Guild Wars 2

Title says it all, I’m working toward ascended on my condi engineer, but if I buy everything it’s about 1500-1700g. I would farm the mats, but god knows that farming a specific mat in this game and getting a decent amount of it is a joke. So what i’m asking is how did you farm your gear?

I crafted it all pre-Heart of Thorns. I spent a LOT of time in the Silverwastes to fund it, mainly by gathering all the required silk and linen for Bolts of Damask that I salvaged from drops.

I’m sure others got theirs in a different manner.

I spent a lot of time in the Silverwastes for silk. Eventually I got gated by linen and made a mid-level bag opener for mid-range salvage. Slowly, over time, I crafted each piece. All that time in the Silverwastes also got me pretty far into the Bioluminescent Armor collection set, so I finished that off and the reward is an ascended armour piece. That was my sixth.

I crafted it (working on another weapon right now) from drops and salvaged gear. I’m not much of a TP user. Well, I mean I sell, but very rarely buy on the TP.

Yep crafted as well. A set for each wieght class which is shared for all may characters. Some carry exotic sets as well.

My suggestion for armor is to salvage green cloth armor and all blues. buy silk and thick leather from broker to supplement. For lower tier cloth and leather, buy blue gloves with karma and throw them into the mystic forge to get salvageable gloves. Above all, don’t be in a hurry. It takes time.

For weapons, harvest the raw materials and make your own.

Rings from soloing the daily fractal, the other accessories from HoT’s story, weapons from dropped boxes and the chest piece from the achievement. I haven’t bothered with the rest, though I do have maxed professions and enough to craft whatever (~100 of each: damask, etc) – but why bother?

HakunaMataBaby.2734:

I would farm the mats, but god knows that farming a specific mat in this game and getting a decent amount of it is a joke.

Due to the personal loot system, you’re not actually meant to farm your own materials. You’re meant to farm a little bit of everything and sell what you don’t need and buy what you do.

Trinkets – Laurels and Badges
Weapon – thx to Tequatl
Armor – crafted (crafted time-gateed every day, long before I decided to go for asc set). Basic materials from TP.

Most of my ascended gear pre-HoT was from doing fractals/pvp/achievements as well as from Teq and 3-headed wurm. Some were crafted. I had several asc sets but alas, I recently salvaged most for the fractal reliquary.

Crafted about 2.5 sets worth with 2 or so pieces from collection rewards pre HoT. Had about 1.5 sets worth of armor from fractal chest drops on top.

Weapons I’ve crafted (GS, 4 swords, Axe, etc.) and had 3-4 drop as ascended chests from all over.

Rings I have about 4-5 banks tabs worth of left over from fractals pre HoT (at 1 point I sold 2 bank tabs worth wayway back so I ended only with 2.5 bankt abs full for HoT). Accessoires from guild mission tokens. Amulets from laurels. Backpieces mostly from fractal relics.

I got all of my ascended gear doing fractals and had some lucky drops in champ boxes. I don’t think you can do that anymore though…unfortunately.

Did the most of my crafting before HoT. 3 sets of gear (light, med, heavy). Glad I did too, had to craft a few pieces after HoT to finish up the sets and I was amazed how much more it cost. Luckily I had most of the mats saved up.

Haven’t played the game since though. The cost didn’t bother me too much, but the other changes HoT made are over the top.

Gathered resources from the start of the game continuously.
Maxed crafting.
Salvaged for cloth.
Laurels for accessories.
Did content for the home instance nodes for backpack blade shards.
Crafted light, medium, and heavy celestial, then 3 more berserker,
then individuals of ventari and sinister,
and now we have more options.

Most important of all? Expect what you craft to become obsolete.
That’s how it’s done here.

Been working towards it for a period measured in years now. Still don’t have a set. Two pieces of armor and one weapon dropped. Had BiS for every weapon and three armor sets on my main within months of launch. Going on three years of effort later and still have not reclaimed what was taken away.

I am still working on my sets. I have the worst luck with drops. I have been wanting the Teq weapons for so long and can’t get them. But, I am working on crafting them. Accessories and Bank are from the places others have mentioned though.

i bought gold with cash (cash → gems → gold) and just bought all the stuff. took me one day of rl farming.

Crafting over about a month when ascended armor first came out. Never seen an armor box drop

Rewards from tracks in PvP. Oh and laurel merchant for the rings, amulet, and necklace. The backpack I got after the one-day Karka event . . . I think.

Hit all the rich nodes you can with every toon you can- rich iron, rich platinum, rich mithril. Mystic Forge karma armor from low tier vendors (if you have enough karma). I had over 10 million karma at one point, am down to around 5 million and change, just from low tier light armor vendors that I’d toss into the Mystic Forge. Do it as soon and as fast as you can, because when Anet realizes what’s happening, they’ll nerf it so we all have to use zaced.7948’s method.

Oh, and I’ve gotten 3 ascended armor chests from WvW rank up chests.

Crafted my light ascended first for my ele so i can do fractals, and 3 of my alts i fully equipped in ascended thanks to fractal drops.

Weapons: Tequatl. Approximately 70 times. Got 1 ascended weapon chest from the Dragon Chest (the Chest) and one from the Dragon Chest (Exotic)

Armor: World Boss train and Rich Node Gathering. Approximately 70 days. Step 1) Waypoint to a world boss. Help with a Pre or 2. Step 2) Press 1 repeatedly while salvaging from inventory. Step 3) WP to a rich node and harvest. Step 4) Repeat from Step 1. After 2-3 hours following the world boss train casually, salvage for essential ingredients, sell everything else. Buy mats from the TP with the profit. YMMV. I did all the pre-events and also have 150% base magic find, so I usually got a few extra rares just off the trash mobs each day.

The most profitable world bosses are probably 1) Karka Queen: 2 guaranteed rares; karka shells; lots of ori and ancient wood along the way 2) Tequatl: ascended weapon chests; the dragon chests; tons of experience 3) Ulgoth: a ton of supply bags/sacks; tons of blues and greens; centaur hoofs.

Trinkets: Laurels and Badges of Honor. Approximately 4 months. Get 55 laurels per 30 days from the daily log-in. Went to WvW vendor.

What I should have done instead: Worked overtime a single Saturday, purchased Gems with cold hard cash, converted Gems to Gold, bought all the mats off the TP, and finished LWS2 with the extra 192 hours on ascended gear.

I have a total of 1 ascended GS and 2 ascended amulets (for MF and Karma – which I keep forgetting to transfer around from character to character… oops). Oh and a Teq staff, but I barely count that cause the stats are such that I never use it.

I got the amulets through laurels mainly, I think. The GS I got before HoT wasn’t too bad, since I’d been stockpiling mats for a while when I seriously started going after it. Probably ended up costing me more on getting the rest of the way to 500 weaponsmith than it did for the weapon itself lol.

I’ve never seriously considered working on a set of ascended gear. Partly because of crafting level and partly cost (I have 500 tailor, but only 400 something on the other two). Plus my playstyle has never made the motivation strong. I simply don’t do content that makes it noticeable. Now that raids are out, I’ve considered tagging along a few times, but figure it’s not worth trying without ascended.

I’ve had enough of gear grinds to last me a lifetime and because of how stat variation works in GW2, there might as well be four or five tiers of gear per class if you want to be optimal.

i crafted my first set when they first came out. took me about 2 months. My second set, I got 4 of the pieces from ascended armor chests from pvp. And I got about 3 ascended wep boxes in pvp also.

A combination of saving mats, buying others, repeat. The chest of my heavy ascended though I acquired through the luminescent collection, then crafted the rest.

Before the expansion rolled out, I had my light ascended made up first, followed by heavy, then mid. Currently waiting to finish the last 5 pieces of the mid set – gloves/boots/helm/shoulders/leggings.

I have made quite a lot of ascended gear, and I did it using a combination of farming/regular playing/grinding gold to outright buy materials.

Regular playing – I refused to work on ascended gear 100% of my playing time. So, I spent a portion of my play time just doing what I enjoyed – leveling alts and map completions. These things netted me materials that I used on my ascended gear.

Farming – I used the Silverwastes map events to farm bandit crests which I used to buy keys and once I had built up a good supply of them, I hit up a chest train (usually on weekends) and filled up my inventory with loot from doing this. I kept the mats that I could use for my ascended gear and I sold the rest for gold.

Grinding gold – Another method I used for this was Black Lion key farming. It doesn’t really work now, but I used it extensively to get ticket scraps, which I then used to buy weapon skins that I sold for good money on the TP.

Every day I crafted my time-gated materials, buying what I needed for that day that I hadn’t already acquired via the activities mentioned above. It took me more than 4 months to make everything I wanted. But really, the time I spent waiting for the time-gated items allowed me a natural break (there was a lot of grinding involved in those 4 months. lol) and gave me time to continue to rack up more gold.

In the end, I’m just super glad I made all this before HoT, considering the TP prices of things right now.

Bought everything off TP to make full heavy.
Crafted, with help from friends, all the damask for light armor.
Got 5 out of 6 slots for medium armor from fractals chests only.

I take a little pride in that I “crafted” each set a different way but Anet nerfed drops from fractals so I guess I’ll never get 18/18 and 6/6 for medium. Woe unto me T____T

Grinded. Sold planks and then ingots after fully crafting ascended heavy. I got the light armor chest from LS 2 chapters 5-8 achievements because that was most expensive, and did a komba of manufacturing myself and buying mats off the TP.

Let’s see. I have 2 characters in full ascended and most of my 6 other characaters carry 1 or more ascended weapons. Please note that weapons take priority as they help much more than armor pieces do.

I crafted/salvaged most of it, though was fortunate to find a piece here and there to convert. Also, by putting lots of buy orders in advance, usually looking for low prices on materials I know I will need, such as mithril, elder wood, iron, silk, and now thick leather. I play mostly WvW with some Teq and SW sometimes. Sometimes I look for exotics with decent runes with the chance to drop an inscription and use BL kits to get dark matter from them. With some extra time in the new zones but I don’t think that changes matters much. Selling HoT guild related stuff seems pretty profitable though. Silverwastes goes without saying.

But I don’t really rush. I just see if I have a lot of materials and decide whether it would be better to just sell the materials or make something.

How are you calculating this as 1500g though?

PvP rewards, fractal drops, crafting, one from a seed pouch from SW, and one from the bioluminescence achievement.

I crafted my ascended light armor when I had ~400 gold, the highest I have ever had. I made all the time-gated stuff myself, I never bought any Damask bolts. I had to frequently buy silk scraps and some other materials but other than that I used what I had in my bank. I don’t think I farmed anything.

When I was finished I had about ~130 gold left, but I gained some gold throughout the process since I was doing other stuff like running a dungeon one day and silverwastes another. But I never grinded them.

Armor – Crafted
Weapons – Tequatl & Reaper Collection (Dark Harvest)
Trinkets – Laurels, Badges, Guild Commendations & Fractals
Backpiece – Mawdrey

HakunaMataBaby.2734:

Title says it all, I’m working toward ascended on my condi engineer, but if I buy everything it’s about 1500-1700g. I would farm the mats, but god knows that farming a specific mat in this game and getting a decent amount of it is a joke. So what i’m asking is how did you farm your gear?

I crafted my ascended weapon in a very patient manner without buying much of anything on the TP.

I slowly but surely farmed a lot of everything over a period of months. Trees and ore I got in open PvE, fabrics and other misc. items I got by salvaging everything I got in WvW.

I don’t do fractals or dungeons.

Also, map completion in high level areas often gives rare crafting materials as a reward.

A few crafting materials I bought on the TP, but not much.

Keep in mind you can sometimes put lower-level crafting materials in the mystic toilet and transmute them.

I also have my own guild (a one-person guild, literally) and I have my own guild bank for extra storage. This is where I keep all my non-account bound crafting materials.

I crafted three complete armor sets, one for each weight class. In my 2200 hours of game time i got 3 ascended armor and 2 weapon boxes, ran over 700 fractals, did frac level 50 regularly pre hot. medium armor was the cheapest with around 400 to 500g i guess and light the most expensive at around 900 to 1000g. farmed for all of it over time and made one piece after another.

a tip if u r going for viper: dont build it directly. go for something else and use the mystic forge to convert it to viper stats with exotic viper inscriptions. much less gold to spend.

but i am suprised how expensive ascended armor crafting got recently. i only had to craft some weapons for the new specs and trying out some new stuff and it felt much more expensive. im happy that im set on the armor side and can wait to get drops slowly to build up my secondary chars.

I’m one of those very lucky kittens that got my first piece of Ascended as a drop from Triple Terror on my first run, even though it failed.

I bought gems → into gold and bought all the stuff. Made it all in about an hour or less. The only thing I’m gated on though is spirit shards. Literally have little to zero of those. Sigh.

If your Magic Find is above 200%, then play at least one sPvP match a day. I get 2 ascendeds from sPvP each month on average playing just 1 match a day.

I spend all my playing time on PvE content and I get like 1 ascended every two months on average. Suffice to say, the drop rate is very skewed in favor of sPvP. I understand one cannot gather materials as quickly as sPvP, but the rate is still ridiculously lop-sided.

I don’t farm with crafting ascended in mind. My former daily routine of SW, Karka Queen, Tequatl, Triple Trouble, and Dungeons was to get resources for legendary crafting.

It invariably ends with me getting lots of other materials as by-products of farming that are used for ascended, so I have like 5 characters fully decked in ascended armor and 7 with ascended weapons, and I never felt like I spent any effort on ascended equipment at all. In short, aim for something else, and get your ascendeds as bonus.

My WvW character crafted 4 pieces of the armor and had the other 2 drop. I am not playing him anymore though.

All my other characters are content with exotic as I would rather sell any mats I get for the income than get the minimal increase in stats. If I do get an ultra rare drop though I would most likely give it to whatever character I am using to farm.

I have 5 characters with full ascended rings and accessories I bought with laurels/commendations, 3 of those have ascended back pieces. The fact that ANet decided to make the armor/weapons so much harder to get as drops or gated crafting still annoys me, so I live without.

Tumult.2578:

Most important of all? Expect what you craft to become obsolete.
That’s how it’s done here.

This is a very important lesson to learn with ArenaNet.

Sometimes, also, they go full circle and those items which were useful, then made obsolete, get dragged back into play again.

I bought gems and converted them to gold to buy silk. Everything else I did through crafting via node farming and salvaging. This is all pre- HOT. I also received two ascended weapon chests. I also have a handful of rings from drops, mainly WvW ranking and Guild missions.

1st set: rings from fotm, trinkets from laurels/guild commendations, weapon crafted, armor crafted.

Important to note that I was crafting and selling the time gated materials before I decided to make the armor. Would buy all of the cloth on TP, then craft the damask, and sell it, typically profiting 2-3g eacg go. By the time I was ready to make the armor myself, I had amassed more than enough extra gold to cover all of the cloth costs.

Never really found Ascended armor to be overly expensive.

2nd set of ascended armor and weapons was almost exclusively from FoTM. I think I had to craft the gloves and boots to finish it out.

A lot of WvW and salvaging the materials from dead corpses. Unfortunately that method is rather kaput with WvW in the state it’s in right now.

laurels and wvw drop.

Two weaps, two armour pieces and some rings from drops.

Trinkets from WvW badges and laurels.

is it possible to still get ascended chests from fractals?

(got my accessoaries from guild missions, rings and back from fractals, amulet from laurels rest from RNG drops in pvp)

Crafted a full set of armor and weapons for my main, cost me an arm and a leg waaaay back then but at least I had something to work towards. Atm I have enough boxes of asc armor and weps for any alt I would need to gear up, but no need for it so far. Had to open 2 boxes of asc gloves for legendary backpiece collection thingie, that hurt a lot. As for rings and trinkets, the first set for my main I got with laurels/guild comms, all the rest of the rings from FOTM. Backpiece from FOTM and Mawdrey.

Labjax.2465:

I’ve had enough of gear grinds to last me a lifetime and because of how stat variation works in GW2, there might as well be four or five tiers of gear per class if you want to be optimal.

I know.

I really think they need to both reduce the number of gear sets to a more manageable amount and also make the stats easily changeable on ascended gear.

Expecting people to get one set of ascended, for every gear type, is enough; without expecting them to have to get several (or change them all via the forge, all the time).

Also, I think we need something other than the bank, or our bags, to store account wide gear in.

It’s bad enough filling up your bag with different sets of exotic gear, on one char, but having to visit the bank on both the char that has the ascended gear and the one that needs it, before being able to play, is a nightmare.

In fact, such a nightmare, that I bought two sets of same-stat trinkets, so I at least didn’t need to do that for WvW, on two chars.

I still have to change my gathering tools and keep forgetting. ><

Do they really expect people to buy multiple sets of gemstore gathering tools for several chars?

I’m beginning to see how that poor guy, who left, spent “tens of thousands”, now. :/

Surely, they would make more overall, though, by making things sharable, via the hero panel?

As more people would buy them.

I crafted the weapon sets for 9 chars. It took me about 2 years of slowly accumulating enough mats and then crafting each weapon. It took close to the same amount of time for full sets of ascended trinkets for each. As to armor, I have maybe 4 pieces, all from drops (mostly from doing PvP dailies).

Edit: PvP dailies do give acended chests over time. At one time I had 4 weapon chests and 2 armor chests sitting in my inventory from doing PvP.

I crafted one piece, got the rest from Fractals pre-HoT (you know, when it dropped occasionally from there). I then forged it into the stats I wanted.

1500-1700??? how? I craft Zojjas insignia every 3 days to sell and only cost me about 35g to craft if I don’t farm anything which I do ( salvage green from SW). So 1 armor piece would cost about 50g top x6 = 300g (mats from TP). How you come up to 1500-1700g?

Oh you trying to buy the insignia from the TP but still they selling at 80-90g per, yeah that way is around 50g more than crafting, doing 3 hours SW jumping from 1 instance after finish to another one will get you about 150-170 bags to salvage all the stuff, plus tier 6 mats. I probably spent of 25g on lower tier mats to finish the insignia.

Remember you buy the trinkets with fractals relics or Laurels.

I crafted all 6 pieces of mine, pre HoT. If I never see another Bolt of Damask again in my life it will be too soon. :/

I farmed the mats by salvaging every blue and green I picked up (like, 50-60 a day just doing dailies and running around Orr and/or Silverwastes) and ended up not having to buy much- maybe 200 or so Silk tops, plus a few Karka Shells (because I hate Southsun) and some Powerful Blood. This was not particularly cumbersome to do since the components were all time-gated and it was only possible to make one a day no matter how many mats you had.

I crafted the pieces in order of the “biggest bang for the buck” meaning the largest stats increase Ascended over Exotics, so Chest was my first slot, then Legs, then Helm, etc.