Farming

Farming is a term that means going out into explorable areas or missions and killing monsters for the singular purpose of gathering gold and items. Often you will find parties (especially in the harder areas of the game) searching for people to go farming with them. Farming is done to find better weapons, gather needed crafting materials or simply to generate gold.

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 members will get quality items. It also means less people to split the gold with.
 * Expediting the death of enemies: The faster enemies dies, the more enemies you can kill in a single session. Also, there is no place in successful farming for repeatedly dying and/or retreating.

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 an elementalist to expedite things) can singlehandedly kill off most of the monsters in this very high-level area. By design, ArenaNet will try to foil such strategies; but farming groups will keep coming up with new ones.

Note: It is important to remember that the loot found in an area is proportional to the expected level of the character's development in the PvE game. That is, farming in Old Ascalon will yield items suitable for character of level 3 to 6, even if the party farming is all level 20, while farming in the Ring of Fire Islands will yield level 20 loot.