Guild Wars 2

So I’m finally getting my first set of ascended armor for my mesmer main (basically so I can do fractals 50+).

So my question is – what should I get? Is Zerkers still the ‘best’ stat combo?

Also, in order to do fractals 100, according to the wiki I need 150 AR. Any tips on the cheapest way to do that?

Thanks!

Depends a little on what class you play. In general zerkers is fine, but you might want to consider condition damage.

That being said, unless you absolutely want to craft the armor now, just get to fractal 75 and hope for armor drops from chests. You don’t need armor to progress that far (98 ar was easily achieveable without armor I believe).

As far as kitten tup to reach 150 ar:
7 in every ascended piece = 98 ar (with ascended armor and infused backpiece)
3x(10) and 2x(11) = 52 ar (double upgraded rings)

Now if you decide to not use ascended armor until absolutely needed you end up with 108 ar (ascended weapons, infused backpiece, double upgraded rings and all trinkets. exotic armor) which is good until fractal level 78-79.

So here is my recommendation:

- hold off getting armor until you reach 75+, you might get lucky and get 1-2 drops
- do the bioluminescence achievement and get yourself a chest piece

then commit to full ascended armor.

First, the most important AR to reach is 109 to join in the 56/67/77 fractal daily swamp runs. Those can be done relatively quickly and you should get 1 ascended chest drop (most often boots, shoulders, or gloves) every other week assuming you do them daily. Keep in mind what Cyninja said for outfitting your accessories and weapons with Agony Infusions.

Second keep in mind you can get ascended armor boxes from completing the Ambrite, Bioluminescence, and Leystone collections. Ambrite is probably time/cost preventive, but both Bioluminescence and Leystone can be gotten relatively easily. I would suggest you use those boxes to get your coat and Leggings in that order. This can cut 150+g off the bill of getting your ascended armor.

Finally, remember to craft your ascended mats (Silk Weaving and Elonian Cord) as often as you can. This can help reduce the eventual price of the Damask and Elonian Leather by 10-15%. When you have enough to craft a piece feel free to, but I would suggest crafting your headpiece first as ascended headgear drops very rarely and it gives a ton of stats.

Thanks for the advice!

And I guess I should have started off by stating I already had the ascended armor boxes sitting in storage (was just waiting for the right time to use them), and so I’m not crafting anything other than the attribute change to Zerker.

Also, what is the best rune/upgrade for Zerker?

Scholar for general dps

Yeah, Zerkers is still the best for most things. Condi is great now in high level fractals and raids, but it isn’t as great outside of that.

The approach I take with my Daredevil is to just to gear for Zerkers right now. I’ll switch the armor and weapons over to Vipers at some point and just use exotic Zerkers for open world until I build up a second set of Zerkers ascended from fractal drops.

I think that approach is the best, because Vipers ascended is very expensive to craft and I think you come out ahead if you just craft a full set of Zerkers and then just switch it over to Vipers in the Mystic Forge when you are ready to go Condi.

Anyways, my quick guide to gathering your first full set of Ascended…

Weapon – If you have HoT and have maxed out your elite spec for your class, do the collection for your elite spec weapon. It’s ascended and you can swap out the stats on it to something suited for your build in the Mystic Forge. It’s the quickest and easiest way to get a weapon compared to investing the time and materials to level a weapon crafting profession to 500. You can get away with your main damage weapon being ascended and your support weapon being exotic.

(If the ascended weapon from the collection isn’t one you use as your primary damage weapon or you dual wield, then you are kind of SoL here. You really need to invest money and time into leveling a weapon crafting profession and crafting an ascended weapon as your first priority, because it makes a big difference in your damage output. I was lucky, because I roll a Daredevil right and use Staff so I was able to get my Bo and skip this whole process. Only other option is to take your chances with champion loot, guild mission chests and Tequatl. I will craft my weapons after I get everything else, because I don’t need them as long as my primary damage is ascended.)

Amulet – Save up your laurels for this; I always recommend Utility Slot. If you got a group of friends you can knock out HoT Act 4 Story Achievements with and the stat choices on the necklace are ones your build can use, then go for that. You need laurels for ascended crafting. (Act 3 Story gives you Marauders with Utility slot and can be done in a couple hours. Marauders works well with Zerker builds)

Earring – Do guild missions to get commendations and use them to get your earrings. Don’t spend the laurels. If you have a guild that does all the missions, including the hard ones, once a week, you get 12 commendations each week which is the cost of one earring.

Rings – Do low level fractals and save up your Pristine Fractal Relics to get the rings you want. You can get lucky off the chests, too. You want Infused, too, but I don’t recommend burning Shards on converting normal to Infused yourself if you want to do the Legendary collection. With Attuned rings, you don’t need Infused to get enough AR to get you into the 50s where Infused rings start to drop regularly.

Backpiece – Save up your normal Fractal Relics for the Prototype Fractal Capacitor. You need it for the collection for Legendary Backpiece anyways. Convert your Pristine Fractal Relics to normal ones to help with this after you get your rings. Once you get it, then you need 500 for relics to upgrade it to Ascended (also needed for Legendary Backpack). If you have a ton of cash, you can make an ascended backpeice straight up, but I don’t recommend it. You have to go thru this process anyways for the Legendary Backpeice and the upgrade to Infused costs 250 ecto, so your money is better saved. (Alternative: If you get the Prototype and have the first Legendary Backpack collection done, crafting Ad Infinitum is pretty cheap and will get you ascended quicker than waiting for 500 fractal relics to upgrade the Prototype)

Armor – Last thing you should work on. Whether or not you actually want to craft it is up to you. Like, at this point, if you got an Ascended weapon from the elite spec collection and you have Ascended Earrings, Infused Rings and Infused Backpiece, have upgraded all the +5 infusions to +7 and have all +9 (maybe one +12) infusions in your bonus slots, then you should have enough AR to start doing the triple swamp champ runs. You can just try your luck to get all your armor pieces and any weapons you still need at this point; the drop rates are high enough that is reasonable.

If you do want to craft it…

My approach to crafting ascended armor is whenever I get all the Tier 5 materials (mithril, elder wood, silk, etc) I need to craft an ascended cloth, leather, plank or ignot, I spend 3-4 gold to buy all the other materials and do it. If you take this approach and sell your crafting materials, you’ll have a positive cash flow while still slowly stockpiling ascended materials. You get a lot of Tier 5 materials just from doing any content and salvaging. There is no real hurry for this, because as I said, you got the AR for triple swamp runs from everything else.

As for how to get your ascended gear, most people already gave you a great answer. But for what gear and rune you would want. I wouldn’t take Zerker/Scholar if I were you.

The Mesmer don’t really follow the usually setup because it’s not a good dps, but a great buffer. Metabattle isn’t always on point, it had a couple of horrible months after the raid appear as people started to update build and all. But for mesmer it give good information.

http://metabattle.com/wiki/Build:Chronomancer_-_Utility_DPS

The goal of the build is to work with the strenght of the Chronomancer. It’s have a bad dps anyway, so may as well focus on the buff. The main goal here is to provide perma quickness to the party, as well as decent alacrity uptime.

The basic setup is Assassin’s Armor (Mesmer was always better with assassin than zerker for most of GW2 anyway), Beserker Trinket and Rune of the Chronomancer.

This build also work for raid with small adjustment. Take a look at the raid build if you want.
http://metabattle.com/wiki/Build:Chronomancer_-_Utility_DPS_

I find that as long as mesmers can deal out some damage and not in Nomad’s gear, it’s all good.

Mesmers can mainly add to the group dynamic and help in speed runs by their utilities: blink + port, alacrity, the thing that copies boons to your team. There’s probably a lot more that I don’t know about, but those are the few that I’ve noticed while playing with some top-top-top-notch mesmers on high levels.

Don’t worry so much about your armor, as a mesmer watch more on how you play