Guild Wars 2

Working through your questions in reverse order:

Warrors, Guardians, and Mesmers are considered to be the top PVE classes. The rest kind of come in next, and engineers are (unfairly) often considered tier 3.

Ranged classes and weapons always do less damage than melee.

Mesmers are widely wanted for their support abilities.

Based on your criteria, I would suggest a condition based necromancer. Scepter/dagger at mid range, and staff for long range. Can’t burst at all, but bleed stacks keep ticking even when you’re dead, so sustained damage can be pretty high. Has high health and death shroud to give survival. Doesn’t bother with boons a whole bunch. And the condition build doesn’t use pets (although they are good for leveling). Oh, and your AoE abilities can’t be beat.

Downsides, your damage in world events will suffer due to condition stack limits. Likewise, a group can only really use one bleed-based member, or they can lose damage due to the cap. You won’t see any big numbers for damage, but you will see small numbers fill the screen.

Jackums.3496:

That is the exact same build I use, and it is spectacular! I always feel like I had an impact on every battle I was in.

The necro is really a jack of all trades who doesn’t fit nicely into a niche.
I play a rabid conditionmancer. I provide moderate DPS, which becomes better in long fights due to more time for bleeds to run. I provide support by weakening, crippling, chilling, and blinding the enemies. I help remove conditions from my allies. As the only person in my guild who mains a necromancer, people say dungeons are just easier when I’m around.
As a necro, you have to be able to adapt to the situation and change skills and traits as needed. Epidemic can be the best utility skill in the game one fight, and useless in the next.

Engels is right. I like my build for dungeons and some PVP, but condition duration also helps your weakness and chill durations, your fear durations, and can boost your long term DPS quite a bit.

The ascended trinkets are only a little better than exotics, but there are no upgrades with both condition damage and toughness for trinkets, except crest of the rabid. The ascended gear is thus a bigger upgrade than normal. Both the runes of the undead and the tuning crystals convert toughness to condition damage, so traiting into death magic helps too.

1587 condition damage bare bones.
signet of corruption + rare veggie pizza + master tuning crystal gets me to 2062.
That’s 145 per tick before might.

Full curses, Rabid gear and undead runes, I tick about 140 without food. I’ve seen 155 with food, and about 15 stacks of might. I still have 2 rings and a trinket to upgrade to ascended before I can really max it out.

As a cloth/leather crafter, you can sell all of that Ore you mine, instead of having to use it for crafting. This easily offsets the cost of salvaging for mats, and grants funds to buy more cloth.