Ascended armor acquisition question

Hi,So correct me if I am wrong, but there are two main ways of acquiring ascended armor:

1. Buy the ascended recipe for karma from the armorsmith/tailor/leatherworker, and craft away.
2. Buy the Grandmaster mark from Bling 9009, craft x 3, and then buy the piece from Bling for 400 relics, 12 pages, 3 marks, 2 gold.

Is that about right? If so, what is the more efficient way. Or rather, what is the difference in methods? Does it matter? Im not sure which method I should be pursuing, Method #1 is a lot of straight up crafting and time gated crafting. Method #2 seems to a slog of a craft grind itself, not as much as #1, but has a gold/fractal relic component to it as well.

In most cases it's crafting your first ascended gear. Marks are good when you have piled some fractals/pvp currency and need gear with expensive starts such as ministrel, tralblazer.In both cases you need your crafting to be 500.

Now about efficiency. Time gated mats are tradable. So the best way is to farm gold. Istan, Silverwastes farm can get you 12-20 gold per hour.

As far as crafting, yes those are the two ways.

Method 1 is the basic craft the item approach and is most often the most gold expensive one.

Method 2 is cheaper but requires content specific materials (fractals, WvW or spvp). It is designed to allow people to acquire ascended gear at a lower gold cost in favor of other materials.

I just play fractals long enough untill I got all the boxes to drop have not crafted a single ascended equipment.

You can acquire ascended gear through crafting( which would be the most expensive but the quickest way but not all stat may be available mainly pof and Hot stats but I am not really sure on that part) you can acquire gear through wvw and pvp which will take some time to acquire the currency needed. Also doing daily fractals and reqs each day can earn you ascended rings and armor and this method will take some time as well( you could also get lucky and get ascended drops from daily reward chests!) and the final methods are raids and collections that give ascended reward.

If you re a little bit on pvp side, you can grind seasons for ascended pieces. Armor pieces also can convert to legendary after acquiring them, and trinkets are stat swap at any time with capacitor. Also from the main source you can also obtain an ascended back piece but with limited stat choices.You can do the same in wvw but time gate will be longer.Other source is to craft them or grind low level fractals until drop.For trinkets you can use ls maps to buy them with magic and map currency.

Imo best way is to play the game, earn gold, level up your desired crafting professions and craft your main's armor. Then all additional drops can be used to gear up alts.

You can also get like four pieces from achievements, I believe. That's how I did most of my first set.

If you want to play and acquire ascended armor and gear, here a general overview:

Trinkets: easiest via LWS3, a good overview here: https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Ascended_trinket

Weapons: Knights of Thorn quest line (requires a Vision Crystal, guide here: http://dulfy.net/2017/02/22/gw2-feb-22-current-events-guide/), elite specialization weapon collections

Armor: in general the most time consuming and expensive for a first set (and least required gear at 2-3% stat advantage versus exotic per piece), collections in general are time consuming: https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Ascended_Armor_Chest (Bioluminescence collection is easy but time consuming and will reward over 100-200 gold in loot while farming for it, enough to craft a majority of the remaining set). The two raid collections award 2 full sets of ascended armor (1 of which is the precursor for the legendary set from collection 2) and can also be used as a first set since raiding in exotic armor is absolutely fine.

Once full ascended on a character, the most efficient way to acquire more ascended gear is running daily fractals T4 daily and raid weekly. Both game modes have a comparatively very high ascended drop rate (1 item per week on average in fractals) or give resource to easy acquire select pieces (Magnetite Shards in raids, Grandmaster Crafting tokens for fractals).

Crafting in general is the most straightforward but also most expensive approach at around 300 gold per full set (down from 600+ gold and even 800+ gold in the past) plus approximately 60-90 gold for getting a crafting skill to 500 (gw2crafts.net).

Honestly if I was trying to get a set of ascended armor on a new account, I would first get trinkets and weapons via season 3 maps and achievements, then I would just raid. Envoy 1 collection is a full set with any stat you want (I think any stat; at the very least any stat that is meta), of you could just do weekly magnetite capping via easy bosses like escort,trio, and MO, and buy armor with magnetite.

Don't get me wrong, my first set of ascended armor was crafted, that was back in the pre-hot era. I'm glad I have all my crafting professions maxed, but crafting ascended armor just isn't worth it if you can raid. I have somewhere between 20 and 30 sets at this point. The first 3 to 5 sets were a combination of drops, crafting, and achievements, but after that the majority of it was drops from fractals and raids.

Im crafting my first set. I understand its more of a gold sink. I enjoy working toward something every few days, smaller achieveable goals especially after the months long grind for my first legendary. After my first set, all savings from fractals, etc...maybe toward leg #2.

Get your trinkets and accessories via laurels or LS3 if you need newer stats like Viper's. Craft the weapons. Get the armour from box drops in fractals and stat swap if necessary, since you don't even need armour until T4 and even then, just three pieces plus a potion will see you through to the 150 AR requirement for 100.

Seriously don't craft the armour, it's an enormous waste of resources imo.

Do first Legendary armor collection and you will get free ascended armor.

To comment on this:

I have been running Daily T2, some Recs, and some non-daily fractals each night for 1-2 months. Ive gotten two ascended chests in that time for gear types that are not what I need (which is Medium).

I don't raid and have zero interest in doing so. This eliminates running raids for ascended gear AND the legendary collection.

I think my only method of acquisition is via crafting whether it is straight up materials farm, WvW, or PvP centric. And it sucks that this is the most expensive way for someone that doesn't raid. I feel compelled to raid if I dont want to break the bank and gather the required materials to craft, but I am refusing to do so. I left all of that raiding stuff behind in WoW and I never wanted it in GW2 (but here it is.).

To the crafting station I go!

The most reliable way is to craft. If you dont want to raid then getting it from raids cost more (you can farm gold instead of raiding).You can get lucky drops but i wouldnt count on them (at least for first set).As for weapons, specialization collections and knight of the thorns is the best way I feel.Trinkets from laurel vendor or ls3 maps. Pof stats are much harder to get but you can get them from pof/ls4 maps.

@cesmode.4257 said:To comment on this:

I have been running Daily T2, some Recs, and some non-daily fractals each night for 1-2 months. Ive gotten two ascended chests in that time for gear types that are not what I need (which is Medium).

I don't raid and have zero interest in doing so. This eliminates running raids for ascended gear AND the legendary collection.

I think my only method of acquisition is via crafting whether it is straight up materials farm, WvW, or PvP centric. And it sucks that this is the most expensive way for someone that doesn't raid. I feel compelled to raid if I dont want to break the bank and gather the required materials to craft, but I am refusing to do so. I left all of that raiding stuff behind in WoW and I never wanted it in GW2 (but here it is.).

To the crafting station I go!

I thought you could chose heavy,medium and light in the armor boxes havent you only looked at the wrong pieces becouse you see all possilbe stat combinations on all 3 weight classes.