Farming

Farming is a term that means going out into any area and killing monsters for the purpose of gathering items, experience, gold, Faction, or promotion points. Often you will find parties (especially in the harder areas of the game) searching for people to go farming with them.

Groups dedicated to farming will develop strategies and techniques that aim at optimizing the farming output. The strategies revolve around two seemingly contradicting principles:
 * Reducing the number of party members: The smaller the size of the party, the higher the chance for each member to get a quality item. It similarly means fewer people to split the gold with.
 * Expediting the death of enemies: The faster enemies die, the more enemies you can kill in a given time frame. Therefore, repeatedly dying or retreating is unfavorable for farming.

As such, dedicated farming groups spend much time experimenting with builds in high-experience areas of the game to try and find an effective party structure that can clear out an area quickly and yet have less than full party size. A perfect farming scenario will be something like what used to happen in the Underworld. Players discovered that a specific build of monks (preferably aided by a necromancer or an elementalist to expedite things) can singlehandedly kill off most of the monsters in this very high-level area. The underworld is still very commonly farmed by groups of two: an invincimonk and a Spiteful Spirit necromancer. Arenanet has introduced Dying Nightmares to make farming the underworld more difficult. By design, ArenaNet will try to foil such strategies; but farming groups will keep coming up with new ones.

Common farming targets in Tyria (Prophecies) include Mountain Trolls in a cave to the north of Droknar's Forge, Desert Griffons to the south of Augury Rock and Mahgo Hydras in the Ring of Fire Islands. Pre-searing, in the original campaign, is a popular place to farm for dye, as they are reported to drop more frequently there.

In Cantha (Factions), Vermin in Xaquang Skyway and Shiro'ken in Unwaking Waters are probably the most popular targets. Others include Wardens and Kirin.

Click here for a list of farming builds.

Faction Farming

 * Balthazar Faction can be farmed in Training Arenas, Zaishen Challenge, Zaishen Elite and holiday arenas.
 * Kurzick and Luxon faction is often farmed in Alliance Battles and repeatable quests. The Jade Arena can be quickly and easily farmed with henchmen, while Duel of the Houses generally requires other players or heroes to farm quickly.

Sunspear and Lightbringer farming

 * Sunspear promotion points are easily farmed with heroes and henchmen while progressing through the campaign. Going through A Land of Heroes a few times and restarting before completing it is a good place to farm but will only let you reach Sunspear Commander.
 * Lightbringer promotion points are often farmed early on in The Mirror of Lyss, and later in the Realm of Torment with Lightbringer's Gaze. See also the Lightbringer article's section on this.