Guild Wars 2

As someone who just fought my way to 80, finished my Personal Story (Vendor Trash), finished Arah (A joke +A Hat), and has chosen Cooking as my profession I am curious how the heck I am supposed to get any exotics, let alone legendarys?

I have plenty of Magic Find (Averaging around 75%-125%) and have yet to get a drop over Rare.

From my experience in the world there are three avenues to get good-looking exotics:
Karma from Orrian event-end cycle vendors, such as Dwayna/Lyssa temple events.
Badges from Dungeons
or Badges of Honor from PvP

But every single one of these systems for rewards seems to be broken or nerfed into the ground.

Karma: Diminishing returns for events with gear at 42,000 for each piece, when I am averaging 100-200 diminished Karma per event, leaves me thinking it is going to be months. Do the math: 30-40 minutes per event+travel time = 350 Karma per hour. 42,000/350 means 120 hours logged for each piece of Karma gear. UNREASONABLE

Explorable Mode Badges: Each boss event drops 5 badges, specific to that dungeon. I am okay with dungeon specificity as it adds a certain bit of character to your gear.
Explorable Dungeon bosses take about an hour to get to the first one (with wipes and a decent group) and then the rest of the explorable dungeon (2 more bosses) can take anywhere from 2-3 hours.
You are looking at a 3-4 Hour investment for a return of 15 badges.
I didn’t add up the totals but from my understanding it costs about 1,000 badges for a set.
So the Math:
1,000/ 15 3
You are looking at 200 hours logged for a full dungeon set. This might be acceptable. *BUT The problems are: Finding Groups can add an additional 30minutes – an hour. The dungeon events are often broken. And you often cannot find a group to finish the entire dungeon. Repair costs force you to trade gold for badges, and well let’s face it the explorable mode is STRESSFUL

PvP Gear: I believe the price is close to 1,000 badges from WvW to get a full set of “invaders” armor exotics. Well, I suppose the math doesn’t work here. Depends on play time and WvW success. But I have spent probably 5-10 hours in WvW total and have 50 badges. Now I am usually not in the zerg, I am often in camps winning loyalties or doing jumping puzzles. But this number seems high for me to reach for as well

Not to mention the WvW exotics only have Vitality/Power/Toughness on them, and don’t look particularly unique.

So how am I supposed to get gear as a casual player?

Q: So how am I supposed to get gear as a casual player?

A: Casually.

Buy gems in the cash shop, turn them to gold, buy stuff from the trade post.

At least that seems to be the way AN intends for you to do it.