HeLp!!! Profession Questions

[UnsacredTko.1792]

Ok so I am coming from Never Winter online. I am So Confused I watched a few guides and read a few and now i am all confused about professions and which one to pick. I played alot of mmos and was always a raid tank with a warrior or paladin. so i should pick a warrior or a guardian? but Some guides tell me there is no true tank they just dps or support. but on the other hand there is the ranger which is the healer? and thiefs are not like rogues yep confused i wanna be a tank but my brain cant wrap my head around that. the mesmer a cloth wearer is the tank which one of the guides on youtube mentioned Mind Blowed. Prehaps i am over thinking this i dont know how raiding works or dungeons or fractals whatever those are.Just want some help for me to make sense of this in the simplest fromI am enjoying the game made a guardian but not sure if i should keep with it or reroll a new toon to do raids

[TwiceCookedPorkins.8940]

So there are no tanks in the game. There are a few raid encounters that use tank-like mechanics, but that's as far as that goes.

There are healers and buffers, however. Druids are typically the go-to healer for raids, as they are strong healers and provide pretty unbeatable, max-stack Might uptime (might buffs power and condition damage and stacks up to 25 times). The other three major buff specs are Firebrand, Renegade and Chronomancer (Guardian, Revenant and Mesmer, respectively). Renegades and Chronos can provide a lot of Alacrity (a buff that speeds up cooldowns) and Chronos and Firebrands can provide a lot of Quickness (which speeds up attack animations). While both Renegades and Firebrands are pretty good healers, Chronos are not.

Warriors are also highly sought after for their unique Banners, which buff large amounts of players with unique buffs. They're also really good DPS. Boon-share Thief also exists, but it's pretty much a meme build.

There are a few other specs to consider when looking at support. Elementalists can take the Tempest spec, which is one of the strongest specs for straight-up healing. They can also provide Auras to their party, which are unique buffs of varying worth. Necromancers can take the Scourge spec which is a great source of Barrier (Barrier is a damage shield). And then there are Scrappers, which you won't see much of in PVE, because their main focus is healing and condition cleanse.

That's a pretty simplistic overview, but basically how the game is set up for the moment.

[Irensaga.6935]

Most tanking in the game is not about relying on hit points or armor - but rather firing off evasion skills at exactly the right moment. For example a Mesmer sees the raid boss telegraphing his big swing and activates Blurred Frenzy right at that moment making themselves immune to the hit. Other classes have similar abilities they can use. Some are better at it than others.

[Randulf.7614]

The game isn't designed to have a trinity of tanks/healers/dps in a hard format like that. Different classes can adapt to the roles - some better than others, but it's much more free form. Certainly raid tanks like you are used to in more classic settings do not exist. Warriors can be built to be pure brick walls, but aggro control isn't the same here and so a brick warrior in a raid or dungeon is just a loss of dps or support.

Basically, forget what you know. GW2 for better or worse tries it a different way.

Your Guardian will give a lot of support and depending how you spec it with later expansions, you will be pretty useful - just not in the traditional heavy class way

[Lexi.1398]

Gw2 has a very active combat system, for raid encounters where tanking mechanics exist you can do two things: Use active defenses to take 0 damage, or outheal the damage. Sometimes an active defense is absolutely required for attacks that one hit KO or do an additional crowd control effect (generally speaking, this means an effect which controls how you move, often by making you unable to move) - one cannot heal themselves through this kind of attack.

Mesmer has the most active defence of any class in the game, doubly so with the chronomancer spec. It is one of the easier raid tanks simply because there's so many ways to block, dodge, and invuln through attacks they can eat a lot of attacks other tanks would need to heal through, and some builds just do not have the defensive skills required in order to tank some bosses. - additionally, even other builds that do have a lot of blocks and etc, nothing can really match the cooldown on mesmer's blocking/dogding skills.

Keep in mind, there are multiple methods the game gives a tanking role, and also technically -anything- can tank, but in terms of raids, you want to tank to use a build that loses the least comapred to other builds in order to tank. That is usually supports that lose the least out of tanking, between having to take toughness gear sometimes, being unable to do a dps rotation in favour of movement/dodging/block/invuln, and even having the boss face you on some specs is lost damage. Generally speaking, it will be chronomancer (mesmer) or heal firebrand (guardian) tanking - most other tanks aren't used except in highly optimal stategies.

Leveling up in gw2 takes a very short amount of time (especially in comparison to most mmos), so i wouldn't worry about picking the rigth profession from the get go. Pick what you want, leveling up a second character will be even easier & quicker after your first.

[Irensaga.6935]

Guardian is a great class to start with. But don't go thinking it's a tank. It has evasion abilities like all the classes, can do force fields that block projectiles, and wears heavy armor. But it's not really great at tanking - even Guild Wars style. The hit points are lower than the other two heavy armor classes, closer to Elementalist levels of hit points. And they don't have enough hard evade abilities to really stand toe-to-toe with a boss and survive.

Guardians are more like magic user DPS that wear plate armor. They can mix it up close with a two-handed sword OK, but the current power build on them is actually a scepter lobbing long range energy balls at enemies. But they're versatile and pretty survivable and have never really had an update where they were ever a bad class. So it's a nice class to start on.

If you want tanks, the current meta for raids is almost all Mesmers doing the tanking - using the Chronomancer elite specialization from Heart of Thorns. Mesmers have a lot of excellent counter abilities that make them able to dodge damage. An experienced player can rig his Mesmer so they are able to always have a dodge/evade ability off cooldown ready to use when a boss makes a big damage attack. Throwing around constant distracting clones of themselves also makes them really resilient, since monsters often go after the clones instead. I love my Mesmer playing solo. Really tough character, even though she's just a magic user in cloth armor. But I'm not a raider. I'm just going off what I know from the builds over at Metabattle.

EDIT: I read Lexi's comment above that mentions Guardians tanking. Lexi probably knows more about the raid scene than I do, so I'll defer to that comment.

[Irensaga.6935]

Definitely keep the Guardian if you're enjoying it. That's a solid character for raiding later. But keep in mind that you have more character slots. Leveling to 80 is easy once you've done it once. I've accumulated so many scraps and books of experience just from playing normally, that I could instantly make a new character level 80 right now if I had an extra character slot.

I'd say play through the story completely once on your Guardian. Stick with it and learn the game. Then test out different classes on one of your character slots. Level each one to level 20 to see how it plays (you'll have all your core abilities unlocked around level 20). Level 20 is sooo easy to get to. Then if you don't like the class much, delete the character and roll again for another class. If you like it, keep it.

Don't use exp scrolls or books or a insta-level 80 boost on your first character though. You'll want to play through traditionally on the first character to learn the game. The boosts are meant for alts. You can skip the story after one playthrough too if you want (though I played through it enough times to get one character in each of the Orders - Vigil, Whispers and Priory - so I could unlock all the armor skins for each order).

My main characters are an Elementalist and Mesmer. But I like my Guardian alt a lot and think it's a great choice for a first character - especially if you're liking it.