Guild Wars 2

Hello.

I have recently restarted the game after having a 3 year break, i never made it to end game and recently purchased the DLC and it came with a level boost so thats my first level 80.

I have a couple of questions though and some minor worries;

My main intention on GW2 would be PvP, WvW, and the highest level of PvE possible without having to min/max.

I have never liked raids on any mmo I have played and was wondering if its possible to achieve a high gear level and high enough to do the living season stuff and the dungeons and fractals(not sure if these are raid like?) and a high enough gear set to be efficient in WvW without doing the raids on this game?

I was looking at different gears and weapons on the store too and quickly got lost and confused again(lol), I saw 2 berserker greatswords both of them have 230+ stats and 1100 weapon damage or so however one was a hell of alot cheaper than the other, is there any reason for this? The swords I was looking at were; Berserker Mordrem Warblade and the Berserker Pearl Broadsword both are level 80 exotics with identical stats but vastly different prices?

The level boost has given me a set of exotic armor which the stats arent what im looking for so I was planning to salvage them and sell the materials for a bit of extra money and looked at a few guides and a few videos and saw that people were saying to use berserker gear for what I want and noticed in the written guide it says berserker items and on the videos of the similar/same build it showed ascended gear etc, is it worthwhile to buy the exotic gear to work my way up or should I leave it and suffice with the exotics i have with sub optimal stats+?

Sorry if these questions are stupid/noob/asked frequently/etc.
If you have taken the time to read the above thanks and if you can help in anyway I appriciate the advice!

Exotics will do fine in WvW. You might want to work on getting Ascended trinkets and weapons, since they have the biggest stat increases over their exotic counterparts, but it’s not an immediate requirement.

Soldier’s is actually a fairly decent set to start WvW with, especially as a frontliner. Going full beserker means that you can only survive a few hits, and is better for experienced roamers (solo players). I would suggest sticking with it for now, and do rewardtracks to get more gear of your choosing.

GW2 is fashionwars. The difference in price on those two greatswords is in the rarity of the skin. They’re the same in stats, but people like to look good.

Gear in GW2 is quite different to a lot of games.

Firstly there are only 6 tiers (white/common, blue/fine, green/masterwork, yellow/rare, orange/exotic and pink/ascended) and exotics are relatively easy to get, so most people don’t bother with the lower tiers at level 80.

Secondly all equipment with the same rarity and level requirement has equal stats, no matter where it came from. So there’s no need to worry about crafting gear to do dungeons to get gear to do raids or whatever. It also means you can mix and match equipment from different places if you want to (which is useful if you can’t afford a full set with one currency).

The upshot of which is: yes you can do everything else in the game without raiding.

The other side of gear in GW2 is the skins. There’s not much in the way of stat progression at level 80, but there is a huge variety of different skins and as you may have noticed the Wardrobe allows you to change them whenever you want. People are willing to invest a lot of time and money in making their character look the way they want.

This is why some equipment is far more expensive, even though the stats are the same. The Pearl Broadsword is the default crafted exotic skin, whereas the Mordrem Warblade is a rare drop from the final Heart of Thorns map, making it both rarer and more interesting.