So this morning a good mate of mine mentioned he had purchased an exotic armor piece from a Karma vendor & given my focus in game has been making a few copper in the TP and when not hunting down enemies in the WvW battleground this news was very interesting to me.
To date I have been saving every silver coin that comes my way resulting in my toons largely running around in green set items or maybe the odd rare item for slightly better stat's so I'm a fish out of water when it comes to knowing what armor is available from who or what & where.
That said in googling the topic there are several ways of obtaining rare & exotic armor:
- Loot from drops from beasties killed
- Trading Post - make sure you visit spidy / gw2db / tpcalc first etc
- Instances or Dungeons which issues tokens upon completion
- WvW where you obtain Badges of Honor
- Craft your own!
- Obtain Order sets meaning the Priory, Whisper or Vigil
- Karma via a vendor
Dulfy.net has a post up that addresses this topic, I've mentioned these guys have good info before so I really should have used my own links to visit their site first ...
The TLDR version is:
- There are 6 locations / vendors / PvE sets available
- The vendors only 'spawn' or are available after an event has been completed & the area is shown on your map as uncontested
- The cost in karma is typically around 42k for the large items
If using karma to buy items is not your thing you can visit gw2db.com & using their search tools you can find your armor type super quick & work out where to pick them up from or what mats you need to create.
If your character uses medium armor like my toon is & you like to have magic find then something like the Divinity Council set could be of interest, or a bit of everything then the Aidan's set might be to your flavour then there's the Aurora set which is quite nice.
So, have a think about how you play your character, where you play so you know how many tokens or how much karma you need, how many gold pieces are required, if you favour a balanced approach or want moar DPS as these will all impact the armor that you eventually decide upon.
Personally, if you have the coin I'd probably lean toward suggesting buying the pieces you like on the TP and saving your karma for that Legendary item later on.
