- Warriors
Have a lot of weapons to choose from, and can do some healing eventually, or increase stats of party members using banners. They also have the highest basic health & armor. They can do high condition damage (damage over time) or direct damage. They are suited for most basic roles. Mace allows more defensive combat, axe is direct high damage, swords stack lots of bleeding, which eventually becomes quite powerful. Not only that, but you have a choice between longbow and rifle for ranged weapons. On top of that, warriors can dual-wield swords, axes and maces if they like, allowing you to customize the basic attacks to a satisfying extent. That’s a lot of variety, though warrior is so far rather common if you ask me – so that might be a bit of a trade-off. Warriors have it quite easy in pve, and are very much hands-on, with direct damage as their main feature. This makes them remarkably satisfying to play.
- Guardian
Guardians are more defensive than warriors are, and they will always be helpful to a group even if you don’t specialize in it (exceptions exist..). They are lacking in ranged abilities, but have strong melee and impressive durability in the form of heavy armor & boons/automatic heals. Their virtues (like auras in other games) can be activated to protect allies in the area, and add burning to their attacks, but you can always keep these abilities active on yourself. With many skills that rely on protecting friends, guardians are always a pleasure to have around in dungeons or general pve travels, and they don’t sacrifice damage to achieve this. The difference in durability to warriors is that guardians have low health, but in return they often negate attacks entirely, and have a basic health regeneration that no other profession gets. As a guardian, you are about as close as it gets to a healer in the game, as few professions can support parties as well as they do.
- Rangers
They’re known for having some issues as some of their abilities are currently in need of some change. Regardless, pve is impressively simple for this profession. Ranger damage and durability is quite alright on its own (though not as excellent as that of other professions), and their pet adds damage (cat-pets), durability (bears) or balanced stats (wolves) to their build. There are quite a lot of pets, each with their own special ability. Once you master how to fight in unison with your pet, you’ll have things quite easy in pve, and often you won’t even need to lift a finger on casual travels. Rangers can inflict many conditions, constrict enemies, dodge a lot of attacks, have very decent self-heal abilities (though nothing like the guardian) and can buff allies using spirits. Perhaps you’d like to focus on your pet? Then you’ll choose beast mastery. Perhaps you’d rather be a hard-hitting marksman, then marksmanship is for you! If you see yourself as a cunning survival expert, then skirmishing/survival will add versatility, traps and great melee, rogue-ish traits into the mix. Ranger utility skills are somewhat lacking in fighting power at the moment, but this will be changed. On the plus side: you get to see your profession improve with updates, without fear of Anet reducing the damage of your abilities – I can almost guarantee this.
These are the easiest professions for pve in my opinion. If it helps – I think the heavy armor users are the best because they are solid, not-very-bugged options. Apart from that, I personally think heavy armor looks better than leather. Lastly, guardians & rangers will ultimately be the most versatile if you take their utility skills into consideration.
