Guild Wars 2

Hi guys, been away from GW2 for a while. Back now and very excited with HoT, but I am kinda lost. What should I do to gear up? (I am already finishing my masteries).

What do you mean by gearing up?

GW2 isn’t like typical MMOs where everyone is constantly chasing new levels and equipment. Once you’re level 80 there’s only really two “steps” to worry about – getting a full set of exotics (which is relatively cheap and easy to do) and then maybe making ascended if you really want to.

Since you’ve been able to complete the masteries I assume you’ve already got exotics (although if you’re good enough it is possible to complete everything in HoT in lower tiers), so it’s only ascended equipment you might want to think about.

If you can give us some more info on your build and what equipment you’re using at the moment we can give you advice on what to go for. But if you only want it because you assume what you had before is now out of date I’d say not to worry and just carry on playing what you enjoy.

There is no gearing up. You can work toward ascended gear, but the stats are only marginally better than exotic and vastly more expensive/time-consuming to earn. And the only thing you need it for are high level fractals, where the special sockets on ascended pieces may be used to provide agony resistance (a mechanic specific to fractals).

You may need to put in some work farming gold or map currency to get the exotic gear, but it’s nowhere near as much work as for ascended.

I am full exotic at the moment. Most of my gear is Flame Legion. But I would like to farm the ascended. The only ascended piece I have is my coat, seer coat. But like I said I am kinda lost on how to get the ascended stuff (including the weapons).

There really is no easy way to get ascended. You can get ascended chests randomly at very low chances from doing pvp, wvw, or pve world events/bosses/fractals raids. But the drop chance is really low and not a reliable method to obtain ascended gear. Even in t4 fractals where you need like 150 agony resistance, ascended chests are really scarce based on my personal experience. Ascended accessories are easy enough to get however- you can get them via laurels, fractals, and guild commendations. The only reliable way to obtain ascended gear (armor and weapons) is to get your crafting up to 500 and craft it yourself. But crafting ascended is no fun task.

1) it costs a ton of gold. Especially in today’s inflated game economy, it’ll cost you hundreds and hundreds of gold. I am actually in the process of outfitting my third alt in full ascended and I’ve sunk around 150 gold so far for a helm and shoulder only. Getting your crafting up to 500 also costs a lot. According to the gw2craft website (which btw is an amazing guide), it should cost you around 100 gold to get tailoring up to 500.

2) You need a lot of ascended crafting material that you cannot buy off TP due to them being account bound- bloodstone dust, dragonite, empyreal shards. You’ll need an excess of a thousand of these for a full ascended set. Frankly, the bloodstone and dragonite is incredibly easy to get. However, empyreal fragments are a huge pain in the butt to grind. Essentially, the pace of your ascended crafted is more or less often dictated by how quickly you can grind empyreal frags.

There are cheap and relatively easy ways to get certain ascended weapons and armor:

• Elite collections will reward ascended weapons – you don’t get a choice… only the weapon types linked the each elite is available. But, you can forge those to whatever stat you like.
• Leystone and bio luminescent armor collections give you an ascended armor box.
• Machined weapons collection gives you an ascended weapon box (this one’s harder cos you need tons of map currency from all the HoT maps)

And like Daedraz says, accessories are easy. They are also the best bang for your buck in terms of stats.