Levelling to 80: what gives experience and what wastes your time

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.

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.