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Best Solo Open World PvE Class (bounties, events, champions, etc)


Opopanax.1803

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Looking for a new build to play and explore the world.

Needs to be able to solo:

  1. Champions/legends
  2. Dynamic events
  3. Bounties
  4. Some dungeons

Also, I am leaning towards asura or sylvari so I can make a smaller took to get in tighter caves and places.

Rich now I'm leaning towards trailblazer mirage staff but would love to know how other top solo builds stack up and if any are better.

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@"Opopanax.1803" said:Looking for a new build to play and explore the world.

Needs to be able to solo:

  1. Champions/legends
  2. Dynamic events
  3. Bounties
  4. Some dungeons

Also, I am leaning towards asura or sylvari so I can make a smaller took to get in tighter caves and places.

Rich now I'm leaning towards trailblazer mirage staff but would love to know how other top solo builds stack up and if any are better.

I've been putting up video of staff cmirage for years. It's a great solo build and is probably the most effortless survival build you can play. However, the damage is middling at best (and that's if you take axe as a swap).

DeanBB mentioned my fire weaver build. It's much better damage than staff mirage, but is also significantly more difficult to play. It's also locked into melee range, which can be problematic for bounties due to certain unstable magic mechanics. However, the damage is so good you can still outdps staff mirage while only dealing damage 50% of the time!

Here's a video sample of fire weaver:

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Good suggestions all.

I do wonder if it is worth investing in Runes of Torment for a Revenant condi build, as I can't imagine them lasting much longer without a nerf...

How does ele survivability compare to mirage? All of my ele experience tells me it would be a lot more prone to death and less able to kite.

Necro seems like a good option for face tanking and having an npc army... I wonder if that would be better at being able to solo cycle events with all of the AI that would be there to help you out...

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@Opopanax.1803 said:Good suggestions all.

I do wonder if it is worth investing in Runes of Torment for a Revenant condi build, as I can't imagine them lasting much longer without a nerf...

How does ele survivability compare to mirage? All of my ele experience tells me it would be a lot more prone to death and less able to kite.

Necro seems like a good option for face tanking and having an npc army... I wonder if that would be better at being able to solo cycle events with all of the AI that would be there to help you out...

Sword weaver doesn't kite. They get by on evasion and small but constant healing and barrier. Adding tanky stats like dire makes it pretty durable. The major difference is you can't just spam dodge the way mirage does. Timing matters.

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@AliamRationem.5172 said:

@Opopanax.1803 said:Good suggestions all.

I do wonder if it is worth investing in Runes of Torment for a Revenant condi build, as I can't imagine them lasting much longer without a nerf...

How does ele survivability compare to mirage? All of my ele experience tells me it would be a lot more prone to death and less able to kite.

Necro seems like a good option for face tanking and having an npc army... I wonder if that would be better at being able to solo cycle events with all of the AI that would be there to help you out...

Sword weaver doesn't kite. They get by on evasion and small but constant healing and barrier. Adding tanky stats like dire makes it pretty durable. The major difference is you can't just spam dodge the way mirage does. Timing matters.

Helpful, thanks

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@Opopanax.1803 said:Do you all think Necro with minions would be better than Mesmer with clones for completing events solo? Specifically I am thinking about events that have waves of enemies that have to be defeated.

I don't think so ... you CAN run out of minions depending on how hard the mobs hit and you can't split aggro over individual minions.

ON the other hand, mobs might target different clones and you are always replenishing them anyways.

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@"Opopanax.1803" said:Do you all think Necro with minions would be better than Mesmer with clones for completing events solo? Specifically I am thinking about events that have waves of enemies that have to be defeated.

The trouble with minion master is you give up other utilities and you are reliant upon minions, which may be a liability in some situations. Mirage has traits which mostly make this a non-issue for clones. Regardless, it's splitting hairs. If you want faceroll open world play, minion master necro and mirage are going to be on the top of anyone's list who has ever used these builds.

The most important of these is Infinite Horizon, which makes it so that when you dodge your clones also dodge. This has excellent synergy with Deceptive Evasion, which spawns a clone when you dodge. Since mirage is not very dependent upon shatters for offense and in fact generates a significant amount of damage from clone ambush attacks alone (especially if you're using the staff-only variant!), your clones become mostly immortal as they evade while they are attacking and are replenished faster than they can be killed in most cases. It even increases your damage because your clones ambush attack along with you!

These two traits are the engine that drives mirage. Just spam dodge and ambush and pretty much anything else you do is just icing on the cake of sustaining with your eyes closed. Here's a video I put together a couple of years ago on staff mirage. The idea was to use cheap gear (dire exotic), runes/sigils and make a bulletproof open world build that any player can play successfully with no knowledge or skill requirement whatsoever (Seriously!). There's even a bounty demo for the finale (admittedly it's the easiest one!).

You can see a little more serious mirage work in many of my other videos where I prefer to do most of my work with axe/torch with staff for range. I successfully soloed about 75% of the bounty bosses with that (the axe/torch) build, including legendaries and have videos up for most of them if you want to see some variety! Also check out videos from Lord Hizen. He plays more classes than I do, including necro.

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Lord Hizen just came back, and he will be doing solo videos for every class.

His mirage and condi herald is old vid but still works.

His current new video series currently has Berserker, Soulbeast and Firebrand.

For Weaver, u can check out Aliams post above.

So currently, Herald, Mirage, Weaver, Zerker, Soulbeast, Firebrand, and Weaver have solid videos so far.

Pick your poison.

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@Opopanax.1803 said:Do you all think Necro with minions would be better than Mesmer with clones for completing events solo? Specifically I am thinking about events that have waves of enemies that have to be defeated.

It depends on your skill level. If you are less proficient, I would say that necro minions are easier. If you are more proficient, clones would probably be better. The overall issue is going to be that your clones are going to disappear when your target dies which can be difficult to manage depending on the situation.

@Opopanax.1803 said:

@knite.1542 said:What exactly do you mean by best?

Best for me would be:
  1. completing world events solo if no one else is there
  2. running a dungeon by myself when no one else is interested
  3. tackling champions and legendary enemies solo
  4. being able to explore cool and unique areas more easily

If you are looking for something easy (and by easy I mean the smallest amount of punishment for making mistakes or taking unnecessary damage) that can do those things I would say trailblazer necro with minions.

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I was wondering how a Scrapper in Marshalls might fair...seems like barrier would be insane for the most part! Interesting to think about.

I wonder how a scrapper would compare to a necro for face tanking... Or just who would have the better sustain..> @Firebeard.1746 said:

Necro I think fits you bill. Scrapper and spellbreaker might too. I mostly see Spellbreaker do crazy things in PVP. Scrapper is situational.

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Lowkey shocked reaper isn't mentioned more. Very good personal DPS when solo/with no external support (which is most of PvE farming), tanky and spunky, cheap to gear up, can run minions+death magic for soloing bounties and champs/legendaries by having almost permanent protection/ton of free toughness/"Rise" for memes, can run blood to be of great help in any zerg/meta, lots of cleave, good tagging if you just put on staff over axe/wh. Just slap some berserker/marauder on it and rune of strength/hydromancy sigils, and you're golden. Some would say it's slow mobility-wise, but you actually get permanent swiftness by just pressing wh5 and spectral walk off CD, for the rest - mounts are a thing. As for soloing dungeons, it can when there's no things like DPS checks (ascalon p1, cleaving graveling burrows before guy dies). Then again, I can guarantee that trailblazer solo builds won't ever be able to do that as well, because condi are bad in older content. Another thing that works very well in dungeon soloing in Reaper's favor is the fact that traits like Decimate Defences and Death Perception do not get downscaled with stats - while other power specs get their precision all the way to the gutter, Reaper basically still has critcap/close to it regardless.

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@"Gogdarth.6741" said:Lowkey shocked reaper isn't mentioned more. Very good personal DPS when solo/with no external support (which is most of PvE farming), tanky and spunky, cheap to gear up, can run minions+death magic for soloing bounties and champs/legendaries by having almost permanent protection/ton of free toughness/"Rise" for memes, can run blood to be of great help in any zerg/meta, lots of cleave, good tagging if you just put on staff over axe/wh. Just slap some berserker/marauder on it and rune of strength/hydromancy sigils, and you're golden. Some would say it's slow mobility-wise, but you actually get permanent swiftness by just pressing wh5 and spectral walk off CD, for the rest - mounts are a thing. As for soloing dungeons, it can when there's no things like DPS checks (ascalon p1, cleaving graveling burrows before guy dies). Then again, I can guarantee that trailblazer solo builds won't ever be able to do that as well, because condi are bad in older content. Another thing that works very well in dungeon soloing in Reaper's favor is the fact that traits like Decimate Defences and Death Perception do not get downscaled with stats - while other power specs get their precision all the way to the gutter, Reaper basically still has critcap/close to it regardless.

I fully support reaper as a great pick for open world. It's all of the things you say and it's very straightforward to play. Most players should be able to get results with it. That bit about dungeon solos is oddly specific, though. Condi builds have a strong advantage in solo PvE situations where pressure is high. Dungeons are just a special case because old school objects cannot have conditions applied to them and low-level scaling favors burst damage. But for the really tough stuff you can't just power through, condi builds allow for far better sustain without giving up a ton of damage.

For example, this avatar of Balthazar solo. You see he's landing 3-4k hits and seems to swing about every 1.5 seconds, which would probably be more like 4.5-6k on a glass build. Glass weaver has only 12-16k health (depending on traits) and <2k armor. You could potentially go down in about 3 seconds to this boss with those stats!

As you can see, with 22k health and 3k armor, I not only take significantly less damage but I'm able to take many more hits before I'm forced to play defensively. In fact, I neither use an active heal, rotate to water, nor use any major defensive cooldowns (e.g. final shielding, obsidian flesh) during this fight and my health never dips below 66%.

This allows me to go full on offense. Also, since I'm using mostly dire stats which have the most condition damage while also capping my burn duration which accounts for about 90% of my damage in this fight, I'm giving up very little on damage as reflected by arcdps. It would be very difficult for an equivalent power build using soldier stats to hit these numbers. This is the advantage of condition-based builds when the pressure is on.

Edit: Sorry about that! Just realized dungeons were specifically mentioned and it's true that condi builds would not be ideal for dungeon solos!

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@AliamRationem.5172 said:

@Gogdarth.6741 said:Edit: Sorry about that! Just realized dungeons were specifically mentioned and it's true that condi builds would not be ideal for dungeon solos!

Yep, it's oki, and your mentioned reasons are exactly correct - it's because older content doesn't support condition damage on structures and you do need to do this often enough to be annoyed about it.

As to your showcase - first of all, very nice and I will definitely check your build out myself, second - while Reaper would deal less DPS here (abt. 13k-11kish, with blood/death over soul reaping), what it would gain is tremendous ease instead. Beauty of Reaper is that it barely needs to go defensive at all, since if things are extremely tough - you can just give up some damage for extremely strong self-sustain options (Soul Eater, DM/BM, Blighter's Boon if you must - though I absolutely never needed to, Dagger 2 is literally a second low-CD healskill and an easy/cheap swap from Axe) with close to no gear changes. Due to Reaper having a load of free stats just in traits, you can also go even further - for example, it loses very little from running Marauder, or some trinkets can easily be valkyre/knight/what have you, due to you basically being at critcap almost from traits alone, especially in Shroud. I just find it excessive and needless and practically never ran into a situation in entirety of my solo/OW play that would warrant something like this. At absolute worst (MM Reaper with Death Magic), it's DPS is about 9k-10k, slightly less if you're lazy and not even pretending to do rotations (8k), which is surprisingly respectable given the fact that you basically can put something on autoattack button and alttab to look at Youtube vids most of the time. And it's not to diss Reaper for it - in fact, I super enjoy having an option like that for those days when I just can't be asked nicely to press more than 3 buttons. Meanwhile, best I could bench on Scrapper solo so far was about 8k, though it's perfectly viable for most farming just as well - it's just a little slower at it.

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@Gogdarth.6741 said:

@Gogdarth.6741 said:Edit: Sorry about that! Just realized dungeons were specifically mentioned and it's true that condi builds would not be ideal for dungeon solos!

Yep, it's oki, and your mentioned reasons are exactly correct - it's because older content doesn't support condition damage on structures and you do need to do this often enough to be annoyed about it.

As to your showcase - first of all, very nice and I will definitely check your build out myself, second - while Reaper would deal less DPS here (abt. 13k-11kish, with blood/death over soul reaping), what it would gain is tremendous ease instead. Beauty of Reaper is that it barely needs to go defensive at all, since if things are extremely tough - you can just give up some damage for extremely strong self-sustain options (Soul Eater, DM/BM, Blighter's Boon if you must - though I absolutely never needed to, Dagger 2 is literally a second low-CD healskill and an easy/cheap swap from Axe) with close to no gear changes. Due to Reaper having a load of free stats just in traits, you can also go even further - for example, it loses very little from running Marauder, or some trinkets can easily be valkyre/knight/what have you, due to you basically being at critcap almost from traits alone, especially in Shroud. I just find it excessive and needless and practically never ran into a situation in entirety of my solo/OW play that would warrant something like this. At absolute worst (MM Reaper with Death Magic), it's DPS is about 9k-10k, slightly less if you're lazy and not even pretending to do rotations (8k), which is surprisingly respectable given the fact that you basically can put something on autoattack button and alttab to look at Youtube vids most of the time. And it's not to diss Reaper for it - in fact, I super enjoy having an option like that for those days when I just can't be asked nicely to press more than 3 buttons. Meanwhile, best I could bench on Scrapper solo so far was about 8k, though it's perfectly viable for most farming just as well - it's just a little slower at it.

Thanks for the dps values. I find it helps to provide these kinds of reference points so that we may better understand these complex comparisons and make informed decisions on the builds we choose. And again I agree with reaper as a great choice here. It's going to be much easier to get results with than weaver.

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@AliamRationem.5172 said:

@Gogdarth.6741 said:Edit: Sorry about that! Just realized dungeons were specifically mentioned and it's true that condi builds would not be ideal for dungeon solos!

Yep, it's oki, and your mentioned reasons are exactly correct - it's because older content doesn't support condition damage on structures and you do need to do this often enough to be annoyed about it.

As to your showcase - first of all, very nice and I will definitely check your build out myself, second - while Reaper would deal less DPS here (abt. 13k-11kish, with blood/death over soul reaping), what it would gain is tremendous ease instead. Beauty of Reaper is that it barely needs to go defensive at all, since if things are extremely tough - you can just give up some damage for extremely strong self-sustain options (Soul Eater, DM/BM, Blighter's Boon if you must - though I absolutely never needed to, Dagger 2 is literally a second low-CD healskill and an easy/cheap swap from Axe) with close to no gear changes. Due to Reaper having a load of free stats just in traits, you can also go even further - for example, it loses very little from running Marauder, or some trinkets can easily be valkyre/knight/what have you, due to you basically being at critcap almost from traits alone, especially in Shroud. I just find it excessive and needless and practically never ran into a situation in entirety of my solo/OW play that would warrant something like this. At absolute worst (MM Reaper with Death Magic), it's DPS is about 9k-10k, slightly less if you're lazy and not even pretending to do rotations (8k), which is surprisingly respectable given the fact that you basically can put something on autoattack button and alttab to look at Youtube vids most of the time. And it's not to diss Reaper for it - in fact, I super enjoy having an option like that for those days when I just can't be asked nicely to press more than 3 buttons. Meanwhile, best I could bench on Scrapper solo so far was about 8k, though it's perfectly viable for most farming just as well - it's just a little slower at it.

And again I agree with reaper as a great choice here. It's going to be much easier to get results with than weaver.

Yeah, I think that reaper necromancer is much easier to pick up than elementalist for open world PvE, although I really do like playing the elementalist in it. The way the mechanics work of killing lots of enemies to build life force to make you sort of invulnerable for a while makes it easy to play it in an optimal manner. I find this is the case for both the builds with minions and without.

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@"Gogdarth.6741" said:Lowkey shocked reaper isn't mentioned more. Very good personal DPS when solo/with no external support (which is most of PvE farming), tanky and spunky, cheap to gear up, can run minions+death magic for soloing bounties and champs/legendaries by having almost permanent protection/ton of free toughness/"Rise" for memes, can run blood to be of great help in any zerg/meta, lots of cleave, good tagging if you just put on staff over axe/wh. Just slap some berserker/marauder on it and rune of strength/hydromancy sigils, and you're golden. Some would say it's slow mobility-wise, but you actually get permanent swiftness by just pressing wh5 and spectral walk off CD, for the rest - mounts are a thing. As for soloing dungeons, it can when there's no things like DPS checks (ascalon p1, cleaving graveling burrows before guy dies). Then again, I can guarantee that trailblazer solo builds won't ever be able to do that as well, because condi are bad in older content. Another thing that works very well in dungeon soloing in Reaper's favor is the fact that traits like Decimate Defences and Death Perception do not get downscaled with stats - while other power specs get their precision all the way to the gutter, Reaper basically still has critcap/close to it regardless.

Would you mind sharing a link to your reaper build? I am pretty familiar with the mesmer ones, but not so much the reaper ones.

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@Opopanax.1803 said:

@"Gogdarth.6741" said:Lowkey shocked reaper isn't mentioned more. Very good personal DPS when solo/with no external support (which is most of PvE farming), tanky and spunky, cheap to gear up, can run minions+death magic for soloing bounties and champs/legendaries by having almost permanent protection/ton of free toughness/"Rise" for memes, can run blood to be of great help in any zerg/meta, lots of cleave, good tagging if you just put on staff over axe/wh. Just slap some berserker/marauder on it and rune of strength/hydromancy sigils, and you're golden. Some would say it's slow mobility-wise, but you actually get permanent swiftness by just pressing wh5 and spectral walk off CD, for the rest - mounts are a thing. As for soloing dungeons, it can when there's no things like DPS checks (ascalon p1, cleaving graveling burrows before guy dies). Then again, I can guarantee that trailblazer solo builds won't ever be able to do that as well, because condi are bad in older content. Another thing that works very well in dungeon soloing in Reaper's favor is the fact that traits like Decimate Defences and Death Perception do not get downscaled with stats - while other power specs get their precision all the way to the gutter, Reaper basically still has critcap/close to it regardless.

Would you mind sharing a link to your reaper build? I am pretty familiar with the mesmer ones, but not so much the reaper ones.

I don't know exactly which build the poster is using, but in case it helps and you didn't know already: you can find many build suggestions for all professions and types of content on this website.

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