This should give you a basic idea of what you can aim to achieve in a reasonable amount of time - say, a month - depending on what campaigns you own and so on. It's a basic "how to get 30 points" guide with some economics thrown in to help you get the necessary money.
Resourceshttp://wiki.guildwars.com/wiki/Main_Page - Guild Wars Wiki, gives you information on enemy locations, advice on how to complete missions and what skills you might need to bring, what you can salvage from what, and a lot of other stuff.
http://www.gwpvx.com/PvX_wiki - PvX Wiki, a source for working builds for all characters in both PvE and PvP; also contains hero builds, including the popular "7 hero support team"
http://argos-soft.net/GwEstimator/ - The Argos GWEstimator is basically a price check on various items you'll need for crafting, and money-making
http://hom.guildwars2.com/en/#page=welcome - this lets you know how far you've got to go and what you've got thus far for HoM points and rewards
--x--
Campaigns
Owning all the campaigns helps speed things along a ways, but isn't completely necessary. All campaigns provide access to Obsidian armour, which is not remotely recommended for HoM points.
Prophecies provides the Sorrow's Furnace mission which is good for a title, but is the longest campaign and has no heroes included (but 1 in WiK). It includes War In Kryta and Hearts of the North free campaigns, which are very profitable both in terms of money and HoM points.
Armour: 6 armours for all classes.
Factions provides Ritualist skills (very useful for good hero builds), a fair amount of money, and the Winds of Change free campaign which while long and at times difficult, is profitable. It has no heroes in the main campaign but two in WoC, and is quite quick and easy to complete.
Armour: 2-3 armours for all classes, 2 extra armours for Ritualists or Assassins.
Nightfall provides a lot of heroes, a lot of money, but no free campaign at this point. Its main hub, Kamadan, is the trading city of choice in Guild Wars, which is very useful; you can still buy/sell in EotN, but not as easily.
Armour: 4 armours for all classes.
Eye of the North is necessary to actually receive HoM rewards, and provides a lot of heroes and a lot of money.
Armour: 3 armours for all classes, 1 extra armour for Warriors.
--x--
Money
There are a few basic rules to being profitable from just playing the game.
1) Identifying. Use basic Identification Kits (the 100g ones), and identify anything worth more than 16g to a merchant unless you're going to salvage it. This improves the value of the item.
2) Salvage. Salvage anything that has iron, feathers, granite or plant fibers. You can find out what has them in using GWW, e.g.
http://wiki.guildwars.com/wiki/Category:Contains_granite for Granite. Normal Salvage kits can't give rare salvage, so it's worth getting Expert's Salvage Kits. If you have Nightfall or Factions, you can get
Superior Salvage Kits for 5 quest reward items (
do not use Trade Contracts for this).
3) Tournament points. Each account is entitled to 50 free Tournament points. To access these, you need to reach a certain area (Lion's Arch, Kaineng Center, Kamadan having completed the Istan portion of the campaign), travel to Isle of Balthazar, talk to Tolkano and register your account, then talk to High Priest Zhang for 50 Tournament points. You can then turn these in to Tolkano for 10 Zaishen Keys, each of which sells for 5.7-6k.
4) Rares. These are the
gold coloured items that drop occasionally. 7
unidentified rares can be sold to players for 5k without much trouble. You can also sell them for 700 each if you really want to.
5) Zaishen quests. These are your 'daily' quests, 3 available from Embark Beach, 1 more from Isle of Balthazar. The Zaishen Mission and Bounty are usually a good source of quick 'free' gold; Zaishen Vanquish is tougher until you're all kitted out with good heroes, and Zaishen Combat requires PvPing.
6) War in Kryta + Hearts of the North. These two campaigns give you a
lot of money. Between the two of them, you should be able to get 15 Medals of Honor, 23 Royal Gifts and almost 125 War Supplies (which you can turn into 5 more Medals of Honor). 10 Medals of Honor turn into an Oppressor Weapon, which players will buy for 90-100k. Rather than buy a particular weapon and try to sell it, it's better to hold onto your Medals and ask your buyer what weapon they want (since you can't trade Medals of Honor). Keep 10 Medals for your own Oppressor Weapon, obviously. Royal gifts sell for 5k each; that's 115k. So you've made 215k and a point in the HoM just for doing these campaigns, which are both pretty short!
7) Winds of Change. This campaign is much harder and longer, but also provides some very worthwhile
rewards. Rubies and Sapphires are worth 8-8.5k each, and are used for crafting Vabbian armour for players with Nightfall.
8) Trade Contracts. If you own Nightfall, you will get Trade Contracts for completing quests in Vabbi. 7 of these can be turned into a Ruby or Sapphire, and there are
27 total; you can buy the last one from other players for 700-900g.
9) Farming. It's possible to solo some of the Underworld for 'ectos' (which are worth 8-8.5k each) as a Ritualist and some other classes too. Serafina Pekalla in the guild can hook you up with his build, which he's been making unnecessary levels of profit with. There are other ways to farm and make money (Feathers can be farmed by repeating one mission in Winds of Change, for example), but most are fairly tedious. I haven't done any serious farming myself, just completed the main campaigns and EotN, and ended at around 500k in cash.
10) Dungeons. In EotN there are dungeons and when you complete them a chest spawns. Some of the
items unique to those chests are worth a
lot of money; check them on Argos. Also, remember to bring
Light of Deldrimor and spam it; rare crafting materials can drop from the hidden treasures that spawn, and that could be a free Ruby or better!
11) Runes/Inscriptions. Occasionally you'll get a magic item with a rune/inscription that's
definitely worth salvaging. Since we're not identifying rares, runes/insignias will only be on salvage armours, but inscriptions can be good on anything. Here's a list of stuff you should salvage:
Runes/Insignias:
Sentinel Insignia [Warrior]
Minor Strength
Minor Divine Favor
Minor Soul Reaping
Minor Fast Casting
Minor Inspiration Magic
Minor Energy Storage
Nightstalker's Insignia [Assassin]
Minor Dagger Mastery
Shaman's Insignia [Ritualist]
Minor Restoration Magic
Minor Communing
Minor Spawning Power
Windwalker Insignia [Dervish]
Minor Mysticism
Minor Scythe Mastery
Centurion's Insignia [Paragon]
Survivor Insignia
Blessed Insignia
Minor Vigor
Vitae
Attunement
Major Vigor
Mods
Poison + 33% bowstring
Strength & Honor: Damage +15% while health above 50%
I have the power!: Energy +5
Aptitude not Attitude: -20% casting time on spells of attribute
I Can See Clearly Now: -20% Blind duration
Forget Me Not: -20% recharge time on spells of attribute
*Measure for Measure: Highly Salvageable. Take these off items you don't want salvage from, and stick them on blues/purples with an empty inscription slot [Nightfall/EotN only] that give good salvage (i.e. Granite, Iron).
--x--
HoM points
Here's where we get the nitty-gritty. Depending on what campaigns you own, certain goals are reasonable. If you're prepared to farm, you can get 30 points just by paying for most of them.
Devotion/Miniatures
Points: 4-5 points easily, 3 more points more expensively
Costs: 130kish for 5 points
Make sure you are buying undedicated mini-pets; "unded" in trade channel. When buying, hover over the item offered to make sure you can't see the phrase "Dedicated at the Hall of Monuments".
All campaigns can get these by buying them from other players.
You want 1 rare (Rurik/Shiro/Lich/Water Djinn) from Year 1 or 2 for around 20-30k
18-19 commons. There are 8 commons from each year, 1-4k for year 1, 5-10k for year 2/3, 10k+ for year 4-5.
If you own all three campaigns, you can get the Unique
Black Moa Chick mini-pet. If not, you can buy them for 50k+.
Fellowship/Companions
Points: 6 points easily, 8 points easily for Nightfall, 9 points easily for all three campaigns.
Costs: free if you do the challenges yourself, 5k per armour piece if you don't (125k total)
Dedicating pets requires they be level 20, which is no problem mostly. Dedicating Heroes requires they are wearing an upgraded hero armour piece, which means completing missions in either Nightfall or EotN. Miku, Keiran Thackery and Initiate Zei Ri can't be dedicated for this reason. You can buy these pieces for around 5k (25 pieces required total).
A profession changer can give you the Ranger secondary spec for 500g, which includes the Tame Companion skill. You can use this skill to tame the Black Widow in the Underworld (all campaigns) and the Black Moa and Phoenix in Factions. Dedicating one of these pets provides both its statue and the Animal Companion statue, i.e. 2 dedications and 2 points.
Honor/Titles
Points: 3 freely, 5 more easily, 1-4 more at medium difficulty, 6 more very expensively
Costs: free for most titles you'll be aiming at,
very expensive for the ones you won't!
Completing a campaign provides 1 title, as does completing all its mission bonuses. Prophecies also includes Sorrow's Furnace which can be easily completed for another title.
2 titles per campaign + Sorrow's Furnace = 7 titles (you need 5 for 5 HoM points).
To reach 10 titles, you can get 2 more points by completing the Underworld (medium) and Fissure of Woe (easy with good heroes). The easiest last titles to get are probably either
Lightbringer or
Sunspear. The other three Eternal Conqueror (The Deep, Urgoz' Warren or Domain of Anguish) are possibilities too, but will require a good group to complete and aren't really doable with just you and heroes.
Legendary Survivor is a possibility if you have a very strong tolerance for repetition; see
Kilroy Stonekin.
Resilience/Armour
Points: 4 points easily, 3 more points somewhat expensively, 1 more point super-expensively
Costs: varies by armour, probably around 200-300k total the 'easy' way.
You do not need the headgear to dedicate armour.
Deldrimor armour cannot be dedicated.
Asuran, Monument and Norn armour costs less gold to craft, but requires reputation with those factions (and sometimes weird crafting materials which make them less desirable).
You'll want to look up the costs of crafting armour on the wiki and decide which armours to go for based on their crafting materials.
Kurzick/Luxon armour costs 70k for Jadeite Shards/Amber Chunks on top of normal crafting materials.
Vabbian armour costs 224k for the Rubies and Sapphires on top of normal crafting materials.
Valor/Weapons
Points: 3 points easily, 5 more points more expensively
The Oppressor weapon is easily gotten through WiK. Otherwise, they're 90-100k (you can try buying 250 War Supplies for 350 each to lower the cost, but this can take a while).
The Destroyer weapon can be easily gotten once you complete EotN. 10 Diamonds = 50-55k, 10 Onyx = 10k, Granite Stack = 13-14k, 100 iron = 3k, +5k crafting = 81-87k.
The Tormented weapon is very expensive;200k, which means 24e (since you can't trade more than 100k; e means ecto i.e. ectoplasm rare material, 1 ecto = 8-8.5k).
Oppressor + Destroyer = 3 points, more than that will cost you. If you're going for 30 points, you'll want to work out what's cheaper: Destroyer weapons or your armour sets. Usually, it's armour sets.
--x--
Points totals!
Low-hanging fruits only by campaign:
If you only go for the easy stuff to get, here's a rough average of what you can expect:
Prophecies only: 26 points (5/6/8/4/3)
Factions only: 23 points (5/6/5/4/3)
Nightfall only: 27 points (5/7/8/4/3)
If you have two campaigns, you should be able to hit 27 easily, and pick up the last few points from armour or weapons.
Getting your goals in order and knowing what you're aiming for and how reasonable it is to complete it in a given time frame is the key here. I would say most people should be able to make 30 points in the HoM in about a month and a half of 1-2 hours a day, provided you don't have too much trouble with the campaigns.
--x--
Campaign Order Addendum
In my personal opinion, do:
EITHER: Nightfall up until you can go to EotN, getting as many heroes as possible on the way.
OR: Factions if you're going to be a Ritualist, up until you can go to EotN.
Go do a bit of EotN, though the final battle might be too hard for you. Make sure you go to
Gunnar's Hold and enter
Magni the Bison's fighting tournament (100g per attempt). Look up builds that can get to to round 3+, and pick up Xandra (it's a random chance whether you fight her or not, but once you beat her you have a Ritualist in your party). Make sure you do the Asuran quest up to Finding the Bloodstone to get Livia.
EITHER: finish Nightfall for more heroes, then do Zaishen quests or PvP until you can unlock elites.
OR: if you're a Ritualist, do enough of/finish Factions for Signet of Spirits, Soul Twisting and Signet of Ghostly Might elite skills, then head off to Nightfall for more heroes.
Your aim now is to build the skills necessary for
7 hero support, which will make all PvE from that point onward fairly easy. You can get the elite skills via Balthazar faction (Zaishen quests give you silver Z coins which turn into 1k Balthazar for 2; 3k = an elite), PvPing or skill-hunting yourself (profession change if necessary).
Once you've got the set-up, do anything else left to do in whatever order you want!
Posts
The game doesn't explain missions very well. I was all out of quests in Ascalon before realizing what those shield icons meant.
the worst thing
in the world.
No, I don't remember my master account name, because I haven't used it in years. Any PW recovery system with any amount of sense asks for the account's E-MAIL ADDRESS, because that is a permanent fixture.
So I've been having to kind of GUESS what my account name is, and now that I've found it, I have to deal with the next layer of opaque annoyance: because I had failed guesses as to what my account name was, the system put me on lockout. Except that it doesn't tell me that when I try to reset my PW. Instead, after I enter the account name I want to reset the password for, it asks for my DoB and to fill out the two word human confirmation. I submit ... and then redirects back to the 'enter account name' field, with no notification of a failure or anything to suggest why it's looping.
I've gotten to the security question field ONCE and it failed.
PSN: ShogunGunshow
Origin: ShogunGunshow
If you're looking for a certain crafting item, then yeah, makes sense to salvage trash drops. You can look at the GW Wiki to see what they give. Otherwise, I'd just sell them. Of course I'm obsessive and save all the trash drops for Nicholas the Traveler. Oh, also, I have 16 extra seeds for the item this week for any guildies that want them.
Yeah, while pre-searing was great, it really didn't give a good overview of the mission system
Yes, NCSoft is horrible. I haven't really contacted support but once, and it was a bit of a struggle to deal with them. You can try contacting support to get some more help, thought they'll probably ask you all those questions the site's asking you.
You'll also have to know one of your characters name to log into GW.
I think I must have gotten hacked. None of the passwords I use work for logging into GW.
PSN: ShogunGunshow
Origin: ShogunGunshow
I finished Cantha but I've never done any end-game stuff in either Tyria or Cantha. I did FoW a couple of times a while ago though. I'll try to be on Friday if you guys will take me.
Also, if anyone needs to do the Final Assault mission in Sorrow's Furnace let me know. I know at least another guildie was thinking of doing it maybe this weekend. If you need help getting to the final mission I'll help as well.
If for some reason if you still have the activation codes that works as well. I didn't remember anything about my account except my character name and I had the codes. They sent me the information I needed.
...I bought Nightfall 3 years ago, I do not have those serial key cards anymore.
I eventually convinced them to unlock it, but seriously, locking me out of my own account for doing exactly what you asked me to do? That's just terrible.
Also, for reference, my characters are of the form C-title Tanto. Like Comrade, or Corporal, or Castellan, or Centurion. I've made a promise to have more creative character names in GW2. Or to just make a necromancer named Ogden Bonestealer.
good work, Geod!
PS if you want to access the blog to maek poasts there let me know and I can give you permissions if you create an account on Tumblr
Generally speaking, yes, but this depends on your team. Most dungeons can be cleared with a pretty general party build in Normal Mode, but then the length of time needed to complete dungeons increases exponentially. There are lots of "speed clearing" builds that can be used by teams, and these require very specific builds, skill sets, and equipment.
I have not done this dungeon in 5 years... not since it became THE place to get green items. I understand it has changed very much from the 4-man party that used to be able to ace the place in no time flat, and so I would be down to join you for this. We may work it into the "weekly endgame event" cycle.
Played a Kurzick defense against the turtles thingy and rocked out with my Monk out.
Shield of Regen!
Shielding Hands!
You ain't killin shit.
PSN: ShogunGunshow
Origin: ShogunGunshow
If you open up the game and use the reset password in there, it sent it immediately to me.
Download this handy tiny exe file: http://www.guildwars.com/download
Boom. Now you have Guild Wars installed. Of course, it'll take about 50-100mb more to actually get you logged in and playing, but still. I've always loved how the entire game can be streamed as you play.
The bigger issue is remembering character names... which would actually be easier if GuildWars didn't let you select surnames, et cetera...
Took me three days to get them to remind me what one of my characters was named.
Add -image behind the shortcut.exe
And you can download the whole game at one game.
Streaming is terrible.
After getting 30/50.
I have been trying so hard not to play this game since i have a huge backlog of games.
Must resist untill Winds of Change comes out.
I hope Shiro returns.
I bet he does, he had to get assassins nerfed so one doesn't own him, and now he is back for revenge.
Which is kind of a shame, I always liked the twist on that boss, that he was originally brought down by a single assassin, and you could do the same thing(if you were an assassin) when he came back as the envoy.
Also, Alecthar (IGN: Amakir) has an excellent set of builds, as does Gabriel of Istan.
Go to the PVX wiki, they have hero builds listed there.
I usually roll 2 necros and gwen, one minion master, one curser, and gwen for interrupts.
The hench handle healing ok most of the time.
Given the infrequency with which I play I'm normally rolling with hero+hench and it hasn't gone so well. I haven't really been back to GW in a long time.
I only have Prophecies + EotN, as well...so many of the recommended builds, I can't use.
Got rolled by over 350 points
One sample a distribution does not make, but why is Kurzick so bad at Alliance Battle? The Luxons seem to always be in Kurzick territory whenever I look at the factions map.
In this particular battle, there was a drawn-out 8v8 (since everybody runs builds optimized for shrine capturing, not pvp) between two shrines. Not sure what the other teams of four were doing, but we went from controlling 5 shrines to 1 during the stalemate, and eventually lost our remaining shrine, too.
Several years ago, teams tended to be much more balanced, and maps rarely got to Ancestral lands/Grentz Frontier
Aspenwood suffers this to a lesser extent, and Jade Quarry seems to be the exception
It seems to be at what time you hit it. I've had great JQ and FA, rarely do I have a really bad string of losses. I don't do AB tons, but yeah, I've noticed that Kurzicks suck more than often in there
I was accepted as an A/Me as soon as I logged in, thankfully I told them to wait so I could at least get a build off a wiki. Not really sure what we were doing either, a combination between chasing off stragglers and trying to control 1 shrine. I tended to see a lot of people go off on their own, especially this one Necro MM that had a small army with him, it was a bit funny to see.
I lost a lot and it doesn't seem like there was much coordination, still a lot fun though. It's probably a bit more fun to go with a group you know.
Makes me wish I was 70k faction down my Luxon track instead.
Yes, Kurz has wayyyy more people.
My theory is that red is the color of COMMUNISM!
Also, totally just finished City of Torc'qua on hard mode (I am never doing that again)
So. Double Kurzick/Luxon title track points. The doubling only counts when redeeming points, so I'm planning on accumulating points now, and dumping them all when the event starts. Assuming that I'll get 4 title points for every point redeemed for alliance rep, I'll be able to hit rank 4, which gives the HoM statue and allows for one more second of "Save Yourselves!"
How can you say no one told you? I literally say it in every post.
I guess I own Prophecies and Factions, but I really thought I owned Nightfall too. I guess I will see when I enter the game
I am, I'll be on later tonight, possibly, and definitely this weekend.
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