Hero points: 250 per elite spec, gathered in an evening

Hero points are the currency that unlocks your skills and traits. Without them a level 80 character stays half empty, and an elite specialisation will not open at all.

How many you need

Two numbers worth remembering:

398 fully unlocks a core profession: every skill and every trait.

250 is what each elite specialisation costs on top.

So a class plus one elite is 648 points, plus two elites is 898, and so on. Every class has four (what they do).

Where they come from

Levelling. The road from 1 to 80 gives exactly 398 points. The core class therefore unlocks itself, purely for reaching the end (how to get there faster).

Hero challenges. Marked points on the map, available from level 11.

🔴 And the detail that matters: a core Tyria challenge gives 1 point, an expansion challenge gives 10.

Where they are

Region	Each challenge	Points
Core Tyria	1	189
Heart of Maguuma (HoT)	10	400
Crystal Desert (PoF)	10	290
Cantha (EoD)	10	310
Castora (VoE)	10	300

With levelling included, 1,912 points exist. That is three times what a class with all four elites requires.

One expansion challenge is worth ten core ones.

The arithmetic that decides how you spend your evening:

• Core Tyria and friends: 214 challenges, 1 point each, so 214 points in total. That figure includes 189 in central Tyria, 11 in the Maguuma Wastes, 13 in World versus World and one from the Krait Obelisk Shard.
• Expansion maps: 130 challenges, 10 points each, for 1,300 points. Heart of Maguuma pays 400, the Crystal Desert 290, Cantha 310 and Castora 300.

1,514 points exist in the world in total.

Sit with the first line for a second. Clearing every single hero challenge in the whole of core Tyria, every map, hours upon hours of walking, gets you 214 points. That is not enough for one elite specialisation. Twenty-five challenges in Heart of Maguuma beat all of it.

Which is why nobody unlocks elite specs the honest way, and why the trains exist.

What this means in practice

Unlocking an elite takes 25 challenges in an expansion instead of 250 points in the core game.

The difference is an evening against a week. So the standard route runs: reach 80, go to an expansion map, collect 25 points, unlock the elite.

Expansion challenges are harder and some are built for groups, especially in Heart of Thorns. That is rarely a problem, because trains of players run those same points all day. Ask in map chat or use the group finder.

🔴 Points do not carry between characters.

Hero points belong to the character, not the account.

Roll a second character and you gather everything again. The challenges reset per character too.

This is one reason players rarely keep ten active characters: every new 80 means another 25 points in the jungle.

Types of challenge

Not all of them involve fighting:

• Single combat against one opponent
• Group combat, the hardest of them in Heart of Thorns
• Communing with a place of power: walk up and hold a key
• An item to use
• A dialogue with a choice
• A mini-game

Combat challenges in expansions also drop a bonus chest once a day. They give no further hero points on a repeat, and the chest is a reason to come back.

Challenges in WvW

They exist on WvW maps too, across all four borderlands. An acquired taste: players from another world can kill you on the way to the point.

The hero point train, which is the best thing about this system.

You will see it in map chat sooner or later. Somebody puts up a commander tag, writes something like “HP train, Verdant Brink, all welcome, no requirements”, and twenty strangers fall in behind them.

Then for the next hour a large disorganised crowd walks around a hostile jungle killing champions, and every one of those twenty people opens up a specialisation they could not have reached alone. The commander gets nothing out of it. They already have their points. They are doing it because somebody did it for them.

If you are new and staring at 250 points you do not have, this is your answer, and the price of admission is asking in map chat whether anyone is running one. Someone usually is. If nobody is, say you need points anyway, and be ready for how often a complete stranger will answer “give me ten minutes, I will take you round”.

It is worth remembering, on the days when the internet is exhausting, that this happens every single evening in a game from 2012.

Advice for a newcomer

Do not farm core Tyria points deliberately. They arrive on their own while you explore maps, and that is enough.

The real work starts after 80: buy an expansion, walk its maps, and collect ten at a time. Twenty-five points and the elite is yours.