Guild Wars 2

As the title suggests, what is the fastest profession for clearing renown hearts? ele or thief maybe?

Any level 80 zerker. That is all

If we take into account mobility between points, Thief win out of those two.

I don’t think that any single profession is faster at completing tasks, but choosing a class with good dps is a good start.

Thief is probably the most mobile class and can span areas pretty quickly (spamming heartseeker), so I would choose thief personally.

I tried with thief once, but I feel that my necro can complete hearts faster than thief since thief lacks AOE damage. But I used d/d, guess I need to go with s/d for extra cleave?

I am not sure it makes too much of a difference really. Any advantage from a particular class is far outweighed by the difference in time between one person and another due to things like luck when something spawns and being in the right place at the right time.

Don’t listen to people that say there isn’t an optimal class … optimizing your Openworld experience isn’t just a matter of taking any level 80 in full zerker. There ARE optimal classes to do OW content. These are the factors I have considered:

1. Runspeed – Why? Because doing OW content is all about running between all the aresas on those maps. Best classes in this category here are the ones that have built in runspeed with signets (best) or traits (good). If you HAVE to use a class without these things, you can supplement with Sigil of Speed (very good option, can be used any level) or Runes of the Traveller (worst option, only at level 69+, expensive).

2. Damage – obviously, but the caveat here is good BURST damage that you can access frequently; this is very different than what people refer to as ‘meta’ builds, mostly used for maximizing dungeon DPS while teaming. The optimal builds for doing OW events, hearts, etc… is NOT necessarily the same as the dungeon meta builds. While leveling, the optimal classes can change as you get access to new traits but at level 80, some classes outshine others, mostly because they have multiple damage sources.

3. Resistance/Closing – closing a fight without conditions is important, as well as reducing your non-fighting downtime. Classes that have frequent and non-specific condition cleansing are optimal here as well as resisiting knockbacks, breaking stun and avoiding interrupts.

Based on these criteria, the classes that excel are Guardian and Thief, the worst is Mesmer. To be fair, I haven’t fully explored Ele’s OW capability but I don’t get the impression it’s that’s good.

Ele, due to ease of mobility boost and AE damage.

I feel like mesmer is the worse due to the fact that phantasms have “high” cooldown and disappear when the target dies.
Warrior/Guardian are really good at that, of all the classes i’ve used they’ve been the easiest to complete hearts, then i would place thief/ranger and Eles too.

Ranger would be good also. signet grants 25% movement, plus Long bow would mean you didn’t have to get close so you would save time running from target to target.

My vote is for rangers too. I main’d ranger when the game first started, and when I started doing other classes, I noticed several things off the bat.

Rangers are mobile, (still) have large number endurance boosting traits and skills, generally high survivability due to skills and pet tanking (on of the few applications where they are an advantage), and the only class other then a Guardian that has a good chance of getting back up on their own if downed. I regularly send my pet in as a distraction while open grand chests from under the champ’s nose.

And as a side effect of their janky trait synergy, you don’t lose much build potential by running mixed utilities. Longbow is the go-to for high damage, and you can use either GS for general melee tagging, axe for ranged tagging, or sword for some extra DPS. Sword is kind of tricky because the AA chain is hard to break, and you have no easy gap closer.

I nominate thief or engineer as the best map completionists. They have good mobility (not the best,) and stealth which makes Skill Points and Waypoints and POIs and Vistas incredibly easy to unlock. Which class is better for hearts really just depends on the heart. Thief has easier access to stealth (better for avoiding fights with pesky enemies) while engineer has invulnerability which can be better for a few skillpoints (like contested statues in Orr which have environmental effects that can interrupt the cast without invuln.)

Stealth and mobility are the best mechanics for world map completion, but if you’re asking only about Elementalist versus Thief regarding hearts, I’d say Thief wins.

Edit: I almost forgot they changed skill points to hero points or something. Woohoo.

I’m thinking that most of the time in clearing the hearts is getting to the hearts, so Thief is the winner here. They have the fastest out of combat mobility and thus would be able to quickly get from one to another. This is even more true to hearts that require you to go around all over the place to achieve the goals.

Thief is the fastest or it was before the trait update.

Ayrilana.1396:

Thief is the fastest or it was before the trait update.

That was my experience, yes. I was running P/P and once I hit lvl 60 and unlocked Ricochet, map completion got both very quick and very easy.

It has far less to do with DPS and more to do with speed. Thief is a good mix of both.

There shouldn’t be any hearts that require a ton of survivability, that I can remember anyway.

Ariurotl.3718:

Ayrilana.1396:

Thief is the fastest or it was before the trait update.

That was my experience, yes. I was running P/P and once I hit lvl 60 and unlocked Ricochet, map completion got both very quick and very easy.

Too bad they eliminated Ricochet from the traits list. That was easily in my top 3 favorite Thief traits. It isn’t that useful in PvP and since that is all the devs seem to care about they removed it from the traits. Ricochet was an awesome trait for PvE and a good one for zerg/zerg WvW.

I found ranger to be the easiest. But that was before all the trait changes I could just unlock the signet very fast and have the movment speed. Ranger is also a good class you can do higher than yourself hearts quite easy with because of your 2 tanky pets.

Ranger is still very good. If it wasn’t for the lack of resist/cleansing and pet management, it would be at the top of my picks.

Necro, engi, and ranger were the three fastest and easiest to do basic map completion for me.

I’ve got world map completion on 4 of my toons (Warrior, Necro, Thief, Guardian) and did my map completions in roughly that order as well. All of that was done prior to the 6-23-2015 skill updates. While later ones definitely benefited from the learning curve aspect of knowing how to finish up hearts and maps more quickly, the class was also a factor. I know this because my subsequent work on map completion with a mesmer seems to be going slower.

Thief was probably the fastest out of those I’ve map completed so far, and while movement is a factor here, another important reason was stealth. Being able to completely avoid mobs near some of the Vistas, PoIs, and skill challenge (now called Hero challenge) commune locations greatly helped in the speed at which I could clear maps. Stealth is probably less of a benefit for hearts, but it might still help with a few.

I’ve done world completion on thief, guard and necro. For me, necro was the easiest for several reasons some people mentioned above. I alwyas experiment with builds, but settled on zerker as I got comfortable with the class. So reasons why necro was easiest for me
1) burst AOE in form of wells. 2) access to swiftness via warhorn. Like thief, necro has a signet givign you increased movement speed, but this is slower than swiftness. So my other adice is put a superior sigil of speed on a weapon. You can build up several min of swiftness which makes the movement speed signets unnecessairy. I was able to switch it to the flat power boost signet without loosing mobility.
Acutally, thats about it. I was pretty happy with necro and i felt I got it all done pretty efficiently.
Dont forget…SUPERIOR SIGIL OF SWIFTNESS!! all classes have enough damage potential so that you wont miss it by equiping one, and it makes a nice difference.

Kalendraf.9521:

Thief was probably the fastest out of those I’ve map completed so far, and while movement is a factor here, another important reason was stealth. Being able to completely avoid mobs near some of the Vistas, PoIs, and skill challenge (now called Hero challenge) commune locations greatly helped in the speed at which I could clear maps. Stealth is probably less of a benefit for hearts, but it might still help with a few.

Great point about the stealth. OP was talking about hearts specifically, but some of those Hero Challenges require clearing Champions, which is nice to be able to stealth around.

When I did map completion this last time I did 5 toons at once, each zone i did on each class and then moved to the next zone. While the Mesmer is definitely the slowest I would have to give a slight edge to the Thief as the fastest overall. I’ve done all classes now and the mobility combined with the burst damage and ability to get out of combat quickly(stealth) make hearts very easy. Also moving in between hearts is easier because what you cannot avoid will die in 1 or 2 hits. Guardian is a close second because of the power/survivabilty combined with endless run speed.

On a side note, because of how easy it is between hearts to kill random mobs on a Thief my bags were twice as full as any other character when I finished a zone.

As others have mentioned, probably Thief since you have good mobility, damage, and stealth.

I did my map completion on warrior, that felt pretty quick too, you have good mobility and it’s easy to buff yourself.

I’ve done 11 world completions. Guardian with shouts and swiftness – staff/gs, is by far the fastest to get through it.

Definitely agree that Mes is the slowest, it was the last for me to finish a world completion on.