Making money and gearing up.
It may help to think of Exotics as 15k armor, and Rares as your 1.5k armor. I know in GW1 there wasn’t a stat difference, and that makes me kind of sad that in GW2, we have as much stat difference on armor as we do…
That being said, if you want ’zerker’s gear, my advice would be to hang out in CoF…. I know you said your time is limited, but I’ve stared flaberghasted at the clock when I’m finished with CoF explorable, path 1, only 15 minutes after starting. Not all runs are that quick, but it doesn’t take too long, and you can start racking up the armor pieces fairly quickly.
LVL 80’s: Thief / Warrior / Guardian / Mesmer