Guides

Writs, Tomes and Boosters: The Leveling Guide

You may be leveling your first character up. Or you may be manually leveling your second, third, or nth. Or you've gotten to level 80 and are now actively attempting to level your masteries to make certain content accessible to you, eg. better gliding, certain mount masteries, or raid utilities. What is the most efficient way to farm experience? A Level 80 booster, but avoid using these on your first character of a given class when possible as they won't teach you to play the class, and certainly not on your first character as they won't teach you the game.

Experience in Guild Wars 2 is granted in percentages of your current experience bar. It goes without saying that doing any of the following is the best course of action for you if you're also working towards another goal than XP farming, eg. map completion is your best route if you're planning to make a legendary which requires map completion, and leveling a crafting profession is your best route if your goal is to craft some high-level gear.

Introduction

Open-World Experience

Leveling your character's crafting profession from 0 to 500 will give you about 10 levels of XP (but don't teach one character more than two crafting professions, as keeping more than two will require a gemstore purchase). In the open world, you get XP for participating in events, progressing your active story, gathering from material nodes, completing Adventures, and killing things. Renown Hearts do not give lots of experience unless they involve killing mobs or a dynamic event (in which case the XP comes from the event or killing the mobs in question). Map completion can be a good way to farm experience before reaching level 30 on a character, but killing mobs or leveling a crafting profession (if you can afford to) overtakes map completion by leaps in terms of speed. Honorable mentions in the open world go to completing achievements and reviving players and NPCs; these actions grant some XP but the gain is minor.
Under level 80, Writs of Experience grant 5% of your XP bar, and Tomes of Mentorship and Tomes of Knowledge grant 100% of an XP bar (so 1 level). You cannot use these items for XP after level 80.

XP Consumables

Writ of Experience

Grants 5% of the experience needed to reach the next level.

Tome of Mentorship

Grants one character level if below level 80.

Tome of Knowledge

Grants one character level if below level 80 or one spirit shard if level 80.

Instanced Content Experience

Instanced content is generally very good at giving XP, where pre-level 80 dungeons (available from level 30 to level 80) give you 70% of a level's XP bar. As of level 80, Fractals give a lot of central Tyria mastery experience, Raids give a lot of Heart of Thorns (HoT wings 1-4) or Path of Fire (PoF wings 5-7) mastery experience, and The Icebrood Saga Strikes give a lot of TIS experience. The exception (as of the writing of this guide) is End of Dragons, where completing an EoD strike does not grant a lot of EoD experience.

Recommendation

Recommended Methods

The UCT recommended method of farming XP in groups is instanced content that you can complete: before level 80, that'll be dungeons; as of level 80, that'll usually be fractals. The UCT recommended method of farming XP on your own, while superior in terms of XP gain if a bit grindy and boring since you're not with friends, is killing neutral mobs: because it is easy to find a lot of them and it is very easy to boost XP gain from this method.

On Killing Neutral Mobs: Why You Should Partake In Grub Genocide Today

The longer a creature has been alive in the world, the more experience your character gains from slaying it.

There are three types of mobs in Guild Wars 2, and you can tell them apart by behaviour and by the color of their name, which appears above their head if you enable the right option (Show All Usable Object Names in the option panel). Mobs can be friendly, neutral or hostile. Friendly mobs have their names in green, hostile mobs have their names in red, and neutral mobs have their names either in white or in yellow. You cannot harm green-named mobs.
Hostile mobs in Guild Wars 2 will aggro on players and chase them until either one kills the other, or the mob loses aggro; as a result, enemy mobs are more likely to get killed more often. White-named mobs do not give experience and are generally killable by accident (an auto-attack or AOE skill is usually sufficient).
Yellow-named mobs are easy to kill, and will not attack the player until they initiate combat. As a result, they are the least likely to get attacked by players and get to stay alive the longest in the open world. Which means that, when you kill them, you'll get a lot of bonus experience for very little work.

Conveniently, most experience boosters operate on kill. Which makes it all the more worthwhile to kill yellow-named mobs. Even better still, experience is granted to all players who participate in killing the creature (aka 'tagging'), regardless whose blow actually finishes it off. As a result, you can team up with a couple of players and go around tagging and finishing off each other's yellow-named mobs for a funner, healthy, communal, almost-non-violent way of farming experience. But before you embark on your butchering journey, be sure to stack up on experience gain buffs.

On Boosting Experience Gain

The easiest and cheapest experience boosters to obtain operate on kill experience. That being said, here are all the experience booster types ingame as of now, excluding ones that apply game-wide during certain periods of the year.

General XP Boosters

Guild XP Gain (10% all XP gained for UCT, varies per guild; obtained for free by speaking to the bartender at the Guild Hall tavern)
Black Lion Boost (50% all XP gained, obtained from Black Lion chests or for statuettes)
Winter's Blessing (10%, obtained from completing achievements during the Wintersday festival in December-January)
Ascended Food (5% all XP gained)
Blessings of the New Year (10% all XP gained, from the Lucky Firecraker item obtained during the Lunar New Year festival in February or from the trading post)
Guild Experience Bonus (5% all XP gained, obtained from a Guild Exp Banner purchased for Guild Commendations at the Guild Hall)
Guild Experience Banner Bonus (15% all XP gained, obtained from a Guild Karma and Experience Banners or a Guild Heroes Banners purchased for Guild Commendations at the Guild Hall); does not stack with Guild Experience Bonus
Experienced Enrichment (20% all XP gained, obtained from an Experienced Enrichment purchased with laurels and equipped in your enrichment slot in an ascended or legendary amulet)
As of the End of Dragons release, leaving your character at the inn in Arborstone when you log off will grant it a 25% experience boost as long as it is left at the inn for at least 4 hours.

On-Kill XP Boosters

Nourishment (10% to 15% XP from kills, obtained for consuming a Food Item, which can be purchased from the trading post or crafted; see below)
Enhancement (10% XP from kills, obtained for consuming a Utility Item, which can be purchased from the trading post or crafted; see below)
New Year's Gift (5% from kills, obtained for consuming Lunar New Year fireworks such as Lucky Draketails, which can be purchased from the trading post)
Celebration Bonus (100% XP from kills, obtained from the Birthday Booster or the Celebration Booster items)
Experience Bonus (50% to 150% XP from kills, obtained from the Experience Booster or Heroic Booster items, or from a Communal Boost Bonfire. Gives Active Kill Streak! which adds 10% for each kill up to 100% to XP boost)
Festival Gobbler Boost (25% XP from kills, obtained from the Zhaitaffy Gobbler or Snowflake Gobbler gemstore items when fed the relevant materials)

Purchasable Consumables

You may purchase any food or utility items your level allows you to use from the trading post, or craft them. You may also purchase Lunar New Year fireworks for 5% experience from kills, and Lucky Firecrakers for 10% experience from all sources. Some food items or utilities can be purchased for gold or karma from vendors around the open world instead. Whatever you do, please make sure you are obtaining items your current level allows you to use, and make sure not to use items that will interfere negatively with game mechanics (that is, do not take Toughness food in raids). For all intents and purposes, here are some items UCT recommends: