Guild Wars 2

Hi, I just got too level 80 and finished the personal story, w00t! Now i’m wondering how to gear up, I’ve seen some vendors selling exotic gear for about 42k karma, then there’s exotic gear from the trading post? Is that the way to go? Or level up my crafting and make my own gear? I’ve yet to look up how to make ascended gear, should I try to skip straight to that?

Thank you for any and all advice!

If your crafting is maxed it will still take awhile to get your ascended gear crafted. If you have enough karma I would purchase it from the merchants in Cursed Shore and customize your runes to fit your character. Keep in mind the karma merchants are limited on what they offer as far as stats. If they don’t have what you need it might be better for you to craft your own exotics.

If you plan on crafting your own gear, you can just buy level 80 Masterworks to hold you over until you can craft your Exotics. Those will then serve you well until you finally get your Ascended gear.

Level 80 gear can also be purchased for karma from the Temples (costs about 200k karma a set), or from WvW for gold + Badges of Honor. Be careful though; karma and Badge-bought armor cannot be salvaged, so any runes you stick in there can’t be retrieved. (Unless you use the Upgrade Extractor, but the cost per use for that is so ridiculously high that it’s not worthwhile to use it unless the upgrade is worth hundreds of gold.)

Make a full set of ascended Nomad armor for maximum troll points.

do cof path 1 and 2 everyday. And you can get a bunch of exotic berserker gear that way.

In the mean time, buy a few rare berserker gear. You can salvage it for ecto later anyway.

lvl up for ascended weapon first. It make more difference. And ascended armor take a bunch of gold to make, so it’ll take a while. If you are going for ascended armor, make sure to level them up early, so you can craft a few of the time gated material everyday.

A lot of this has already been said, but I’m going to try and cover everything in one post.

Get exotic gear. – It’s easy enough to get that the lower tiers can be skipped and even if you’ve levelled the relevant crafting professions already ascended takes a while so it’s worth getting exotics to use while you work on it. A lot of people don’t bother with ascended armor (or even weapons) at all because the game is balanced around exotics anyway.

You can get it from a number of places and they’re all equally good. Level 80 Beserker exotics from Temples have identical stats to ones from the TP or dungeons etc.The options (in no particular order) are:

• Buy it from the TP with gold
• Buy it from Temple merchants in Orr with karma
• Buy it from WvW armorers with badges of honour + gold
• Get it from dungeons with tokens
• Get it from PvP reward tracks
• Craft it yourself
• Get it as drops

In general I’d say pick the option that’s suits your playstyle. If you’ve got a lot of karma built up then use that. If you’re mainly a WvW player then running the same dungeon multiple times a day for several days might sound like your idea of hell but getting badges of honour is easy.

Remember you don’t need to get the full set from 1 place either, you can combine options.

A few things to consider first though:

• Think about what stat combination/s you want, not all of them are available from all sources.
• Gear bought with karma and badges can’t be salvaged, so any upgrades you put in it are stuck there.
• Think about what skins you want. Of course these can be changed easily but why waste time and/or currency and a transmutation charge if you can get the right stats and the right skin in one go?

On the topic of “what stats should I use ?”

It depends on what you are planning to do:

• If you plan on speed clearing, your way is already defined and go for CoF. Get berserker armour with the tokens.
• If you plan to do WvW, use badges to get the armour corresponding to the meta build of you class
• If you plan to do PvX, either buy multiple armour or stick with knight/valkyrie/celestial. These stats set are polyvalent.

What I wish I had known when I hit 80:

1 – First, get a set of rare knights or soldier’s armor from the TP. It won’t cost too much and you can always salvage it later for ectos to recover a good portion of your money. I suggest Knights or soldiers armor as these options will give you good survivability while you learn to run dungeons for the first time. Also, rare armor will provide you with decent enough stats to be a “useful” member of the party.

2 – Next, run CoF path 1 and 2 daily until you can get a full set of exotic berserk armor with tokens. This way you get your exotic armor fast and virtually free. You may want to try out other types of armor later on but you will likely always want to have a set of berserk armor with you at all times so CoF is a good place to start for your first set.

I don’t personally recommend getting your exotic armor using karma as I consider this an unnecessary use (waste) of karma. Plus, karma armor cant not be salvaged (though I think it can be used in the MF). I also don’t recommend getting exotic armor/weapons with badges of honor through EOTM farming as these cannot be salvaged either.