The beauty of gw2 is any pathway is a good pathway, you could opt to get geared and decked out in legendaries or even become a WvW God and get to rank 10,000. Or maybe sPvP is your calling. You could join a raiding guild and learn to clear all the instanced content or attempt to unlock all the mastery points and get all the mounts!Masteries would work as usual, but the ones that give abilities like mounts and gliding would have an extra step to activate, requiring you to spend hero points to 'learn' them. Those that unlock features like legendary crafting and Autoloot would remain fully account-wide as usually and not require hero points to use. Op, as others mentioned, without any hero points (HP), at level 80 you will unlock all 5 core lines and all utilities. Additional hero points can be found and earned through Tyria, HoT and PoF maps (but not Living World maps). Tyria HP are everywhere, but only provide 1 point. PoF and HoT HP are much less, but provide 10 HP each. Hero point cost Cumulative cost 1 Sword Proficiency: Trait 30 30 2 Weaver: Trait 10 40 3 Elemental Pursuit: Trait 10 50 4 Elemental Refreshment: Trait 10 60 5 Swift Revenge: Trait 10 70 6 Elemental Polyphony: Trait 10 80 7 Woven Stride: Trait 10 90 8 Aquatic Stance: Skill 15 105 9 Stone Resonance: Skill 15 120 10 Superior Elements: Trait 10
Masteries are account wide, so you can work on them on any character that's level 80. If you get a mount on one character you have it on all your characters, even lower level ones. Same with gliding. Hero points are how you unlock your elite spec, which to some degree changes the way you play your character.
The guide is intended to level faster, since you only get a boost in XP, when you finish them, and i think this is reduced, when reaching level 80, since you don't need to level anymore. So doing those achievements after hitting level 80 is kind of pointless. before hitting level 80 one volume gives like 100k points. after lvl 80 they only give 7k.