The following guide will bring you from newbie chef to Master in mere hours, and it’s pretty easy to do. You’re going to have to do some Trading Post shopping if you haven’t collected many ingredients, but the guide keeps gathered material to a minimum.

There are simple ingredients that you can find from the Chef Vendor for karma and copper. These items are Water, Flour, Butter, Sugar, Egg, Chocolate Bar, Oil, Vinegar, Buttermilk, Bell Pepper, Black Peppercorn, Salt and Soy Sauce.

One thing to note: The karma vendor ingredients require you to complete hearts to access. The highest level heart required in this guide is level 69. Obviously, there are other alternatives if you have access to other ingredients.

There are a lot of places in the game where you can follow an event train from beginning to end for multiple rewards and it then cycles back to the beginning. The biggest one we’ve found is in Kessex Hills on the western side of the map. This is an efficient way to level (if efficient leveling is your goal) up through the 40s.

The start point is the bridge at the northwest corner of the lake. Once finished you won’t have to wait very long for the event to start over again. There are also two nearby events (marked off in purple) that might randomly show up that you can diverge and complete during your cycle.

This rotation works extremely well at all level ranges. The experience starts to lag down after level 30, but is still completely viable. It’s a very good way to earn karma and gold as well.
 
 

 
Here is what to expect at each step:
 

• Point 1: Break centaur worker morale to prevent bridge repairs. Reduce morale to 0%.
• Point 2: Dispatch the Harathi Lieutenants. Kill all three.
• Point 3: Kill the Harathi Overlord.
• Point 4: Stop the Risen Krait from building their army. Kill all four, not labeled on map.
• Point 5: The END point has it’s own rotation of events:
• END 1: Destroy the bandit cannons before the ore shipment is ready. Kill five canons.
• END 2: Stop bandits from collecting ore for a centaur supply shipment. Kill all the miners.
• END 3: Defeat the champion bandit foreman before he finishes collecting ore for centaurs. He has two forms: Mech and Human.

There are a few other places where you have a system like this after level 40. We’ll bring those to you as soon as we can.

Mesmers are a tricky profession; they were one of the last to be introduced and almost universally thought of as underpowered through the vast majority of BWEs. What a lot of people don’t realize is that Mesmer is a very fun profession to play and actually quite powerful if you understand the fundamentals. With the buffs they received just prior to the launch they achieve parity with other DPS classes by the time you achieve level 80, or jump on one in sPVP.

Mesmers are extremely dependent on traits, much more than any other class. For example, using arbitrary, made up numbers, an Elementalist starts off with 80% of its full potential and gain the last 20% of its power via traits as he or she levels up to 80. The Mesmer, on the other hand, probably starts off at 40% of its full potential and their traits give it 60% of its strength. Because a bulk of a Mesmer’s damage is based off of illusions one way or another, there are a series of traits and skills that make them do more damage and survive longer that are essential to almost every build.