Some questions about mesmer
You can craft Ascended weapons (or get them as drops, cant buy on TP), not much better than Exotic, but a little bit. Stay away from the wvw weapons you can buy for badges, you can’t salvage the sigils from them.
http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Ascended_weapon
http://www.guildwars2hub.com/guides/crafting/how-craft-ascended-weapons
I wouldn’t think about ascended armour yet – the stat increase is minimal so save the gold. Also if you’re not 100% certain on rune choices in your armour sets, you could end up in the unpleasant situation of having to overwrite expensive runes if they are stuck in ascended armour (the upgrade extractor is ludicrously overpriced).
What are your favourite builds? Power, condition or hybrid? Shattering illusions frequently or leaving them up?
Whatever you’re running, I would aim for ascended trinkets (from wvw vendor and fractals), exotic armour, and eventually ascended weapons. The ascended backpiece will set you back a fair bit of gold even with the cheapest options from the mystic forge.
You can’t really go wrong with crafting say, berserker ascended weapons, because it’s almost guaranteed to find a use in one way or another.
But do please buy all your armour off the TP (or craft it) so that you are able to salvage for the runes in the future if necessary. Nothing worse than having expensive upgrades being stuck in unsalvageable armour…
The temples in Orr all have exotic armor sets, each temple has different stats, and you can buy them for just karma. No you can’t salvage them, but they are basically free so…
Ascended is totally over priced, and if you decide to change your build, you’re out all that money.
….and that’s about it for gear. There is no stat grind, it’s a cosmetic look grind.
Once you have your gear, it’s all about finding your favorite build, and then you can get ascended if your really, really want a small edge over the other players.
Playing the engineer “as intended” is simply not viable.