The Road to 50: A guide to filling your Guild Wars Hall of Monuments (II)

Welcome to day two of The Road to 50! After addressing minipets yesterday, I'm excited to spend today on their larger counterparts: pets and heroes. The Monument to Fellowship is so much fun to fill in my view, because it sends you to challenge missions, off-the-beaten-path quests, elite areas, and more in order to obtain everything on the list.

Getting every pet required and armor for every hero in the game, in my view, is an opportunity to explore some real teamwork with your friends, guildmates, and allies while you see parts of Guild Wars that you haven't seen before.

Follow along as I tell you all about how to get the full eight points in the Monument to Fellowship.

Heroes

I started out on the assumption that if you're a veteran player, you've got every hero in the game. Just in case you don't, I want to do a quick rundown on how to acquire the full roster. Heroes come only from Nightfall and Eye of the North, so your first step is obviously to complete these two campaigns. As you progress, you'll pick up the majority of your heroes along the way.

Some heroes in Nightfall are mutually exclusive, meaning you have to choose one and reject the other, but don't worry. Anyone that gets left behind will show up for you when you complete that campaign. You'll find them hanging around the Throne of Secrets. Speak to any that you left behind before, and he or she will give you a quick and easy quest for acquisition. It's usually not much more than "Go here and talk to this person. The end."

A few other heroes are a little more complicated. Acolyte Jin, Acolyte Sousuke, Olias, Zenmai, and Razah in Nightfall, and Xandra, Hayda, and Kahmu in Eye of the North are all optional heroes and require side quests for acquisition. The Guild Wars wiki has a great recruitment guide for this. Click on any hero's name in the guide, and the link will tell you exactly where and how to get that hero.

Once you've acquired your heroes, the fun begins! Your heroes require upgraded armor to be added to the Hall of Monuments. (They do not have to be level 20, and thanks to my guild for helping to confirm that!) Rather than crafting it like you do your own armor, you need to get upgrade armor pieces and turn them into specific NPCs -- one piece will completely upgrade one hero. There are five missions and one dungeon that each drop a different type of armor piece, so let me go through them individually. Please note that there are tips and suggestions available for each of these missions, but I simply don't have room to go through them here. If you are interested in one, click the link for a full guide.

Cloth of the Brotherhood is probably my most favored. It can be used on every Eye of the North hero and is a guaranteed drop. You need to have access to the Central Transfer Chamber to acquire one. Speak to NPC Consular Brand Oakencask to do the Glint's Challenge mission. You'll need to fight off six waves of destroyers, all intent on killing the baby dragon in the center. If you've never done it before, it might take a few tries to get the hang of it, but don't get frustrated. Once you've got it, it's a quick mission -- under 15 minutes -- and at the end, everyone in the party gets a Cloth of the Brotherhood from the reward chest.

Deldrimor Armor Remnants are the other option for upgrading your Eye of the North heroes, and they are on the opposite end of the "like" scale for me in terms of ease of acquisition. They are also a guaranteed drop and can be used on any EotN hero, but you have to go through an extremely difficult series of dungeons, Slavers Exile, to obtain one Remnant. Now I know it's strictly a matter of personal preference and a lot of people really enjoy Slavers, but in terms of time, you could probably obtain enough Cloth of the Brotherhood pieces to outfit all of your heroes in the same amount of time you required to obtain one Deldrimor Armor Remnant.

Nightfall heroes have more options. Primeval Armor Remnants are usable on every Nightfall hero and can be obtained in the Ebony Citadel of Mallyx mission (generally referred to by players as the Domain of Anguish or DoA after the explorable). It's got a similar setup to Slavers Exile, in that there is a series of pre-quests leading up to a final boss fight. However, rather than having to complete the entire chain, you can complete any of the quests for a chance to receive a Primeval Armor Remnant.

Stolen Sunspear Armor, Ancient Armor Remnants, and Mysterious Armor Pieces are much more efficient if you're looking strictly at time spent acquiring them. Each type of armor piece is good for a specific list of Nightfall heroes. For example, Stolen Sunspear Armor can only be given to Jin, Sousuke, Dunkoro, Koss, and Melonni. Each link includes that list for reference. The armor pieces are acquired by running a different challenge mission in Nightfall. Each of the three armor types comes from a different challenge mission, and the goal is similar in all three: kill everything as quickly as you can.

Unless you're planning to obtain all of your Nightfall hero armor through the Domain of Anguish, you'll need to do all three challenge missions: Dajkah Inlet, Remains of Sahlahja, and The Shadow Nexus. Again, there are tips and tricks to all three, so make sure you check the links. The armor drops are not guaranteed in any of these three missions, but it evens out with a relatively high drop rate. You'll note in each link that killing a particular type of foe in each mission gives you a chance to have an armor piece placed directly into your inventory, so the faster you kill, the more you can obtain. You'll often emerge from a single challenge mission with 2 or 3 armor pieces in your inventory.

Finally, I want to point out the hero armor gallery. Different upgrades will give your heroes' armor different appearances, so make sure you look through and see what catches your eye. If you like a certain armor look for certain heroes, that can help guide you in what you pursue as much as anything.

Pets

Pets are the other half of the Monument to Fellowship equation. This is all tied up with the Zaishen Menagerie and can be really confusing, so let's go over all of that. We'll start with the basics: how to get to the Menagerie in the first place. Simply go to the Great Temple of Balthazar and press M to call up the world map. In the northernmost part near Heroes' Ascent, you'll see the Zaishen Menagerie. Map travel there and you'll see Gate Guard Hirvela just down the path in front of you. He'll give you access to your personal menagerie grounds.

Getting in is easy; it's what you do after you've arrived that is confusing. The purpose of the Zaishen Menagerie is to "unlock" pets, making them available for every character on your account. Once you have tamed a pet on one character, take it to your Menagerie and talk to Emryd the Tamer to add it to your collection. Once you've done that, any character on your account can find and tame that type of creature inside the Menagerie. It's a real time-saver when you want to switch pets on a character.

For the purposes of your Monument, however, it provides a slightly different bonus. Since you need a normal level 20 pet to get maximum points in Fellowship, many players have been using the Menagerie grounds to death-level their pets. Normal pets are level five when you tame them, and they achieve level 20 the same way we do: running around killing things. A much faster way is to death level your pet in the Zaishen Menagerie. It's a process that takes a bit of preparation and the proper setup, but it's fairly simple in the end. The wiki has a quick guide on getting started.

This method is a matter of preference -- do you want to hit level 20 through gameplay or take the shortcut? I don't have a personal preference, but as I've said before, you have plenty of time. One final note on the Menagerie grounds: Once you have added a pet to your collection, that type of creature will gravitate to a specific area of the grounds. It's a big place, and it's easy to get lost, so keep this map handy to find your desired creature quickly. (There is more to the Zaishen Menagerie, of course, but for our purposes a basic overview will suffice.)

Since we're aiming for full points here, you're going to need to obtain a regular pet plus every rare pet on the list: the Black Moa, Imperial Phoenix, and Black Widow Spider. These three rare pets have very specific methods of acquisition, so let's go through them one by one.

The Black Moa can only be accessed and tamed by someone who has completed the quest The Beak of Darkness, but there's a nice little loophole. If anyone in your party has completed that quest, the bird will spawn and you can tame him, so ask around your friends list, guildmates, and allies. (I personally recommend just doing the quest. It's fun.)

The Phoenix can be tamed by any character who has completed Factions. Simply do the Imperial Sanctum mission with Charm Animal on your skill bar. Once you've beaten Shiro, you can tame a Phoenix in the Divine Path, the area you are taken to after your victory.

Finally, the Black Widow. This is definitely the hardest of the three to tame, but it's not too difficult. These creatures spawn in The Underworld once certain quests are completed. Wrathful Spirits is generally considered one of the easier and quicker of these quests, but it's a matter of opinion and preference. Once a quest is finished, a Black Widow will spawn at the nearby reaper and can be tamed in the normal way.

Now that we've gone through the various pets, I want to revisit the Zaishen Menagerie for a moment. If you have a surplus of Zaishen Coins, you can save some time and unlock animals by giving coins and gold to Helena, the Zaishen Keeper. The rarer the pet, the more expensive it is, but it's a very good alternative for many players.

Thus ends part two of The Road to 50! Tomorrow we'll visit the third Monument, the Monument to Honor. I hope this has helped you with an overview of the Fellowship section, and best of luck -- have fun!