You can slot runes and infusions on ascended. You are 100% correct. I just looked at one of my older character from a few years ago, he has ascended gear with runes stupid me. Posted August 26, 2021 (edited) +Stat agony infusions tend to be extremely overpriced and not worth it when gearing up.
Ascended gear from Strike currency is slightly cheaper, but not by much since it still costs a little and you can buy other stuff with the tokens, also you need to do the Strikes. It is a lot less profitable to do WvW and PvP than most PvE content in gold/ hour, so that way it is even more expensive to craft them if you are not already doing
You get new individual maps for each chapter starting with LW3 and on, and on each map you can get the "Return To X" meta achievements (X being the name of each chapter), the third tier of which will get you 250 of that map's unique currency to buy the ascended trinkets with, primarily in LW3 as each map offers pink trinkets with the easiest to
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