How to "farm" faction in Guild Wars

Guild Wars a while back introduced the ability to unlock all skills, weapon upgrades, and runes via PvP by earning faction. As you earn faction you can trade it in for the aforementioned items. Usually it costs anywhere from 1000-3000 faction per item. Here is a great breakdown of how much can be earned in the various arenas of PvP.

I like Guild Wars PvP, but I won't say I love it. Not right now anyways. Without a good team playing against equally matched oponents... Guild Wars PvP is a hot/cold experience. One second you and your random team are red hot... the next you are pushing up daisys.

After much death, much winning, and a bit of searching I have found out a way to basically always win in Random Arenas. Random Arenas are 4 vs 4 matches that put you into random teams against each other. That means you have to get used to the fact your team isn't always going to be good or act as a "team".

What I discovered was the teams that were winning; were winning because of healing and healing alone. Looking into it further I found this article over at the Guild Hall about Guild Wars healing monks.

Basically all you are doing is playing the role of "heal bitch". If you are half way decent at the game and have the available skills you can pretty much guarantee wins for your team because you can keep em cranking out damage. Now you don't always win... some teams just are better and can coordinate well enough to take down a full blown monk.

For the most part though with my monk I've just been winning and winning. It takes usually 4-5 matches before a loss is handed to my team. Sometimes earlier if the team winds up heavily stacked as monks... those matches can last forever!

So I will push on with winning in Random Arenas... I have skills to unlock :) I've gone from 500 faction gain in a night of casual random arenas to almost 2,000 in a single hour :) Bling.