Gearing in Guild Wars 2 is simultaneously really nice and also very frustrating. It’s nice because there is no uber tier of stats locked behind dungeons or raids, and you can get all of it through the trading post or crafting. Plus, since the level cap never goes up, your gear is never invalidated when the next expansion comes out. But it’s also frustrating because there are a lot of stat combinations out there, and most of them are garbage – or at least very niche. It also has the problem that power gear is very easy and cheap to get, but gear that’s optimal for condition damage, healing, and support is expensive and sometimes locked behind currency grinds.
While writing my piece on easy builds for solo play, I thought I would include a paragraph on how to get cheap gear, but I quickly realized that this is an important topic that not every casual Guild Wars 2 player probably knows a lot about, so I spun it off into its own article. I hope it helps someone learn something!
For expansion content, you will want to be kitted out in at least exotic (orange) armor and weapons. Don’t worry about your aquatic stuff; you will use that so little that the free lowbie stuff they throw at you for leveling up will do just fine. We will get to jewelry in a second.
Exotic weapons can all slot sigils, and exotic armor can all slot runes. Rune effects stack, so you always want to have six of the same. There is a lot of min/maxing that can go on there, and certain hard-to-get slotables can get very pricey, but honestly, if you’re here looking for easy solo build advice, just pick some reasonably priced sigils and runes from the trading post that look like they fit with your build, and pop them in. Something is better than nothing. I would recommend Superior Rune of the Eagle for power builds, and Superior Rune of Balthazar or Afflicted for condition, but there are others that work just as well.
As far as stats go, by and large, if you want to do a power DPS build, you want gear with Berserker’s stats all the way down. Berserker’s gear has Power (direct damage) Precision (crit chance) and Ferocity (crit power) stats, weighted toward Power. Assassin’s is a similar set, weighted toward Precision instead of Power, so if you look at your build and you see things activating on crit, you probably want to be as close to 100% crit chance as possible.
As mentioned before, Berserker’s is cheap; you can usually walk into the trading post and walk out with a full set of exotic armor and weapons for probably less than 15 gold. Even if you’re new, if you’ve leveled 1-80, you probably have that much sitting in your bank in crafting mats if nothing else. There are named versions of Berserker armor from drops that tend to be cheaper than the crafted ones. Those are Zhed’s for light, Nika’s for medium, and Devona’s for heavy. Same for weapons, but that’s a long list, so just check the wiki or just put Power, Precision, and Ferocity in the AH filter and you should find something. If you’re feeling too squishy with all Berserker’s, try mixing in a few piece of Marauder’s, which is like Berserker’s that trades some damage stats for vitality.
For condi DPS builds, you probably want Viper’s. There are a number of other condi armors, like Rampager’s and Sinister’s, so maybe glance at a build guide before you put too much effort in, but Viper’s is the most widely used. Viper’s gear sports bonuses to Condition Damage (damage over time), Power (direct damage), Expertise (condition duration), and Precision (crit chance).
Actual condi gear is expensive, so stat-selectable armor is your friend. First, search the trading post for the Ice Golem’s Maw Box. This is a super cheap box that drops from some popular strike missions that contains a choice of light, medium, or heavy head gear, that you can then assign any stat combo to. It is also super ugly, so be prepared to hide or transmute it. If you happen to be playing a Charr, look up Blood Legion Soldier Helm Box or Charr War Mask Box. Same story there, but even cheaper, the only downside being that they are Charr only.
Next, look up Shoulders of the Ebon Vanguard Choice Chest. These are a little more expensive, but should be significantly less than actual Viper’s armor. Again, this lets you pick a stat-selectable shoulder piece of any weight.
As for the rest of the gear, I recommend watching the group finder for a Verdant Brink night meta group. Yes, all the way back to the first expansion. The Airship Parts currency can be traded for stat-selectable Bladed armor, all except the chest piece. The chest only comes as a reward for downing all of the meta bosses, which happens fairly often, but not every time.
Exotic Viper’s weapons used to be pretty pricey, but since Secrets of the Obscure brought us the Abomination set, which drop somewhat frequently from events in Amnytas and all have Viper’s stats. They’re still way more expensive than cheap Zerker’s, but that’s the price you pay for playing a condition build for some reason.
Jewelry tends to be where a lot of the cost of gearing a character ends up coming from. I actually tend to go straight for ascended (pink) jewelry because exotics tend to be so expensive that the currency grind I’m about to talk about tends to be more worth it for me. That said, Berserker jewelry is, again, dead simple to get: Simply spend some laurels at the vendor in Lion’s Arch. You probably have heaps of them from the old login rewards system, or if you’re newer than that, you can buy them with Wizard’s Favor from doing dailies.
But if you want ascended jewelry stats that aren’t for sale on the Laurel vendor, your best bet is to pick a Living World map you like, check its vendor to be sure they have the particular piece of jewelry you need, and start roaming around gathering its unique map currency. Renown heart vendors generally sell a package of a few of the currency for their map. Bitterfrost Frontier tends to be a popular one, since Winterberries can be gathered from nodes visible on the map as well as Icebound Chests. Don’t go in and expect get enough Winterberries all in one go; I tend to just default to gathering the easy berries when I can’t decide what to do, so they’re stocked up for when I need new gear.
Level 80 back pieces are similarly hard to get ahold of outside of currency grinds, so the same advice applies there. However, if you just want to slot something and don’t mind it being subpar, each crafting profession can make a series of upgradeable backpacks that cap out at level 78 exotic with 400 of that craft. Lunar New Year backpacks are also buyable on the auction hall if you have a few more coins to splash around.
It should be noted that ascended gear is account bound, so if you decide you’re done playing your condi Engineer, you can throw all of her ascended gear into the bank and withdraw it on your condi necro.
Gear for healing and boon support builds tends to be just as expensive as Viper’s, so I recommend the above methods for getting stat-selectables for any of those builds. There are a number of different viable healing and support sets, so I recommend checking your friendly local meta build site for recommendations for those.
I also feel I should mention that Berserker’s and Viper’s are great DPS gear, but if you are primarily a solo open world player, or even if you just can’t choose a particular build, there is also something to be said for Celestial gear. Celestial gear has a little bit of all of the stats, which gives it decent power, condition, and survivability. There is a reason it’s the standard gear given to boosted characters. It’s a jack of all trades, master of none gear set. Celestial armor and weapons are pretty expensive, so go with the stat-selectable method above, but the ascended jewelry is available on the laurel vendor.
If you happen to have any ascended armor or weapons, perhaps from the Wizard’s Vault, but are sad that they aren’t in the stats that you want for your build, you’re in luck because you can actually stat change ascended gear for a small fee! Simply place your weapon or armor in the mystic forge along with an exotic inscription for the desired stats, 5 globs of ectoplasm, and an anthology of heroes (10 spirit shards from the mystic forge attendant).
Incidentally, if you didn’t know, while the legendary gear tier is considered higher than ascended, the only difference between the two is that legendary gear can be stat swapped freely at any time and is accessible to all characters on your account with that armor class or weapon proficiency; legendary stats are identical to ascended. So don’t go grinding raids or rifts hoping to get an edge.
Getting good gear in Guild Wars 2 can be a pain, but at least there are some shortcuts to getting it more quickly and easily if you know where to look. I hope new and casual players have learned something from this and that it makes gearing up a little less of a chore for someone!
Flameseeker Chronicles is one of Massively OP’s longest-running columns, covering the Guild Wars franchise since before there was a Guild Wars 2. Now penned by Tina Lauro and Colin Henry, it arrives on Tuesdays to report everything from GW2 guides and news to opinion pieces and dev diary breakdowns. If there’s a GW2 topic you’d love to see explored, drop ’em a comment!
