GW2 How To Gear Up Your Character After Level 80 PvE - Best Ways To Gear Up Fast In GW2

GW2 How To Gear Up Your Character After Level 80 PvE - Best Ways To Gear Up Fast In GW2

6/24/2022 10:33:24 AM

In this guide, we are going to provide guidance on how to gear up your GW2 character more efficiently by asking yourself a few basic questions and planning before you even start. This guide isn't only aimed at newer players, it's also meant for content creators. We are going to provide full details on all the gearing options here because there's a really well written guide on the wiki for gearing up a GW2 character.

HOW TO GEAR A CHARACTER IN GW2

GW2 Gearing Guide: How To Gear Up Your Character Efficiently After Level 80

Before we start this GW2 character gearing guide, we should define what efficiency is. Efficiency is the ability to produce an intended result like gearing up a character for pve in the way that results in the least waste of time effort and resources. So you have a fixed goal and you want to get there with minimal effort. Effectiveness on the other hand is producing the best result with a given amount of effort, so there's a slight but important difference. The process we suggest consist of four steps.

1. Defining Your Goals

The main question you should ask yourself first is what content to play especially in the long run. You'll probably want to at least have the option to do all kinds of content at some point and that's why many open world guides out there don't really provide very efficient builds for you because they are inflexible. They imply that your goal is to never do anything besides open world pve because if they assumed anything else, they'd have to change the builds they suggest. You just have to look for an open world guide on any elite spec and you'll see several of them. It's clear that that approach is not very useful in guild wars 2 especially since most optimal content doesn't even require a dedicated build to complete it quite effectively. Instead, it makes more sense to use raid or fractal builds as a starting point and gradually build for survivability until you're comfortable in openworld. This means that instead of buying a full set of trailblazer armor for 80 gold or more as the main gear set only by the large pieces one by one and only when you feel like they are needed. The smaller pieces of armor only provide a very small fraction of stats compared to the chest amulets and weapons anyway. Aside from that basically every class has traits that makes you very survivable without changing your gear much or even at all. You'd be surprised how much of a difference trade choices can make.

As the third option you can always change your food and utility item for defensive attributes. These points do not only apply to full dps builds, they also apply to quickness or alacrity support builds in the very same way. They are very much sought after in any kind of content in open world and you're the hero of meta events if you do good damage and provide this support as well.

You might ask but what if I also want to do pvp? You should never expect to be able to run the same gear for pvp and pve in any mmo, because the requirements for these two game modes are vastly different. This is reinforced by the fact that in guild wars 2 you only carry over your pve gear to one aspect of pvp and that is world versus world. In structured pvp, your gear is standardized anyway so world vs world is the only mode you would be making a strong compromise for. That said unless you want to go for competitive and min max world versus world over longer time periods, you can use the same approach as you do in open mode. Start with a full pve damage build and increase utility and survivability gradually. Again, you can gain a lot of survivability by just changing some gear pieces traits and food.

2. Filler Exotic/Rare Gear

Once you define your goals, you can start actually gearing up. Looking at budget options in exotic or rare quality as a filler for your final build. Since ascendant and legendary gear takes time to acquire, you need something you can use until you get it a mix of exotic and rare gear is totally fine for that since the difference in effective power is not that large, usually between 10 and 20% depending on the build. Only higher tier fractals require ascended gear due to agony resistance. Problem mode is not gonna make or break a build if you don't fully max out your crit chance or condition duration. You'll have a harder time doing that in exotic or rare gear anyway. So what you can do is you can go with budget options from the trading post. Power builds can buy cheap berserker gear of the trading post as cheap named items for all three armor weights and weapons exist. So it makes sense to use a power build for starters even if you intend to go for a full condition build afterwards. This way you'll only need around 20 gold for the entire gear set.

Pair the zerka gear with eagle runes and switches of accuracy and fire so you can get close to the crit cap even with exotic gear. Armor including runes costs around 5 gold in total weapons will be around 1-3 gold depending on which ones you need, trinkets in exotic will cost a bit more which is why we use rare quality stuff since it only costs a fraction of it. You'll need berserker's stuff on level 80 in rare, make sure to use the correct filters. The back item you can craft easily yourself, just go for a crafting profession backpack like the elegant weaponsmiths backpack. If you don't have that crafting line leveled, you can also buy one of the trading posts, you can then put a ruby jewel into all of the trinkets at the cost of another three gold. This way the entire gear set will cost you as much as one or two pieces of alternative gear and you'll be able to do your fair share of damage and instant content already if you do some rotation practice. That's because other stats like viper divine or ritualist are a lot more expensive. The cost efficient option for those is to farm stat selectable armor like verdant brink, meta for the bladed armor boxes if you have heart of thorns. There's also a few stat selectable pieces from the trading post like the ice golem small box for around 1 gold which are often cheaper than buying the standard exotic pieces of their respective attribute combination.

3. Getting Ascended Gear

When you have your interim set up, you can look at efficient ways to acquire ascended items for the instance pve setup of your choice which brings me to obtaining ascended gear. Ascended gear doesn't have to cost much, it often just takes a little bit of time to acquire some pieces you can buy for relatively cheap, the ascended amulet vial of salt for example doesn't cost much more than any exotic piece for trailblazer, viper or ritualist armor like 20 gold and is stat selectable while providing a large chunk of your stats. There are also weapon collections for the elite specs, these take a little bit of time and effort but they reward you with ascendant weapons of all types with comparably low effort. The only downside is that you need to level their respective class to 80 to unlock them. And since the tasks they require include stuff you often do anyway once you're level 80, they are a great way to obtain your first assigned weapons. But trinkets make up for almost half of your entire stats which is why these should be the first thing to focus on. Stat selectable ascended trinkets come from living world zones like bitter frost frontier and dragonfall, both provide options to consistently farm their currencies and allow you to get a full set of trinkers within a few days. The winterberry farm and bitter frost can be done with multiple characters on the same day while mistborn modes farm and dragonfall can be done on one character repeatedly. Bloodstone fan is also worth a mention here since it allows you to reset the stats on all the items you get there, but it's slower than the other options. These living world chapters cost a bit of gold or gems but they are definitely worth it for the easy access to ascended trinkets, so getting them in the long run. With your interim setup you can also do strike missions raids or lower tier fractals which will award you with currency that allows you to buy ascended gear, that's also stat selectable. They further have chances to drop ascended armor or weapon boxes directly even though you shouldn't rely on those since the drop chances are rather small. Fractals also reward you with pristine relics which you can use to buy ascended trinkets too.

4. Efficient Survivability

Building for survivability and efficient wave open world includes a few essential elements and can be done through various means, but it always focuses on outlasting or avoiding incoming damage. That can be done by increasing toughness vitality or damage taken reductions by generating large amounts of self-healing or simply by avoiding damage in the first place, for example by using lots of evades or being at range. Guild Wars 2 builds are quite complex, so it's hard to wrap your head around them right now, but that's what good build guides are for. Overall, which way of building for survivability is more effective depends on the class and it's hard to give general guidance. But most meta battle open world guides give you several alternatives.

You should try to identify traits that have a worthwhile trade-off for the loss and damage for whenever you need survivability. Use the vindicator traits for runner of death and vessels of the empire as an example. Forerunner of death makes you ideal 15 increased damage for 15 seconds after dodging and also applies vulnerability. So it can yield an even higher damage increase. Vessels on the empire on the other hand doesn't provide that, but it provides area protection might and also extends all booms on allies by two seconds. It therefore does not only provide a large amount of survivability through permanent 33% strike damage reduction but it also has a good chunk of group utility through boons built in and also boosts damage if you don't have other external sources of might. A trade-off that can be very much worth it if you're struggling to survive or want to help allies around you. You can also swap armor pieces, but there's no real point if you can also save all the money by just swapping out traits or utility skills one by one until you're comfortable. You can do the very same thing with stun brakes, blocks, condition cleanse, evades, etc. Before you look at exchanging gear, have a look at your weapon or utility options and try to find something there instead. That also leads to you learning the class better instead of just exchanging gear and button meshing randomly.