Guild Wars 2

I am a returning player that hadn’t been playing the game for probably about half a year. I last stopped with an 80 powermancer as my main and Exotic gear with Superior runes of divinity and I got like 7G in my bank.

I am currently lost as to what I should be doing as an objective. I don’t know if my gear would be considered optimized anymore as I know there are those Ascended gear but are the only ways to getting them through dailies to get laurels? And are there any new gear or dungeon I should be trying out?

Would be nice if someone could point me out what content I should look at first and what I should be getting to optimize my character.

Thanks in advance to any help received.

Ascended gear is superior to exotic so your gear is not really optimized anymore, although the difference isn’t that big of a deal for anything but Fractals of the Mist (a particular dungeon released in November). Currently there are no ascended weapons or armors, and the ascended jewellery can be gotten through a mixture of dailies, guild missions and fractals of the mist.

You may want to do the Living Story content first, as its temporary and only lasts 2 weeks before another 2 week Living Story is out…

Exotic gear is fine…just get your ascended trinkets slowly via laurels.

Only 3 ways to obtain laurels, do daily, do monthly and for every 500 achievement points you get.

So currently to build my character I will have to rely solely on dailies and Fractals of the Mist?

And also what should I look out for in Fractals of the Mist? As in what drops or items should I be looking out for in there.

As for my current weapons, etc. I assume I’m okay for now since there have been no new ascended gear of those types released?

To be honest, everything you got is okay. Nobody will ever gearcheck you because Exotics are more than enough to do the current content and because there isn’t such a large gap between someone with full exotics and someone with every ascended piece currently available.

That being said, dailies can get you all the ascended equipment minus the backpiece, but there are alternatives to speed up the process. You may want to get the rings and backpiece through fractals of the mists (search the wiki to see how it works) and the earrings through guild missions (you have to be in a guild). Also if you have any excess Badges of Honor (WvW currency) you can use them to buy ascended gear from a WvW vendor that has discounted prices on laurels. Basically instead of paying 30 laurels for an amulet you have the option of paying 25 (I don’t recall the numbers) +250 badges of honor.

Sorry for my poor writing skills. Hope this helps.

Most important thing about ascended items: you can’t wear two of the same. Each ascended items exists with two names, one has an offensive infusion slot and one has a defensive slot. There is a trick to wearing two of the same but that requires infusing one item and that will require doing fotm.

Ascended items can also be obtained in WvW where the laurel cost is reduced by 10 and 250 Badges of Honor is required.

Ascended accessories/earrings can also be obtained through guild missions. Assuming a guild has all mission types unlocked it would take 2 weeks per accessory.

Various types of mist essences in fotm that can give items passive agony resistance, you don’t have to care about those if you don’t plan on doing high level fractals.

From level 10+ the daily chest of fractal you get a pristine fractal relic. 10 pristine will buy you an ascended ring. The same chest can also drop a random ascended ring(in addition to the pristine relic).

The enemies haven’t really changed so ascended is only necessary to make the game easier or higher level fotm(15+).

Ascended gear makes the numbers in the hero panel go up but I haven’t really felt much difference from it. Things that were able to kill me before can still do it. I haven’t suddenly started being able to mow through enemies I wasn’t able to before either. Changing traits is much more noticeable. The only place where ascended is is noticeable is doing higher level fractals without agony resistance(you don’t need any until at least level/scale 10)