Guild Wars 2

I’m running an engineer with berserker stats. Rifle and some accessories are ascended, rest exotic.

I recently figured that it’d be probably better to change my stats to something with defense, like valkyrie.
Especially for WVW and some big world bosses, who you can’t critically damage.

My problem is now that it’s enormously time consuming to get the ascended parts.

So one question is, will there be maybe a way to change the armor stats like you can with the legendary weapons? With gems or a big stack of gold? I’m not talking about legendary armor, which should be king of expenditure of time. It’s acquisition idea just doesn’t coincide with my style of play.

The other question is, if it’s a good idea to run with a 6 part exotic valkyrie armor set and an ascended berserker rifle and berserker accessories some exo, some asco.
Simply asked, is mixing stats useful on the field of battle or would I waste some precious fire power doing so?

dont go valk
go knight