Eternal Ice Shards in Guild Wars 2 are a very useful currency which can be used for various upgrades. Want that sweet Skyscale flying mount? You’re going to need a lot of these. They spawn within the Icebrood Saga as a gatherable resource, but can be gotten through other means. You could do circuits around the Icebrood Saga map looking for Eternal Ice nodes, but that’s a very slow process. There are much better ways to get Eternal Ice Shards in Guild Wars 2.
Icebrood Saga
Considering this is the content that introduced Eternal Ice Shards, it makes sense they would drop here. You can complete certain missions in Episodes 1 and 2 to get Eternal Ice Shards. Complete the following Personal Story steps to get a cache of shards on first completion.
- Episode 1: Whisper in the Dark
- Silence (5)
- What’s Left Behind (10)
- The Wind and Nothing More (10)
- The Invitation (30)
- Episode 2: Shadow in the Ice
- Chasing Ghosts (10)
- Still Waters Speaking (10)
- Lost Spirits Found (10)
- The Hunt Begins (10)
- Voice in the Deep (30)
Strike Missions
Strike missions, specifically the bosses, will also give you some Ice Shards as loot. Completing these 10-man dungeon runs gives players access to a set of multiple chests each time. These chests can contain various loot, including shards. The Small, Medium and Large chests all can contain the shards. You will find them in Valor, Resillience and Vigilance chests.
You need to have access to certain Icebrood Saga Masteries, namely the Essence Manipulation ones, to open some of these three chests. Although without those there are still some chests in Strikes you can open. Just make to skip Forging Steel on most days, as it takes a very long time to finish. The 6 other Strikes can easily gain you hundreds of Ice Shards each day. Plus, you get access to bonus loot chests each week for completing Strikes.
Alt Parking
Alt Parking in MMOs is the practice of placing an alt in a desirable area and leaving them there. You can use characters you aren’t playing that much for this. Just place an alt in the right place and you can farm endless Shards each day. The Glorious Norn chests that are scattered all around Bjora Marches are perfect for this. These set spawns have a ton of loot in them, including a small bundle of Ice Shards. Here’s a map that lays out the locations of the Glorious Norn Chests.
There’s another option as well. You could use a premade route to get hundreds of Eternal Ice Shards in GW2 by farming them manually. If you’re doing HP runs or other content alongside hunting for shards, this is an OK, if tedious, way to get through this process. You will need Gliders and certain movement Masteries like Springer to fully make use of these paths though.
The community even put together a tool call Tactical Overlay that helps show players exactly the route to follow. Using TACO, you can farm a preset route for Eternal Shards very quickly. I’ve tested it and it still seems to work quite well.
