Guild Wars 2

I’m at the part in the personal story where I have to select a order to join. my friend told me about how each order have their own set of armor and weapons(for level cap).
my question is, how do they compared to weapons you could find, like say from a drop or a reward or crafting? are there anything that is on par/better then those besides legendary/ascended gear? I’m still new to this game somewhat, so please forgive If I do not understand something.

Each order armor and weapons are equivalent to any rare quality weapon and armor you can find in the game as drops, but much more expensive (3.6g for weapons, about 1.5g for each armor piece, rare quality, equivalent gear statwise can be found on TP for less than 30s tops).

Each order has different stat distributiom, vigil has power/thoughness/vitality (equivalent to soldier’s gear), order of whispers has cond. damage/precision/toughness (equivalent to rabid) and the durmand priory has healing power/precision/vitality (equivalent to magi). However, it’s rare and you can probably find exotic gear on the TP for the same price.

That said, each armor has unique armor and weapon skins so most people that get them is because of that, and then use transmutation crystals to apply the stats they want… it’s what I’ve done at least, my guardian uses several pieces of the vigil gear, and my asura warrior uses the priory weapons and some pieces of armor. The whisper’s weapons are really cool as well, several of them fold when you put them away and unfold when you pull them out, for example.

Also you can mix and match different pieces of order gear. If you have a character that wants a bit of armor/weapon from other order, you can just get a character into that order, purchase it, then transmute it to a low level white item and put it on bank (it’ll make it account bount but preserve the skin), then grab that on another character and transmute it again to a piece of gear with the stats you want.

You just get them for looks if you happen to want that look. Statwise they aren’t anything amazing and they are expensive for rares… thus… just for looks.

All gear that is the same level and rarity are equal in stats assuming they have the same prefix. It doesn’t matter if it is crafted/from a dungeon/bought from a vendor/dropped by a mob. They are all the same. The only thing that can be different is the look.

buyer beware: be sure you really love the look. if you ever change your mind, you are stuck with a useless set.

example: my first major armor purchase was a full set of Vigil armor. I put Sup. Altruism runes on them, and enjoyed it. after a while I was able craft an exotic draconic set, and I used a different rune set up since my build had changed. Yes, you can transmute your older stuff for stats, but if you say just want to remove the runes and use them on something else, you can’t. Any gear from a merchant type (order NPCs included) cannot be salvaged at all. You can’t even sell them back.

In short, for every piece of order stuff you buy, get 2 transmutation crystals for each one. (for the first time you get level 80 armor, and for the first time you change your build). it will only save you trouble later.