GW2 Endgame gearing guide

Basic info here but if you didn’t know how item tiers in GW2 work, this could be a useful primer. Items are tiered by color.

White (trash) < Blue (fine) < Green (masterwork) < Yellow (rare) < Orange (exotic) < Ascended (red-pink) < Purple (legendary)

Yes, unlike other MMOs, green is actually better than blue, shocking I know!

Our goal here is to get you from wherever you are to L80 full exotics with ascended backpieces and rings. Don’t even bother with legendary unless you have a lot of time and gold to waste!

When viewing items, you will see a bunch of names. A lot of it may not make sense but they are actually prefixes and suffixes determining the item’s stats.

Dominant stat = the stats out of the three that there tends to be more of.

Something to note: Berserker and Explorer are really popular affixes and will cost you a lot of money. People like glass cannon builds and finding rare items so they value crit damage and magic find highly. Ruby and Opal are also popular trinket affixes.

Top tier crafting mats are expensive, you can either salvage L68+ items for them or buy them from the trading post.

• Gossamer Scrap (trading post prices)
• Hardened Leather Section (trading post prices)
• Ancient Wood Log (trading post prices)
• Orichalcum Ore (trading post prices).

Gossamer and Orichalcum are some of the expensive top tier common crafting mats.

What salvage kit should you use?

• Crude (small chance for rares – 32 copper /15)
• Basic (10% chance for rares – 88 copper/25)
• Fine (15% chance for rares – 2 silver 88 copper/25)
• Journeyman (20% chance for rares – 8 silver/25)
• Master Salvage Kit (25% chance for rares – 15 silver 36 copper/25)
• Mystic Salvage Kit (25% chance for rares ~depends on gems to gold conversion).
• Black Lion Salvage Kit (50% chance for rares ~ depends on gems to gold conversion)

Players have had various theories and studies on these salvage kits. Some have reported no difference on getting gossamer/orichalcums from using Master/Mystic vs Crude salvage kits (10% chance regardless of the salvage kit used). If you have mystic forge stones to spare (the recent gold to gem ratio make them very expensive to purchase), you can make a mystic kit to save on inventory spaces since it has 250 uses.

To make a mystic salvage kit, you will need

• 1 Fine Salvage Kit (2 silver 88 copper)
• 1 Journeyman Salvage Kit (8 silver)
• 1 Master Salvage Kit (15 silver 36 copper)
• 3 Mystic Forge Stone (sold on the gems store 10 for 450 gems, roughly 60 silver per 3 stones)

Put these into the Mystic forge in Lion’s Arch or WvW maps should yield you a Mystic Salvage Kit with 250 uses.

Now, for L68+ rares and exotic, salvaging them have a chance to yield Globs of Ectoplasm.

• Rares have a chance to yield 0-3 ectos when salvaged. Exotics have a chance to yield 0-5 ectos when salvaged.
• Black Lion salvage kit give out significantly more ectos than master/mystic kits while exotics have a slightly higher chance to give ectos than rares.
• Black Lion salvage kit can either be purchased on the gem store or obtained as a rare drop from the Black Lion chests

Globs of Ectoplasm are used for crafting exotic armor pieces, you need 5 globs per piece or 30 globs per set.

Completing these zones will grant you 2x L70+ exotics per map completed as well as a nice sum of silver. Well there is a good chance that the exotics you get are not for your class or have bad stats, you can sell them on the TP for coins or exchange them with others. These exotics have pretty good stats and can hold you over until you get L80 exotics.

• Mount Maelstrom 60-70
• Fireheart Rise 60-70
• Frostgorge Sound 70-80
• Straits of Devastation 70-75
• Malchor’s Leap 75-80
• Cursed Shores 80

Trinkets are your  2x Accessory (Earrings), 2x Rings and 1x Amulet. Prefixes like Beryl, Opal etc refers to the actual trinket while suffixes like Explorer, Cleric etc refers to the gem socketed in them (it is switched around from armor/weapons). Certain item prefixes and gem suffixes always go together.

*Candy Corn prefix is only available for amulet, not for earrings/rings

You will want to start off with L80 Masterwork. Put these fields onto the search box in Trading Post. You will find crafted jewelry and random named backpieces that drop from mobs. Keep in mind that crafted jewelry will always have gems etc socketed into them while some of the named backpieces have empty sockets (and thus less stats).

Note that this list does not include the crafted jewelery

Items with Berserker, Explorer, Ruby and Opal affixes are a lot more expensive than others because a lot of people go for either glass cannon builds or magic find.

These Masterworks are quite cheap, most under <10 silver each and some only 2-3 silvers.

With the lost shore update, lots of rare trinkets started dropping and they are relatively cheap. They are good to have while you get the exotic trinkets and the ascended rings. Here is a list of named jewelry you can find on the trading post. This list does not include the crafted ones.

Crafting: Exotics use orichalcum and rare gems in addition to Globs of Ectoplasm. The margin for profit isn’t too big on the trading post so you can just buy them directly if you don’t want to go through the hassle of collecting raw mats and getting a jewelcrafter to make them for you (they are around 2-3 gold each so a full set of exotic jewelery would cost you around 10-12 gold).

Accessory (each)

• 28x Orichalcum Ore (20x from Exquisite Jewel, 4x from Orichalcum Hook, 4x from Orichalcum Setting)
• 5 Orbs (Beryl, Chrysocola, Coral, Emerald, Opal, Ruby, Sapphire) or 5 Flawless Snowflake or 75 Passion Flower
• 5 Glob of Ectoplasm

Ring (each)

• 30x Orichalcum Ore (20x from Exquisite Jewel, 6x from Orichalcum Band, 4x from Orichalcum Setting)
• 5 Orbs (Beryl, Chrysocola, Coral, Emerald, Opal, Ruby, Sapphire) or 5 Flawless Snowflake or 75 Passion Flower
• 5 Glob of Ectoplasm

Amulet

• 32x Orichalcum Ore (20x from Exquisite Jewel, 8x from Orichalcum Band, 4x from Orichalcum Setting)
• 5 Orbs (Beryl, Chrysocola, Coral, Emerald, Opal, Ruby, Sapphire) or 5 Flawless Snowflake or 75 Passion Flower
• 5 Glob of Ectoplasm

Amulet (Candy Corn version)

• 24 Orichalcum Ore (12x from Exquisite Opal Jewel, 8x from Orichalcum Band, 4x from Orichalcum Setting)
• 3 Opal Orb
• 3 Glob of Ectoplasm
• 150 Pieces of Candy Corn

Direct Purchase: In addition to crafting them, you can also buy named exotic trinkets on the trading post. They tend to be much more expensive than the crafted jewelry and doesn’t come socketed so buying them may not be a good idea.  Here is a list regardless. Note that a lot of the craftable jewelery listed below requires recipes that are a rare drop off certain dungeons.

Karma: Finally, if you have lots of karma, the January update provided a method to acquire exotic trinkets via karma. They costs 42k karma each and can be brought at the 5 temples in Orr. They have the Cavalier, Rabid, Magi, Wayfarer, and Soldier stats.

Please see this page for a list of all the trinkets available from the temples.

At this time of this writing, only trinkets with Ascended versions are rings, amulets, and accessories. Ascended items do not have a upgrade component slot (its stats already include the stats you would gain from an upgrade component) but instead have an infusion slot that allow you to insert infusions that grant +5 agony resistance (some specially crafted infusions also comes with +5 vitality, precision etc) or utility stats such as Magic Find or Gold gain.

Ascended items can also come in the (infused) version, in which it already have +5 agony resistance as part of the item in addition to the infusion slot. This allow you to have a maximum of +10 agony resistance per ascended item. Currently only rings can be infused.

The only source of Ascended items at the moment is from Fractal of the Mists (FOTM) dungeon, laurel vendors, or Guild Commendation vendors. .

FOTM:  Even number FOTM (Fractal of the Mists) fractals, starting with scale 10, have a chance to give you Ascended rings via its daily chest. Additionally, each daily chest will also give you a Pristine Fractal Relic. Once you acquire 10 of these fractal relics, you can purchase an Ascended ring from the vendor if you are not so lucky on the daily chest drops.

Infused Ascended ring will start to drop starting at FOTM scale 20. At FOTM scale 26+, you will be guaranteed an infused ring if a ring drops from the daily chest. You can also make a ring to the infused version by using this simple formula: Infused ring = 1 Shard of Crystallized Mists Essence + 3 Glob of Coagulated Mists Essence + 5 Vial of Condensed Mists Essence+ Non infused ring (Shards, Globs, and Vials of Mist Essence are acquired from Fractal of the Mists fractals).

Laurel Vendor: Laurels are earned from daily and monthly achievements currently (1 per daily achievement, 10 per monthly achievement). These vendors can be found in major cities (i.e. there is one outside the WvW gates in Lion’s Arch) and sell Ascended rings, amulets and accessories in exchange for laurels.

• Amulets costs 30 laurels, these cannot be infused.
• Rings cost 35 laurels, these can be infused.
• Accessories cost 40 Laurels and 50 Globs of Ectoplasm. These cannot be infused.

Guild Commendation Vendor: This vendor is located near the bank in Lion’s Arch and sells Ascended accessories in exchange for gold and Guild Commendations earned from doing Guild Missions. Each Ascended accessory costs 5 gold and 12 Guild Commendations.

Here is a chart of all the ascended ring, amulet and accessory stat combinations.

You can get a masterwork backpiece as a reward from your Personal Story Quest. Additionally, you can purchase Masterwork backpieces on the trading post by putting in Spineguard with the filter for Masterwork

It used to be that the only way to acquire rare backpieces was to buying them from the Guild Armorer for 5 gold. This is no longer the case with the Lost Shores update. You can now acquire rare backpieces on the trading post extra cheap, since they cannot be salvaged for ectoplasms. Search for spineguard on the trading post.

Exotics backpieces are a rare drop from certain end bosses on explorable mode dungeons. They are not tradeable so you won’t see them on the trading post. Luckily, Ascended backpieces are not too hard to make so there is no worry if you can’t get the exotic version.

There are two methods to make Ascended backpieces – grind Fractal of the Mists dungeon or make them with gold. Both methods are covered fairly extensively in this guide so I suggest you take a read!

Trading Post

You can get all kinds of Fine/Masterwork armor on the trading post for cheap and you can save up your badges and karma for something else.

Cursed Shore Karma Vendors

Depending on what kind of stuff you are wearing when you get to L80, Fine/Masterwork L80 gear might actually be an upgrade! Cursed Shore has 8 karma vendors that sell various fine/masterwork L80 gear. Here is a link that will show you all the karma vendors in Cursed Shore.

WvW

If you don’t feel like running around in Cursed Shores to hunt down karma vendors, there is a karma vendor in WvW as well. The fastest way is to port to your server’s Borderlands and then find him here.

Stats

Crafting

If you don’t have a lot of gold or a lot of time to grind dungeons/WvW/karma, it can be a long time before you are in full exotics. A set of rare can tide you over as you acquire exotics at your own pace.

The rare crafted set is called

• Light armor: Masquerade
• Medium armor: Noble
• Heavy armor: Gladiator

How does it look?

• Masquerade
• Noble 
• Gladiator

A full set of rare isn’t too expensive fortunately, you just need about 6×15 = 90 fine crafting materials (except for Apothecary and Giver affixes that takes 20 and 8 respectively per piece) , some silk and leather/mithril ingots.With crafted items, you can choose your own stats, as long you know the affixes you want (if you want a reminder, look at the tooltip in the table below).

Most of the fine crafting materials are under a silver or less so you can easily get all the fine crafting materials you need for less than a gold (exceptions are the Karka shells for the Apothecary set)

Light armor

Medium Armor

Heavy armor

Find a friendly crafter, hand them the mats and have the full set crafted! The full set prolly cost you less than 1 gold and 50 silver.

WvW Karma vendors

Got lots of karma? The Borderlands Karma vendor also sell rare gear for karma.

Exotic armor has a lot of variety and a lot of ways to obtain. There are no sub tiers within the exotics – one set of exotics is no more powerful than the other. What you will be choosing instead is 1) three stats you like on your armor 2) method to obtain it and 3) the looks.

There are four main methods to obtain L80 exotics

• Dungeon – if you like running dungeons, this is the option for you
• Crafting – if you have a small sum of gold, this is the quickest
• WvW – If you enjoy only doing WvW, then Badges of Honor will come in handy
• Karma – If you don’t mind grinding out 252k karma (42k karma per piece).

Before we get into the details on all the armor sets, here is a handy chart that allow you to see the distribution of stats on all of them. Use this chart to pick a armor set with the three stats that you like the best. Note that despite having three stats, one of them is dominant (i.e. more of), and is marked in red.

To help you picking stats, here is a little table I made.

Dungeon

There are eight dungeons in GW2 and they all give out unique tokens when you run them on Explorable mode. Most dungeons have three explorable paths and you can get 60 tokens per path the first time you run that path per day. Subsequent runs of the same path before the daily reset (8pm EST) will give less tokens. This means that if you can knock out two different paths of an explorable dungeon per day, for example, you will get 120 tokens daily. Dungeon armors have an advantage over the crafted armor in that it already comes with Runes (see below).

How does it look?

• Check out this page (image heavy)

The vendors to exchange your tokens for gear are located in Fort Marriner in Lion’s Arch

The cheapest piece starts at 180 tokens while the most expensive piece (chest) will cost you 330 tokens.

Here are the stats distributions on those dungeon armors. You can clearly see what I meant about dominant stat earlier. One of the stats totals at 315 while other two stats total at only 224. Note that both crit damage and magic find are %.

Ascalonian Catacombs
Cadecus Manor
Twilight Arbor
Sorrow’s Furnance
Citadel of Flame
Honor of the Waves
Crucible of Eternity
Arah

In addition to the stats, it is important to take a look at the runes that come with each armor. All armor sets from the same dungeon have the same rune. Rune basically apply a set bonus to your armor and the set bonus generally get stronger the more pieces you have w/ the rune.

If you don’t buy the dungeon armor, these runes are sold separately on the vendor for 120 tokens.

Crafting

Crafting is the more expensive route. Gossamer scraps and Orichalcum Ore are not cheap. Crafted armor also don’t come with runes. If you have a bit of gold though, you can get a full set of exotics the day you dinged 80!

• Light armor crafted set is called Exalted
• Medium armor crafted set is called Emblazoned
• Heavy armor crafted set is called Draconic

How does it look?

• Exalted
• Emblazoned
• Draconic

Stats Distribution

For crafting exotics, you only need 5 fine crafting materials per insignia (exceptions are the Apothecary insignia which needs 30 karka shells and Giver insignia which needs 10 Flawless Snowflakes)  but each insignia also needs 5 Globs of Ectoplasm I mentioned earlier. So that is 5×6 = 30 Fine Crafting Materials and 30 Globs of Ectoplasm for the full set.

You will also need Gossamer, Hardened Leather and Orichalcum for the crafting components to combine with the insignias.

Light Armor

Medium Armor

Heavy Armor

Expect to spend ~10-12 gold or more to get everything crafted if you are buying everything from the trading post. Find a friendly crafter and you are done!

WvW

WvW armor sadly doesn’t have a lot of variety. You get one stat distribution and that is it (Power, Toughness, Vitality)

You will need to use Badges of Honor, a token earned by killing players and NPCs in WvW. You can also earn quite a few of Badges of Honor if you do the jumping puzzle in Eternal Battlegrounds (Obsidian Sanctum) and Borderlands daily. The EB jumping puzzle takes 10-15 minutes once you get used to it and give you 2x Siege Blueprints as well.

The fastest way to get to the vendor is to teleport to your server’s Borderlands map. The merchant is located right here (look for the armorsmith)

How does it look?

How much does it cost?

Like crafted armor, WvW armor does not come with runes.

Karma

You can purchase exotic armor with karma but the prices are not cheap at 42k a piece. You will need to open up temples on the Island of Orr to gain access to these vendors. There is a whole guide devoted to it so I suggest you take a read here.

Like armor, you can buy fine/masterwork weapons at the Trading Post/Cursed Shore Karma vendors or WvW Borderlands vendors for karma. There isn’t much to say about that except you should get Rare/Exotic level weapons ASAP to boost your damage.

All the WvW weapons have Power, Toughness and Vitality as the three stats, with Power being the dominant stat.

• WvW Fine: 1715 Karma for Shield, Focus, Torch, Warhorn, 2450 for other 1handers. 3185 for 2handers.
• WvW Masterwork: 5222 Kama for Shield, Focus, Torch, Warhorn, 7476 for other 1handers, 9702 for 2handers

Karma

WvW Borderlands Karma vendor has them for sale for a sizeable amount of karma. They have Power, Toughness, Vitality for stats.

• 18543 Karma for Shield, Focus, Torch, Warhorn
• 26530 Karma for remaining  1handers
• 34433 Karma for 2 handers

It might be worth checking out the T3 cultural weapons if you have 63k Karma to spare. There is a guide for that here.

Crafting

Rare weapons can be crafted. Keep in mind which crafting professions craft which weapons. The weapons are also quite cheap on the trading post, you can spend 20 silver and get a rare if you don’t want go through the hassle of collecting raw mats.

If you want to know which Fine Crafting Mat provide which stats, please go to the Rare section of armor, there is a table there providing you with all the info.

Weaponsmith

Huntsman

Artificer

Like armor, there is a few ways to obtain exotics weapons

• Crafting
• Mystic Forge Crafting
• Dungeons
• WvW

Here is a chart with the stats distributions, it is very similar to the armor stats distribution. Note that it does not include the Mystic weapons, which all have different stats.

Crafting

The L80 exotic weapons have a pearl prefix and the actual stats depends on the fine crafting material used (there is a table in the exotic armor section if you are unsure)

Weaponsmith

Huntsman

Artificer

Mystic Forge Crafting

The Mystic Forge can produce exotic weapons as well but the stats are fixed and you can’t choose the stats.This section will only cover the regular Mystic Forge weapons and none of the named ones (those ones are expensive and considered luxury items). Mystic weapons are good if you like the stats on the weapon and have skill points/mystic coins to spare as they don’t require fine crafting mats and globs of ectoplasm.

Each of the mystic weapons will need

• 30 Mystic Coins,
• 1 Eldritch Scroll (costs 50 Skill Points, brought from vendor right by Mystic Forge)
• 5x Crafting Component A
• 5x Crafting Component B

Dungeons

If you don’t like crafting or WvW, dungeons also provide a source of exotic weapons but does take a bit of grind.

These weapons can be purchased at the same location in Lion’s Arch where you purchase the exotic armor so check that section of the guide if you are not sure where to go.

The sigils attached to these dungeon weapons are not that great as they mostly increase your damage against specific mob types inside that dungeon and are fairly useless outside.

This page has a collection of images of these weapons or you can just preview it yourself at the vendors.

WvW

Sold at the Borderlands vendor. If you are not sure where to go, check the armor exotic section under WvW for a screenshot of the merchant location.

Permanent Bonuses

On kill bonuses

Condition Duration

On Critical Hit

On weapon swap

There are also a bunch of sigils that deals increased damage to certain types of enemies that I didn’t list. They are not very useful for general usage except maybe the Undead one if you are in Orr a lot. (Superior Sigil of Undead Slaying)