Ele: Staff is preferred for High DPS. D/F is used in some fights for better projectile control or for smaller hit-box solo bosses. Same ol’ same ol’ though, Deep freeze and nuke everything.
Guardian: Easy mode toon. The patch switched things up to where Mace replaces
Sword for the most part. Torch is preferred over Focus when you don’t need the block. Guards also bring quickness/fury to the group in a relatively short cooldown. Other than that Guards still fill the role of defense support with all their boons, buffs, reflects, blinds, etc.
Thief: Blast bot and stealth bot. New traits gave them quite the increase in damage (noticing a theme here…), but their blinds, blasts, and frequent stealth access is what we’re after in this class.
Warrior: You have two options: The Greatsword/Arms version offers high amounts of damage but it wouldn’t be as easy to keep Might up when swapping to second weapon sets. However, Arms offers vulnerability on critical strikes which helps to make up for the loss of being able to weapon swap as comfortably. The Fast Hands version still preserves the 5 second swap allowing the accustomed wiggle room for Axe/Mace for the usual Vulnerability stacking.
Mesmer is starting to come around as the new jack of trades. Their redesigned Inspiration line allows them to heal, group cleanse, and even offer group distortion. As before this line grants them high reflect uptime. Domination does some really odd things when interrupting foes to the point to where they will sit there and auto-attack since you’ve forced everything else to go on cooldown. Chaos grants high modification/benefits to stealth allowing them to pseudo-thief if needed. Overall, the class has quite a few new features to help make the run easier; however there’s still a bad taste for the class so it’s not necessarily too well received by default.
Overall, when selecting a ‘fractal toon’ is mostly about what roles you want to play in the team.
