Last night I was having a conversation with a good friend of mine as they struggled to figure out which class that they wanted to play in Guild Wars 2, and it reminded me of something that I did not talk about yesterday. This is potentially the largest challenge that I had to overcome, and it is wrapping my head around the concept of class as it relates to this game. World of Warcraft and Everquest before it poisoned the well when it came to thinking about what a class means. For me each word associated with a class meant something specific, and this ultimately will set you off on the wrong foot when it comes to understanding Guild Wars.
Going into this game I brought with me a lot of assumptions about what each class available meant. I am going to share with you those assumptions and then the reality check that I had to have in order to wrap my head around the truth. Here goes some bad takes:
- Elementalist – Glass cannon caster that hurls fireballs at things and falls over if anything looks at them wrong… aka WoW Mage.
- Engineer – Ranged class that maybe uses mechanical pets or traps. Basically an old school survival hunter from WoW.
- Guardian – The Paladin, tries to be a Warrior but mostly fails and is resigned to a support role.
- Mesmer – The illusionist… essentially the Everquest Enchanter.
- Necromancer – Squishy caster that only really survives because of their undead pets that they summon.
- Ranger – Ranged pet class aka the WoW Beastmaster Hunter.
- Revenant – Seems a lot like a Frost Death Knight from WoW.
- Thief – Lightweight melee class that relies on stealth and sneak attacks to survive aka WoW Rogue.
- Warrior – Tank or at least a Tanky DPS. High survival and can just soak damage.
Talking with my friend last night, it sounds like they also made some of these assumptions because it is what we are used to thinking when we think of “class”. However while you can effectively play each of them as the thing I said… they are so much more than that. Guild Wars 2 specifically uses the term profession instead of class, but I have to admit that I did not catch onto this because I already had my mind set down a specific path. The truth is none of the professions have a fixed path that you have to or are supposed to follow. They are instead a combination of choices made in your build, the gear that you are wearing, and most importantly the weapon combinations that you choose to be using.
Instead it is best to think of the “classes” of Guild Wars 2 as classes from Dungeons and Dragons or any other pen and paper roleplaying game. They are archetypes but do not dictate the role that you will play. For example in Dungeons and Dragons it is super easy to create a Cleric and turn them into a murder machine on the battlefield… or resign to the back line as their more common role of the healer or combat medic. Cleric is less a specific role that is played and more a style of magic that is used, and for the most part this type of mindset translates over to Guild Wars 2 very well. Your profession dictates the types of abilities that you are going to have access to, but not necessarily what you do with them.
So for example if we go back through the list of professions, here is a more truthful statement about what they represent. Granted this is my understanding and it might conflict with yours… so bear with me.
- Elementalist – Has access to elemental magic fire/ice/lightning etc and things related to that.
- Engineer – The tinkerer or artificer that has access to things related to machinery and technology based attacks.
- Guardian – I mean it is a Paladin but think of it as a Holy Warrior archetype with access to auras and holy magic.
- Mesmer – Illusionist is correct but way more broad and adaptable with the ability to bend reality.
- Necromancer – Anything related to Death, Blood, or Curse Magic is its jam which of course also includes reanimating dead things to fight for it.
- Ranger – Deep affinity with nature magic and its pet bond, with a wide variety of pets to choose from.
- Revenant – Draws strength from the ancestors and what that means is determined greatly by which ancestor you are choosing to channel.
- Thief – Relies on Agility, Stealth, Surprise and an acrobatic fighting style but can go in a bunch of different directions.
- Warrior – Adrenaline fueled combatant that relies on shouts, banners, and rage style mechanics to command the battlefield and also buff the party.
I have been spending most of my time playing Necromancer of late so let’s use that as an example. When I first started playing the class I was using more of a pure caster build where I stood back and cast spells with my staff and let the pets do most of the work. When I learned the Reaper elite specialization from Heart of Thorns, I transitioned to playing more of something akin to a World of Warcraft Death Knight or Everquest Shadow Knight. This allowed me to be a big tanky melee with a great sword and hacking the enemies up while my pets kept me healed. Yesterday I finished learning Harbinger the specialization from End of Dragons, and it allowed me to start playing a sort of gunslinger build where I fire pistols at my opponents and the bullets ricochet through the entire pack. These are three wildly different feeling builds, all out of the same class… and I am certain there are other builds I could have gone with that would have taken it in wildly different directions.
It was a hard fought realization, but the truth is the weapons you decide to bring to the battlefield and the abilities that you pair with them are what makes your character… not your class. As a result I spent a decade trying to make this game fit a model that it just did not. I kept trying to make the Warrior be this uber tank, when it was way more suited to being something completely different. I can of course BUILD the Warrior tanky… just not in the way I wanted it to be, and it will never be the tank archtype from other games either. It was not until I pushed myself completely out of my comfort zone with a “finger wiggler” class that I started to understand that my preconceived notions were getting in the way of my enjoyment.
This is just a me thing but mentally I started thinking of it in terms of Diablo 3, and how I build characters there and how wildly different a Barbarian can be for example depending on how you gear them. A Barbarian is no more tanky than any other class in that game, but it can take on that role if geared and built correctly. Guild Wars 2 essentially works in a very similar pattern and placing the game in that sort of headspace helped me to really engage with it. I am not sure if this will help anyone out there who has tried and failed to engage with it, but this is what worked for me. Based on a few conversations last night, it sounds like some of my friends are also standing on this precipice as well.
This actually reminds me of Elder Scrolls Online, too. I remember playing a Templar and someone insisting I should heal the group. I “looked” at my 2-handed sword and bow, my huge pool of Stamina & tiny pool of Magica, and just shook my head.
This series has almost tempted me to try Guild Wars 2 again. Almost. I feel like there are so many games I can just jump in and enjoy and I’ve not yet read the post that convinces me GW2 is worth the work of learning it.
Maybe I was playing my Warrior badly and my Guardian well but I didn’t notice a real difference in tankiness and damage. They were both completely fine though, so perhaps I was just being bad with both in normal open world content 😉
I loved using a greatsword on my Mesmer while leveling.
I despised the Necro’s summons, so I went with a more melee build on that until I hit 80 and swapped into a Reaper build using the greatsword for it.
Oddly enough, I really liked the summons on the elementalist, I just wish I didn’t have to recast the summon spell on cooldown to keep all 3 of them (and make sure I was in lightning spec when doing it — much preferred the ranged lightning pets, despite preferring to play mostly in Fire aspect)
My thief was a full dual-pistol gunslinger.
The engineer was an AOE beast with bombs.
Another thing to realize is that the newer “elite” specs are not necessarily better than the original builds. They make each profession more versatile, not more powerful. So for instance, the new thief spec, Specter, is meant to be a support role, not a high DPS role like the Dead-eye. And, unless things have changed significantly from the last time I checked, the Ranger’s Druid spec has turned out to be the most powerful healer in the game.
It got a lot of competition from Firebrand (Guardian), and to a lesser extent Scourge (Necro) and Renegade (Revenant), but it’s still pretty high up there.
“Necromancer – Squishy caster…”
It’s especially funny you had this preconception given that Necro is like the tankiest class in the game, and can, moreso than any other class, be built to be basically unkillable.
Yeah and given it is now what I spend most of my time playing. Just shows how far off the preconception based on “other mmorpgs” was, but I think there are a lot of folks who approach GW2 from this sort of mindset.
Yeah, I came down here to say that. Necro and Warrior have the most base hit points of all the classes. But my warrior is the most likely to die (thanks in part to the revenge(?) downed ability, while my necro is pretty much unkillable. Like Bel, I wish I switched to Reaper much sooner, I spent too much time trying to make Scourge work. And, while flashy, I know I will never like Harbinger.
I think it’s easy to miss its gimmick or it’s level-dependant. I stopped mine at 70 and I fully agree with Bel, it felt nearly as squishy as my mesmer. So maybe for people who usually don’t play casters… it doesn’t feel tanky if you’re maybe doing it wrong.