bonus XP reduces after you've killed them, I'd prefer to see a video regardless. One of the videos from 2016 was misleading as they're doing their route once or twice in Queensdale and then essentially log off for many hours based on the clock.

@Ayrilana.1396 said:I'd prefer to see a video of an entire playthrough of someone leveling to level 80 in under 10 hours by killing just mobs only although there have been many people that have claimed to have done so based off some YouTube videos. One person claimed to do it in under 5 hours. Still, with how spread out mobs are, and how the bonus XP reduces after you've killed them, I'd prefer to see a video regardless. One of the videos from 2016 was misleading as they're doing their route once or twice in Queensdale and then essentially log off for many hours based on the clock.

What you'd need to see is not just a video of this, but a video of this and other methods that are supposedly faster. WIth the exception of crafting and tomes, I'm not sure another faster method exists. Doesn't matter if you see a video like that or not, if you don't have videos of all the other methods.

@Vayne.8563 said:

@Ayrilana.1396 said:I'd prefer to see a video of an entire playthrough of someone leveling to level 80 in under 10 hours by killing just mobs only although there have been many people that have claimed to have done so based off some YouTube videos. One person claimed to do it in under 5 hours. Still, with how spread out mobs are, and how the bonus XP reduces after you've killed them, I'd prefer to see a video regardless. One of the videos from 2016 was misleading as they're doing their route once or twice in Queensdale and then essentially log off for many hours based on the clock.

Actually there are and they have been posted over the years.

9 levels in 5 or 6 hours does seem slow, when I was doing the lv60 key run it was closer to around 10 levels per hour but that is on an old account with some exp boosts that aren't really available to a new account.

ANet's own expectations are around 1 level per hour from before launch. So you are leveling at what the devs would consider normal.

Okay the way I leveled all my chars was by doing dungeons.Ascalon , Caudecous and Twilight arbor. The thing Here is sometimes you may get a bit of Rage towards you if you don't know the mechanics. Because you'll die a lot since explorable more paths are supposed to be for lvl 80.Since you won't make much of damage most of the Times I take CC Skills or take sustain skills for me to keep alive. That way you are helping with CC on bosses and you ain't slowing down your team. (Skills that boost damage or give boons for your team are great too)Take note not everybody will rage at you in fact there's a lot of nice players that will help take time to explain you things etc etc. I already got both of styles. And I always ask if it is cool to go with them since im low level.Well this way and without any booster , only used food and utility with 10% exp and guild buff too.I made around 26 hours or something from lvl 0 - 80.It kinda will depend on your team too if they know or not what they doing. And for me this is the easiest and best way. Never got to lvl 80 so quick. And I didnt use a booster.Now last time I did this a guy from my guild actually showed me a good way too. But you need a friend at lvl 80 or someone that can take time to help you. The way is just pop all exp things ( boosters food utility) and follow him and tag mobs . ( You gotta go to a map that mobs are higher level than you ) He tags like 5 or 6 , you hit once too and them he kills all . I did from 65 to 78 in 40 minutes. Easy.This is the best ways.

But to be honest , if you are a new player at Guild Wars 2 you really should do leveling by map completation. So you can learn your class a bit better. But oh well Im just a rusher . I hit lvl 30 by map completation and after that I just spam dungeons.