What is the fastest way to reach 80?

Playing normally is close to it. Experience comes from events, story, map exploration, gathering and crafting, so the fastest route in practice is doing whatever gives you the most of those at once.

Is killing enemies a good way to level?

It is the slowest method in the game. Standing in one place farming mobs pays far less than a dynamic event that runs for a few minutes.

Should I use the Level-80 Boost?

Not on your first character. A level 80 with a full skill bar is confusing when you have not learned the class. Save it for a second or third character.

Can I try the boost before spending it?

Yes. A character below 80 is teleported to Camp Resolve in the Silverwastes, where you can play at maximum level and then decide whether to keep the boost.

Should I buy gear while levelling?

Only bags. Armour and weapons are disposable before 80 and will be replaced every few levels; bigger inventory works for the whole account forever.

Levelling to 80: what gives experience, what wastes it

The main thing to understand about levels in Guild Wars 2: there is no separate levelling activity. Experience arrives for almost any sensible action, so 80 turns up on its own while you do whatever interests you.

Players arriving from games with a strict quest grid tend to miss this and start hunting for “the fastest way to level”. A fastest way exists. It is almost always worse than playing.

What pays experience

Dynamic events, the orange circles on the map. The densest source: an event runs a few minutes and pays better than ten minutes of killing things.
Personal story, your own chapter line, roughly every two levels.
Map exploration: areas, waypoints, vistas, hero challenges. Every new patch of map pays for being walked into.
Gathering. Yes, every ore node and every tree. Passing one? Take it. Free experience and materials at once.
Crafting, which pays character experience and a decent amount of it.
Reviving allies. Small, but it counts.

Plus consumables: Writ of Experience, Experience Scroll and Tome of Knowledge. Hold on to the last one, for reasons below.

The worst thing you can do

Farm mobs for experience. It is the slowest route in the game. Standing in one spot killing respawns means you are doing the one thing the game does not reward.

Follow an “optimal route”. The world scales to you: on a low-level map your level is reduced, so there is no need to travel by level bracket. Go where it looks interesting.

Buy gear on the way. Below 80 it is disposable and eight levels will retire it. The exception is bags: a larger inventory serves you for all 80 levels and everything after.

What changes at 80

Experience does not disappear, it stops being personal. From 80 it becomes account-wide and feeds masteries: the glider, mounts, language tracks, all the things that gate expansion content.

Which is why Tome of Knowledge is worth saving. At low levels it is one level. At 80 it is progress in a track you would otherwise grind for hours.

The bar does not stop at 80, it changes job.

Most levelling guides end at the number 80. What happens to the experience bar after that is the part worth knowing before you get there, because it changes how you feel about the whole climb.

The bar keeps filling. It feeds mastery tracks instead of levels, and when a region’s masteries are all trained it rolls into a repeatable track worth 254,000 experience that pays a Spirit Shard each time it completes.

There is no cap on that and nothing expires. Every event you do out of habit for the next five years quietly turns into a currency that promotes materials in the Mystic Forge.

Which means the honest framing of levelling in this game is that you are not climbing towards an endgame, you are climbing towards a different bar. Nothing about your character stops improving at 80; the improvement just stops being numbers on a sheet and starts being what you can reach.

Should you spend the Level-80 Boost

It sits in your shared inventory slots, one of them, and everybody asks the same question.

What it grants when consumed:

level 80 and unlocked waypoints
a Level-80 Boost Package and a Level-80 Equipment Package to choose from
temporary gear with the Celestial prefix
default skills and specialisations set up for you
extras: dyes, boosters, gathering tools, bags

What it does not grant: the level-up rewards along the way, and masteries, which still have to be earned by playing. The temporary gear cannot be sold, salvaged or thrown into the Mystic Forge.

A detail many people miss: there is a trial before you commit. A character below 80 gets teleported to Camp Resolve in the Silverwastes, plays at max level for a while, and only then decides whether to spend the boost or return.

My advice. On your first character, keep it. A class at 80 with every skill unlocked is confusing: twenty buttons appear at once and none of them arrived in a context you remember. Levelling by hand delivers them one at a time, and this is one of the cases where slower means clearer.

The boost earns its place on a second or third character, once the game makes sense and you want to try another class at the top.

How long does it take

Depends entirely on how easily you get distracted. Doing the personal story and closing maps along the way runs into tens of hours, and none of it feels like a grind because it is the actual game. Aiming straight at the number 80 is faster and skips the part you came for.

Level 80 is not the finish line here, it is the place the rest of the game starts from. What waits there.

Nobody is watching you level.

The advice everybody gives is “do map completion, it is efficient”. It is efficient. It is also the fastest way to make an unhurried game feel like a checklist, and plenty of people quit somewhere in the middle of their second zone without ever knowing why.

What nobody tells a new player, and it is the whole reason this game levels the way it does.

There is no race. Nobody is ahead of you, because there is nothing at 80 that expires. There is no raid tier closing, no season ending with your name on a list, no friend who will out-gear you into a different bracket. A person who reaches 80 in a week and a person who takes eight months arrive at exactly the same game, and the second one has seen more of it.

The world scales down to your level, so every zone in the game is playable at any time. That is not a convenience feature. It is permission. You are allowed to walk into a map because the screenshot looked nice, spend an evening there, and gain nothing measurable, and the game will not punish you for it in any way you can detect.

Take that permission. It is the actual product here, and the people who use it are the ones still logged in three years later.

The permission nobody gives you

One last thing, and it is the hardest advice to follow.

You are allowed to go the wrong way.

There is a cliff to your right with a vista on top and no reason to climb it. A cave nobody mentioned. A heart three zones above your level where the enemies hit harder than they should. None of it is optimal. All of it pays experience, because in this game the experience is attached to being somewhere and doing something, rather than to the correct thing.

Players arriving from games with efficient routes find this hard to accept. They open a guide, follow the fastest path, reach 80 in a fraction of the time, and then sit at max level wondering why the world feels like a corridor they ran down without looking.

The levelling here was built to be wandered through. Nothing you skip is gone, and nothing you detour into is wasted. That is an unusual promise, and the only way to collect on it is to take the cliff.