best kept secrets

Ok so with GW2 just around the corner was wondering if those that are leaving for pretty much good, would they spill the beans on the areas most secretly guarded for the best farming spots, for not only weapons but for that old nostalgic area that brought the wow factor into the game for them.

The Boss that rocked you in game that made you go arrrrrrrrrrrggghhhhhhhhh till you beat them.


For me even after all this time i love having a shot at that big bad ass dragon in Majesty's rest ,Rotascale, and only the other day while doing the new content the bugger finally dropped his Green Bow after years of having shots at him for the fun of it.


cheers hope everyone shares

My favorite 'farming spot' would be the old griffon farm in the desert... just running around with a warrior feeling like a champ because I was soloing multiple desert griffons haha... never got any good drops but it was fun way back then.

my favorite memory would be with my two friends from real life. One day we decided we would invade the kurzick base in alliance battles (when there was only one base defender). it took awhile, but devoting a whole team to buffing me combined with symbiosis, we managed to invade the kurzick base and i was able to just stand where they resed.

what ill miss most has long been gone. that would be the challenge of the game.

I truly think that there are no "secret farming places, just things some people enjoy more. most farming spots are known. beside the little debate bout wich one is better, there are no big secrets bout them. (with debate i mean like the debate for e.g. featherfarming. some are convinced that outside bergen hot springs is the best. other are devoted to the factions nooby-island, but everyone agrees it is this or that. I never heard bout farming sensali in asura territory for the feathers).

For the biggest Wow moment:

Well for the farm i guess it is Raptor farming, loved them dieng in like 10 secs..

Kunvie Firewing ... I just hate this boss very very much...

My wife found akelarumi's post above and directed me to it. We both agree wholeheartedly with that "wow moment." We spent more days than we would like to admit in pre, thinking that was the game -- and being pestered by this urchin who always wanted to accompany us. Then when we approached EotN much later, well, suffice it to say, we didn't see that coming. I feel sorry for those who started in Factions or Nightfall and who experience that moment without a clue as to the poignancy, so I guess it does qualify as a "secret" of sorts. (Nick's "red iris speech" at the beginning of his second cycle was similarly affecting, but perhaps again only if you knew Mary from pre and had visited the Traveler weekly beforehand.)

As to farms, any number of times, we have marched out of Rata Sum aiming for Pywatt and a quick Zbounty, when we happened to get a Hunt Rampage while still in Magus Stones, and it was off to the races. Magus Stones has to be the best vanquish in all of EotN. New foes and lots of them are never less than 60 seconds away and it has one of the highest boss counts in Eotn (two in all of Arbor Bay, really?) for when the boss bounty comes up. Combine it with an Eotn weekend and the reputation points cascaded onto the bar.

So many good times. Thank you, Anet.

Secret Farm: The Fog Nightmares in the black curtain, south of the temple of ages. They dropped like 20-30+ dust at a time, I used to hunt them on my ranger, as a trapper and as a PBAoE Fire ele. I would get stacks of dust in about 30-45 minutes, plus junk i could salvage into iron, steel, bones, plant fibers, and sometimes granite in addition to raw gold. Those things funded my first few sets of 15k armor.

Wow factor: Rurik getting whacked, seeing the view from the highest points in the shiverpeaks, finding Kormir blind in the prison, setting lose the titans, and most of hall.....

BEATING THUNDER HEAD KEEP WITH HENCHMEN!!!!! BITE ME SNOTTY PUGS MWUAAHAHAHAAAA!!!!

Also.... anyone remember Josso Essa from thirsty river.... WoH on top of his little priest with a mob that spawns every 2 minutes...

You could keep a farming build secret for a while, but not forever. Even if you stayed quiet, someone that couldn't keep their mouth shut would independently discover the approach and it would go viral. If it was a group build, eventually there would be drama and someone would splinter off and spill the beans in order to have people to farm with.

The result is that pretty much everything that can be done is already public knowledge.

As far as things that I enjoyed, I think that 55 Prot Bond in UW remains the most enjoyable farm. Some other fun, abusive ones include HM Urgoz, 4-4-4 Deep via a Rebirth exploit and the original HM UW speed runs back when no one believed we could do it that fast. And I still remember making 10k a pop for about a month running people through Sepulchre of Dragrimmar in 10-15 minutes by exploiting Shadow Form and res shrine teleporting.

I remeber Ursanway when it wasn't nerfed, everything I do, Ursan. and the game was so fun and easy .

I guess that snowball event during wintersday where I got 100k/hr was a good farm. I was a ranger with a necro hero. Z key farming hero battles was fun for me as well. I had a tanked rating and just ran some op assassin damage build and half the people resigned immedialtey after I din't roll. I guess my pve wow factors would be beating uw in nm with heroes as well as getting full guardian title (all campaigns HM + bonus/masters) purely with heroes and not one help from a human. Most missions were easy, of course, but there were a few that were a pain such as eternal grove without being allowed to have a single tree singer die.

I personally have a few high profit farms that no one has ever posted that I keep for myself. I know its hard to believe but there are a lot of very good quest spawns in the game that people either decided were unfarmable long ago or forgot about.

Well the point of the thread is to post those builds that you've kept secret, so why post saying you have some, but then not share them?

As for me, I remember the old desert griffon farms, the troll farming outside of Droknar's and some other random ones along the way. No secret builds or farms for me though Used to farm RA a ton over double balth faction weekends and walk away with a boatload of extra money from zkeys. Yes I synced like an ass!

my fave farming spots (by no means secret anymore) are dragon mosses in the forest with ranger and naphui quarter 330 rit farm. my all time fave was solo 55 UW.

would prob agree with rotscale being one of my fave bosses. big ass bone dragon. what else do you need LOL

QFT

A good chest farming spot is in Rhea's Crater. Make sure you have more kurzick faction than luxon, leave from Aurios Mines then die. You will rez in the middle of the map and in that area you can find 1-2 easy outcast chests for the taking. It helps a great deal to bring a few Incoming and Fallback heroes to ensure that you don't die from outcast mobs while getting them. Easy to do in HM

There is the good old raptor farm but that only becomes a real money maker during festival events.

You can farm almost any green weapon with a SoS rit.

The escort quest outside HzH will spawn Dragon Mosses outside Saint Anjeka's Shrine which can be farmed with a Whirling Ranger for anything that drops specifically in the Echovald forest(Echovald Shields, Gothic Shields and Ornate Shields).

Using a very similar build to the Dragon Moss Ranger you can farm Mantids outside Naphui Quarter for Celestial weapons and a few other gems such as Clouded Mauls.

This one I haven't done in a long time and forget the name of the quest but you use a 105 hp monk with prot spirit and SoA to farm quest spawns in a luxon area for Dragon Staffs and other rare goodies.

All this is super easy in HM except for most SoS rit farms. Greens should be farmed in NM.

Favourite farm was the magma shield chest in RoT during the Holding the Line quest. Made me a nice sum of cash.

Oh and running Ruins of Morah early on during NF. That was a ridiculously easy and profitable run.

Honestly, all of the Nightfall campaign was a wow moment for me. Amazing setting, scenery, story, quests, characters, ELDRITCH ABOMINATIONS, etc(though I wish Kormir wasn't useless). Playing through it was probably the most fun I've had in GW.

It is not really a secret but i doubt that not many players did this (because it was a bit slow and challenging):

* titans solo trapping in Defend North Kryta Province in HM

It kept me busy in a period where i didnt want to do quests, etc
It was challenging and fun
It gave me lots of gold drops (weapons and runes), but nothing real worthy, and many materials

I also used to duotrap UW a lot (NM)... it gave a fair amount of ecto drops and it was fun to do.

Nowadays i dont trap anymore... for whatever reason trapping got nerfed, friends left the game and i got slower :P

Farming "The Halcyon Job" is my fave farm. Lots of tomes and Jittes and Canthan Dragon Staffs. Lots of chests too. If you still have the quest active, you can farm it over and over. If you are Kurz aligned you just run out of Zos Chivros and die and it puts you at the rez shrine right next to the farming area. I used to spend hours there. Great stuff. I also like it because there are multiple ways to do it. Get creative on multiple classes.

Shiro'ken farm outside Harvest Temple was fun.

I once bought 7 UNIDs from a player in kamadan
they were all UNID armors rather than weapons

I was curious why he had 7 of the exact same UNID armors
So I looked up where they dropped and found that they dropped in the Jade Sea

So I went to every outpost looking for a stream of farmers like you might find in certain outposts. Nothing. So I went to the international districts. Went through the outposts again. WHOA. Found a stream of players. Only 25% of them or so moved like a bot. So I asked them what they were farming. One of them showed me.

I was already around 2000 into Wisdom at this point and wanted to max it. So I put into trade chat "WTB UNIDs 7=5k"

And they all swarmed to me

These players were lining up to trade with me. Most spoke broken english so I could only hope that they could understand when I told them that I need to go to my guild hall to ID and sell off my purchases.

I decided to lower my buying price since... I had a monopoly here. I was able to buy around four thousand UNIDs over about 2 weeks for 7=4k. I had run out of money though, so I had to stop.

But what made this great? The extraordinary ratio of UNID armors. I was able to salvage so many runes and insignias that I could sell to the rune trader, that I was sometimes able to break even or lose very little. I actually watched the prices of key runes and insignias fall in price over these 2 weeks.

I think they nerfed the drops sometime after.

Reminds me of when I wanted show how awesome this new 600hp/sb monk was to a friend around the time it went public. Persuaded him to let me run it on our smite farming run, despite his reluctance, and proceeded to tank and ball almost all the spiders in one go once we got to the wastes.
I can still remember his reaction to seeing me gather all the patrols and then his reaction to seeing me tanking all of them so comfortably on ventrilo.

abused perma sf way before it became popular !!

There was a farm I did for months and months after the release of Factions that I never saw discussed on Guru. That isn't to say it wasn't discussed - just that I never saw it.

When you first get Cantha, you get a quest with Menhlo and Cynn and other NPCs who assist your group but do not share loot. I would solo a variation of the Minion master build with vampiric horrors for healing and bone fiends for damage. With Menhlo and the other npc's, you could get a swarm of ten minions rolling and fill up your inventory with drops in minutes running around Bukdek Byway. This was pre-loot scaling, and because you weren't re-zoning very often, you got a decent number of golds.

The problem with the farm, of course, was that you couldn't advance through Cantha if you kept the quest that allowed the farm to continue. Also, Anet had just added the elite Flesh Golem, and resisting that new skill was hard for any MM.

With the advent of loot scaling, I doubt the farm is viable any more since it was based on sweeping across a zone and killing as fast as you could, but it was fun while it lasted.

A guildie of mine only found out you could flag on the mini map recently, i assume there may be others that didn't know.
I was surprised to hear a trumpet noise too when joining a new guild.

Echo dusting Stygian Vale - I absolutely loved those massive clouds of ouch numbers when they hit

My best farming spots over the years:

55/SS is hands down the most fun/skill ive needed in an mmo. I think 55's agree that it took plenty of skill before it was nerfed and assassin was introduced. Killing 15-20 smite crawlers and having so many -3's it lagged out my game was awesome.

'Secret Farming' Spot:

Back when farming master dungeon guide was popular, I ran Arachni's Haunt for 25k each and people were paying consistently for it. I used an E/A build (for increased dodge) and never shared, but eventually just like with every build, some1 would figure it out. Basically the same build with egg and candy cons.

55ing Fahranur in HM (for dust and golds), and VwK rit farming Khepket (for greens).....not the most profitable farms by any stretch of the imagination, but I loved the music that played in those maps. SoS rit farming in UW was good for a change of scenery every now and then.

Rhea's Crater Outcast Farming


Back before SF got its latest nerf in late 10'(ish??), i used to farm those two spots with a custom build and get loads of outcast gear. the top area was on that part before the bridge where the oni spawned, and i used to get 20ish outcast, also spawn the 6 or 7 oni there, and just wipe them out those were the good days. Rezone in top left port, then repeat. the bottom one was about 18 orso outcasts, and it was just alot quicker. (die by warp, then get rez to shrine in the middle) best drop- q11(?) 20/20 Blood outcast staff. best shield +27 +10vs.piercing, if i remember correctly. Now outcast gear doesn't go for as much, and i dont understand why. its never been easy to get. just chest runs for the most part now. Damn Deathhands cast strip way to often to solo farm....

Anyone else farm these areas in the past? besides you Vendetta Rae, :P


Oh Yeah! just remembered this one too...

Secret Lair of the Snowmen


Now before u say "yeah i farmed there too" there was always a bit more then anyone, i knew, knew about . i only told a couple people and told them not to tell anyone :P but yeah ok obviously the first mob, bringing about 25 kill average. the second spot was by the second rez shrine, had to shadow step to foe cuz they block u if u used the bridge access. that group was about 35ish. but the last group was the biggest and Best by far. into the room with the jingle moas on the right, u collect Both of the groups of snowmen. had to be careful for the avalanche. but altogether that was like a 50 foe drop. one time i got q9, q10, and a q11 Brute sword dropping the last big group at once. it gave me some insight into the loot drop system. Not so random... it just moves Very fast. the last boss was doable too. but it wasn't worth it imo. Ill try and find a screen-shot, but i dont think i saved those.
Best farming spot for event drops, Ever. way better than viettir imo. All monks, so the monk weapons i got were perfect for gearing up my 3 heros for all 9 toons.

edit: i forgot to mention. since sf nerf, i was Not able to perform the full run. the snowmen, from in the second group, started interrupting. plus the obvious SF nerf. it May be possible if someone was so willing to put the effort into researching. but i'm not.

found this in photobucket. it was from the chocolate bunny events, (i forgot the name of them) i took it because of the amount of golds i got combined with the candies.

....speed clearing dungeons with a guild back in 2008 when r9 Silverwing was 200+ and r9 Storm daggs 40+.

..farming Keiran mini-missions to max out Vanguard on my necro (and I ended up farming it for money actually, necro now has 450k in vanguard..).

for Nostalgic... I still enjoy random chat in Ascalon ad1... lol

My best kept secret. Clearing up to the first tower in FoW with 4 accounts... Payed for my Fow armor in shards, got a lot of dust from remnants. Way back when before Rasti auto ran you used to be able to do the same down on the beach/caves and get tons of shards/saphires but not anymore... I do it once in a while, but I used to do it a lot. It was my cash maker instead of doing dungeons, UW, or DoA. Shard drop rates have always been very good.

Proudest moment: beating Thunderhead Keep and beating Prophecies with henchies back in the day(2005) when the game was way more challenging. I remember running a blood necro and using every enemy corpse I could for wells to regen my henchies.

Fave farms: Ettin farming for gold armors, hoping to get a sup rune of vigor which went for 100k back then. The original 55 monk build that used prot bond for only 5% damage. I still have a req8 15%^50 gold wingblade from griffon farming in the desert. Farming the chaos plains for stacks of ecto in the summer of 2008 - man I hit that until I couldnt take it anymore! Solo farming Jaya Bluffs in HM for feathers and the ever elusive gold Bo Staff. My absolute favorite though because it was so much fun was keg-farming vaettirs..BOOM BOOM BOOM BOOM BOOM BOOM BOOM BOOM...

Hmm I really don't have any secret farms. =/

It was interesting when voltaic spear farms were constant and I sold like 100 diamonds for 500g each... lol
Of course I also remember my first farm, was a totem axe farm. A friend and I would get so excited to see those green letters!
And I agree with Loot Junkie, keg-farming vaettirs was very fun. My inventory literally had stacks of unids.

Did this with 3 accounts at the same time for a while, and showed it to a close friend who did it with 4 accounts. Best Outcast item farm ever, hands down. There was a chest in your immediate proximity about 60-70% of the time, and with each run taking about 45-50 seconds, that was little about 150-170 outcast chests per hour I opened on average. The friend who did it with 4 accounts did it differently. I took the lazy approach, but he ran all the way north, opening another 1 or 2 chests there. He could clock in 250 chests/hour no sweat.

Another thing he did was quad account farming froggies with a friend. Each of them loaded up 4 accounts, and they went froggies farming all day, both completely baked usually. I know he earned about 1000e/week at one point in time doing that shit. I also know the friend he did it with made well over $1000 dollars selling his in game money over his entire GW career. Each Froggie run would take them 6-10 minutes. So that's 24-40 froggie chests they opened per hour.

Also, dual account chest running Pongmei was fun as well. Each run taking 4-5 minutes tops and getting 8-10 chests/run was pretty good money.

I knew of several ways to rezscroll glitch your way through pretty much any dungeon, but I wasn't the one experimenting with that shit. Most of the credit goes to a couple of friends of mine who could clear most dungeons in about the time it took you to run to the end with cons up. This wasn't a really economically viable thing though, the amount of money you wasted on scrolls and cons gravely outweighed the money you made doing the dungeons.

14 hero glitch was the most fun I ever had in this game. I would curbstomp any mob in the game, and usually 3 of them at a time. I shat on WoC HM when it first came out, having made a special build, specifically made for 14 heroes.

Most of the casual players have no idea, but there are tactics to clear all of DoA in roughly 13 minutes. Credit mostly goes to [Zraw] for those. The tactics have very little success rate though. But casual tactics could, with a decent team, if you don't RED ENGINE GORED ENGINE GORED ENGINE GORED ENGINE GO up, easily get you 24-26min clears. Made some hardcore money in that area... But that's general knowledge anyway..

@Bright Star Shine - what's a 14 hero glitch?

There used to be a glitch, that was very easily abused, which got viral in early '11 and was fixed subsequently because it got to Anet eventually. I know it has always existed, because I knew of a couple of guys that had been doing it for a long time. It has to do with how the game treats disconnects, and Anet's incapability of fixing that issue.

Basically, how you used to do it was that you loaded up 2 accounts (or 2 players) and zone into an explorable area from a town. Once there, one of the people purposely disconnects (this was most easily achieved by opening task manager and simply ending the gw.exe program) and once he disconnected, the other person zoned back into the town. When the second guy comes back, the first person loads up 6 heroes, and the other guy does this as well. The non-disconnected person then invites the other guy to his party, and because of how you got disconnected, for some reason the game used to think you didn't exist, and you were able to make a party of 14/8. In fact, it was possible to go up to 20/8 (we VQ'ed Varajar Fells in 16 minutes doing that), but that got fixed in the first update. After the first update, the general public that had gotten wind from the thing (mainly due to Zraw using the glitch to get a 14min UW) wasn't able to do the glitch anymore, but the fix Anet implemented was incredibly lazy, and it was still possible to use the glitch for at least a month or two after the first fix, but a lot less people knew about it then.

Basically, how I did it was loading up a second account I had access to and loading up 6 heroes on both accounts. Although you only had 12 heroes, it got named the 14 hero glitch because you made 14//8 parties. I cleared a lot of stuff on my assassin that way, just for fun. I didn't get GWAMM on my ssin that way. I already had GWAMM on my ele way before 7 heroes even got implemented and I had no intention on doing it all again.

The glitch doesn't work anymore, I've tried countless things to get it going again, but they fixed it completely now.

THIS and dual and solo trapping UW back before trapping got nerfed, and they added crap to UW.


I remember when our guild first speed cleared FoW and UW. Then doing that every night was tons of fun.

Another posted about how much fun NF was when it first came out - I agree heartedly. It WAS a lot of fun.

Beating Thunderhead keep with guildies and henchies.

FoW beach farming with my Dervish was a lot of fun. So was farming the FoW forest.

Running people to Ascalon from LA with my Dervish was a lot of fun. Didn't make a whole lotta money,, but it didn't matter. 10k/ea at first, then it dropped to 1k each so very quickly. But it was still fun.

Underworld Protective Spirit Farming!

God I must have spent half my guild wars life farming there with those old 55 builds

At weekends I like to wear womens clothing

Edit - oh you meant GW stuff...oops

AFKing Glints challenge on multi accounts when cloths of the brotherhood sold for 10k easily, and very few people knew about it. Easy 1 million gold a day for AFK.

When Ghial's Staff dropped for the first time with a warrior farming build I was so happy.

Most mental challenge was three of us (tnx Dev & Crassus) trying to do all of Prophecies in a single weekend. We went from pre to Thunderhead Keep (2 out of 3 with no deaths - both got to survivor lvl 1) but just ran out of time and couldn't take any more gaming anyway, we were so burned out. We made a judgement call and popped over to Kamadan in order to pick up a few heroes: Had Koss as our minion master, called him Blackula )

Happy Days, thank you Guild Wars

Farming Koosuns Fire Staff on my ele and selling them for 100k each. That was the easiest money I ever made. I also farmed his friends, but their weapons sold for a lot less.

I've spend hours doing 55/ss duo in UW. It was so much fun (before they nerfed the loot-scaling).

There were so many happy days in Guild Wars. Can't name them all.

I tried many farming spots over the years but got bored quickly... I tried farming Griffons/Hydras/Smites/Vettirs/Feather farming. None of these farms lasted long because it seemed like work.

The only farm in the game imho that was fun and didn't seem like work at all was Glints. It's quick 10-15 minutes in length. You can solo/duo or have a big team. You also get to race against the clock and end up on the scoreboard if your time was fast. Getting the chest was guaranteed so you get paid everytime.

I farmed that area for 5 years, never getting tired of it. The money was the best in the game, reaching a peak when the HOM rewards were announced. You couldn't farm it fast enough and Cloths of Brotherhood were selling for up to 25k each. Prices dropped immediately when PvX showed the AFK build.