profession help for lvl 80 boost

[KingBacon.2150]

heya! im having a hard time choosing a class to use my boost on, i have an 80 warrior as my main.im thinking of aguardian, necro or engineer, ive always been really interested in engineer but heard theres a learning curve.i did think of the ranger but im still on the fence and i would like a mesmer but i want to levl that from scratch to learn the class, the others intrest me but not as much.i also dont like to follow any sort of meta or build guide as i left wow because of the reliance of that to be any good. gw2 always felt alot more free to me and thats where i feel most welcome

definatly keen to hear your suggestions and thanks for any help!

[Sephylon.4938]

you can do a trial of the lvl 80 boost before using it permanently.

[eldrjth.7384]

I would go guardian as you can share ascended armour with him at the beginning and both have good builds for endgame. This means you can concentrate on getting armourer and weapon smith to 500. I find both guardian elites (DH and firebrand) very easy and enjoyable in open world as well as fractals.

Also If you plan on levelling a few classes normally at some point necro is one of the easier ones because it has minions that can tank. I personally found engineer straight forward to level too because of kits meaning you dont have to rely on weapon skills (use whatever weapon is cheapest on TP) and the bomb kit has decent aoe/dmg. As mentioned above you can trial boost before using them at SW or in PvP. Though if you do that you get crap gear which is not really an indication of how good it will be endgame and it also doesnt have elite specs available.

[Dace.8173]

Engineer is a learning curve and it is something I don't recommend boosting. If you don't like meta then you will definitely want to level an Engineer the old way so that you can get a good feeling for how it works. I know you can do a trial run with the boost but that is a poor substitute for actually LEARNING the profession. Most folks will never play in the trial area enough to actually figure out if they would really like it. I think the boost trial is more a gimmick, a way to see what you think is cool but doesn't really do much to help folks actually figure out if a profession will work for them on a deeper level.

Thus Guardian or Necromancer would be the go to. I know you hate meta and stuff but they do have some of the stronger meta builds and while you may dislike it you will be playing against it in WvW and PvP.

[KrHome.1920]

I did boost an engineer to holosmith yesterday and gave it the ascended marauder gear of my thief -> running Power Holo now.

I do not regret this. Engineer is only confusing when you equip it with multiple kits. Then the amount of skills becomes really hard to memorize and time well (at least in PvP - PvE is more forgiving).

If you equip the spec with other utilities than kits (which works fine!) it plays more like a scourge:

• one weapon
• photon forge as second weapon
• F1 - F4 skills

It took me about one hour (and a keybind change: F5 -> Q) to get used to holosmith.

Engineer has a huge amount of utilities. I enjoy it so far. It's definitely not a one-dimensional spec like thief, revenant or warrior.

[Dace.8173]

Holosmith is definitely easier to pick up than standard Engineer and Scrapper. That appears to be the general consensus at least. I know I find playing it a bit easier than when I opt to play a Scrapper build or a basic Engineer build. At some point you are going to want to learn kits to make yourself truly versatile, otherwise, you are basically playing half a profession and will be at a disadvantage in places like WvW. I've noticed in WvW that the basic Engineer players on kit build tear apart the Holosmiths they encounter.

The issue isn't really that you can't play an Engineer easily, as a lot of folks describe Holosmith as the easier way to play Engineer. It's always been that the learning curve is steep if you actually want to be good at playing the Engineer. But that's only important if you are a competive player in WvW or PvP. If you are more into PvE or you don't really care about how well you do in WvW or PvP then being good at it isn't required. I see a few folks who enter WvW just to have fun with their toon. The folks that want to be at the top of, being able to solo camps and take on 2 to 3 people at a time, those folks are going to face a bit of a harder learning curve than say someone who picks up Scourge and just surrounds themselves with AOEs.

Which is why I typically recommend folks level it to 80. You can boost it to 80 and pick Holosmith and do fine. But the profession is easier for most folks to master if they put in the time to learn all the kinks of it gradually.