The most compacted home instance?

Which race's home instance is the most compacted, that is has the collectibles closest to each other?

I think the Dreamer's Terrace in the Grove is the smallest home instance. At least it seems so to me. Less running around if you have lots of nodes to gather.

The Grove's home puts the chests far and away, bother to get to. I prefer the asuran home when gathering in Maguuma.

Human + asuran = bestCharr + norn = about the sameSylvari = worst

My opinion.

@DeanBB.4268 said:The Grove's home puts the chests far and away, bother to get to. I prefer the asuran home when gathering in Maguuma.

Human + asuran = bestCharr + norn = about the sameSylvari = worst

My opinion.

Amen to this, Asuran was the best by far until the Oysters was added since those are way off the track. Human might be slightly better but if you helped the Quagan, they like to stand in the way and make it annoying at times to harvest those (no I don't want to talk to you you silly thing). The norn one is a giant circle but there are some far runs to get from each thing to the next. The Charr one is pretty nice and relatively compact, though there are slight detours into the huts for cloth and leather. I have not stepped foot in the Sylvari home to do farming for over a year because the few times I did, it was horrible.

I suppose it depends what nodes you have for the ideal path but I prefer the human one. Next is a toss-up between Asuran and Charr. The Norn is an exercise in frustration. The Sylvari one? Just when I thought the Norn layout was bad ...

charr asuran and humans home instance node layout is pretty nice, i tend to go to one of those 3 all the time. norn is annoying and sylvari is EVIL then again you'd expect that from them considering HoT story

I only can tell about the Norn.The Norn home instance has more layers which irritates me since I can jump over the fences and glide down - I only can jump over at the stairs to make it shorter but I have to be careful not to get much damage because that will make me slower so... yeah...The 3 HoT node what I have are close to each other but for example the Winter event Tree is at the other corner, I basically have to run a mini marathon to get it... (I just have started to get the nodes that's why I only have a few)The human sure is better.

@DeanBB.4268 said:Human + asuran = bestCharr + norn = about the sameSylvari = worst

Voted up.

The asura is the overal best for gathering. Depending on where the found bandit chest randomly appears there may be some backtracking and having to take detours, but other than that is has the nodes put the closest to each other and they all can be gathered in the least time. It also loads the fastest as it's separate from the rest of Rata Sum and there's very little stuff in it.

I personally start with the nodes to the left from the entrance, then gather them while heading towards the orrian oyster, then to the jade shard, petrified wood, cloth and leather, then walk to the winterberries, trees, bloodstone crystals, petrified wood, plants, charge quartz, wintersday tree and HoT chests.

The Human is the most lively. It has several services and merchants to sell junk you may get from bags, but things are a bit too spread out, so it isn't as fast.

The norn is the most linear, you can gather everything with no backtracking with a very clear and straight path. But the path is the longest.

The charr one isn't too bad, but some things are a bit too out of the way like the wintersday tree.

The grove is pure chaos. The worst. There's no path that can touch all nodes without backtracking. It even loads the slowest because it has to load all the stuff you can see from inside of it, which is basically all of the grove. It amazes me how anyone can think this is the best one. The only good thing about this home instance is that it has one of the two easiest Belcher's Bluff NPC.

This area is so bad it doesn't have any wall that could be used to add a cave or something to expand it if they ever added some sort of housing or home instance decoration. In the human area you could open one of the closed houses, with lots of possible room on the houses attached to the city walls. In the charr and norn area there's room on the roofs. In the asura and norn areas there could be a tunnel leading to a cave in the mountains. In the asura area there could be floating platforms too. But the dreamer's terrace is in the middle of the grove's bottom floor out in the open, no walls, not enough room on the ceilings. All jumbled up. The only direction you could expand it is digging a hole underground towards the roots.

I've tried them all for months at a time, and I think the Grove is the best. For those concerned about the HoT chests outside, you can slip under the bridge next to the Fire Orchid node and get right to those chests. You can also drop off the ramp right onto the Petrified Wood node from the Wintersday Gift tree.

But, of course, each player has their favorite.

Good luck.

I always use my Asuran home instance (I don't have too many nodes) since it feels like I can just go anti-clockwise and gather everything so easily. My only gripe is the WTF RANDOMNESS of the Jade Shard node hidden behind the staircase which makes it so out of place, otherwise it's top notch!