**Playing a hardcore Guild Wars 2 character means imposing a set of restrictions on yourself that make the game more engaging in a vareity 
of ways. They are just honor rules, it is easy to cheat and there are no real rewards beyond your own personal satisfaction.**

Have you ever wished that leveling and playing personal story was more engaging? Ever thought it would be cool if there
was a chance to fail so you had to actually focus and would appreciate any gear you had? Are you sick of exploring the world by following
a checklist and zig-zagging from waypoint to waypoint? What about creating a unique character while making meaningful decisions at story junctures?

The vanilla game, especially since feature pack 2, simply can't offer this experience. That's where hardcore mode comes in.
Hardcore mode borrows ideas from rogue-lite games, introducing tension, a high chance of failure, and fun in making multiple  characters who each explore Tyria in their own unique way.
The idea is to make the game more challenging, immersive, and - most importantly - a lot more fun!

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OBJECTIVE:
Defeat Zhaitan.

RULES:
1. If you die, your character is deleted.
2. You cannot withdraw from the bank, and start with no gold.
3. You cannot waypoint.
4. You can only make a hero point purchase after completing a hero challenge.
5. You have no minimap or content guide. You can only view your world map while in a city.
6. You cannot explore maps until the personal story has directed you to them.
7. You cannot change your build during personal story steps.
8. Personal story steps must be completed: Solo, consecutively, and as soon as they are available.
9. Many core capabilities, such as dodge rolling and using your heal skill, are unavailable until purchased from the shop.

Cities are qualified as:
 - Rata Sum, The Grove, Lion's Arch, Divinities Reach, Hoelbrak, The Black Citadel, Ebonhawke and Fort Trinity

Your build is qualified as:
 - All items you have equipped & their upgrade components, chosen utility skills and your specialization choices

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THE SHOP:
Players are unable to perform certain actions until they are bought from the shop with gold. 
 - The shops inventory expands over time.

At first the shop only carries:
 - A booster token, sold for 50s. 
   - Holding this token allows the player to access black lion armourer vendors and claim any one booster.
   - With this token in hand, an additional booster may be acquired after each personal story chapter is finished.
 - An 18 slot invisible bag, sold for 50s.
   - This bag is a cheap way of expanding your inventory and holds exactly enough space for all tokens gathered on an adventure.

After the level 10 personal story steps are complete the shop is expanded:
 - Trinket slots are now sold for 5g
 - Armour slots are sold for 10g
   - When starting, characters cannot equip or upgrade these items to their character. Buying the token allows you equip item in that slot freely.

After the level 40 personal story steps:
 - Dodgeroll is sold for 25g
 - Healing is sold for 25g
   - Without these tokens the player cannot dodge roll, use or assign a new heal skill.

After the level 60 personal story steps:
 - Trinket and gemstone trading post access is sold for 15g
 - Armour and rune trading post access is sold for 15g
 - Weapon and sigil trading post access is sold for 15g
Until this point, a character cannot use the trading post to buy these items. Selling, however, is allowed.

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Specific rules about cheating:

The ONLY wallet currencies you may spend are: Gold, Karma and Transmutation charges
You forfeit the challenge if your level is four higher than the personal story recommends when entering that instance
You must start with an empty trading post
You may not visit World Versus World, Heart, or Edge of the Mists as the personal story does not direct you to them
You may not accept items from other players
You may not 'teleport to a friend'
You may not purchase exotic equipment from the Karma vendors in Orr
You may not teleport your guild hall
You may not use the currencies or mails UI to see the map while not in a city
You may not use home instance nodes and other related upgrades
In the rare circumstance you are forced to travel through a map with no personal story, you must take the most direct route you can. Use no vendors, open no chests, nor claim any hero points there.
If choosing to craft, you must empty your materials storage of all items gathered by other characters.

Things a player can do:
Lions arch and Gendarren fields will always unlock,  after the level 30 story story steps are complete.
Boosters are allowed, but you cannot spend gems to acquire them
You can deposit items (e.g black lion ticket scraps) to the bank if you really need to, but can't withdraw
You can craft with the materials deposited to your bank, but not manually withdraw them
You can visit the Hall of Monuments, but only while in Lion's Arch
You can accept and use any login or achievement rewards
You can complete dailies and use their rewards
You can use bonfires, guild banners and guild buffs
Allies in the open world are welcome to support you or revive you when downed

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THE SETUP

Now that you know what the rules are, you'll see that you need to do a couple of things before playing. It doesn't take long.

Your account:
First, you need to get rid of your gold so that your new character starts with 0. This is best done by depositing to a personal guild bank. You may already 
have one for storage purposes, but if not you can quickly create one and buy a little influence for the guild storage upgrades.
  - If you have no guild bank OR available slots to create one, find another way to get rid of your gold. Spend it. Invest it. Mail it to an alt account, trust a friend. Whatever.

Second, hardcore characters cannot dodge roll or use their heal skills until halfway through the adventure when they have the option of buying them. You can trust yourself 
to never press these keys, but much better to unbind them in your options! No accidents.

Third, boosters. As you continue your adventure, you'll be able to purchase enchanted boosters from black lion armourer vendors to speed up leveling or help you in combat - your choice.
The catch is - these vendors use the existing boosters they find sitting around in your bank as a currency. Make sure, then, that you have all those spare gathering, karma, XP (and so on) 
boosters visible in your bank for the vendor to see before you start.
 - If you're out of boosters, you still get a lot from black lion chests and raising other characters to level 80. You can always choose not to use them, too.

Lastly, the content guide needs to be disabled. You'll find the ability to do that in general options.

You're done! It's that easy.

 *A note on crafting. Crafting doesn't really add much to the challenge, except as a means of a little bonus experience from refining. I would encourage you to ignore it, however,
if you want to try crafting on your hardcore character there is an extra step - make sure your bank is empty of all crafting materials gathered by other characters before you begin! You can
either sell it all or pull it onto alts. This process can be a pain to maintain if you're planning on playing a little of the normal game AND a hardcore character at the same time, though,
and considering how little value crafting has, I would consider not bothering unless you sincerely want the option.*


Disabling the minimap:
Playing a hardcore character means you get no minimap. This encourages you to use scouts and study the physical environment to figure out where to go and what to do.
It's a highly immersive and challenging element of the experience, but the game doesn't offer an actual setting to disable the minimap! Not to worry, it's easily accomplished with ICM:
http://wesslen.org/ICM/ .
Extract the archive to your guild wars 2 directory and in the configuration settings make sure to 'hide minimap always'. You probably also want to turn off 'combatmode' so that the only thing to 
change is the UI, but that's up to you. If you're unsure what to do I'll include my settings for you to copy and paste into the config file:
http://pastebin.com/raw.php?i=P2eaV1jh

You're done again!


The shop:
The last big element of the challenge is the shop. The shop holds tokens you buy as you earn money in order to equip new gear, access areas of the trading post and complete certain actions in combat.
When a purchase is made the player simply deposits that amount of gold into the shop - unable to reclaim it until the challenge is over. (Either by yours - or Zhaitans - death.)
Once again you'll find it best to use a guild bank for this. You can have any setup you like, and actually be rather creative in the items and ordering too! Here is my shop layout but it could be as messy 
or fancy as you wish.

http://i.imgur.com/Lpk6Jht.jpg

With the last step complete, everything is ready! Feel free to make a new character of any race, profession and backstory you like. Follow the rules and see if you can make it to defeating zhaitan.