Monk / Mesmer 12(+2)Smiting 8Inspiration 10(+2)Healing

Bathlazars Aura
Smite Hex
Symbol of Wrath
Shield of Judgement
Banish
Channeling
Mending
Purge Conditions

Perfect for farming undead heavy missions. Holy damage does 200% to undead. D'alessio Seaboard is perfect for this build, and can be farmed quite quickly. All of these skills can be purchased in towns as well, so this character is relatively easy to create.

To use this character you simply keep mending on you at all times, run up to minions to be melee, then start casting channeling, then either symbol of wrath, Shield of Judgement or bathlazars aura. Followed by banish. Purge Conditions and Smite hex are situational and very effective.

The trick to running d'alessio seaboard effectively is use the farmers and white mantle as beacons. It is ideal to cast either shield of judgement or bathlazars aura on them and sit and watch the undead minions and zombies die. You could even go as far as casting mending on them to keep them alive through the beating. I am able to run the mission in 10minutes (I stop after I kill the last boss in defending the abbot), and usually get 4yellow drops, some salvagables sometimes 1blue(from a lucky barrel) and a dye or two.

With the introduction of Hard Mode (HM), ArenaNet gave a mixed blessing. Though in HM loot drops are significantly better, yielding more rare, or gold?items, the introduction of loot scaling seemed to hit farming pretty hard.

Simply put, loot scaling makes it so that the amount of loot that you get is quivalent?to the amount that you would get when in a full party (drops are randomly assigned, thus only about 1/x of the drops are given to a certain player). This is accomplished by drastically reducing drops in high level areas (which tend to have a maximum party size of 8) when farming alone. As an example, before the update, a 1-2 minute Hydra farm could fetch up to 750 gold; however, after the addition of loot scaling, one would be lucky to get half of that on a longer run. While this may seem to be a problem, players have begun to find ways to somewhat get around it.

One example is to farm hard mode in a previously low-level area. In Tyria, accessible to those who own the Prophecies/Original Campaign, Old Ascalon presents and interesting farming ground. Using a Warrior, it is possible to solo farm Hulking Stone Elementals, which according to Guildwiki, have a good drop rate for rare items. The build used to farm the elementals can be found here. The run begins from Sardelac Sanitarium, and loops back to the beginning outpost. Excluding a few item sales, it is possible to make over 1,000 gold per run. By exploiting the higher drop rates in HM, and possibly the mechanics of loot scaling.

It is also popular to farm elite areas such as the Domain of Anguish. While I have not yet done this because I have yet to complete the Nightfall Campaign, I have read that on forums that farming DoA yields high returns. It is important to note, however, that as an elite area, DoA poses a much larger challenge than other areas of the world. This is mostly due to various environmental effects as well as unique monster skills.

Now, some may ask, thy do I care about farming??With the iminent release of Eye of the North, prices for various items, such as runes will increase. In addition, more armor sets will be introduced, which may appeal to some. To the competitor, there will be about 10 additional skills per profession that can be used for Player versus Player. For the jraggart? there are titles that are often achieved by spending over one million gold. For the loyal player, certain weapons and armor (I would assume unique weapons and ascended armors) as well as titles can be stored in the Hall of Monuments for you to claim in Guild Wars 2.