How much does it cost to craft ascended stuff
As a ranger I crafted my longbow from Huntsman crafting line, from 0-500 with some owned mats and cost about 120G.
A few months later I crafted my staff in Artificer again 0-500 with a lot more of my own mats and cost less at ~80G.
Depends on what stat you’re going for, but generally it’s around 90-120g per piece if you buy all the materials and craft all the daily gated stuff (Lump of Mithrilium, Silk Weaving thread, etc).
I would strongly suggest you use: https://gw2efficiency.com/
You can use your API key for your account and see how much you will actually need. The website looks through your storage and characters to see the items you have for a provided Ascended set and will give you a shopping list with what to get and how much it will cost from the BLTC.
Remember the elite spec collections reward ascended weapons, so if you have a reaper and a mesmer/rev, completing those are a cheap way to get your gs and shield. Also, the ley stone armor collection is a cheap way to get an ascended armor box.
Ascended (especially weapon which is most important) is very easy to get for “free” – ie by playing the game, harvesting the materials and crafting. There is really no need to buy anything.
I do not know if you’ve crafted at all yet. If you haven’t you have to level that up to 500 before you can craft ascended items. That is a costly thing to do, especially if you haven’t saved any of the materials that you will need to do it. If you’ve gotten your crafting up to 500 it depends on what you craft, as some have stated. A full set of ascended armor costs approximately between 500 to 600g depending on the stats and the weight. You can offset this cost greatly by farming as many mats as you can.
For free ascended items just play lots of WvW. You have a low chance to get ascended boxes in your WvW rank up chests. I just got an armor box 2 or 3 nights ago.
The only reason I would ever craft ascended gear is if I had money to throw away for no reason or it was absolutely needed for the content I wanted to play (only fractals atm).
Not to turn you off from crafting it, but there may be faster ways to acquire your goal.
You can do daily:
-Teq
-Tripple Trouble
-Fractals low scale (higher scale would assume you have ascended so that defeats the purpose)
If you have a complete exotic set, you can also raid for wing 1.
Even if you get an ascended stat you can not use, you can re-roll the stats in the mystic forge to the stats you want.
As a devout ranger player, I have 3 ascended armor sets and only one of them I crafted. The other two, I’ve gotten as drops or spent magnetite shards from raiding on.
Again, not to turn you off from your goal or objective, but do remember there are mostly free options available for you to try at.
2015-2016
Fort Aspenwood
-Teq
-Tripple Trouble
-Fractals low scale (higher scale would assume you have ascended so that defeats the purpose)
I probably wouldn’t rely on those to get fully ascended, at least, not unless you’re very patient. Teq and TT have low RNG to drop ascended chests (For my n=1 sample, in a 6 month period of consistantly doing those 5+ days a week, I recieved 3 or 4 boxes in total). And fractals will only have reasonable drop rates at T4 (Possible at T3 but still low chance). Low levels will net you rings and trinkets.
It will be more reliable to get the elite and leystone collection boxes and craft the rest. Then you’ll be able to do T4 fractals and raids if you want a 2nd set or for alts.