Guild Wars 2

Vayne.8563:

HoT is pretty much all end game content, so those who used to run dungeons find HoT more profitable. I’d rather run an hour dragon stand map than a 15 minute dungeon.

World bosses are still done. Whether they’re relevant or not depends on what you like to do. People still to Teq. Big guilds still do Triple Trouble. There’s even a guild dedicated to doing Dry Top.

But there’s more action in the HoT zones as far as end game stuff than the old zones, partly because it is new content.

People who raid seem to like raids, but I’m not one of them.

Can’t tell you about all servers, but I’m up in Tier 1 and there’s plenty of WvW activity.

Oh yeah, fractals are more rewarding than they used to be and a lot of people run them now because of it. Try a fractal group instead of a dungeon group.

I’m glad to hear there’s a lot of endgame content in HoT. The game felt kind of deserted to me when I logged in earlier but I guess that makes sense since I was still at the old content and people are mostly doing the new HoT content now.

As for WvW all of my characters are in Gandara so that should not be a problem

And it’s great to hear fractals are more popular now cause I really used to enjoy those. Not going to try them right away now because I don’t have updated builds and don’t remember the specifics of each fractal but definitely happy to hear this.

I actively played GW2 from launch until a few months before the release of HoT, then quit because I got bored from the lack of new content. I haven’t looked at GW2 much since then so I don’t really know what the game is like nowadays, but I’m feeling motivated again so right now I am contemplating whether I want to buy HoT and get back into the game or not. Logged in today for the first time in a long time and noticed a few things:

- Is nobody doing dungeons anymore? Before HoT there were always lots of people running dungeons, especially dungeons with fast/easy paths like AC and CoF were crowded, while now it seems hard to even find enough people to fill a party with for those dungeons.

- What are raids like, are they expansive and challenging enough to keep an active player busy for months or do raids quickly get boring?

- Are world bosses still relevant?

- Do people still actively participate in WvW?

Basically I’m just trying to get an idea of what the endgame life in this game is like nowadays and whether it’s worth it for me to buy HoT and spend a lot of time catching up or if I will only find myself in an endgame situation that will get me bored before the end of summer again

Rule #9: Don’t bother focusing classes like mesmers and thieves, they will just stealth away anyways. Instead, it’s better to focus targets which are more stationary, like bunker guardians.

Dodging for me is the only thing that’s keeping me alive in PvE. That is against World bosses, as well as in dungeons and fractals. I even trait extra Vigor access if possible with the profession I’m playing (and if it makes sense in the build ofc) so I can stay alive longer. It’s essential in difficult PvE content to dodge knockdowns, stuns, or skills that will generally one-shot you. Please, don’t go complain on the forum because you managed to find one boss with a skill that cannot be dodged, there are many bosses with skills like that, just like there are bosses with projectile attacks that cannot be reflected.

So I have this 80 mesmer with exotic assassins gear which I used to play a lot near release but haven’t touched for at least a year. I played it again in dungeons a couple of times today (with a build from metabattle.com – http://metabattle.com/wiki/Build:Mesmer_-_S/S_/F_/P) and really enjoyed it. As of what I have read/seen so far, mesmers like to take assassins gear to get as close to 100% crit chance as possible (for 100% crit reflects I guess?), even though assassins is known to have slightly less dps than berserkers. Now I happen to have more than enough materials/gold to craft a new set of ascended gear, but I noticed that with ascended assassins gear+traits+runes+consumables+buffs (discipline, spotter etc)+fury, crit chance goes way above 100%. This is obviously a lot of wasted precision that could have been much more useful as power. So basically, I’m wondering if it makes sense to calculate how much precision I need to get exactly 80% crit chance (taking into account consumables, traits, runes and buffs) so that I can determine the ideal mix of ascended berserker/assassins gear to get as close as possible to that amount of precision (for 80% crit chance). That way, crit chance will be 100% with fury up, but no precision will be wasted.

Also, I heard from a speedrunning group that crit chance also seems to scale with your target’s level, and therefore doesn’t stay true to the tooltip. For example, if the tooltip would say you have 90% crit chance but you’re fighting a lvl 82 mob, your real crit chance would be lower than 90%. Does anyone have more info on this?

Thanks

I was going through my bank and inventories and I noticed I have a lot of experience boosters, namely:
- 2x improved experience booster (100%, 1 hour ea)
- Some more regular experience boosters (50%,1 hour ea)
- 6x celebration boosters (=100%, 1 hour ea)
The regular/improved boosters should stack with the celebration boosters, and I can buy the following exp boosters to stack them with even more:
- Killstreak Booster (100%)
- Laureate Booster (30%)
- Consumables (25%)
- Guild exp Banner (10%)

As of what I read on the wiki, these should all stack, meaning I could get myself 365% extra exp from kills for at least 2 hours, and still about 200% for 3-4 hours after that. I have never tried lvling a character through only killing monsters but I heard it’s the fastest way to level a character. I have this lvl 20something warrior which I’d really like to level to 80, I’m wondering if anyone can give me an indication of how far I could get with these experience boosters and where specifically I should kill stuff (needs to be a place with a nearly endless supply of monsters to keep the killstreak booster going). Thanks

I’m experiencing a similar problem, when I try to sell something on the TP the list of buyers either loads extremely slow or it doesn’t load at all. If it does load eventually and I try to sell something, it says ‘an error has occured’. Buying stuff works fine. This is annoying though, my inventory is filling up with reasonably valuable stuff I’d like to sell instead of destroy to make room for new items but can’t do that when the TP doesn’t work…

Cause story is so difficult….

Randomly came across this post just now and I’m wondering, has anything been implemented to fix this by now or is it still an issue?

I recently returned to GW2 after not playing since early summer this year. I remember back then I always tried to kill all significant world bosses like Tequatl, Jungle Wurm etc. daily, which would usually be no problem. However, I tried some world bosses for the first time today since I returned and it was a complete disaster. For example, just tried Tequatl. Several months ago it would be crowded there, with several people tagging up and trying to direct the mass into organised groups to get a smooth kill on Tequatl. Tried Tequatl just now and there weren’t nearly as many people as there used to be, only 1 guy tagged up, and the whole group just died before Tequatl even got below 95% health, then everyone just kinda quit. What happened? Did they nerf the rewards? Did the bosses get buffed? Did everyone quit GW2? Or did I just get bad luck with the groups?

Hi there,
I’m a bit confused as to what I should be doing with gear I receive but don’t need myself. I googled for this and some people say salvage, others say Mystic Forge, I would really like to know what is the best thing to do when my goal is currently to get a precursor (as I have all the other gear/runes etc I could possibly want), or if the chance of getting a precursor from MF’ing spare gear is just abysmal, the goal will be to simply get as much gold out of my spare gear as possible so I can eventually buy myself a precursor.

So basically:
What do I do with blue gear?
What do I do with green gear?
What do I do with yellow gear?
What do I do with exotics?
And if the answer to any of the above questions is salvage, which salvaging kit do I use?

Thanks

Selver.1307:

All I have time for, correct me if I am wrong anyone and please have a great day! I tried to be generalistic, but I do have a wvwvw/dd bias. Sorry

Good luck1

Thanks for adding all these explanations, they were very helpful. I overlooked the issue that there’s a limit on how long a single post can be, so I moved the compilation of the different explanations to the 3rd/4th message. It would be fantastic if you could remove your post and repost it so the collection of different explanations moves up to the 2nd post. Sorry for that…..But thanks a lot for taking the time to write up some tactics for beating those 3 builds!

Shatter Mesmer
Selver.1307:

We all but hard counter. Dodge their zerker, their unload spam phantasm, and get out of or evade frame from sb#3 the lockdown from their sword, it’s a setup for their pistol whip equivalent (you wouldn’t believe I have a mesmer, I suck at remembering skill names of their class because I haven’t seriously played mine in over a year), or their full wad of burst. Use their clones/phants to gain stealth. pistol offhands can daze once on a relatively short cd, and it can bounce off of you to allies or them to you. mainly just keep pressure and avoid a lockdown of any sort when dealing with them even thinking about strolling by casually. their steal is useful to use during a stealth to open with, or before popping a refuge, the aegis is great against push/pull. be wary of them being annoying like you with all the in combat juking they are capable of.

Terrorsquad.2349:

The Shatter mesmer part is a bit.. incomplete.

Dodge/avoid/block/kite away from:
- GS 2 (the closer the mesmer is, the more it will bounce and the more damage it will do. Also, this is unblockable. If it lands, we’re looking at +7k damage in 1second)
Most experienced mesmers will combo this with Shatter F1 to have utmost dps. We’re looking at +13k damage if the full combo lands and 3clones)
- GS 4 (Is the animation you’re waiting for. This is where the Mesmer holds up his GS in the air and spawns a spinning clone dealing damage and cripple. Dodge 0.5 – 1.0s after the Mesmer is performing this skill to avoid the criple and damage. Note: aslong you don’t kill this clone, he’ll remain doing the spinning attack every 5-8s (?)
- GS 5 (hard to dodge but easy to know when it’s going to be casted. Mostly at start to land their GS2/GS4 OR at the end of it to land their Staff 5 Chaos Storm)

When Mesmer is in staff, there is not much of a burst here (except staff 3 but has no animation) but there is some condition pressure here due the auto attack, Chaos Armor (Staff 4 and/or Staff 5 + staff 2 combo out of it) and Chaos Storm (the noisy field dazing you, giving you conditions when standing in and giving the Mesmer random boons while he stands in it.

All in all, the way to counter/outlive mesmer is simply by dodging his GS/shatter bursts.
If you can dodge GS2 and GS4, there’s is not much to worry about.
The Shatters, however, could still apply pressure. We are talking about F1 power shatter, which deals a great amount of damage the more clones the Mesmer has up.

If you see the mesmer has +2 clones up and tries to get to you, be carefull.
Their shatters can be dodged/blocked!

This is how you counter:
D/D Elementalist
Selver.1307:

Bait out their cantrips as best you can, play defensively when they are in fire until you can get past drake’s breath and fire grab. Watch out for RTL and updraft (sometimes combo’d) in air. Earth they can aa while not facing you, and earthquake is the skill to watch out for here. Churning Earth is easy enough to avoid, but careful of the cripple. Their 3 in earth is a projectile that will immobilize you and they can jump to you after it lands, it’s often a good setup for earthquake (the knockdown). If you can anticipate water, go ham, go ham and go hard. keep poison applied best you can, and try and get your steal from them off as soon as you can after they hit water. Once they switch to water and out of it is your ONLY (against a good dd) time frame to kill them. If they get water back up they may have a utility up again and you’ll have to chew through at least 33% of their HP again (if you can survive that long again). Keeping protection (and to another extent regen and vigor) off of them helps tremendously they can have great uptime on boons in general

Celestial Rifle Engineer
?

Bunker Guardian
?

Terrormancer Necro
?

Condi Ranger
?

Power Ranger
?

Hambow Warrior
?

S/D Thieves
?

D/P Thieves
Selver.1307:

you just have to keep them from getting that bp>hs combo off. I have found a great use in pistol offhand 4, scorpion wire, traited steal, to do this. They will get stealths off for sure. you can too. keeping blind off can be problematic, especially saving dodges for their inevitable stealth. it is thief v thief though – go play dp and get your butt handed to you and see how it happened. Once you get the hang of dp it’s stupid strong and you almost don’t want to go back to dd. I miss cnd too much though. That comment goes for sd too, those are mainly dodging larcenous, CnD, and the third aa chain, and keeping track of their return circle.

I recently started actively playing PvP in this game and I’ve been trying to learn several different professions, so that if I eventually pick one profession to main I know how to counter the rest. I’m surprised by the lack of thief PvP guides that are being made. I mean, there are a couple of good ±10 minute videos explaining typical trait builds, skill choices etc, while for most other professions I have been able to find very lengthy guides that do not only state the obvious but also go very much in-depth on how to fight other professions and really play your character to it’s highest potential. My main issue with thief (S/D and D/P) is currently that thief is really squishy compared to most other professions, because of which perfect dodging, disengaging etc is even more crucial on the thief than it is on any other profession. Still I cannot find any in-depth guide explaining how to fight other classes as a thief. I understand that thief is not really meant to go 1v1 against other classes but more to decap points, finish off squishies etc, but everyone will inevitably find themselves in a 1v1 situation with another player every now and then where being able to kill that player or at least survive for a little while to contest/defend a point can be very benificial for your team.

I’ve found several topics where people asked a similar question, but there isn’t a complete guide on how to counter other professions as thief anywhere. I think it would be very helpful for the thief community to have one of those guides as thief can be a difficult profession to learn. I’d love to write this, but I’m a rubbish thief, so that would be somewhat…pointless. So I tried to think of a way in which veteran thieves can share their knowledge about countering other professions in an understandable and helpful way, and came up with the following:

How about we make a list of common professions/builds people will face in sPvP, and experienced thieves can then post a reply explaining their thought processes when they fight a specific profession/build. I will then copy-paste any well-written explanations in this first post (of course giving you credit for what you wrote), so we will eventually end up with a list of explanations on what you should be paying attention to when facing a specific profession/build. If enough experienced thieves contribute to this, I think we will be able to create a great guide that will help a lot of new thieves.

Please look at the third message in this topic for a compilation of the different explanations people have added so far (I initally overlooked the issue that there’s a limit on how long posts can be so it’s in the 3rd post)

I suggested some professions/builds to start with. Of course if you would like to cover another build that is not listed here, feel free to do so, and I will add it to the list. It’s probably a good idea if we focus on the most common thief builds in sPvP, so currently (December 2014) S/D and D/P. Again, if you would like to cover a different build, feel free to do so.

If all experienced thieves who read this would pick one build they know a lot about and write a short 5-minute section on how to counter it, we will get a great guide to help out new thieves in no-time. Thanks for reading, I hope you will consider contributing to this project\

Again, please refer to the third post for a compilation of all the different build. thanks

Teutos.8620:

Ranked is designed to be the more competitive queue.
The biggest difference is, that in ranked queue, you get in addition some points to show off in the leaderboard.

In unranked you have three additional map options: Skyhammer, Courtyard and Spirit Watch.

Both are using an individual MMR-System, and therefore you should be competing in both with players at about your level of expertise.

I use unranked if I mess around with a more unfamiliar profession or build.

Wait, are you saying that you can’t play in Skyhammer, Courtyard and Spirit Watch in ranked mode? (I’m new, never played ranked before)

I’d like to point out that there is a potential for profit with a big prize pool. Let’s say (hypothetically speaking) they organize a big GW2 tournament with a 2 million $ prizepool and another 500.000$ in additional expenses (like advertising), so costing them 2.5m$ total. With some good advertising a tournament with a 2m$ prizepool is definitely going to get a lot of attention in the gaming world. GW2 currently costs 50$ I think. So if the popularity gained from that big prizepool leads to 50.000 copies of GW2 sold after the tournament (in addition to the amount of copies they would normally sell) they will make a profit. 50.000 really isn’t impossible to reach. Take for example another popular MMORPG with a PvP scene that everyone knows: WoW. I don’t know the exact numbers but they have millions of active players. a 2m$ tournament is bound to persuade at least 50.000 of them to buy GW2 and try it out. So essentially what I’m saying is that a tournament with a big prizepool can be a great investment for Anet

Terrorsquad.2349:

Here’s the PvP comminty’s fb: https://www.facebook.com/groups/GuildWars2PvP/
Feel free to join!

Unfortunately I’m not an active Facebook user, but I will give it a try if I can’t find people to play with within the next week or two. Thanks for linking it!

Benjamin.8237:

I’m not sure whether the guilds are recruiting, but there is a selection of large open pvp guilds as well as smaller teams. [Revo], [TPvP] and [Zeus] seem to be open and friendly, but I can’t vouch for any of them. Msg them if you see them. Also if someone plays well, or you got on with them, just add them to your contacts or directly invite them after a game. Eventually you will end up with a large pool of people to play with.

Can’t find anything about TPvP. Zeus seems to be for experienced players only (which I am not). Revo seems promising, will try to contact their leaders and see if it’s a good guild for me. Thanks for helping

uberkingkong.8041:

Are there any PvP guilds out there?
No

Should there be?
Yes

Teams that run under a guild name I don’t consider communities or guilds.
You cant join them, they just showing off there team.

GASM is probably the closest you’ll get to a community.
Being OP is hard I think use to be a community.

Sad to hear there aren’t that many dedicated PvP guilds. Thanks for the suggestions, I will try to contact GASM too see if it’s a good guild for me and if they’re recruiting.

Hi there,
I recently returned to GW2 after a long break. I have focused mainly on sPvP the past few weeks. I’m currently trying to learn to play several different professions in unranked soloQ, having a lot of fun and getting great results so far, however, just playing soloQ game after soloQ game is getting somewhat boring. In other MMORPG’s I actively PvP’ed in like WoW I used to have a network of several dozens of players who were basically always up for a few PvP games, but in my past few weeks of actively PvP’ing in GW2 I haven’t found a single other person to play with. I’m always politely trying to start conversations with the players I’m matched up with/against, hoping to make new friends and find some people to queue with while talking on TS/Skype. Not even for the wins, but simply for the sake of breaking my monotonous chain of soloQ’s. I’ve been looking for PvP focused guilds ingame and in the ‘Looking for’ section of this forum and searched Google for a bit, but I cannot find a single guild that revolves around PvP, just PvE and server-specific WvW guilds. Of course I’m not expecting to become part of a big network of PvP’ers in my first weeks of playing PvP in this game but I’m really wondering if there are any guilds, communities, anything, out there which aim to bring GW2 sPvP players together so they can form temporary teams to queue with (or even serious teams to play ranked with, though I am not ready for that level of play yet), ask questions to fellow PvP enthusiasts, find specific professions to scrim against 1v1 (which would be incredibly helpful to me atm since there are a few professions I really need to practice fighting against, but I can’t find anyone to scrim with), hang out on TS, etc.
Thanks

Hi there,
I started playing GW2 a while ago, I’ve been spending quite some time in PvE and WvW, but recently I fell in love with sPvP. I main a S/D thief in sPvP, currently with a winrate of 77% out of roughly 100 unranked soloQ games. This however seems to be a little bit misleading as my opponents so far have been extremely inexperienced (capping a single points with 3 or 4 guys even though there isn’t an enemy around, that kind of players) and I have lots of PvP experience from other MMORPG’s like WoW, allowing me to steamroll any average player around the same rank as me. My biggest weakness is that I do not yet have a lot of knowledge of all different professions and their builds because I am still reasonably new to this game, making it difficult to anticipate my opponent’s next moves. I want to join a sPvP focused guild to find friends to play with as soloQ’ing all the time is getting boring, but also to find specific professions/builds to scrim against and discuss afterwards how I can improve my plays vs that specific profession/build. I also enjoy solo roaming in WvW and would love to get some experience in small group WvW with a guild, so if the guild does that as well that would be great but not required, sPvP is the main focus for me. I’m based on the Gandara server, can move if I find a guild I reallyreallyreally like on a different server.

I am 19 years old. I live in the Netherlands. I have a mic and I can use TS, Skype etc. I can play for about 2-3 hours every day during weekdays (usually around 6-9 GMT) and 5 hours per day during weekends.

Thanks for reading

I only recently started playing sPvP actively. I’m currently really bad so I’m trying to practice a lot in practice mode (custom arenas/hotjoin). Sometimes I do really well, but most of the time I just get completely destroyed in fights. I started paying attention to the finishers of the people who kill me, and I noticed that the vast majority of people who kill me have a high-rank finisher like Dragon or Phoenix. I know there isn’t any matchmaking in practice mode, but as it is named practice mode, I would expect it to be a place where inexperienced players who are new to the GW2 PvP scene can face off to practice and improve instead of being instakilled by seasoned veterans. I only just got to the Deer rank so naturally fighting a Dragon rank player won’t turn out well for me. I’m having some trouble understanding why you would need to practice in practice mode if you already have at least 1000+ sPvP matches played, you’d learn more from fighting people on your own skill level in ranked/unranked games instead of stomping noobs in practice mode, right? I’m not sure how the matchmaking in unranked games are as I have only played one or two of them, but I don’t feel like I can be useful to a team yet and I definitely want to practice some more because of that, but getting steamrolled by Dragon rank players is getting frustrating. Why are so many high-ranked players playing practice mode, and is it acceptable for a noob like me to go into unranked games even though I might ruin games for my team?

I have recently returned to GW2 after a 1 year break. I have 4 lvl 80’s but never played sPvP before. I tried it out for the first time earlier this week and it seems to be really fun, however, I absolutely don’t have a clue what I’m doing, because of which my team usually gets steamrolled. I’m currently playing a S/D thief, which as of what I’ve heard is already very difficult to play compared to other builds. I think the biggest problem is that I hardly know any builds of professions other than thief, so when I enter a fight I don’t know what to expect. My typical fight looks like this: I use infiltrator’s strike to enter a fight, run around a little trying to dodge as much stuff as possible dealing absolutely no damage whatsoever to my opponents even though I’m constantly hitting them, then get knocked down or stunned with my stunbreak (shadowstep) on cooldown and then instantly bursted down with some attack I don’t know. Currently I just try to make myself as useful as possible for my team by decapping unguarded points and participating in as many fights as possible, but I still feel like a huge liability to my team because of the fact that I regularly die before I even get to swing my weapon at the opponent that killed me me. Of course I still have a lot to learn about S/D thief, but I think the main issue here is that as I said, I really don’t know what every profession is capable of. I looked at the skills of all professions and typical trait builds, but it’s pretty much impossible for me to memorize it, let alone adapt to the endless amount of different weapon and trait combinations that can be used. Where do I start? I feel like just looking up skills of every profession is not nearly enough to remember them under pressure during a fight. How did you learn it? Is it a good idea to make one character of every profession and play them in sPvP a few times to get the hang of it? Or will it come with time if I just keep playing more sPvP on my S/D thief? Are there any tutorials out there which explain how to (generally) counter each profession? Thanks

Silv.9207:

In my guild, we use that build:

http://gw2skills.net/editor/?fVAQJAWSl0ApVo1CxRI0ENBFBl9LS/6xOBLYCXFAA-T1CDABPcIAoRlAsvA8XQiRVCtU6JlyAHUCCwRAIH1UC4BAoiuASBYiwI-w

Thx for the reply! I’ve indeed heard a lot of positive things about the healway build, but I’ve also heard it’s not viable anymore because of recent changes to boons (again, I haven’t played for almost a year, I don’t know exactly which changes). Is there anyone who can tell me if this build is still viable or not?

Hi there,
I recently started playing my guardian in WvW a lot. I only play WvW in small groups (2-4 with friends, up to 10 ppl with guild). I don’t solo roam, and I rarely find myself in a big zerg. I don’t have a very specific role in these groups, we usually just run around in borderlands taking small objectives. Until now I’ve been running with a full berserker PvE build, but I think it’s time I switch to something more WvW appropriate. I’ve been looking for a good build for a few days now but I’m having a hard time telling which builds are up to date and suitable for small group play. I found a sticky on this forum (https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/professions/guardian/Guide-World-Vs-World-The-Guardian-and-You) which has a section on small group play. I’ve read that the healway build isn’t as good anymore as it used to be because of some changes to boons (I don’t know exactly what, I haven’t played gw2 in a long time), is this true? For the other two builds it mentions under the small group section, I’m a bit confused by the gear it suggests, which seems to be an unorganized mess of assassins, berserkers, knights, soldiers, and valkyrie gear. Is this on purpose or a mistake? I’d much rather keep it simple and mix 2, max 3 different stat sets. I’d prefer to have all of my trinkets berserkers as I have those ascended. Does anyone know a good build for me which is good for this playstyle and my preferences? Thank you for your time

Hi there,
I recently got my first two characters to 80, and I’m now faced with the challenge of getting enough gold to get the exotic gear, runes and sigils I need. I’ve looked all over the internet for this but I just can’t seem to be able to find something that works for me. I’m now doing like a daily dungeon routine (cof p1&p2, ta p1, HotW p1, and ac p1&p3), through which I earn a few gold a day, and some dungeon tokens which I can eventually turn into gear or some more gold. People also say that killing world bosses is good for making gold, but so far, after 5 hours of killing every world boss that is up, I’m averaging 40 silver profit per boss (which, with about 6 bosses killed per hour, doesn’t add up to much either). Other than that I haven’t really come across any gold making method that still works. All that’s left is ‘playing the trading post’, which I know nothing about, and that barely works without a good amount of starting gold. I’ve heard people run around with hundreds, possibly even over a thousand gold. How can I get there? (unexperienced player, not a lot of starting gold to play with, gem to gold exchange is not an option). Thank you for your time

Thanks guys! So I can just do that in any dungeon, and it doesn’t matter which level my alt is?

Hi there,
I want to level a low level mesmer to 80 fast, I heard it’s possible to run through dungeons, then switch to your low level just before the end so it gets the exp instead of your main character. But I’m wondering, is there a minimum level requirement to enter a dungeon? I’ve heard about people using this method on cof with low lvl characters, but as far as I’m concerned you need to be 75 to get in there. How does this work?

Hi there,
I am going to start playing gw2 again after not having played for about a year. I currently have a lvl 80 guardian in full exotic gear, and only 50 gold. Even though I had a great time playing my guardian, I’ve always wanted to have a mesmer, so this seems like a good moment to level and gear one. The problem is that a lot of new content has been added since I last played, way too much for me to read up on. I have been sitting with 2 questions for a while which I can’t find a good answer for:

1. I have 100% world completion on my guardian and I do not feel like doing all those zones over again. What’s a fast way to level my mesmer, considering I have only 50 gold and don’t want to spend any real money on anything? I remember about just running along with big groups in WvW, crafting, running dungeons on my guardian and changing to my mesmer right before the end, etc, which one is the best and most affordable nowadays?

2. I’ve been reading about this ascended gear, which wasn’t released yet when I last played. I can’t quite picture how difficult it is to obtain this gear. What would you advise me to do on my mesmer in terms of gearing up after it hits level 80?

I would be very grateful if someone could advise me on this, as it could potentially save me a lot of wasted time and effort. Thank you for your time