Guild Wars 2

I know there’s legendaries, ascended gear, epic gear and a bunch of other types of gear in the game. I’m just looking for something to focus on which requires time to acquire, but preferably not RNG. So if I invest 5 hours farming karma to get a piece of gear, I get the karma and buy the piece. Done. No RNG.

I like to do events and outdoor bosses and dungeons in story mode, and WvW PVP ( although I understand stats don’t exactly matter in WvW).

Ascended gear requires pretty much no RNG. All you need is level 500 crafting in the discipline(s) for the gear you want and time to farm out all the mats you’d need (loooooooooots of cloth, metals, and leather for the armors and lots of wood and metal for the weapons and lots of the bloodstone dust, emp fragments, and dragonite). I think making ascended weapons and maybe armor (if you want to go that far with it) would be a good goal for you. So, look at the character(s) you play the most, and see what weapons they use. For example: a warrior uses many weapons that a Weaponsmith makes (greatsword, sword, mace, axe, spear). So, if you main a warrior, it might be a good idea to go for level 500 Weaponsmithing to make some Ascended weapons for that character. Plus, if you have any other character that can also use the Ascended weapons you make, you can simply put them in your bank for your other characters to use when you play them.

Edit: There is a slight RNG side to this in that you need Dark Matter to craft ascended items, and that drops from salvaging exotic items. It’s not a definite chance to drop, so yeah, some RNG.

Also, stats do matter in wvw.

Ascended takes time and effort, so look at it as a longer term goal.

Exotics are good gear and easy to get by either crafting or putting in buy orders on the trading post.

As far as stats go ascended jewelry > weapons > armor.

In terms of cost (least to most expensive) jewelry > weapons > armor.

For a casual player just jewelry and weapons are fine. Ascended armor you can take it nice and slow if you even want to bother with it at all… unless you plan on doing high level fractals it’s really not necessary and the stat improvement is very small.

Yeah I don’t ever plan to do high level organized stuff, I just log in, have fun, log out. I want to be geared enough to be useful in outdoor boss fights and WvW though and be ready for the expansion.

If Exotic is considered good enough for that I’ll focus on it at max level, and look at Ascended weapon and jewelry as a long term goal.

Thanks for the input!

If you are in a guild, doing guild missions is the easiest way to getting ascended trinkets (earrings, rings, and necklace). I mention this over the other gear because trinkets have the highest stat distribution of any other item in the game.

Yup, exotic is definitely good enough for pve content (except for high level fractals).

Tree.3916:

If you are in a guild, doing guild missions is the easiest way to getting ascended trinkets (earrings, rings, and necklace). I mention this over the other gear because trinkets have the highest stat distribution of any other item in the game.

The easiest way to get them is to buy them for Laurels.
You dont need to do anything for those.

@op
GW2 is a bit weird when it comes to casual players.

It is fundamentally an incredibly casual game, but there are few lategame goals that are realistic for casuals.

For the most part you will be farming for skins.
Ascended weapons are quite possible too.

But ascended armor and Legendaries are flat out impossible for casual players to “farm”.
You might actually get them some day, but it will take months at least for ascended armor and possibly years for legendaries if you play casually.

Whatever you plan on doing, I’d recommend making sure your gear always has Power on it. Some bosses are immune to criticals, so Precision/Ferocity will only get you so far, and some basic survivability couldn’t hurt.
As you start finding builds you have fun playing, investigate gear attributes that will compliment it, so you don’t have to double back and buy more later.

Ascended is a fine goal even for casual players. It might take you a really, really long time, but that just means you have a reason to play for that much longer. It may seem daunting, but once you get to 500 crafting you can just start accruing materials/gold by playing the game, and eventually you’ll be able to start crafting the pieces.

Until then you would want to go exotic, I suppose, but given that a full set of exotic armor will probably run you less than 30g, that shouldn’t take terribly long.

This question really depends on where you are at now.

If you are in a full exotic set, with stats of you choice, then you may want to set your goal on cosmetic versus ascendeds.

If you have the appearance you like but the ghear is lower level, then farming karma for a full Orrian Temple exotic set would be the easiest goal. Or if you enjoy WvW, buying an exotic set with tokens.

If you have full exotic and appearance already, then my suggestion would be to experiment with stat combos of exotic sets and see what you like while levelling crafting or stockpiling mats.

KorbenDallas.6729:

Yeah I don’t ever plan to do high level organized stuff, I just log in, have fun, log out. I want to be geared enough to be useful in outdoor boss fights and WvW though and be ready for the expansion.

If Exotic is considered good enough for that I’ll focus on it at max level, and look at Ascended weapon and jewelry as a long term goal.

Thanks for the input!

I’d get exotic gear if I were you. You should have enough karma to get temple armor by the time you ding 80. You can even buy a set from the TP that won’t break the bank.

For jewelery you can get ascended with laurels this way you can infuse it for fractals, if you chose to do them. If not then just buy exotics, as you won’t need the infusion slot and can use the upgrade slot.

for back pieces the options are kinda limited. either play through the PS and get one or buy an exotic from a temple.

Hope that was helpful.

Yes, all the suggestions were very helpful, thank you. I didn’t know there was a full set of gear you could buy with Karma, I currently use Karma here and there at hearts to upgrade my pieces one by one.

I’m lvl 74 atm, and planning ahead so as to farm something at max level until I’m decently geared, then planning long to very long term goals after that.

Playing from 1-80 (PvE, during double XP weekend) selling everything I found on the TP without care (except materials, unless the material storage was full), I was able to simply buy a full set of cloth berserker exotics at 80. I had around 40-50g, no farming whatsoever, just map completion leveling.

I’d say exotics are too easy of a goal for a casual player. Even back at launch, it only took me about an hour a day for 3 days to farm and craft my first set (cloth), which is one reason why ascended exists.

Ascended is definitely possible for a casual play style (so is a legendary), but expect it to take several months. I wouldn’t specifically go for it, just casually collect materials and you’ll eventually have what you need.

Not sure you are into crafting, if not, you can get exotic gear rather quickly by doing Dungeon. The best one is CoF P1. It’s easy, fast, and fun (?). Earn 1 gold with 40+ tokens daily (double them if you do P2 as well). Soon, you’ll have enough to buy all the exotic gears, and best of all, they are all Berserker. ^^

i consider myself casual even though my weekend playtime is 4+ hours per day usually an hour or so on the weekdays

my initial goal for my newest character (necro) was crafted exotic and now that i have 500 tailor i’m to start working on ascended armor focusing on 1 piece at a time so i don’t get overwhelmed

KorbenDallas.6729:

I know there’s legendaries, ascended gear, epic gear and a bunch of other types of gear in the game. I’m just looking for something to focus on which requires time to acquire, but preferably not RNG. So if I invest 5 hours farming karma to get a piece of gear, I get the karma and buy the piece. Done. No RNG.

I like to do events and outdoor bosses and dungeons in story mode, and WvW PVP ( although I understand stats don’t exactly matter in WvW).

Have you tried fractals? It can be a bit of a challenge eventually but at first its pretty easy. It has a sweet looking backpiece and isn’t RNG at all. Just time. You mentioned in other replies some interest in ascended armor and weapons and since the updates you have a much better chance of getting them as drops too (well much better is relative, but a lot higher than when i got mine… lol) and I heard some can be quite frequent. As well as exclusive fractal only weapon skins so there’s some special snowflake prestige there too.

KorbenDallas.6729:

Yes, all the suggestions were very helpful, thank you. I didn’t know there was a full set of gear you could buy with Karma, I currently use Karma here and there at hearts to upgrade my pieces one by one.

I’m lvl 74 atm, and planning ahead so as to farm something at max level until I’m decently geared, then planning long to very long term goals after that.

Firstly, using a bit of karma for upgrading armor as you level is fine (I did too). But I don’t recommend using it or Badges of Honor for purchasing your level 80 gear as those items can not be salvaged. Thus, runes and sigils can not be retrieved if you decide to change your gear at any point.

Secondly, ascended armor and weapons are a long, long term goal for a casual player. Exotic gear is perfectly fine as knowing how to play your class is far more important than the minor difference in stats between ascended and exotic. Therefore, I would recommend the following goals to a new, casual player:

1. When you hit 80, buy some rare armor from the TP (knights or soldiers for learning) and start farming CoF p1 and p2 for tokens which you can use to get all your zerker exotic armor/weapons as well as to make money to buy your runes and sigils (you can salvage your rare armor afterwards to get ectoplasms).

2. Run guild missions to buy ascended accessories with guild commendations.

3. Run low level fractals to purchase ascended rings.

…And have fun!

for a casual player, exotic is more than enough to do all content apart from level 10+ fractals. Ascended is only necessary for completing higher level fractals, where you need agony resistance

OP could always buy exotic temple armor with karma. At 42k karma per piece, a full set of armor is 252k karma. The downside is that you can’t salvage karma gear so any runes and signals are not removable.

The different temples have different stats, but the appearance is the same. You can also mix and match pieces to get stats you want.

https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Temple_armor

If one plans to eventually craft Ascended gear, one might consider also crafting the Exotic one wants to use. Exotic gear is lvl 400 craft and making a set will help towards the goal of lvl 500 and Ascended.
Crafted gear is also salvageable, so if you invest in runes/sigils you can get them back and put them in the better gear.

exotic is very easy to get, so do that. Aim for ascended, it may seem like a ridiculous effort, but you can easily get there step by step. Noone is rushing you in this journey. If you don´t choose any of the other ways of obtaining gear, you can even get some of the exotics you want as a byproduct of leveling your crafting skills.

Break down:

Armor -> Exotic is sufficient. You should get enough gold together through casual play.

Weapons -> Exotic is sufficient. Same as armor. If you require a greatsword or other more expensive weapon you can aquire dungeon tokens of your liking and buy them there.

Rings -> Ideally ascended. Low level fractals can be done casually and even if unlucky, after about 1/2 a month of fractals you could have both rings. If you really dislike fractals you can buy them via laurels.

Accessories -> Ideally ascended, might have to be exotic first. If you are doing guild missions these will come over time for guild commendations. Otherwise also available via laurels.

Amulett -> Ideally ascended. This should be your first ascended item from laurels since it’s the only one available via laurel buying. If you enjoy WvW gather some Badges of Honor and buy from WvW merchant to save laurels.

For more details check out:
https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/List_of_ascended_trinkets

PS. I would refrain from ascended armor or weapon crafting if you are really causally playing at this time. The cost/benefit ratio is very weak and only really useful for agony resist options. 3 Months from now HoT should release and there might be new/cheaper ways to gear up.

If you are truly a casual player, rare stuff will fall into your lap just from doing world bosses if nothing else. So, at a minimum you should eventually get rare or higher quality. Most of what you would want can be bought fairly cheaply for half a gold or less (for rares).

Exotics typically cost about 1.3 to 2 gold. They can be crafted at 400 skill which is easy to get. I HIGHLY RECOMMEND that you follow a guide when raising crafting skills. Crafting skill levels typically follow a pattern like this: 1 to 25 skill from refining stuff that is easy to get. 26 to 50 from crafting items. 51 to 75 from refining. 76 to 100 from crafting items. If your skill is in the range where you can raise it by refining, the only things you should be making are things made with refining or ingredients that will go into your weapons, armor, and so forth such as hilts, etc. DO NOT DISCOVER DURING THE REFINING PHASE!!! During the item crafting phases, you get the most benefit from discovering new recipes. If you make the mistake of discovering your new recipes when you could have been raising skill by refining and crafting ingredients, you may run out of discoveries during the discovery phase and end up spending a ton of money to slowly crawl through those skill levels.

I also highly recommend that you use a crafting booster while crafting to 400 or 500 and do it all in one shot so as to not waste the booster.

Ascended jewelry can be obtained through fractals and by spending laurels and guild commendations (from guild missions). Some living story achievement tracks give an ascended item.

Ascended weapons and armor can be crafted or obtained from certain chests that drop very rarely.

It’s better to have an exotic item with the right stats than an ascended item with the wrong stats for your build. Likewise it’s better to have a rare item with the right stats for your build than an exotic item with the wrong stats. By “wrong”, I mean really way off and not similar at all to what it should be.

You sound like the kind of player I am. I’ve found the course of least resistance is to get exotic armor with karma from one of the temples. If You consistantly do events and world bosses you will have more than enough karma. I would do that for my first set.

Money will get better for you in time and you can buy exotics if you choose too.

If you never plan on crafting (like me) see you materials on the Trading post when you reach a full stack. Dont merch them. You will be surprised how much gold you get from the TP. I made 300g cleaning out my materials last time I did it.

I personaly don’t do fractals. So ascended is pretty unnececssary for me. Still you will have laurels so you may want to use them on jewelery to save gold.