The Hall of Monuments provides a convenient way of summarizing how much “stuff” you’ve done in Guild Wars, at least to completion. I am at 25 points. I have done almost everything there is to do in-game at least once. I still have two Eye of the North dungeons I have not visited, a few Factions challenge missions I have never run, and I have only tried the solo-queue PvP options. I also have not run every quest, but the only one left that seems strongly recommended is the titan-clearing chain at the end of Prophecies. I have repeated some but not all on hard mode.
Touring Hall of Monuments categories:
- Devotion seems mostly to be a measure of how long you have played and whether you trashed miniatures as a veteran player. I have 3/8 there for getting a rare and a unique miniature. I would need somewhere around 72,000 gold to get to 20 miniatures (5/8), which would involve farming gold and working through trade spam. Those would be the cheapest HoM points around, I suppose. I theoretically could find miniatures by playing, but I have not yet apart from those two, and I would get more reward from selling them and buying 1st year birthday presents. For the non-veterans, this is a measure of how much you are willing to farm gold and put up with trade spam. I don’t see myself realistically getting 50 minis, but I could someday just by logging into Guild Wars in future years to collect birthday presents. There is a long term GW2 plan!
- Fellowship was the easiest, 8/8. There are six sources of upgraded hero armor, and running each of them once will likely get you to or near 10 companion statues, certainly if you also pick up the rare pets. As a ranger, bringing Charm Animal to the relevant pet capture spots was no hardship. The Eye of the North hero armors are pure farm in that you get 1 per challenge/dungeon completion, but the challenge is easy enough to AFK half of it without a specialized build, and again inexpensive points if you prefer to farm gold instead (4,000 gold for a Cloth of the Brotherhood, so 40,000 for a HoM point is cheap).
- Honor: 9/18. That means 14 statues at the moment, so I get another point soon. Running the six elite missions with the guild filled this quickly, and you get 3 for completing the campaigns. I’m most of the way through Legendary Survivor, playing carefully. I could just use an AFK farm for that, but I have not set it up. A relative newbie guild-mate ran the same dungeon for 12 hours over two days to reach his 1,337,500xp without dying. I’m thinking that’s the kind of thing your game should actively discourage instead of reward, but the lad is trying to build up HoM points before even finishing any campaigns. Back to me, I have been enjoying Jade Quarry, so maybe I will farm myself the Eternal Zaishen Supporter statue for 3 points. I think that would be around 120 wins in JQ if it is the Zaishen Combat of the day. Oy, that sounds long, but I’m not committed to farming it all one day.
- Resilience (3/8) is another gold sink. I’ve picked up 4 armors without actively farming, including Elite Kurzick while earning the Friend of the Kurzicks track, so I am also at the “drop 60,000 gold to get 2 points” status here. I have about half the Vabbian Armor materials, but I see no sane way to get Obsidian without hours of farming. 105 Ectos?!
- Valor has produced 2/8 from normal play (complete War in Kryta). I am almost to a Destroyer and Tormented weapon, so some minimal farming will yield 2 more points, then 1 more weapon to a third. This one seems to have the most painful “full display” point, with 11 weapons clocking in around nearly one million gold. Then again, the gold sink titles can also consumer about a million gold each, so these points would be easier than capping out Honor.
So I’m within spitting distance of 30/50, just needing a little organized effort rather than wandering about. There is actual work involved in getting much further, although I could see myself getting more just through normal play. Normal play generally gets you “almost there” for a great many Hall of Monuments points, and then you just need a little care to cap off your point. I have quite a few titles and goals in the 75+% complete status, and I’m content to let them build over time. Some people, like that new guildmate, seem eager to get all of their HoM points now, but that seems counterproductive to me. There is no reward for having them before the day Guild Wars 2 launches, and you’ll get progress on a great many through normal play without working at it. While I obviously pay attention to achievements, I’m mostly earning as I play, yes with an eye on the goals and how a 5% adjustment in my plans can make tonight’s adventure contribute to two or three HoM statues.
: Zubon
Jady Quarry was also my way of getting Eternal Zaishen supporter. Effectively I’ve done it in less than 3 double imperial faction weekends, but don’t let it stop there if you enjoy PvP. ZKeys are very easy to sell at 100k for 17 keys.
My points breakdown is 3, 7, 9, 7, 4. Some armours work out cheaper than destroyer weapons, as long as you have the materials (no need to make head pieces/helmets) EotN armours are cheaper than the rest and some classes have much cheaper material requirements e.g. elementalists. Both oppressor weapons and tormentors are solely a time commitment, so I went with mostly destroyer weapons. I made most of the required gold from selling kegs and red/blue rock candies, couldn’t resist opening the gifts but that’s not the most valuable way of using them.
7/8 in Resilience: all but Obsidian Armor? Assuming I hit 50/50 someday, I suspect that would be my last point, although the 50th mini or 40th Honor statue could be competitive.
Something often overlooked for the weapons section in the hall of monuments is how absurdly easy it is for longtime players to get the weapons from War in Kryta. Anyone in the game for years tends to accumulate alts: for every character you have that’s progressed far enough to unlock War in Kryta + Hearts of the North, you can effortlessly pick up one or two weapons just by doing that fun set of missions/quests. Filling out the Valor monument is then a matter of picking up a tormented weapon and one or two destroyer weapons.
It’s not really a viable option for someone looking to do things quickly, but if you ever intend to have more than one maxed character it’s the easiest method to get those points short of buying them outright.
i totally agree, i filled that monument with 10 oppressor weapons AND got 2 extra staffs since i think they are one of the best skins available. getting tormented weapons is also quite easy, you need to play far less domain of anguish to get those, than running eotn dun geons for diamonds. but of course you’re always better off selli8ng them, since they are always overprized.
I have six HoM points. I wanted to get to nine for the orange tabby cat but I decided at six that I really have better things to do with my time.
I think that if I can persuade Mrs Bhagpuss, who currently hasn’t even zoned into the Hall of Monuments, far less earned a point, to open the seven years of Birthday presents she has on the four characters on her original account, that between the two of us we might have 20 different ones each. Depends if she gets mostly the same ones I did, I guess.
I looked through all the HoM rewards, though, and the only one I could see that I wanted was that cat. Since I imagine there will be plenty of companion cats on sale in the cash shop anyway, so I’ve pretty much lost interest in the whole thing.
Meh. This just reminds me that I should’ve tried to find a guild in order to get the elite stuff done instead of just taking the easy way out and making my own 1-person guild for the sake of dumping faction (just hit r4 Luxon yesterday, so another statue in Honor, yay, and a 5s Save Yourselves is also nice).
Leohan Rush is our guild leader, if you want in. We’re also Luxon.
Thanks for the ref, but nah. Already passed 30/50, so don’t really need anything more, anyways. Mostly just fart around… :)
You can do it!
HoM points are one of the worst grinds I’ve run into in MMOGs, which is saying something from someone who started playing EverQuest about a week after it went live. Despite my love for Guild Wars, I’d pretty much rather do anything else in gaming than take HoM seriously. Additionally, the per-character rather than per-account nature of many of them makes an altoholic like me want to cry.
I’m pretty sure that you can submit the achievements acquired on multiple characters to your HoM and they count account-wide. For example, I have one character with only a Black Moa Bird and Legendary Survivor, another with only Vabbian armor, turned those in to their respective HoM, and it counts towards my account total even though another character has the bulk of the other achievements.
So Honor is the only area where you might have a problem, say you have completed all the missions in hard mode but have no Guardian titles because no single character has hard-moded a full campaign, or your alcohol is spread across various characters, or no one character has all the elite skills.
This is an advantage to us late-comers. I don’t have time to be an altoholic, so I am focused on one character.
Well, people tended to do titles in which you have to invest heavily on single character, only turning to alts when there was redundancy already, becuase otherwise you would not have title, because before HoM people were going for GWAMM titles which required focused effort on single character.
(Oh, you need help with hardmode X, but i have done it on main … let me take my alt for this.)
Exceptions being survivor title and farming titles (lightbringer, some eotn tracks…). Maybe late main-alt switch for some people.
Yes – you can’t vanquish over multiple characters in a single campaign either, which is a bit of a pity. Another thing to be aware of is that you only get rewarded once for an item of a particular type, so if two of your chars get say norn armor that only counts once.
I started playing GW a month ago and all of those points (and the ways how to get there) seem very confusing to me. Lv.20 now and haven’t played through my first campaign (nightfall) I started EotN-quests and have completed the Norn-storyline.
My question: does it click in the future and suddenly let’s me understand how this whole point-gathering works or do I have to do research on the internet? It really seems to me that Anet wants us to work with their wiki.
Do you feel information on the HoM comes naturally some time later in the game? It’s so much, too much for me at the moment :-(
There’s really not much information you need that you can’t glean from http://hom.guildwars2.com/ (enter a character name, probably the one with the most progress in titles you have) and the wiki pages linked to from there.
Just have to remember that you have to put up a tapestry (that you get for talking to Gwen the first time you get to the Eye of the North itself and for completing each segment of the expansion) before you can place anything on the monuments other than Honor (which is the one based on your titles).
I know the HoM and my current points. My point was: does the game itself teach us how to get those items you show in the HoM? I haven’t heard of this hero armor for example yet. Do I have to finish a campaign to learn more about the HoM?
The game does not teach that well. Yes, they seem to want you to use the wiki. Here: Hall of Monuments guide.
Hero armor is non-obvious. It comes from challenges around the fringes of Nightfall and Eye of the North. If you have beaten Consulate Docks, you are able to run the first challenge for hero armor, Dajkah Inlet. The others are much later: three opportunities near or at the end of Nightfall, two once you beat Eye of the North. So Fellowship is a monument you can unlock late.
If you read my early Guild Wars posts, your question is what I kept coming back to: wow, they really expect you to learn from the wiki, don’t they?
Of course, the [Hero Armor] NPCs in each of the challenge outposts (which have their own distinct symbols, ‘cept for the Central Transfer Chamber) kind of make it obvious how you get the armor bits and where to get them at. :)
True, once you’re there. The natural course of the Nightfall campaign takes you to only one of the four hero armor places, and I don’t recall how obvious that is in Gunnar’s Hold. If you know to look for them, they’re not hard to find. If you don’t know, nothing about Koss really screams, “I should go to Kourna for a cosmetic armor upgrade.”
thanks for your advise, I shouldn’t have been so impatient it seems.
It’s good to plan ahead. You don’t want to look back two months from now and realize that you could have had another 5 HoM points if you had known to pick up X in quest Y. There are just not many of those Xes in this case, and completing the campaigns is a good first step in HoM Quest.
that’s pretty good considering the time. I got super lucky and actually ended up getting all the armors (minus obsidian), and most of the weapons, before the HoM announcement, so i probably saved a couple million gold on that one. The best way i found to grind out the cash sink titles was to farm party favors during special weekends and sell them. If i was dedicated enough i could rake in enough for a few weapons or a handful of minis. Since i’m never going to grind out any of the other Honor titles (vanquishing comes to mind…) that ended up being the best way to get points. And as you mentioned since you’ve got all the way up to and beyond GW2 release you’re going to have plenty of time to farm enough to fill out a bunch more points.
in the end the only title i really wanted was Legendary Defender of Ascalon which was a stupid grind but i’m hoping you can show it off in GW2.