No, you have pretty much everything wrong. I may not be expressing myself perfectly so here in a nutshell:
No, I have not like many others have proven to you now. I will repeat some things because you are not only wrong, you are terribly wrong!
Ascended armor is now for all intents and purposes going to be required for raids which is the only real endgame content we have (until WvW gets really fixed which I am not hopeful about).
No it is not! Full exotic armor is enough. You get asc trinkets via log in and weapons are the one who are bringing most of the -difference + they aren’t that expensive.
They taught you here in this forum that asc armor is just 2 addition, so it is absolutely not necessary if you are in exotic armor, asc weapon + asc trinkets and have over 1 minute of time left. It was my third raid kill in these conditions not like the automated ones now. Look at the full time you have on the bosses and you maybe understand that your assumption is wrong.
Yes, you can have one or two people in your party with exotics, and at least one elite group have done exotic only runs to prove it can be done, but even they don’t recommend it.
You haven’t even understood the whole video. And they don’t recommend for first timer to do it like them. It was not only full exotics, they also had a gold limit that reduced other possibilities like bufffood as well.
Again: since asc weapons and trinkets are pretty much easier to get, not to speak from exotic armor, no ascended armor is required to be successful in raids.
The cost of making ascended armor whether before or after the patch means that for a very large percentage of the playerbase, only one ascended set is going to be practically attainable in a reasonable timeframe. This means that no matter what, most players are locked into a specific armor class and specific armor stats. Many of us have at least 2 sets of exotic armor per toon with different runes and stats to allow for some situational build diversity. Reduced build diversity is not good for anyone.
There is no reduced build diversity in raids at the moment, read the massive amount of threads and posts here in this forum. Asc is still not required, I repeat myself one more time, so the argument of the possibility to have only one asc armor is not given. I by myself have 3 armors, 2 heavy and 1 light, not more. I am perfectly fine because I don’t have to play all classes, all races, thousands of builds and so on. That’s even kitten because you are lacking so much skill in playing all classes that you, as a beginner, won’t even succeed in raids and be a burden in higher fractals if you don’t have a main class. It’s like the old LoL thing:
Player 1: “Do you know how to play this champion?”
Player 2: “No, it’s my first time.”
Player 1: “Dude, it’s a ranked game. Stop doing that.”
Player 2: “Hey come on, it’s fine. They are all like the same.”
—> 5 Minutes later
Player 2 is 0-xx and responsible for the loss of the whole team.
Go build your first asc armor for your main char, I recommend zerker or condi. With both it’s absolutely fine to play raids and high fractals. If you need diversity, you can change the armor to the same weight class, you can change the stats or in the end, you go for your second asc armor like every other player is doing after a decent amount of time.
If you find a group to run the over 50s, which based on the in-game LFG system is very hit or miss.
There are enough groups for fractals 50+. Most often you will see 56-67-77 because that are the easiest for the majority of players.
I’m not a big fan of hamster wheel game mechanics, which is why I have always prefered WvW. I’ll think about crafting a legendary if a precursor drops, I am not going grind out a thousand this and thats and dump hundreds of gold to get one. I think it’s wrong that after spending the time and or gold to craft or acquire ascended armor that it should be a limitation on how I would like to play GW2. You are fine with it, ok. You probably already have a lot of ascended gear, so this conversation is largely irrelevant for you, except you might think my idea would devalue your multiple sets of ascended armors…. it’s tough to be the 1%.
Like I said, I have 3 armors and I am not one of the 1%. Never ever. I don’t grind hard for gold. I play for fun + gold because some content is nicely brainafk after a hard day of work. I haven’t grinded any of the “grind collections” till today – I hate them and the long completion route with special targets is totally unalluring for me.
I haven’t grinded for my asc armors or my 4 legendaries, just played stuff in the game I like very much and from day to day I was checking my bank to have an overview of my progress towards those things.
Ok, I play since 6 months after release but hey, everyone who is starting a game that has been out for a decent time has (starting) problems like you are claiming. This is nothing exquisite to GW2. If you don’t want to accept the difference between veterans having all kind of stuff and newer naked players there is an option for you: Buy gold via gem store and get your asc armors in a few minutes.