Getting Ascended Armor
If you do raids with a group you can get a fair number of armour chests that way either by drop or buying with magnetite shards.
Another good way is from fractals if you have spare pages and fractal relics kicking around and can be cheaper than crafting depending on which piece given the current prices of elonian leather. You also get decent drop rates.
There’s some achievements that give armour chests, for completing the ambrite weapon collection, bioluminescence set and leystone armour sets.
Other than that crafting your daily spool of silk weaving thread and elonian cord goes a long way. Opening loot bags and gear bags on low level characters then salvaging the gear can give you the lower tier mats for making damask and elonian leather.
Also if you get an armour box for say knights armour you can pick light gear and stat change it to berserker using an exotic berserker insignia, 5 globs of ecto, an anthology of heroes and the ascended armour piece.
Also if anyone says you need ascended armour for raids they are being elitist. If you have the right runes, weapons and trinkets ascended you’re not going to be a liability especially on ele. Main thing is to get ascended weapons and trinkets.
(edited by apharma.3741)
Actually, if you have your Tailoring at 500 already, buying Ascended gear costs more than crafting it. It takes over 180 fractal matrices for any piece of exotic gear, and those sell for over 30 silver each for a total of 60 gold, plus the 56 gold it would take with it, for a minimum of 115 gold spent to buy a piece of armor, in addition to using a couple hundred fractal relics and some fractal pages. According to GW2 efficiency, crafting the boots otherwise would cost just under 80 gold if you were able to craft everything, including time-gated stuff, or 100 gold if you were to just buy everything instantly off the TP. Crafting is by far the most consistent way to get ascended stuff. Depending on how high your crafting already is, you would probably save money leveling your Tailoring to 500 before crafting a full set than if you just bought it all from the fractal vendor (For reference, to buy all 6 armor pieces would be at least 70 gold more than crafting it, I’m too lazy to do all the math so I gave a very conservative estimate here. So if it takes less than 70 gold to get your crafting to 500, I would advise that over buying from the fractal vendor, especially since you now have your crafting at 500 which is useful by itself).
That being said, if you can get into a raid and actually clear stuff, using the raid currency (Magnetite Shards I believe) becomes the cheapest way of obtaining ascended gear from a gold standpoint, assuming you don’t need the raid currency for anything else. The raid currency essentially is like the fractal matrices except that you can’t sell them on the TP, meaning that there’s no reason to not use them on what you want.
Also, like Apharma said T4 fractal chests supposedly have a 30% drop rate on ascended loot boxes (weapons and armor), although I have found it to be much lower. That being said, if you do your Daily T4s, you should get at least one ascended box a week if not more. You can’t really T4 until you get more AR though, so this is for future reference. Once you get your first set of ascended stuff, I would personally recommend not making a second set via crafting or buying. The reason being that, if you fractal, you will get that set over time, and unless you are playing a class like Druid and need multiple sets of armor, there’s no reason to worry about a second set for your character. Also, say you want ascended armor for a second character. Think of how much time you spent on your Ele, playing the game, in order to get this first set of ascended gear, enough that you feel comfortable doing higher level content. Chances are that by the time you get to this level of comfort on another class, you will have gotten enough ascended item drops that you might only have to make 1-3 pieces or something like that, especially since the only content that literally requires ascended armor is fractals because you need the infusion slots and nobody has the time or money to get ten +15 Agony Infusions to slot into their trinkets so that they don’t need ascended armor (trust me, if you have full ascended armor and weapons and full trinket slots, you get to 162 AR from filling each slot with one +9, and that doesn’t include and AR that you can get from the Tear of Alba potion that raises your AR).
Also I agree with Apharma on that anyone that requires ascended gear for raids is being elitist. Full ascended gear only offers about a 5-7% DPS increase (I think), but even more than that there was a video on Reddit released a week ago of a 3 man Vale Guardian clear, and I have seen 7, 8, and 9 man clears. Not saying that everyone is capable of this, but if people can clear a raid with only 7 people, then a full party with just exotic gear can definitely clear a raid if they know the mechanics well enough. The DPS increase is only a safety cushion to get through phases faster so that you don’t have time to make as many mistakes is all.
Hopefully this helps. I only have my Ele fully ascended (I’ve gotten two armor chests in about two weeks to put onto my work in progress Chrono) and it’s by far my most played class, and I remember stressing over ascended gear to get into fractals. If you want to, grind AB for it, but by no means do you have to rush. Like I said, it’s only necessary for higher fractals, but taking it slow forces you to learn the fractals anyways so you can get better as you go!
Good luck!