Okay, first let me be absolutely clear; I’m not new to this game. I’ve been playing since the very first pre-purchase beta, played every stress test, and was here from the first minutes of headstart access. The problem however is that I still can’t settle on a main profession. Yeah I know; kind of strange. So I thought I’d just pop on here and throw out my problem in case anyone is willing to help me out. First I’ll let you know what my play style is, and why I’ve been doing what I’ve been doing so far.
Me
I’m an RPer at heart, and spend the vast majority of my play time with my fiancée (she’s been on the same Mesmer since beta, and aside from complaining about not being able to dual-wield pistols is very happy with the profession). Together we play through the various Living Story updates, do occasional dungeon runs, and am currently working on world completion for her legendary. We’re not really “casual” but we are busy (jobs, you know how it is), so our overall progress through the game has been very slow. Not helped much by me re-rolling a while back.
Back in the original Guild Wars my first character was a necromancer, and I played to max level with him using a minion master build simply because I like summoner classes. However I ditched that character and re-rolled when I got my fiancée to give the game a shot (she rolled a Mesmer and instantly fell in love with it). At that point I opted with a ranger because, as an RPer, I was using the same “main character” that I’ve long used when playing games with her. This character is thematically a pirate and a thief, and as of Guild Wars the ranger struck me as the most suitable for that theme. Playing the ranger I tried out a bunch of builds, and spent a while in PvP as a “toucher” (ranger/necro hybrid focusing on melee ranged life steals), but ultimately came to love two core play styles and assembled all my builds around them. Those being traps and preparations.
I liked the idea of setting traps to catch my foes off guard, and I loved being able to modify my skills with preparations (Ignite Arrows was the backbone of many builds). However coming to Guild Wars 2 I changed professions instantly. Instead of sticking with ranger I decided to roll a thief literally the second it was announced for role play reasons. Once in the game I rather enjoyed it…at first. I stuck with it for a long time, but around level thirty or so I hit a snag; it just wasn’t fun anymore. I was just starting to explore the possibilities of traits, but weren’t finding them to have enough influence at that level to reinvigorate the –by that point- stagnant thief gameplay, and worse still I was beginning to struggle to play the profession at all.
Perhaps it was just me, but the thief seemed to hit a massive problem with the way it’s stats scale relative to the world at about level thirty. Where I was a powerhouse, I suddenly felt extremely weak in spite of my habit of using crafting to update my weapons and armor every five levels. The diminishing returns on precision all but destroyed my DPS, and the thief’s low health and armor rating started to really become a problem. By level fourty-five I’d had enough, and after a lot of debate I deleted the character (there can only be one Arkham Creed) and re-rolled as an engineer.