Hardest profession profession to play?

Overall hardest profession to play effectively. Consider PvP, PvE (fractals, raids, open world), and all specializations.

Rev until they finally fix it :joy:

Engineer. But it wouldn't be the case if kits could stand on their own and their other utility skills had real use. Some do, don't get me wrong. Bulwark gyro is my baby. But overall lots of them don't really slot into a build as well as the 1 or 2 skills kits are used for.

Engineer, then Elementalist, then Revenant. If you swap in Weaver for Ele then I would move Weaver ahead of Engineer.

Engineer, especially if you exclude Scrapper and Holo. Hands down.

The big ones (for me) are Ele, Engi, Mesmer, and Rev.

I don't know why people thing revenant is hard to play. It's one of the easiest classes to play ever. It's so easy I figured it out day one. Unless you're trying to heal. Than it is difficult. But even that doesn't compare to scourge or healing scrapper.

There is no profession that's harder to play than another, there are only builds that are harder to play than another.

@Lily.1935 said:I don't know why people thing revenant is hard to play. It's one of the easiest classes to play ever. It's so easy I figured it out day one. Unless you're trying to heal. Than it is difficult. But even that doesn't compare to scourge or healing scrapper.

There is a big leap in difficulty between playing the rev casually, and doing the maximum DPS rotations. Casually the rev is really easy: you just maintain the upkeeps, spam the melee weapon skills, and swap legends when it is off cooldown. Anybody can do that. But, if you're going for max deeps, there are countless things that can go wrong:

(1): A lot of skills have varying levels of appropriateness. Citadel Bombardment and Inspiring Reinforcements are either terrible or the best skills in the game, all depending on if you're fighting a big stationary target or a small/mobile one. Sword 4, Sword 2, and Icerazor all split their damage between multiple targets. Razorclaw is only good with allies in range. Shortbow 4 and Shortbow 3 have weird positioning and usage. Etc. and so on. Using the wrong skill, or at the wrong time can cause performance to dip severely. Because of this, you need to have memorized a collection of which skills are good in which scenario, rather than a static rotation that works well anywhere.

(2: )Energy management is hell once you're relying on Charged Mists. That's the trait that gives you 25 energy on weapon swap if you're under 10 while swapping. For maximum DPS it is required, but that 10 energy range is incredibly difficult to hit in a manner that is both maintaining maximum DPS but also reliable. If you undershoot it, your DPS is tanked no matter what you do, but if you are going to overshoot it your skills will stall, again ruining DPS. In order to maintain energy, rotations will have you delaying upkeep skills by half a second, just to hit that mark. This also means that you have to spend a lot more time staring at your energy bar, which makes watching the fight harder.

(3): Because the entirety of the energy bar is required for the DPS rotation, all of the defensive and niche utilities are effectively disabled. While other classes can afford to have a defensive skill or two on the bar without losing much, Revs using their defensive skills takes away energy, which can throw the rhythm and severely hamper DPS. This causes a class that was once very durable to suddenly turn very glassy. Even dodging can break rhythm.

(4): Minimizing the mistakes from above demands quick thinking and on-the-spot creativity.

(5): All of the above also means that the class is hurt severely by latency.

This puts the rev in the odd place where the skill floor is low, but the skill ceiling is incredibly high.

Well ele and engi are darn hard to play good.Well i choose mesmer not because its as difficult as ele to play good but because of all the quirks and tricks you can do with all the mesmer skills. Which in the end is the highest skillcap i know is to play a mesmer that can utilize all the skill tricks in all environments.

@Blood Red Arachnid.2493 said:

@Lily.1935 said:I don't know why people thing revenant is hard to play. It's one of the easiest classes to play ever. It's so easy I figured it out day one. Unless you're trying to heal. Than it is difficult. But even that doesn't compare to scourge or healing scrapper.

I've played their damage rotations. Both Power and Condi. Its not hard. Its really freaking easy. Now, Engineer and Scourge? Those can be extremely difficult. Energy management on Rev is a joke. Its not really even much of a mechanic. I don't see how people can have such a hard time with it.

i say rev for the reson that they do not have a lot of skill that make them good in a one on one fight for me rev is more of a +1 not a solo. what that means is if you go to a fight unless you can get them off guard you will lose most of the time. the thing that hurts is we have not realy good range or any type of blink/stealth skills like that of a mes or thief. so in short it hurts us quite hard. i know some peps think that ele is hard but its not they are a strong class when you start to learn thare combos and learn how to swap elements at the right times its defenatly a more skilled class for pvp and wvw but not as bad as the rev from what i can tell.

I believe it's engi but maybe it's because I never tried to play it for real. I think it's a bit messy and so it didn't appeal me.I can understand when people say rev cause I'm terrible at it in wvw. I mean, it's easy to deeps but if you wanna do your job properly and survive and all, it gets harder than guard. (I mean guard in wvw cause .. if you wanna do the job well you really have to do so much things for your party and have eyes everywhere)As for ele, you're the most glass canon class so surviving and optimise your deeps is kinda the thing. Weaver is harder to survive in wvw than Ele but at the same time you have so much less to do ( no one gives a fuck about your boons, waterfield or any of your support since PoF so your job is minimized)

To be effective as an engineer you are constantly reconfiguring your skills and even traits on the fly for a given situation. That and the Rachmaninoff 5 level rotations just to get marginal damage output and you have a profession that has an off the charts skill floor..

Mesmer - you have to focu.....LIKE HELL I'M PLAYING A PROFFESION WITH PINK BUTTERFLIES!!!

And now you know why i can't master mesmer...

@Jaruselka.5943 said:To be effective as an engineer you are constantly reconfiguring your skills and even traits on the fly for a given situation. That and the Rachmaninoff 5 level rotations just to get marginal damage output and you have a profession that has an off the charts skill floor..

No kit holo us effective and very low complexity. Kit holo is medium complexity and very effective.Dunno about scrapper since I only put two hours of heal zerging so far but it feels a lot more complex.

It always depends Which is why the vote.is flawed.

@jan.7915 said:

@Jaruselka.5943 said:To be effective as an engineer you are constantly reconfiguring your skills and even traits on the fly for a given situation. That and the Rachmaninoff 5 level rotations just to get marginal damage output and you have a profession that has an off the charts skill floor..

The complexity increases as you roll back from PoF. I usually main a scrapper sustain build (WvW only) and recently went back and tried the vanilla engie after the latest so-called “buffs”. The slight boost in damage from poison dart etc doesn’t make up for the nerfs to tinctures (elixir gun/med kit can help but the kits themselves are garbage and take up valuable slot real estate) which leaves you vulnerable to the condie storm that is WvW. That and the (admittedly less) randomititis that plagues the class as a whole and vanilla engie is essentially a murdered spec. The design decisions over the progression of the game cynically steer players to the elites offered in the expansions.

Ele and kit Engi for similar reasons. It takes a while to get used to, but there is something immensely satisfying in pulverising your keyboard.

engi has always had hard rotations for me without a lot of practice so i'd say mechanically they are the hardest. Ele I feel is easier to get a hang of and requires a lot of button pressing, but not as much thought is needed as with engi. Revenant to me is the most situationally difficult. You can play rev easily and do ok, but maximizing revenants potential requires a lot of work, positioning, timing, and energy management that other classes don't have to worry about. I think the difficulty is the skills aren't free so it's all about making constant trade offs the whole fight. engi>rev>ele

@Lily.1935 said:I don't know why people thing revenant is hard to play. It's one of the easiest classes to play ever. It's so easy I figured it out day one. Unless you're trying to heal. Than it is difficult. But even that doesn't compare to scourge or healing scrapper.

Revenant usually has very bad condition cleansing, not access to stability at all and lacks stealth, plus they have both cooldowns AND energy to spent to be able to use skills.

I can understand that some people choses Eles as the hardest to play because they use a lot of skills and a bad rotation or mistake can kill them very fast, but Engineer is a stealth class, in a game in which stealth is the strongest skill. Classes with broad access to stealth are easy mode.

The hardest profession to play is the one you're not used to.

@Buran.3796 said:

@Lily.1935 said:I don't know why people thing revenant is hard to play. It's one of the easiest classes to play ever. It's so easy I figured it out day one. Unless you're trying to heal. Than it is difficult. But even that doesn't compare to scourge or healing scrapper.

Engineer is not a stealth class. It has a little bit of stealth, but honestly, not much outside of Stealth Gyro. And they lost some stealth with the recent patch. And not to mention that Holosmith's holoforge mechanic can kill you if you're not careful, plus the new rotation requires you use it to damage yourself so, how about that. Engineer is stated to be the most difficult class because it is. Its rotations are more involved than Elementalists and are more dangerous to the Engineer itself.

Also, Necromancer has low access to stability, less than Revenant, fewer stunbreaks, their condi cleans mostly requires them to be the aggressor which means its difficult or impossible to use if running away, lacks stealth, no blocks, no invuln, no disengage skills has both cool downs AND energy to spend on shroud and shades, Plus they attack really slow, have major tells, damage tends to be inconsistent, their defenses have diminishing returns in PvP, one mistake on their condi rotation can lead to your death without the enemy even hitting you, most their skills there is a better version of that skill on another profession at half the cool down. So yeah, everything you complain about the Revenant is matched by Necromancer and some. And that doesn't make necromancer the hardest to play.

Revenant has to deal with energy. Sure, but their energy mechanic is really easy to use. None of their skills requires that much energy, you get 50% to 75% of it back when swapping legends, it regenerates really quickly, you have reliable projectle blocks, access to blocks much better access to stability than necromancer, skills are on a very low cool down, you can disengage a foe without a problem. I'll give you their condi cleans isn't that great. But honestly its no worse than mesmers. Revenant is a really simplistic class to play. Its tricks are straightforward and its rotation doesn't require much thought. I play revenant when I need a break from the more difficult rotations on Scourge and Engineer. Its my relax class. Warrior is too simplistic for me.

The only hard thing about engi is condi build in pve due to juggling 4 kits. Most of other builds use 2 kits at most, and in general you use 2-3 skills per kit at most, so if you have only one kit in your build it's even easier than other classes (weapon swap has cd and it stops animations unlike kits; other classes use more skills from 2nd weapon set). It has easy access to boons, cleanses, mobility and cc or at least 3 of those on any current build, regardless of game mode. It can also stack both might and stealth quickly (prestacking with blasts - mostly pve, gyro - everywhere), unlike ele and thief who can do only one.

I chose ele because it gets 4 "kits" by default, it uses most skills on all of them (except some pve builds which use conjureds instead), it cant sustain itself/survive long without investing a lot into defensive stats (unlike at least 5 classes) aka it's pretty squishy. It also relies a lot (not all builds though) on predicting actions (meteor and general skill placement in wvw, conjures in pve) due to slow nature of staff skills and pve encounters/group dps dependency.

@Lily.1935 said:Revenant is a really simplistic class to play. Its tricks are straightforward and its rotation doesn't require much thought. I play revenant when I need a break from the more difficult rotations on Scourge and Engineer. Its my relax class. Warrior is too simplistic for me.

I have the same w/l ratio in the 1482 PvP matches played with my Rev as in the 28 played with my Necro, which can be played sucessfully hitting the keyboard with the forehead (only Mesmer is easier). Necro has more base HP, an extra life bar, more cc, larger AoEs and if specced to condi damage can run 2 defensive stats, not to mention that as happens with most of classes, has full freedom to combine its skills, whereas Rev uses fixed skills. Even worse, only one build (Glint + Shiro with axe+X/staff) had remained somewhat viable in 2.5 years since the arrival of the class , so everyone facing Rev knowns exactly its strenghts and weakness. Engineers are a mix between the rotation system from Eles but with the mobility and passive lifesavers of a Warrior (plus access to stealth). I'm not sayin that isn't the easiest class to master (I'll put in the top three) but Eles and Revs are harder.

@Buran.3796 said:

@Lily.1935 said:Revenant is a really simplistic class to play. Its tricks are straightforward and its rotation doesn't require much thought. I play revenant when I need a break from the more difficult rotations on Scourge and Engineer. Its my relax class. Warrior is too simplistic for me.

Nuh dude. Revenant is super easy. Two heal skills, 10 second stun breaks, or no recharge at all, tones of extra toughness. The meta in PvP currently is Condi focused but if it were to shift to power, rev would be at the top. Its just a bad time for you in PvP, this doesn't mean its hard to play. Because it isn't. Its really freakin easy.