Learn how to farm Black Lion Chest Keys by creating a new character. Find out how often you can farm for keys, which character race is the best choice for key farming, and more.
What Are Black Lion Chest Keys?
Black Lion Chest Keys are used to unlock Black Lion chests. These chests contain weapons, outfits, random Gem Store merchandise, dyes, tier 6 crafting materials, and other valuable items.
You can get Black Lion Chests as a drop from enemies, or buy them on the Trading Post. However, keys are more difficult to obtain. Most players buy keys from the Gem Store.
Guild Wars 2 also gives you a Black Lion Chest Key as a story reward for finishing Living World Season 2, Heart of Thorns Act 3, and personal story levels 10, 40 (Setting the Stage), and 60 (The Battle of Claw Island).
Farming Black Lion Keys
You get a Black Lion Chest Key for completing level 10 personal story. You can only do this once per account per week. The weekly key farm reset happens at Monday reset (00:30 UTC).
To farm keys:
- Create a new character
- Level them up to 10
- Complete the level 10 personal story to get a key
- Move everything valuable off the character into your bank
- Delete the character
- Repeat weekly
We recommend you choose a human character for key farming. The human Commoner personal story is considered to be the fastest. Pick whichever profession is your favorite.
Tip: Use Weak Potion of Outlaw Slaying. This gives +3% damage to outlaws, which is handy, because you will be fighting a lot of bandits during this storyline. We recommend pairing it with Spicy Flank Steak, which provides +20 power.
Getting to Level 10
Tomes of Knowledge and Experience Scrolls
Key farming is a great way to use your extra Tomes of Knowledge and Experience Scrolls.
If you play Guild Wars 2 for very long, you start to accumulate buckets of these in your account. Using them to level up a key farming character to level 10 is probably the single best use of them in the game.
Crafting
Leveling up a crafting discipline to 200 will get your character up to level 10. Chef is great for this, since most experienced players have tons of chef materials in their material store, with no other use for them. Chef materials are also very cheap to purchase. Here’s a Reddit guide to quick-and-easy leveling Chef to 200.
Map Completion
Keys are also a possible drop from map completion of an Explorable Zone. Explorable Zones are every map EXCEPT:
- Southsun Cove
- Divinity’s Reach
- Hoelbrak
- The Grove
- Black Citadel
- Rata Sum
- Lion’s Arch).
According to player drop rate research on the wiki, you have an approximately 1 in 4 chance of getting a Black Lion Chest Key from map completion.
TIP: Bloodstone Fen and Dragonfall are considered the fastest and easiest maps to complete.
Photo by Marci Angeles on Unsplash
