Skill points are extremely important in Guild Wars 2. Aside from being the only means of unlocking your utility skills, they’re vital to your leveling experience as they also give you a healthy chunk of experience in the process is a bonus. They provide a good source of entertainment and are often challenging, which keeps them from becoming a boring grind. Finally, they’re required for getting zone completion rewards in each PvE zone, which once again provides a nice amount of experience and coin.

Trust me, you want skill points. 

The easiest way to find skill points is through leveling in PvE. Right from the start, you’ll find those little, blue chevrons on your map just begging for your attention. Go ahead and knock them out as you move from heart to heart and event to event. This will net you a few points early on, enough to unlock your first couple of skills.

If you want to get ahead of the curve, however, then you need to do a little hunting.

The first method of finding more is to visit other races zones within your level range. Open your Hero tab and click on the PvP icon; this will give you the option to Enter the Mists. Once there, run straight through the gate to Lion’s Arch. When you exit, it’s only a short run to another set of gates that lead to every other capital city of every other race. Not only is this travel method fast, it’s also completely free, which is important to players just starting out.

After picking the racial zone of your choice, head out to their starting area and use your map to plot a direct course to every available skill point. If you’re worried about spoiling areas for yourself when it comes time to roll an alt, you can easily make tactical strikes for each skill point, leaving everything else untouched. If you want to stop along the way to knock out other hearts and dynamic events, that’s fine too. The karma and experience you’ll earn are an added bonus, and each time you level, you’ll get another skill point! When you’re done, return to Lion’s Arch and repeat the process for the next race’s area.

This method is extremely effective, and virtually guarantees you’ll be ahead of the experience curve when you want to continue on to the higher tier of zones. The downside is that it’s very time consuming, and many players are so conditioned by other MMOs to progress to the next tier of level-appropriate zones as soon as possible, that they won’t want to stay in zones in which they’re being downscaled in level – even if the experience and karma they’re earning along the way is just as good as any other zone.

Luckily, there is another potentially faster, more opportunistic, method of getting extra skill points.  

Instead of going to the Mists, enter World versus World instead! Everyone, regardless of level, should enter WvW at least once every time they log in. Doing so will allow you to see which areas of the map your server currently controls, and more importantly for skill hunters like us, which of those zones contain skill points ripe for the taking.

Using the portals and waypoints that join each of the Borderlands to the Eternal Battlegrounds you can fast-travel, for free, to each of the areas with ease and speed. Then it’s just a simple matter of making your way to each skill point your server controls.

Be warned! This is PvP. Other players want to kill you, probably because you have more skill points than they do. Some of the skill challenges themselves involve tough opponents or camps of NPCs that you’ll need to fight through. If you can bring a buddy, or convince a few guild member to come along, do so. You never know when your server may control those skill point areas again, so strike while the iron is hot!

And there you have it — two very easy tactics for earning as many skill points as possible as quickly as possible. They also have the side benefit of keeping the game fresh. By breaking up your leveling experience between other racial zones and WvW, you’re constantly experiencing something new.

If you have any other means of getting your hands on more skill points, leave us a comment or stop by our forums.

No. Seriously. Stop by and tell me. Don’t hold out on me when it comes to skill points.

What?

I can quit anytime I want!