Guild Wars 2

does anybody roam in exotic gear? compare to someone that has ascended gear how big is the difference?

Lots of people do.

I for one use Exotics on most of my characters, including the second account. Think only my Guardian is fully in Ascended minus the backpack.

Several of the people in my guild or that I run with often runs mostly Exotics with Ascended trinkets.

The stat difference really isn’t that big. As people have said before, focus on getting the weapon because of the increased damage. And fill up with trinkets as you can get those for laurels+badges, or rings as free drops in fractals etc.

Armor just cost a lot for fairly minor increase.

If you are playing a glass character as main do get ascended armor when you can and put 6 wvw toughness infusions in them. The difference isn’t huge (74light, 84medium, 90heavy) but every point counts if it can prevent a hard hit from over 50% hp to downed state. If you get ascended trinkets and some of them are defensive infusion slotted you can add slightly more toughness there aswell. And ofcoarse there is the -% dmg from guard NPC.

But otherwise the weapon for power builds should be gotten especially if it’s a common weapon type like gs. Can always move to a different character if you lose interest.

Ascended are 5% higher in stats than exotic. The question is how much that’s worth it to you.

Exotic everything but trinkets here.

Since launch exotic gear. back piece and weapons. But ascended trinkets.

I do fairly decent for the most part but sometimes will run across a fully ascended player who has a slight advantage and I can sorta tell at times.

I thought it was 4%

Condi builds can easily roam in full exotic. Power builds take a big DPS hit by not using ascended weapons. Armor is only a minor buff. Jewelry is easily obtained just by logging in consistently.

Exotic is enough to do sneak kills or stealth kills. Don’t forget the camping at their spawn points. really fun

Over time I have built up one full ascended set in each weight as well as full ascended sets of jewelery weapons etc.
That said the new runes/sigils/builds and profession specs have basically rendered my ascended armor moot.

After making x amount of ascended it’s easier to make Exotics because of the nature of WvW. What I mean by that is, depending on what exactly you are doing your gear could vary in stats quite a bit. Set for solo, set for roaming, set for guild runs, set for pugzerging, set for condi and so on. Even if you don’t run multiple toons that’s a lot of different sets of ascended you would need to make for each playstyle.

I would imagine a large number of WvW players have at least a couple sets of Exotic for different occasions.