Easiest Profession

I have a work colleague who is interested in GW2 but has slight vision impairment (doesn’t track fine details too well). What is a character that has a fairly simple rotation that would allow them to enjoy the game but still be viable in different game modes? Thanks in advance for any advice.

Easiest profession? That's a hard one. For the longest time, people said that it was warrior, but that may have changed. I've also seen people say that guardian, ranger and necro are easy. So maybe one of those four? Sorry that I can't be much help, but the easiest one for me is ele, and most people say that it's one of the harder professions to learn, so I have to go off what other people have said. I hope that makes sense.

The term easy is sort of a trap. Warrior isn’t really easy, but it is simple (as in the opposite of complex) and straightforward. Which also means it is very limited. Warrior lacks any of the fancier tricks of the other classes, which is particularly noticeable in PvP. Warrior can be hard to play because you have to deal with the more complex classes running circles around you.

Warrior or guardian for melee and necro or ranger for ranged-pets as well for ranger/necro.

Tell him to check the accessibility options when possible.

For classes, Ranger and Necro as easy to play due to Pets/Minions make everything a breeze.

I think the more important question is: will your college be able to keep up with the visual cluster bomb of gw2? The amount of things that can and will go off at once in any game mode may hinder them them no matter what class they play.

1st: i'll be leaving out open world pve, because any profession has possibilities to work really well. even the most squishy looking profession with only 11k base health have insane survive-builds that still do plenty of damage. (meditation-retaliation-valkyrie-guard; fresh-air tempest, crit-heal-thief)...ranger, flamethrower enginner and necro dominate in terms of "easy to play" here - which is probably a bit biased.

for the rest of the game modes there are a couple of options.most of them lose some efficiency if you build them for more survivability though.

warrior works well in pvp and wvw with passive "invul" procs and active defenses, but they hardly use these in pve like fractals. however in pve they provide passive buffs for the grp and have a big health pool that helps with subtle mechanics (skills without big tells - e.g. the chaos fractal boss 3rd auto-chain hit (stun)).

necro in pve does have the advantage of the shroud/barrier but has a lower ceiling of dps and not so much utility. shroud got a few buffs recently, which pushes shroud more and more into the burst category rather than (passive) defense.necro is rather squishy in pvp due to only minor active defenses and passive defenses being a big health pool only.

guardian can be played as a dps/utility-dps with more survivability in pve (more hp with valkyrie gear and some active defenses) - but will lose some efficiency in minmaxed scenarios (raids, fractals).guardian can be a very strong support too, which can make it very durable. my opinion on this is split tho, because it does very good in wvw/spvp BUT is outshined by other professions in pve (minmax in mind again. if minmax/meta isnt the intention however, guard is very solid and has some easy to pick up builds/rotations such as the fractal hammer (qt - popular pve benchmark guild - still use it afaik))

fresh air tempest is "easy" too, if played as a support... pve.elementalist/other specs are a lot more complex and most of the times squishy.

druid (ranger).doing really good as a support/heal in pve tends to be more difficul. doing okay is fairly easy.dont know about dps difficulty.in pvp ranger is more of a roaming/small scale/solo/more fast paced but active defenses available.

in general i feel like support oriented playstyle favors a margin of error (e.g. outhealing subtle mechanics that is). engineer falls into that category too.

my personal descision would be guard or warrior. both can be adjusted to personal liking without losing out too much of their efficiency.

there are still options open (like pve-mirage being easy - or pve-deadeye) but i felt like they dont cover your "easy to play (and viable) in any gamemode"

@Sephylon.4938 said:I think the more important question is: will your college be able to keep up with the visual cluster bomb of gw2? The amount of things that can and will go off at once in any game mode may hinder them them no matter what class they play.

I was wondering the same thing. Also, how well could they see the enemy telegraphing attacks.

As for professions, I think there are a few AOE-based styles that could work well:

1. Full-minion necro build with staff - the minions do alot of the attacking, don't have precise pet management, and staff AOE marks don't require precise placement.
2. Marks/Wells necro - leveraging the AOE abilities of staff plus wells means mostly just getting the AOE circles in the general area of the enemies.
3. Firebrand guardian - the Virtues are AOE, so its pretty easy from a targeting perspective. Downside is that it would take some time to accumulate the hero points to unlock the spec.

Yeah I know the clutter will be a challenge for him. I think there is a setting to reduce the effect noise. I’ll have to look into that. I don’t spend much time on guard. How complex is the Firebrand rotation?

@Daergoth.9415 said:Yeah I know the clutter will be a challenge for him. I think there is a setting to reduce the effect noise. I’ll have to look into that. I don’t spend much time on guard. How complex is the Firebrand rotation?

I’d say about medium complexity/difficulty as a lot of function key abilities are involved in addition to weapon and utility skills.

"Easy" is a tricky word. It comes down to play style:

Would he like to push one or few buttons, have excellent surviveability and win? Warrior and necromancer.

Have fewer choices of skills than all others to keep it simpler with moderate surviveability? Ranger and Revenant.

Have tons of buttons to push constantly with high surviveability? Firebrand and engineer.

Have tons of buttons that require some exciting play? Elementalist and Mesmer

Does he like to be sneaky with patience and skillful timing? Thief.

Actually, it all depends. Some general issues with GW2 gameplay features don't lend themselves to accomodating visual impairment, including map details being too small, inability to increase gamma (some areas too dark, increasing inability to see...for someone with impaired visual acuity it can be like being in pitch blackness) makes it really more frustrating than it has to be. Dailies requiring jump puzzles might be more challenging than for most people, as one issue.

"Visual cluster bomb" is more of a sensory processing issue, rather than low vision, however distinguishing one target from another can be more difficult and the targeting AI is poor, as selecting nearest target often does not, nor does it always target the attacking mob and sometimes it doesn't attack the mob you have targeted. Ranged can accidentally target things you didn't mean to target for whatever reason that isn't intuitive and end up pulling more mobs than you can handle.

Melee classes don't have the problem so much of targeting things you don't want to as you can only effect things within short range in the first place, although even primarily melee classes have some ranged weapons.

I think Guardian and Engineers have good survivability even without being well geared or optimally built. I think classes that need to be considered are the basic classes and not expansion-related specializations which are later along in content and play (meaning you have to get to max level first before you can even start using that content).

I myself have impaired vision and haven't found good resources that mesh well with gameplay yet.

Warrior, Guardian, Ranger and Necro are easiest to learn due to not really having any hard mechanics to get used to, got plenty of passive/active defensive stuff.They also suffer from being predictable and kited (rangers dont get kited though), its generally quite easy to avoid their damage and stuff.

Their specializations really doesnt change things up alot neither, so if you are good with their core professions its usually a "natural" addition to their already "easy" core.

Dont take "easy" as in always great and without problems or a skillceiling though. Its just overall easier to do decent with and learn.

@"Noha.3749" said:Warrior, Guardian, Ranger and Necro are easiest to learn due to not really having any hard mechanics to get used to, got plenty of passive/active defensive stuff.They also suffer from being predictable and kited (rangers dont get kited though), its generally quite easy to avoid their damage and stuff.

Their specializations really doesnt change things up alot neither, so if you are good with their core professions its usually a "natural" addition to their already "easy" core.

Dont take "easy" as in always great and without problems or a skillceiling though. Its just overall easier to do decent with and learn.

Also depends on build. All my characters are easy and I have at least 1 of each class.

@"Daergoth.9415" said:What is a character that has a fairly simple rotation that would allow them to enjoy the game but still be viable in different game modes?That depends entirely on how you define "enjoy the game" but in terms of simple rotation dual pistol deadeye probably takes the cake. The only things you need to care about is positioning and initiative management so your rotation looks somewhat like F1 -> 3,3,3,3,3... -> F2 -> 1 -> 3,3,3,3,3... -> F1 -> ... That being said it's a viable choice for everything PvE (although never optimal) but completely unviable for sPvP and WvW.

RangerElementalistGuardianWarrior

I have the same visual issues as your co-worker. Those classes are the ones that work best.