Hall of Monuments: Overview

So, as I mentioned earlier, if you're a Guild Wars 1 player who intends to buy Guild Wars 2, and you've got the Eye of the North expansion as well as all of the campaigns, you will be able to get some item rewards in GW2 based on filling up your GW1 Hall of Monuments to a certain extent. But you may not be sure about how to tackle doing this. If you need some tips, I think I can help.

Let's start by going over the Hall of Monuments concept really quick. When you first take a character up to the Eye of the North expansion, you're led to the actual place "Eye of the North". Inside, you're directed to a little instanced hall in which there's a scrying pool that helps unravel the story of the expansion... and in which there are five monuments. You're handed a tapestry you can display at one of four monuments (the fifth monument doesn't need one), and you can earn the remaining ones by doing finishing primary quests in the expansion.

The non-tapestry-required monument is Honor, which allows you to display titles and related accomplishments. The ones that require a tapestry are Devotion (where you can display miniatures), Fellowship (where you can display heroes with "upgraded" armor and certain ranger pets), Resilience (where you can display elite (10k/15k) armor), and Valor (where you can display special types of weapons).

If you have more than one character, and you've taken them up to Eye of the North, you can combine the displays into an account view. That's the version that counts for determining your rewards in GW2.

That First Tapestry

Since the first tapestry requires very little effort on your part, any character you take up to EotN can add to your point total without playing them through the bulk of the expansion. Your best bet is probably either to hang it on Resilience or Devotion, since you can get elite armor in any campaign, and any character you have that's at least a year old has a minimum of one miniature.

However, for a Nightfall native character, Fellowship might be a better option, since Nightfall is one of the two places you can get heroes and the attendant upgraded armor (the other being EotN itself).

Bear in mind it's every unique item that counts, so if you have the same elite armor style on two characters, you might want to pick a different monument to hang that first tapestry on. (Likewise for duplicate minis and heroes, of course.)

The rest of the tapestries...

Normally, to get the remaining tapestries requires you to finish up the three factions' primary quests in Eye of the North: recruit the Norn by helping Jora, recruit the Asura by getting some stubborn ones to work together, and recruit the Ebon Vanguard by finding some missing people and convincing the captain to work with you. These actually can be done pretty quickly; if you avoid all the side quests and only follow those primaries, even playing casually you could probably get it done in the space of a week or two. You don't have to finish the expansion's big bad off; just do the quests leading up to that point.

Some people also sell the tapestries, usually for somewhere in the 2-4k range for each one. If you happen to have a lot of things on one character (say, your oldest character has a bunch of minis) but you don't want to take the time to run them through the quests for whatever reason, that's an option to consider. Still, it really doesn't take terribly long to get the tapestries yourself, and you have a while before GW2 will be out.

Before you start

Here's the first thing you should know: if you want to get points for the HoM, you'll want access to all three campaigns. If you only have one campaign plus the expansion, you are much less likely to get your 30 points (it may be possible, but definitely much more difficult), and you will not ever get 50. The games are available these days as a bundle, though, so if you haven't picked them up before now, it will at least be relatively inexpensive.

The next thing you want to know is this: the official wiki and the unofficial wiki will be very, very useful if you need any help figuring out how to do a specific thing. I usually visit the "official" wiki first, but sometimes the information on the other wiki is better. I've linked to a lot of official wiki pages in the course of this write-up for supplemental information.

You also may want to look into purchasing or crafting consumables from Eye of the North to keep around for particular hard areas. Resurrection scrolls are actually useful everywhere in case of a near-party-wipe (even if you have a hard rez, unless it's one of the rare party rez skills). It's better to run and lose aggro and then return to get people rezzed than to try to do so during combat, however, as they rez at only 25% health and 0 energy. Death penalty-reducing consumables are also useful in hard mode, especially when vanquishing (since if everyone in your party reaches 60% death penalty, you will fail and be returned to the nearest outpost).

Getting to 30 points

There are a total of 50 HoM points across the categories. One thing you will see as you take a closer look is that most categories have some leeway in getting the maximum number of points per category, even if you were going for the full 50 points.

30 HoM points will get you every physical reward in GW2: a total of 16 different weapons and off-hands (one of each type), 4 minis, 4 ranger pets, an armor set of each category (light, medium, heavy), and 4 additional single armor pieces. In addition, the title rewards come every 5 levels, so even if you stop at 30 HoM points, you'll get 6 displayable titles (the last 20 HoM points merely give you 4 more titles, though obviously for some people that's a worthwhile goal). That's why we're focusing on that number for this, although if you want to go further and try for 50, you may still find this write-up helpful.

To start off here, you should check out the calculator and figure out what you have already across your various characters. With the exception of Devotion (which only offers a tally of the types and amount of miniatures you have), you can see the precise details of what will give you points you don't yet have. You'll have to take a quick trip through your alts and write down what minis you have on them or in storage to get an accurate count for that monument.

I've broken this into additional posts due to length:

Monument of Devotion (Goal: 3-5 points)
Monument of Fellowship (Goal: 4-6 points)
Monument of Resilience (Goal: 4-6 points)
Monument of Valor (Goal: 3-5 points)
Monument of Honor (Goal: remaining points)
HoM (and Title) Point Synergies
Earning Money for your HoM

Last note before we get started: You do not have to finish accumulating points before GW2 comes out. Although obviously once GW2 is out you'd probably rather spend time playing that, remember that the lack of monthly fee in both games means that you can easily jump between them at your leisure. If you're just trying to get a couple more points, that's something you might want to keep in mind.