Should i farm for Ascended/harriers?

[Avipt.9632]

So i figured i once and for all start getting another gear other than zerker. SO ive been working on buying ascended Harriers for my guardian so i can support. a whole new way of playing, but then my guild mate says this

1 You should get legendary instead for easy swapping.

2 we dont know what will happen in the future so harriers might be bad.

Well for starters legendary seems very far away since i dont play THAT much.

So im just wondering, am i doing myself just a diservice spending time in strikes and such?

[Chyro.1462]

Nr. 1 rule - play what you enjoy. Don't let others tell you how you should spend your time.

Legendaries are a huge time and resource investment and dunno what that friend was thinking recommending to go for legendaries right away.

It's possible that the new expac may introduce a new stat combo great for supports, but nobody can know that. If you're unsure about Harriers, you can run Celestial gear and still play a decent support/heal build - it has slightly less healing and boon duration than harriers, but is more robust and can deal a bit more damage.

[Parasite.5389]

if you're happy doing raiding, you could always start the collection for the Legendary PvE armor;
the first collection will reward you with a set of Stat selectable Ascended armor in a weight of your choice(https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Envoy_Armor_I:_Experimental_Armor) *note: this is not the precursor armor needed to craft the final Legendary gear, so you can always change it stats later if you feel the need

[ArchonWing.9480]

You are correct. Your friend's advice is terrible and is based on what they'd do, instead of what they'd do in your situation.

Getting legendaries just to get a few stat sets is not a good idea when you're starting out. You'd end up raiding to get gear so you can raid. You're not at the point where you're worried about convenience. Even if you decide to frequently raid, being properly geared will help you out everywhere faster.

https://gw2efficiency.com/crafting/calculator/a~0!b~1!c~0!d~1-85286;1-84879;1-85126;1-85330;1-85024;1-85196

It costs 171g to craft a set of Harrier's armor. (add 35 gold for 500 armorsmith)

https://gw2efficiency.com/crafting/calculator/a~0!b~1!c~0!d~1-80384;1-80435;1-80254;1-80205;1-80277;1-80557

Legendary armor would cost 1700 gold

https://gw2efficiency.com/crafting/calculator/a~0!b~1!c~0!d~1-80384;1-80435;1-80254;1-80205;1-80277;1-80557

Even if you made 4 sets of armor, and bought an extra character slot to avoid having to swap gear, you would still have 700 extra gold to spare.

And that's not including any of the other currencies or timegated things you have to do. In practice the cost is significantly higher.

Also if you do not do raids, you may consider the Celestial variant which is easier to play though:

https://snowcrows.com/builds/guardian/firebrand/heal-quickness-firebrand

There is a 2 week timegate on cele gear, so it depends on how fast you farm the rest.

In raids, the toughness from Cele causes issues with aggro in certain taids, but people can work around it if you tell them.

You should also know you can buy exotic harrier or celestial  gear too. However, the gear is overpriced and not that much cheaper than ascended, (around 90-110 gold)so it should only be used a a stopgap should you be bottlenecked by account bount mats or timegates. This is unlikely if you just farm the game normally though.

And if you do these content enough, you'll come across ascended box drops where you can stat swap to alternate stat gear as well.

 

Edited August 13, 2023 by ArchonWing.9480

[babana.7521]

4 hours ago, Avipt.9632 said:

So i figured i once and for all start getting another gear other than zerker. SO ive been working on buying ascended Harriers for my guardian so i can support. a whole new way of playing, but then my guild mate says this

1 You should get legendary instead for easy swapping.

2 we dont know what will happen in the future so harriers might be bad.

Well for starters legendary seems very far away since i dont play THAT much.

So im just wondering, am i doing myself just a diservice spending time in strikes and such?

If you don't play that much, you don't need to get anything specific, just put on any gear that drops, in the mean time hoards all the mats for legendary, when the time come you will have legendary and don't need to spent time and resources for ascended. 

[Teknomancer.4895]

It might be worth waiting a couple weeks until after the expansion drops, just to see if anything changes (and how much) or there are new stat combos you might like. We don't really know yet, so I'm holding off crafting anything for the moment.

[Cyninja.2954]

Get exotic harrier (or ascended, it can be stat swapped if need be).

Save up resources.

Wait until the expansion drops.

Decide hiw to proceed then based on how you enjoyed supporting, how acquisition for the open world legendary armor might look, etc.

[Kaltyn of Torbins Deep.294]

1.  No, I wouldn't say you are doing yourself a disservice spending time in Strikes and such. 

2.  https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Stat_changing - Stat swapping ascended gear only requires the EXOTIC insignia (or exotic inscription for weapons) of the stat combo that you want to swap to.  So, for swapping to Harrier's stats, you would need 1 Insignia of the Harrier (rather than Zehtuka's Harrier's Insignia), 1 Anthology of Heroes (10 Spirit Shards), 5 Globs of Ectoplasm, and 1 piece of ascended armor.  Throw in the mystic forge and you have a piece of ascended Zehtuka's Harrier Armor.

3.  Sometimes it can be cheaper to craft a full set of armor of a set of stats you don't want/need and then stat swap that in the Mystic Forge than it can be to straight craft what you want in the end.  This especially true for armor that you have to get lucky for an RNG drop for the recipe sheet to make it.  I believe that Zehtuka's happens to be that way.  Whereas the Exotic Insignia of the Harrier is a discoverable recipe.  It's even cheaper if you already have the recipe's for a different ascended set of armor.  The last set of ascended I made - vipers for a necro I think - I make an ascended set of Magi's because I already had 6 Exotic Magi's insignias from salvaging and I already had the recipe's for a set of ascended light magi's armor. 

4.  This is a game.  You are supposed to have fun.  If you aren't, you need to change something that you are doing.  If Harrier's turns out to be the wrong set after the next balance patch, see Item 2 above for changing to the new best in slot set of stats quickly and cheaply.

[Endaris.1452]

You need ascended gear to play T4 fractals which are probably the best source of income in the game when done with an efficient group.

Legendary armor is certainly something to look out for but you should keep the following thing in mind:

Legendary armor usually has a precursor that is ascended. Building towards that first for a later upgrade perspective is definitely a good idea. Specifically, working on raid armor even gives you one free-to-use ascended set for the first collection and a precursor set for the second. If you already spend time in strikes, moving to HoT raids won't be all that difficult. There are some open world items you need though so maybe take a look at the relevant collection on the wiki already so you come prepared.

Beyond that there is absolutely no issue with gearing your first 2-3 builds in ascended. You still need 1 Ball of Dark Energy for each piece of legendary gear and the only way to reliably acquire those is to salvage ascended weapons and armor. So even if you go legendary, you still have to craft something ascended to salvage for those balls. Absolutely nothing wrong with actually making gear that you can use for months until you have actually gotten to the point where legendary armor is a real option (aka you have all the other stuff you need and made your way through the related collections).

Edited August 15, 2023 by Endaris.1452

[SoftFootpaws.9134]

the best thing to understand is that harrier's is just one of many effective support sets, and is mostly taken for two reasons: that it has the highest boon duration possible, and that it doesn't have toughness which means it doesn't interfere with the tank in raids.

 

the first point is important because it means harrier's might be wasteful in fractals, where you get 15% bonus boon duration from the potion (so a four-stat set like minstrel's or plaguedoctor's might be better so you don't go down as easily), and the second point is important because if you plan to tank in raids then you actually need the toughness and need to mix some giver's in, or just go full giver's to be sure no one can steal the boss from you.

 

harrier's is also almost never used in wvw as its way too glassy, but can be used to pad out minstrel's for some extra boon duration.

 

now you can see, the main purpose if harrier's is to be used in raids as the off-healer, in which case raids don't require ascended gear whereas fractals and wvw generally do, so you're fine just going with exotics and you can get harrier's stats on exotics extremely easily and cheaply by using stat-selectr gear from verdant brink or the competitive reward tracks that give exotic armor pieces.

 

also outside of this purpose, harrier's is very outdated and many modern support builds just use celestial as it has only slightly lower healing power, higher average damage, far higher survivability and usually as much boon duration is required to maintain alacrity or quickness.  in cases where there's not quite enough boon duration you can pad it out with some harrier's still (or diviner's for more offensive support builds).

 

that said, its still the easiest way to provide support and to max boon duration with decent healing and without doing zero damage. i hope this will help you reach a decision on whether to craft it or not.

Edited August 15, 2023 by SoftFootpaws.9134

[Buran.3796]

   I agree with your friend. People usually start crafting a dps gear build (mostly armor and weapons, since ascended trinkets are almost free from Living World maps). After that, usually the strongest "do all with minimal investment" is celestial, which for most of classes and specially in the Guardian works wonders (take in consideration that an ascended set of armor pieces can be expensive, around 300 gold coins, but replacing all your ascended trinkets and going celestial armor + harrier trinkets is almost free).

  So I encourage players to go for the Legendary armor set as soon as their second or at worst third armor set. You can get the pieces from 3 different sources (raids, WvW and PvP) at the same time if you will or just stick to the most convenient source (for me was PvP and I got the 3 sets from there). The new expansion will only make it EASIER. To me there's no reason to spend resources incrafting ascended armor pieces after your first or at worst your second set. For the cost of crafing a single ascended armor set you can craft a single legendary armor piece (start with chest, then legs and the helm, which provide most stat points) and just forget about having to craft an ascended gear piece of that kind forever for that giver armor class.

   Another example: just doing the daily (usually less than 10 minutes, 2 gold coins in raw gold) and mining orichalcum rich nodes for 20 minutes with 5 characters (or cathering seaweed, or falx, or other stuff in high demand) will provide you another 8+ liquid gold coins, you you'll get 10+ gold in 30 minutes a day, enough to pay a legendary armor set in six months (or two in a year) while devoting the rest of your time to anything you want (including not playing the game).

   Legendary sets are easy to get, and the quality of life they bring is exceptional. Do yourself a favor, ignore most of the coments advicing you to demore it and start the journey now!