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The original was posted on /r/guildwars2 by /u/Dan_Felder on 2025-11-09 23:13:51+00:00.

Seeing a lot of posts asking about this, because so many things are available at once.

Here’s a fun and very useful set of goals you could chase in various orders:

1. Do Immediately: Get a good open world build and the elite spec for it unlocked. Look up “open world” builds that use either PowerDPS or Celestial stats. Power-based builds are more exciting because you can easily get taken out if you get hit but they do more damage. Celestial builds are much, much tankier. If you have a level 80 boost it comes with level 80 exotics with celestial stats so often good to start here. Power-based ascended gear tends to be way easier to acquire than celestial though, so most folks get a power build (often with a mix of berserker and dragon stats for more solo survivability instead of full berserker) as their first ascended goal. Make sure you get the RUNES and SIGILS your build asks for on the trading post. Don’t skimp on any gear piece, epescially trinkets, they all matter immensely for build effectiveness. You may not have access to the build’s relic yet, as it could be content-gated, so find a replacement on the trading post.
2. Main Goal: Unlock Masteries. If you don’t care much about linear story, start with the PoF masteries for sick mounts and great content. If you do care, you can progress through living world seasons 1 and 2 then do heart of thorns: just know jumping to PoF is going to have much better gameplay than LW seasons 1 and 2. Central Tyria autoloot mastery is also a huge quality of life upgrade. Fractal masteries are great for fractals too. HoT gliding is big as well. There’s more, just get masteries. They benefit all your future characters too.
3. Secondary Goal: Get ascended gear, and access to reliable ascended gear farms. Here’s the guide on how to gear a character: There’s no need to rush this, exotics are fine for end-game content and you will get frustrated if you try to rush this as fast as possible, but it’s nice to get stronger and ascended gear is account-bound not character-bound: so it’s a long term investment in future characters too. Do this while working toward more masteries or other goals. https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/User:Tanetris/So_You_Want_To_Gear_a_Character

In No Particular Order (just hop around to what you’re in the mood for, they all help eachother):

1. Climb fractal tiers. You’ll need ascended gear for this. Tier 4 fractals are an awesome gold source and you’ll always want more gold.
2. Learn to play a support build: (boonDPS or healer) for group content. BoonDPS and Healer roles are the actually important roles for group content. BoonDPS deal about 75% of the damage of a full DPS while providing mega-buffs that supercharge everyone’s damage and help the healer do their job too. So a good BoonDPS is worth like 2.5 normal DPS. Healers provide mega-buffs while also keeping everyone alive, blocking key mechanics, being very tanky, and can hard-carry weaker groups too.
3. Unlock your Relics, Jade Core Tier 10, Spear, Weapon Masteries, and Skyscale. These are notable upgrades to build diversity and power, plus Skyscale makes the whole rest of the game greater. Warclaw is good too.
4. Get into WvW. it’s a great alternate source of certain relics and is important in legendary crafting too. You can ignore it fully if you don’t like it but if you do, learning to play the mode in zerg content is a great experience and gives tons of useful rewards. Max at least one reward track, one that gives Gift of Battle, to see how you like it.
5. Max Cooking. You don’t have to do this but it makes you super popular and it’s a good OSRS style progression thing to chase. You can massively help out random pugs by dropping ascended food platters for everyone.
6. Think about chasing a legendary. There’s lots of different ones that reward different activities, from raids to open world farming to map completion to pvp. Season of the Dragon amulet is a really big account milestone, legendary raid armor is pretty sick, legendary tinkets are SUPER valuable and support all your future characters. Maybe skip this if you are already getting loads of ascended or don’t like alt characters, or don’t care about the bragging rights of a cool legendary.
7. Explore the full map. World completion is used for legendary weapons that can make you a bunch of gold if you sell them or you can keep them for yourself. Having access to all the waypoints makes it way easier to do future events too, or farms. If you have to buy things from certain vendors you’ll be happy you have waypoints near them already.
8. Make a ton of alt characters for different uses. GW2 is ultra-alt-friendly (masteries and ascended are account-bound, not soul-bound, and legendaries are even more flexible) and having different professions/especs that are good at different things is super useful. Alt-park some of them next to juicy world chests for awesome passive loot. Get proficient at playing multiple characters so you can play whatever build gets broken in a patch or cover various roles in different content. For example, Herald applies boons in a massive radius and you get credit in events that care about participaiton for applying boons, so heralds are awesome for events like the halloween labyrinth where you can just run around with the group, let them kill everything, and auto-pickup tons of rewards. Also playing and unlocking specs on lots of different characters are fun.