Guild Wars 2 offers quite a few unique mechanics and one of those can be found in how the game handles normal questing and rewards. Instead of hordes of NPCs with question marks floating over their heads, Guild Wars 2 has a more centralized system of questing known as Renown with rewards in the form of Karma. To fully explain these mechanics, Guild Wars 2 Hub offers this intro guide to Renown and Karma.
Renown
We’re all used to the standard MMO fare of grabbing quests from multitudes of NPCs in an area and then running off to do them. Guild Wars 2 handles this aspect in a different way. Instead of multiple NPCs that give quests, there are a handful of fixed locations in every zone that are known as Renown Hearts.
These are marked by heart-shaped icons on your map and will be highlighted by any scouts (people marked with the telescope icon) you interact with, along with what is need to complete each Renown Heart and its level. Each Renown Heart is associated with a specific NPC (those with hearts floating over them), and those NPCs will ask the players to help them. However, a player does not need to talk to the NPC to get the quest as just moving into the area will have it automatically show up on your screen.
To help a Renown NPC in Guild Wars 2, the player will need to perform a variety of tasks. Being able to fulfill a quest by different means is a refreshing change from the typical MMO. In the image below, you can see that I’m involved in helping Farmer Diah. The various ways that I can help her are shown along with a bar showing how much I’ve completed for this Renown task.
You will build up life force in the following ways:
- Whenever a nearby enemy creature or player is defeated
- Through active use of certain weapon or utility skills (listed below)
- Through the passive state of the Signet of Undeath utility skill
You will typically build up life force very quickly while participating in dynamic events that involve defeating creatures. You can take advantage of this fact at lower levels to both unlock your death shroud skills, and get into the habit of entering and exiting death shroud in combat.
Once you enter death shroud, your available life force will slowly deplete naturally, and incoming damage will reduce your life force instead of your health. The latter helps make the necromancer one of the most resilient professions in GW2, so the faster you can build life force, the greater your survivability will be.
To increase the rate at which you generate life force, there are a number of skills that you will want to consider working into your build. These are listed below along with notes on the amount of life force gained, and the base recharge time for each skill.