Returning player, lost and seeking guidance
Welcome back OP. Your questions are easy to answer….and not so easy.
Berserker gear is still generally considered the best for the PvE meta. If you’re a speedrunner type of player and that sort of thing is what you’re interested in, that’s the only game in town. But there are plenty of people who don’t use zerker and do clear content, albeit less efficiently. Also some encounters have now been designed that make zerker quite useless, such as the new Tequatl encounter, since he can’t be crit, or affected by conditions.
You can easily do the new events in rares. A dodge is still a dodge and reflects still reflect and condition removal doesn’t have much to do with your armor. I don’t know any content in the game that requires exotics to beat.
The grind for ascended gear is pretty bad and requires crafting. Fortunately you don’t even need exotics to clear content.
Inflation, from what I can tell, is pretty high…but I’ll leave the economists among us to answer more fully.
Zerker, and especially Warrior is not the only game in town. If you want to speedclear things in a hardcore manner, you might want to have a full set of zerker (Unless you’re doing higher fractals).
You never have to play a specific build or profession to be really good at the game. However, there are still bad builds out there. If you want to be sure, pick a good build from GW2Guru i.e. and maybe personalize it a bit.
If you just zerg around, your effectiveness is not really all that important. You’ll be fine.
If I came back after a break, I’d just do what I always have done: Play dungeons with guildies, play a bit of sPvP, explore the new fractal levels which I bet you missed out on.
In case you play dungeons:
There will always be min/max kittens around that only thinks in a hardcore environment with a hardcore team. If you want to have successful dungeon runs, I’ve found out that it’s actually better to have something a bit more defensive and support-oriented, rather that almost full our Zerk. Although that depends on who you play with. Bottom line: You can play pretty much whatever you want.
You do not need Ascended gear to do anything really well. The progress to Ascended trinkets is fairly enjoyable. Ascended weapons is another story and frankly, not so many people have them. Ascended armor is very rarely used.
Cred to Latinkuro
Gw2 is a masterpiece at it’s foundation. Content-wise however…