Guild Wars 2

I’ve been playing my Mesmer in WvW for over 3k hours and the there is no longer any payoff for running an illusions base Mesmer and I am looking for something new.

What is a hard base (no HoT) class to play which still floats well around the idea of “risk reward”?

I’m not sure what you mean by hard, but out of my 3 mains, ele/engi/thief the engi has the most brutal finger play and quick decision making. My poor fingers.

I would agree that engineer is the most complicated to play (especially to play well) and I’d probably put either ele or mesmer second.

Hardest is more complicated because it depends on a lot of factors, some of which are dependent on the player. For example although I have to pay more attention and push more buttons I find my engineer easier to play than my thief, but that might be simply because thief is probably the furthest from my preferred and most common playstyle. It might also be because my thief is in beserker gear while my engi has rabid so they’re less squishy.

But I know other people who say even a full glass canon thief is easy to play who would refuse to ever touch a mesmer because they don’t like how the traits work, or say an engineer or elementalist requires too many buttons and gets too complicated.

At the other extreme I think warrior is definitely the easiest, followed (IMO) by guardian and then ranger which can be very simple or nearly as complicated as an ele (if you pick lots of situational traits, weapons and pets and then have to remember to swap them as needed).

I’ve not played necromancer enough to know where I’d rank them.

I have more trouble with my thief than most other classes. This is due to a combination of two things – their stealth doesn’t work very well as defensive utility, leaving them with very poor damage mitigation in conjunction with low health. This means they go down a lot. The second thing is that their downed state is terrible in solo PvE.

So, basically, you go down more easily than most classes AND have a harder time rallying than most classes.

I personally find thief easier in PvE since you can stealth and daze from behind as well as lots of dodges and disengages. You have to read animations to get the most of it. Staff is easier than sword and dagger but S/d has on demand stealth if you manage your initiative wisely and may even be better overall due to the daze and shadowstep.

Engineer, if not playing a braindead FT/Turret style build.

It’s gameplay is almost completely reactionary and requires you to know all of the tools at your disposal along with how each tool can interact with eachother.

TexZero.7910:

Engineer, if not playing a braindead FT/Turret style build.

It’s gameplay is almost completely reactionary and requires you to know all of the tools at your disposal along with how each tool can interact with eachother.

Ayup. Kits have huge utility and I hear tales of some absolutely sick skill rotations to get self-combo spam. If you want a high-skill/high-reward class, Engi’s the one.

Even though I’m one of those lazy Shamethrower users, I respect the high end of what the profession can do. :P

I think genji is the hardest.

Insanity.5174:

I think genji is the hardest.

Nah, bastion is deffently the hardest to play

For me, it was Engineer and Thief. I would end up simplifying the class to a one note play style, just to grind them through leveling to 80 and through the story. However, when Thief had ricochet, that was one note for me that was pretty fun to play. For now, they both sit, collecting dust as I focus more on Revenant and Reaper. However, I find myself getting bored of Reaper frequently because it’s just so kitten easy to kill everything in PVE with it. But she’s an awesome toon and I always end up going back.

Engi or thief.

Thief because of the lack of forgiveness with any build.

Engi because to make the most of it your keyboard probably thinks you’re playing starcraft.

I think i’ll consider picking up thief. I’ve never liked engi, and the recent meta has made me hate it even more than normal. I wonder if base thief DA/Acro/Trickery S/D is any good still.

To me it’s Ele because of lowest HP and def.

Engineer is the hardest to play optimally, but it has nothing to do with risk/reward. It’s all about managing massive number of cooldowns you have.

If you’re looking for risk/reward, thief is a better fit

Warrior is the hardest play: you have so many options that you really need to know the class to play it well. I would say Mesmer and Thief are the easiest, since in both cases you can just smash buttons to deal tons of damage. The Revenant is also ridiculously easy in this regard, although it does require a good sense of rhythm to optimally switch between legends and weapons to not suddenly end up with no skills available.