buy living season 3, farm map currencies daily and get 6 ascended trinkets. can do tier 1 fractal dailies to get rings if you don't care about HoT stats and just going for zerker or something. complete HoT story on at least 1 character and do the broken caladbolg quest for a free ascended weapon. get a couple of crafts to 500, leatherworking + something like huntsman or weaponsmith for your ranger and start crafting the daily ectoplasm refinement items, used in crafting ascended gear. save your laurels to buy ascended recipes if you're going for core stats. in the meantime, throw some agony resistance, +9s preferred, in your free ascended trinkets you get from LS3 and work your way up through the fractal scales. attune your rings for an extra infusion slot by doing /wiki <your ring name> to see the mystic forge recipe.
i just returned to the game about a month ago and felt overwhelmed. this is basically what i did to get full ascended in around a month. you can skip the whole fractals thing if that isn't your bag, it's just my preferred method of gold farming in like scale 40 if you get a fast group you can make about 25g per hour or so