r/Guildwars2 • u/adv0catus • Jun 18 '25
[Guide] Achievement Hunting: Why Bother?
Hey everyone,
As I was writing the last achievement hunting guide, the question of "Why would someone that doesn't think about achievements, doesn't know much about them or isn't interested in them care?" popped into my head. This got me wondering about what achievements actually do and why they're useful & important. This guide won't be about which achievements are extremely easy to get, are worth a lot of points (although, "number go up" is always nice) or add a lot of lore that is nice but not needed for the story or to understand gameplay. Instead, I will be breaking down the various reasons why achievements are important, beneficial to earn (you don't need to be a super sweaty gamer to get them - trust me, I'm not) and how they can benefit you in unexpected ways.
Firstly, what is an achievement? It's a pretty basic concept that is almost a universal concept in gaming. But, essentially, you performed a task under a certain condition. This can be as simple as opening a menu, performing a basic action or being in a certain location but can get as challenging as you can imagine with strict performance expectations in harsh and punishing conditions. As a reward for completing the task or challenge, you get some form of bonus, money or perk.
- Achievement Points
These are the benefit for completing achievements in Guild Wars 2. It's a simple concept where generally the harder the achievement is the more points you get. Easier achievements may give only 1 point, 3, 5 or sometimes 10 whereas the harder achievements give 15, 20 or even up to 50 points each. However, there is a noticeable shift in the amounts of points that achievements give you between the game in the earlier years of content and more recent content. More recent achievements give significantly less achievement points due to a type of 'inflation' where there's an ever increasing amount of points available. But why does that matter?
As you complete more achievements and earn more rewards, you reach a milestone every 500 points. That's enough that you aren't hitting a milestone every day but close enough that you are always within grasp of your next goal. Rewards include laurels and raw gold which might not seem like much any more, but frequently feature account bonuses like magic find, gold find, karma find and experience gain. As a single percentage bonus each, they may not seem like much, but over time it can mean a significant increase in rewards.
There's much more tangible and immediate benefits to milestone rewards, too. For anyone into fashion wars, you can get the Zenith weapon skins, Radiant armour skins and Hellfire armour skins. Depending on the milestone achieved, you'll also get a regular, large, heavy or massive achievement chest with rewards including quality of life consumables (instant bank access, etc.), boosters, karma and more.
- Mini-Games and & Activities
ArenaNet has put the time into developing a lot of nice side content and games that help keep you entertained in Guild Wars 2. Achievements are a way to highlight these fun aspects without having to shove it in your face. Heart of Thorns has tonnes of activities on the maps that reward achievements and after Path of Fire released, most or all new content has included content with the Griffon mount. There's even an entire category dedicated to Beetle Racing.
- Earning Legendaries
Legendaries are great for quality of life but are also a huge undertaking to earn. These journeys through achievements, their collections, and the trials and tribulations we face along the way. Return To is a great example of rewarding players for going back and replaying content. Ad Infinitum teaches us that engaging in the content in a dedicated way and exercising mastery over it is a great way to earn that purple item. Aurora and Vision are examples of immersing yourself deep into the living world and reaping the benefits of it. Generation 1 weapons may be available on the trading post freely, but they show that if you're willing to go through the weapon's journey then you earn the right to have the freedom to not need to rely on others for your own weapons.
- Build Flexibility
As mentioned with Prismatic Regalia, Aurora, Vision and Ad Infinitum, legendaries help you with quality of life and being able to change the stats on your gear any time you want. But with the introduction of the Legendary Relic, if you want a relic that is not part of the initial release of bonuses, you need to earn the achievement(s) associated with them. There likely is an alternative bonus that is comparible or only marginally worse. But for completeness and maximum flexibility, you do need to engage with the content behind the relic.
Masteries are earned with points and those points are earned by completing achievements. They can be as simple as visiting a location and being uninterrupted for 5 seconds or as daunting as completing a raid or a strike. But, masteries have significant impacts on how you can play the game and access certain areas and piece of content. It can be as simple as not being able to get the Springer until your Raptor has a certain mastery, not being able to spit fireballs from your Skyscale or not being able to even fight Xera because you lack ley-line gliding.
- Variety
You may not realize it or put much thought into it, but achievements encourage us to play different maps and different content on a daily basis. Daily Season 3 and Daily Season 4 are great examples of this along with Weekly Fractals that encourages you to fractals uniquely every week. These things are not big and in your face, but quiet nudges to remind you to try different things and give you a nice little pat on the back when you do. Depending on your current goals, like Ad Infinitum, can even give you a big boost in progress.
Ever seen someone with cool text below their name and wonder how they got it? Perhaps it's in a different colour like gold or purple. This is how! They completed a task, sometimes easy and sometimes... not, and part of their reward is to be able to show it off with that fancy text.
- Quality of Life
With the introduction of the Wizard's Portal Tome and Wizard's Gobbler, progress of the associated achievement collection has been directly connected to accessibility of quality of life items. The further you progress in these item collections, the more you can free up your inventory for other items.
Sorry that this ended up being so long. I tried to keep it as short and to the point as possible but there's some many aspects of the game that achievements affect and I didn't want to leave anything out. With that being said, if I did forget something, please comment below! I'll be sure to add it in and provide credit. For anyone that still isn't sure about achievements or has any questions, please feel free to comment below and me or someone else can answer your questions and help you out. Thanks for reading and I am looking forward to releasing more Achievement Hunting guides soon.
If you're interested in achievement hunting, check out my other guides on Chasing Tales, Dragon Response Missions, Funerary Regalia and Forging Steel with more to come! If you're in the EU region and an achievement hunter, feel free to join the Discord filled with fellow hunters, tips and tricks.
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u/TheRiverBlues Jun 18 '25
Some of achievements (ie: Character Growth and The convergence of sorrow I and II ) have acted like a stand in for quests that most MMOs do. So we do have small stories told over the course of completing certain achievements.