Guild Wars 2

I saw a lot of topics like this, but all of them are out dated, so i have one question.

In your opinion, what class is the best for PVE and why?

The Best PvE class is the class you enjoy the most. The class your best at!

Everyone has their opinion on what they think is best class for PvE since they are good at what they love.

But it’s a fact, that all classes are viable and can be enjoyed by different types of players.

Just keep in mind, when asking for “what’s the best class?”, you’re asking everybody what they enjoy best. That doesn’t mean you might enjoy the same thing.

I’ve only played a short time after 8 years of WoW, and I can’t express enough how true DreamyAbaddon’s words are when applied to this game. It truly does not matter what class you choose, except that you enjoy it. Unlike WoW, there is no master OP class in GW2, no strict roles either.
My best advice as a GW2 noob to another is to try a few proffs (classes) and then choose one to be your ‘main’. You can enjoy the game equally using each proff.
GL!

He asked a simple question, just give the answer you scrubs.

The answer is mesmers and engineers are the best classes.

After almost a week of playing, I wasn’t sure what ‘best’ even meant in this game. Shame on you for shaming new players in the Players Helping Players forum.

Guanglai Kangyi.4318:

He asked a simple question, just give the answer you scrubs.

The answer is mesmers and engineers are the best classes.

You sir give me cancer due to your ignorance and stupidity. He is saying that there is no ‘best’ class. It all depends on how one uses the class. I play the best as a necro, rather than another person who plays best as a warrior. There is no right or wrong answer. So I advise you to stop being so blunt, and consider what Abaddon and the rest of these fine folks are saying.

For PvE specifically, elementalist.

Why:

1. You can stack 25 might on your whole party. Alone. That’s a 30-40% increase in damage per person. That means you add about 1.5 players’ worth of damage to others before even considering your own damage output.
2. You can cleanse 2 conditions from your whole party, and 10 from yourself, in rapid succession. You also have 3-4 sources of heal of which two are AoE, and can not only give regen, but also Soothing Mist, a regen-equivalent skill buff to your party, that stacks with regen. That makes you one of the better healers in the game, behind only the Guardian and Ranger.
3. You can run nearly permanent protection, regen on your party, permanent 25 might and vigor on your party, and 25% uptime fury on yourself. That makes you the best boon support build in the game.
4. You can swift your whole party for 1 minute 10 seconds, every 30 seconds.
5. Now considering your own damage output, you can match a berserker warrior’s damage output with only celestial gear because of the very high damage multiplier on Lightning Hammers. And unlike them, your skill rotation permanently blinds your targets – which makes your whole party effectively invulnerable to all groups of veteran and below monsters. Against the Nightmare Tree in one of the dungeons, permablind allows you to solo the boss in melee range, where no other class possibly can.
6. You can summon the Fiery Greatsword, whose 3 and 4 skills do the highest damage per second possible. in a stacking environment, your damage under 25 might conditions can equal your entire party’s damage added together.
7. In certain builds, you have invulnerability skills, allowing you to melee fractal bosses that even Guardians cannot fight reliably.
8. You can summon the frost bow. This makes Ascalonian Catacombs explorable modes laughably easy.

It’s gotten to the point that I’m developing all 7 other characters for WvW because of how insanely strong the PvE elementalist is.

But the elementalist is conversely weak in PvP because:

1. Boons are strippable and stealable.
2. Players’ behaviour is much harder to anticipate than PvE bosses. You can’t exactly evade every single major attack by players, though you can do that in PvE quite easily.
3. You have next to no control skills. This is irrelevant in PvE because champions+ have a bad defiance mechanic that makes control useless there anyway, and veterans- die so fast to your insane DPS that controlling them is a waste of time.
4. Mobs do stupid things like stand in the same spot meleeing you when you have invuln on, allowing you to drop ridiculous loads of damage on their heads. Players aren’t half this stupid.

Problems with the elementalist as a PvE choice:

1. Very high skill floor.

===

The classes are designed differently, each class has a niche in which it does better than all other classes at. It just so happens that the entirety of PvE fits into the elementalist’s niche, but WvW functions become way more varied. Attempting to create a build for a class that does not fulfill the specialty of the class results in a build that is inferior to a build for the class that fulfills that function especially well. For instance, if you’re trying to create a guardian that can roam alone in WvW, there wouldn’t be an end to the complaints you’d eventually have against permastealth thieves, because that’s where their element is. If you’re trying to lead a zerg in WvW, guardians will forever seem overpowered and engineers will forever look like kittens (aside from the fact that charr engineers are, in fact, overgrown kittens).

The majority of class vs class comparisons on the forum is about people trying to fit classes into roles the classes are not good at, and complaining about how overpowered those classes which do that role best are.

Because if you were to judge all animals by how far they could reach, the t-rex is forever a failure.

Guanglai Kangyi.4318:

He asked a simple question, just give the answer you scrubs.

The answer is mesmers and engineers are the best classes.

You sir, should be fired… out of a cannon.

OP – Keep in mind profession is just one aspect. Some may say otherwise, but Race really does play a factor.
For example, I tired Mesmer multiple times as Asura, Sylvari, and Norn. I’m not sure what it was, but playing them was at best boring, at worst painful.
It wasn’t until I tried Human that it finally ‘clicked’ with me.
I had similar race / profession issues with my other characters.

In short, if you like the concept of a profession try a few combination of races. You may find that certain mix that can make for a very enjoyable character.

IMO, for the majority of content, the perfect group comp would be:
1- Mesmer
1- Elementalist
1- Guardian
2- Warriors

Depending on the situation, mesmer could be changed to another guardian or warrior.

So, one of those…

A maximal dps PvE group consists of an Celestial elementalist (lightning hammer and FGS compulsory), an Assassin phantasm mesmer (Time Warp compulsory), a Berserker warrior (1x power banner compulsory), a Carrion/Rampager conditioner ranger (ability to maintain 25 bleeds alone compulsory) and a Soldier/Valkyrie/Berserker dps-specced guardian (Justice is Blind, Renewed Justice compulsory).

In this group you have perm burn, perm 25 vulnerability, perm 25 might, perm 25 bleed, perm poison, perm regen, +170 power/condition damage from the warrior banner, +150 precision from the ranger, +7% damage from the ranger, quickness for use against bosses from the mesmer, perm blind, 3 players with projectile nullification/reflection abilities, perm protection, perm regen, perm retaliation and perm swiftness, a reasonable uptime of fury, and a reasonable uptime of Confusion. The mesmer is also capable of switching into boonstripping mode, which can almost permanently keep boons off rebooning bosses at a cost to personal dps (CoE golem, HoTW p1 boss etc).

The phantasm mesmer does 4500 ish dps, the ranger 5000 ish, the guardian 3500 ish (but does this in AoE and also draws aggro for everyone else), the warrior 4000 ish and the elementalist 4000 ish (lightning hammer mode) to 8000 ish (only when Fiery Greatsword is summoned, and under stacking conditions) – all these are when they work alone. In a group like this where the boons and conditions are not duplicated, each of their dps values is anywhere from 30%-50% higher (mesmer benefits the most, elementalist benefits the least). Overall it’s about 27,000+ damage per second for the group, with spikes of >35,000 possible during a Time Warp.

Conditioner ranger can be swapped for Dire necro for a slight decrease in dps.

Engineers (haven’t found a very effective dps build yet), and thieves (good against single targets, weak against many targets; any stealthing functions can be replaced by the mesmer’s veil and Portal, defensive abilities subpar relative to all other classes because its survivability is based on Stealth, a mechanic generally quite irrelevant to PvE bosses which can AoE everything) can do dungeons, but are suboptimal for completion speeds. I’m waiting for Anet to buff these two classes, but in such a way that it doesn’t send PvP balance off kilter again.

Remember however that whether the player is good or not, and whether the build is good or not plays a very large role in whether the overall thing works. This ‘dream team’ requires 5 elite players, the chances of which getting in a PuG group by chance is very small. People usually prefer to add warriors instead since the class takes little skill to do well – a 5 warrior team can already do 20,000 dps between them, and people like these aren’t hard to find. And they usually prefer to avoid rangers because for some odd reason the average ranger can’t do their job.

Guanglai Kangyi.4318:

He asked a simple question, just give the answer you scrubs.

The answer is mesmer and engineers are the best classes.

funny how the scrub is calling people scrubs.

I actually like the Engineer because of the variety of skills you can have(turrets are super useful) but in the end its all opinion, so i don’t really have an answer.

hayashi plz can you show us the ranger build you mentioned above, im curious to test it.
Amazed by the perfect things you wrote, thanks in advance.

Ranger for open world
Warrior for dungeons
Guardian for fractals
Necro for meta bosses

Warr or Guard, as it has always been the case.

I’ve played all GW2 classes to 80 except Engineer… which I can’t get into for some reason.

Warrior is the best class, hands down. Great damage, great survivability, tons of variety in weapons and builds, great in PvE, WvW and sPvP.

Every other class has problems in one area or another.

i think necro is the best:
1. his staff aoe do not activate the moment you put them down so you can set "traps"to start i would go with the staff or the dagger. i like to set the # 5 spell which is fear behind me for 2 reasons if someone sneaks up on you they flee and if they get to close in front you step back and they flee. also the #2 spell you cast at your feet and use the #3 spell to start the first
2. he has a lot of healing spells from the get go.
3. by the time you can get minions is the time you need to get them so it does not seem to be op like the hunter.

I’ve leveled to 80 engi(2 of them), mesmer, necro, ele and warrior. Ranger to 55, thief to 50 only, guardian to 71. There is a popular statement that you should pick whatever you enjoy the most. In most mmos it’s not true, at least for me, but here, in GW2 for the first time I experienced it. As an example I’d like to take elementalist and necromancer. There is always place for ele in dungeons – speedruns and casual ones. I leveled ele, but I didn’t enjoy playing it. Even if I had no problems in finding team, I felt really helpful I stopped playing ele. Then I leveled necro, bought full zerker exotic gear at 80 and even if I could not bring as much to my team as with ele I still play necro.

It’s not like you will be useless if you pick wrong class. Even necro has it’s adventages over other. I might not bring team support, but even in full zerker gear I have enough survivability to carry my team sometimes.

Play what you want, not what others what you to play.

Once you find guild or some friends you won’t see any difference if you are necro or ele. The only difference you might experience is how long certain dungeons will take you, but minute or two are not worth picking a class you won’t enjoy.

BUT if you want a best class I’d say it’s ele or guardian/warrior. They are must haves in every pve mode.

The problem with the OPs question is that they did not specify which aspects of PvE they were referring to. There are several PvE activities that would elicit different answers – open world exploring and leveling, Living Story, open world champion and boss zergs and dungeons and fractals are among some of them.

Of course the correct answer is “the one that you enjoy playing” but there are some people who want more direction. We can not really give that to them until we know aspects of PvE they are asking about.

Edit: Also knowing what the OP’s play style would help.

Dreamy Abbabon is right.
My best classes (can’t have an main, never understood the concept even in games that reuired it) or Mesmer, ele, ranger and necro and it took me a long time to get any joy out of necro. EDIT engie is fun for me in WvW the little I play of it.

i think the best pve class is ranger

The first problem with this question is HOW YOU define PvE (as that encompasses multiple different actual modes of play with very different goals and “requirements”).

Guys, this thread is 9 months old. I’m pretty sure the issue is resolved by now.

Dragon Hearth.4582:

necro

Smells like Thread-Necro-Trolling. :o