I'm considering getting back into the game, i stopped playing around the Guardian retaliation nerfs and the introduction of the ascended rings/fractals. When i left i had a full Knights set on my Guardian with Berserker jewels (and similar decent gear on my D/D elementalist), I know from reading the patch notes even more Ascended gear was added and as such I'm wondering a few things.
Are the Ascended items still generally for the fractals?, and can i just go strait ahead without bothering with gearing up again in all the new open world PvE content? (basically is the gear i had back then still considered good?) - i noticed 80 is still the cap (thank god) and would just really like to know if i really need to start gearing up again.
Also, regarding the clan, is there an EU one or is it global (i forget how the GW2 system works)?.
There's almost zero reason to go for Ascended armour and weapons, except if you really want to inch out a few more numbers on your damage, or if you want to build up a collection of account-bound items. Ascended is now account-bound, so rings you get from fractals, armour and weapons you find or craft, can be given to any character on your account. So in that sense, they're worthwhile to have - like if you make a full Knight ascended armour set, and then later decide to go full Zerk or something, you can give the Knight set to another character.
But no, you don't need Ascended for anything, except perhaps Fractals - but even then, only if you're doing the really high-tier stuff. Usually when you hit that point, you're getting rings as drops in the Fractals anyway, and Agony Resist now drops as items you can combine and slot into Ascended items, so building up some Agony Resist is pretty easy.
A Guardian in Knights with Zerk jewels is pretty much set. You'll want to check your Traits since that system has changed a lot and reset what you chose - but it's free to retrait now, and much easier since they reduced the number of points involved. But there are new Grandmaster traits to collect (or buy straight if you have the gold and skillpoints).
As for the guild, ideally you'd want to be on SBI (NA server). Guilds are regional (so EU, NA and China are split) I believe.