Guild Wars 2

Hello, I have been trying to find a game to play to replace World of Warcraft since I have been playing it for many years and it is getting boring. I found out that Guild wars 2 has added in raids and figured I use to have fun on it before HoTs but haven’t played since before HoTs came out.

I am debating what profession/class to play as. I want to do end game PvE content and I want a class that is engaging to play. In WoW I have played just about everything tanks, healers and DPS so any option works fine. My big thing is I want something that is a bit of a challenge. Is there a profession that is more aimed towards a well experienced player and takes a bit more skill to play than the rest?

Thanks in advance, hope to find some good answers.

Chrono tank – keeping up 100% quickness/alacrity on everyone, tanking boss while taking into account fight mechanics can be quite stressful.

Agreed, playing chrono is pretty engaging and your gameplay will be very impactful. The standard zerk/commander chrono combines the aspects of tanking and DPS, while minstrel chrono is more oriented towards tanking+healing. All of this while also providing quickness and alacrity, buffs that are essential to successful completion of a raid.

You may also want to check out ranger/druid. They are traditionally healers/buffers, but can also assume the role of pure DPS. I have a friend, who can play druid so amazingly, that he can essentialy carry a group of mediocre players even through the hardest of encounters. The rotation is easier than chrono’s, but you’ll need much faster reactions and better battlefield awareness if you want to save your buddies from going downed/dying. Doing your basic job is not very difficult, but if you really want to bring your druid gameplay to this kind of level, it will take a lot of effort and experience.

As far as DPS goes, most difficult profession (also the most sought after) is tempest. You will usually not make as much of impact as the former 2 (because you’re “just” DPS), but you can surely tell a big difference between good tempest and a bad one. If you can pull off good DPS, you’ll be able to skip and ignore many threatening raid mechanics and have a very easy and smooth run.

Thanks for the answers, I have looked up all of these and they all seem pretty cool. Are druids sought after for raid groups? After a lot of looking around a lot of people seem to say that if you don’t play the considered best class you will have a hard time finding a group, if you find one at all.

I did a bit more reading just about raid compositions and people all seem to like druids. So I think I may go with playing a druid.

The four biggest classes in the meta right now are chrono, druid, tempest, and warrior. Pretty much every group will want these on all fights. The meta composition is two identical subgroups, each with a chrono, druid, warrior, and two tempests. What people are looking for largely depends on the pool of people they already have, but all of these will show up in the lfg regularly.

Chrono is difficult to play and can carry groups. Because of the difficulty, it is common for people to not have it available, and so they will need to pug it. However, if a group does have some people that can play it, they will likely make their friends play chrono and pug a less critical role like a dps.

Druid falls into a very similar category as chrono, except I think a lot more people have one available. Druids can carry groups, so if someone has a friend that they know can play druid well, they’ll do that over pugging the druid.

Warrior is easier to play than the others (although it is a lot more difficult to be really good at it than people give it credit for). Because of this, lots of people have warriors, so they are less likely to need one from lfg.

Tempest is by far the easiest to find groups for. Groups will take more eles than any other class so there is a demand for them. Also, groups are much more inclined to pug a dps role than tank or healer. This is what I geared on my second account because I knew it would be easier to find groups.

For the groups that I raid with regularly, we will sometimes end up a person or two short. After we exhaust our friends lists, we’ll use lfg to find more. I think we always look for a dps because our members are multiclass enough where we can cover the other roles.

The best thing you can do to consistently get into groups is to have multiple classes available. Only having one is very restrictive and will probably cause you a problem if you ever want to be part of a static group.

My recommendation is to start out with ele (as long as you enjoy it). This will give you the challenge you want, but is not in a critical role, which will give you time to learn boss mechanics. Once you have some experience with all the bosses, then pick up druid or chrono. This will diversify the roles you can fill which is invaluable to groups.

That sounds like a really good idea. That’s really similar to what I did in world of warcraft, just had one of each role and could fill in to whatever was needed for my guild. I think I will start with an ele like you suggested and my second character be a druid.