Slightly more thinky class evaluation
Wednesday, March 8th, 2017 09:56![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
cashewOkay, so after the last bitchery about class difficulty and ranking, I decided to do a little more actual breakdown of the class difficulty (in my experience, of course), taking into consideration things like excelling vs. competence, and general nuance as it were. Since I've played all the classes through to 80, unlocked all the specialization, and even went so far as to go all the way until the story end of HoT with 3 classes, one of which I deleted to make room for new characters, I say I have a good understanding of the classes in terms of general PvE. Now, sure, there's fractals/raids whatever, but that's the small percentage and I'm breaking it down more for the general populous here.
Clarification of difficulty types:
There are multiple things that contribute to class difficulty and much of the balancing comes from trade off in one particular area to give more advanced abilities in another. As such, it's important to evaluate how to analyze the difficulty before evaluating difficulty. Usually, when it comes to difficulty, there are two types of questions: "What's the hardest class to play?" and "What's the most challenging class to play?"
Broken down, the questions are asking about very different mechanics. In the first, "the hardest class" is asking about the level of accessibility, skill floor, and general effort to effectiveness ratio. Meanwhile, the second question, "the most challenging class", is asking about strategy complexity, skill ceiling, and effort for optimization. As such, I will be breaking down each section and giving each (base) class a ranking. This is because the elite specialization is in a category all on its own and deserves an independent analysis.
Accessibility
By accessibility, I am talking about the ease of which to understand the mechanics. Not necessarily proficiency, but merely the intuitiveness of the class. How easily does the game mechanics match up with the way the class is taught to the player? Here, I'll rank easiest to hardest.
Necromancer - Pretty straight forward. Make minions from death magic to do your bidding. You literally cannot go wrong with any weapon you pick up, because minions mostly do the work for you. Yes, you can move away from minions in the later parts of the game, but until you get to very high levels of play, the general strategy doesn't really ever change.
Warrior - Also pretty straight forward. Hit things. Done. But, some of the weapons don't quite synergize the way you think they would and require a little bit more reading.
Guardian - Only slightly more difficult because the focus is the block weapon and the scepter is meant for melee...wha?
Ranger - Pets can get clunky and suddenly overwhelming. But the basic gist of stay at range and hit things with your bow works even until very late into the game. Also, you're supposed to spam your utility skills for DPS.
Engineer - That's right, I put it in the middle of the pack! Honestly, picking up an engineer isn't that hard. Once you get over the lack of weapon swap, the only thing to know is "drop bomb, drop all the bombs". Things don't get much more complicated until much later in the game.
Elementalist - Just slightly more difficult to pick up than an engineer, but that's thanks to its 4 attunements and needing to understand rotation off the bat. Once the basic grasp of "switch attunements for more skills" settles in, it becomes fairly easy to find a weapon set that you like.
Mesmer - The clone/phantasm mechanic, shattering for buffs/defense, which skills generate what kind of clones is pretty overwhelming. Not to mention, without traits, mesmers are fairly helpless, which means you don't actually start learning the class until you've gotten a good chunk into the leveling process. I would just recommend level 80 boosting that class and start off with its elite spec.
Thief - I would put thief at the very most inaccessible of the core classes. Initiative is just a counter-intuitive mechanism. Finding the right weapon combo is hard. On top of that, stealth as defense means breaking out of combat constantly, so trying to kill anything is doubly annoying. That, in addition to different weapon combos results in different skills plus positioning changes the amount of damage you do, just makes thief overwhelmingly complicated at the get go. There is no easing into a thief.
You probably noticed that I did not include the revenant. That is because the revenant is not a base class and was never meant to be played as one. There is only herald as revenant is not actually playable.
Skill floor:
Skill floor refers to what is the lowest amount of skill required to be able to kill things in PvE. To which, you may answer, "auto attack", and I would agree. So let's bump it up one more notch to "solo kill stuff in the personal story". In other words, finish the personal story with minimal deaths as a measure of basic competency.
Ranger - Bear/bow. We heal as one. Never die. Never.
Necromancer - Shroud. Shroud. Shroud. Maybe die if you run out of life force, but is highly unlikely.
Warrior - Unless you did something like me, which is to try to face tank everything and forgot to bring a condi cleanse, you are unlikely to die. Not impossible, but unlikely.
Thief - Actually, once you figure out you can just short bow everything to death and stealth out of combat, things become very easy. When faced with a boss, just double pistol it to death. Or, if you're slightly more savvy, dagger/pistol and never die, unless you're faced with dredge. Fuck the dredge.
Guardian - You'd think the heavy armor would prevent more deaths, but it doesn't. You actually need to pay attention to your health and use your active skills and figure out how to kill things fast if you don't want to be spiked down. There's no easy get out of "I made a mistake oh shit" card, so you gotta perform well.
Mesmer - Early on, it's a drag. But once you figure out how to generate phantasms and clones, it's just a matter of letting your clones do the work. You still need to dodge out of attacks in a timely manner, but all you have to do is focus on staying alive and your phantasms will do the rest of the work for you. Sadly, staying alive is not as easy once you've blown your cool downs.
Elementalist - As long as you can figure out how to make the NPCs tank for you, just meteor shower away. However, more often than not, you'll get targeted and then it's a matter of trying to stay alive on the squishiest class while trying to do damage with a skill that roots you in place. Yay.
Engineer - Ahahahahaha. The skill floor is the skill ceiling. There is no such thing as a mediocre engineer, for they are the dead ones. Get a friend to carry you through.
Effort to effectiveness ratio:
This actually takes into consideration two different things. First, how much effort to be generally competent, which is kind of address in the skill floor comment. The next is how effectiveness scales with the amount of effort, which is what this section is looking at. The high scaling (thus easy) classes tend to see better payout with slightly higher competence, while the low scaling (thus hard) classes require getting much better to see some mild improvement.
Warrior - Every little thing you improve, every little synergy you inject, will increase your damage out put by a lot. There is no wasted effort.
Guardian - Also fairly straight forward, with needing just a little more reading and thinking and realizing which utilities are must haves and which ones need shelving. Otherwise, pretty easy to get good at.
Mesmer - Earlier on, every time you unlock a trait, things get easier. Once you've learned the sword/focus and greatsword clone spam, it becomes about learning timing. It's one of those accelerated curves that slowly levels out to a more linear curve later on.
Thief - At first, there doesn't seem to be much improvement. But then, once you understand positioning, you start to be able to get more and more out of the mechanics. However, getting better at mechanics requires a lot of practice to see some improvement, so it's a very low curve. A genuinely good thief requires quite a bit of practice.
Elementalist - Practically the inverse of a thief. Learning positioning is about how to stay alive, so mistakes are usually punished with death. Which means having to overcome a very large hurdle before seeing payoff for effort. However, once you get over that hurdle, things accelerate quickly in terms of combos and skill synergy and every new synergy gives a new bonus to things you can do. But the biggest hurdle remains staying alive.
Engineer - Now hear me out. The problem with engineer is that you can put a ton of effort in and see a very slight increase in how well you're doing. Camping flame thrower with the juggernaut trait is only slightly less effective than a 4 kit rotation, and neither is very likely going to get you through to the end of the story instance without dying. You don't get better at being an engineer so much as you get better at knowing the game mechanics. It's the "skill floor IS the ceiling" problem.
Ranger&Necromancer - Yeah, I think these two classes actually give the least effort to effectiveness. Mostly because I don't think you ever get more effective. You can change up how you play, but in the end, the main class mechanic (pets and minions) doesn't change with your skill, since it's controlled by the AI. No amount of effort on the player's end is going to change how effective pets/minions become.
Strategy Complexity:
By strategy, I'm referring to the general approach to problem solving. So a strategically complex class is one that has multiple solutions to a single problem, while a strategically simple class is one that has a single solution to every problem. Pretty straight forward, so here's how I rank them, from simplest to most difficult.
Warrior - Rely on passive buffs, hit things to build adrenaline, burst, burst burst. That's pretty much it. Every problem is solved in the same way, be it CC, DPS, or support.
Guardian - Use utility for emergencies and maybe change up the utilities depending on game mechanics. Should know how to use reflects and protection and grant stability on demand.
Thief - Kill or sneak. Or sneak then kill. Two threads of decision making instead of one, otherwise similar to the previous two classes. However, also has to manage initiative and know when to disengage. Also time steal skills. However, 90% of the time, auto attack.
Necromancer - Use wells or life-leech or hexes. Bomb minions or keep them alive for extra toughness. Passive health leech, active heal, or minion heal. Spread epi or rely on jagged horrors, etc. Can play minion-less!
Ranger - Can choose to go melee or range, use pets for damage or CC, choose the right spirit for the right support, etc. Slightly more complicated than necromancer minion management due to opportunity cost considerations when choosing the pet combination and utility skills.
Engineer - Kits adds a ton of complexity, but going kits is almost always the better choice. So a lot of the decision comes down to: how many kits, what utilities do I need to bring that isn't covered by kits? Kit dependence reduces an otherwise ungodly amount of choices to make.
Mesmer - Must determine when to shatter and when not to shatter. Bring support utilities or survival utilities? How to upkeep buffs? Timing, timing, timing. Almost every skill has an opportunity cost, increasing the difficulty of every decision.
Elementalist - A class that is viable at all ranges, all hitbox size, and all numbers of enemies, plus can cc, dps, or support on demand, with all different combinations and fairly similar effectiveness. Yeah, this class was specifically designed for complexity and unsurprisingly is very good at it.
Skill Ceiling:
Actually surprisingly hard to define. Is it talking about knowledge and synergy or execution of the synergies? Well, to make it easier on myself, I'm going to define it as the level at which you start getting minimal pay back and when you start hitting that particular point. This is a comprehensive balancing of skills needed to survive + not losing DPS + keeping up boon duration as much as possible. The following is ranked from lowest ceiling to highest.
Necromancer - Not hard. Not hard at all. Very little frantic button pressing and as long as you know when to shroud to tank damage, you're good.
Ranger - Pop your spirits. Keep your pet alive. Throw in necessary skills in between. Oh, and occasionally dodge when you get aggro'ed.
Guardian - Mostly because right now, scepter is an extremely high DPS weapon with minimal positioning required. So as long as you use damage skills on cool down, you should be good. Utility skills require more brain work and figuring out how to keep boons up, which runs into the need for hammer, thus positioning does become an issue. But for the most party, it's about timing your utilities.
Warrior - Passive boon generation, but keep up DPS is slightly harder on moving mobs. Gotta keep chasing down those mobs so you can hit them. Stunning, leaping, and other CC and positioning skills require some brain and thought process.
Thief - You have to be constantly moving to stay alive and do high damage, make sure you're to the side or behind the mob which turns faster than you can usually react. Thankfully, you don't have to think about boon duration at all as a thief and your only real group contribution is get basilisk venom in at the right time.
Mesmer - High level play means knowing when to shatter, when not to shatter, your defensive skills ARE your offensive skills, so know when to use/not use them. Oh, and everyone is looking to you for quickness, hope you have that on your bar! Also, keep your ethereal fields out of the ele's way please.
Engineer - I hope you're ready for a 42-chain rotation just to be able to damage at the same level as other classes. And make sure you don't blast the ele or mesmer or necro or guardian's fields by accident and destroy your DPS. You also need to be in melee range, so hope you brought good healing...what's that? You need to blast healing turret? No, but ele is stacking might, what are you doing?!
Elementalist - All the issues of the classes above and also your defensive skills are all on long ass cooldowns, plus you have the lowest HP pool and armor ranking. Good luck and god speed.
Effort on optimization:
This might seem the same as skill ceiling, but slightly different. The question of skill ceiling address how complicated things could theoretically get. This addresses the practical. In practice, how much effort does it take to reach the maximum output of your class in its designated meta role? This includes things like, getting the actual gear to maximize the necessary stats, how much switching around is expected of your class, and how difficult is a practical rotation in a PvE setting? How much situational awareness do you need to do what you need to do? Here's my list from least to most.
Guardian&Warrior&Thief - In practice, the optimal output from these classes are pretty much auto attack. While theoretically they could be doing other stuff, auto attacking is still the optimal for the most part.
Ranger&Necromancer - They're actually just slightly more complicated than the previous because utility skills are kind of necessary, so they actually have to bother to use the other half of the skill bar to make their pets/minions effective at what they do.
Elementalist - In practice, it's about standing back and getting as many of your high hitting spells off as possible. Survival is the challenging bit here.
Mesmer - High level mesmer play requires situational awareness to a high degree, know when to use utility skills, when to shatter for defense, when to shatter for offensive, etc. Practical mesmer use is very close to the theoretical.
Engineer - The theoretical IS the practical. If you're not playing optimally, then you're not effective. Single most punishing class ever.
And that is...longer than I wanted to go on. I'm gonna leave the elite specializations for a later analysis. @_@
Clarification of difficulty types:
There are multiple things that contribute to class difficulty and much of the balancing comes from trade off in one particular area to give more advanced abilities in another. As such, it's important to evaluate how to analyze the difficulty before evaluating difficulty. Usually, when it comes to difficulty, there are two types of questions: "What's the hardest class to play?" and "What's the most challenging class to play?"
Broken down, the questions are asking about very different mechanics. In the first, "the hardest class" is asking about the level of accessibility, skill floor, and general effort to effectiveness ratio. Meanwhile, the second question, "the most challenging class", is asking about strategy complexity, skill ceiling, and effort for optimization. As such, I will be breaking down each section and giving each (base) class a ranking. This is because the elite specialization is in a category all on its own and deserves an independent analysis.
Accessibility
By accessibility, I am talking about the ease of which to understand the mechanics. Not necessarily proficiency, but merely the intuitiveness of the class. How easily does the game mechanics match up with the way the class is taught to the player? Here, I'll rank easiest to hardest.
Necromancer - Pretty straight forward. Make minions from death magic to do your bidding. You literally cannot go wrong with any weapon you pick up, because minions mostly do the work for you. Yes, you can move away from minions in the later parts of the game, but until you get to very high levels of play, the general strategy doesn't really ever change.
Warrior - Also pretty straight forward. Hit things. Done. But, some of the weapons don't quite synergize the way you think they would and require a little bit more reading.
Guardian - Only slightly more difficult because the focus is the block weapon and the scepter is meant for melee...wha?
Ranger - Pets can get clunky and suddenly overwhelming. But the basic gist of stay at range and hit things with your bow works even until very late into the game. Also, you're supposed to spam your utility skills for DPS.
Engineer - That's right, I put it in the middle of the pack! Honestly, picking up an engineer isn't that hard. Once you get over the lack of weapon swap, the only thing to know is "drop bomb, drop all the bombs". Things don't get much more complicated until much later in the game.
Elementalist - Just slightly more difficult to pick up than an engineer, but that's thanks to its 4 attunements and needing to understand rotation off the bat. Once the basic grasp of "switch attunements for more skills" settles in, it becomes fairly easy to find a weapon set that you like.
Mesmer - The clone/phantasm mechanic, shattering for buffs/defense, which skills generate what kind of clones is pretty overwhelming. Not to mention, without traits, mesmers are fairly helpless, which means you don't actually start learning the class until you've gotten a good chunk into the leveling process. I would just recommend level 80 boosting that class and start off with its elite spec.
Thief - I would put thief at the very most inaccessible of the core classes. Initiative is just a counter-intuitive mechanism. Finding the right weapon combo is hard. On top of that, stealth as defense means breaking out of combat constantly, so trying to kill anything is doubly annoying. That, in addition to different weapon combos results in different skills plus positioning changes the amount of damage you do, just makes thief overwhelmingly complicated at the get go. There is no easing into a thief.
You probably noticed that I did not include the revenant. That is because the revenant is not a base class and was never meant to be played as one. There is only herald as revenant is not actually playable.
Skill floor:
Skill floor refers to what is the lowest amount of skill required to be able to kill things in PvE. To which, you may answer, "auto attack", and I would agree. So let's bump it up one more notch to "solo kill stuff in the personal story". In other words, finish the personal story with minimal deaths as a measure of basic competency.
Ranger - Bear/bow. We heal as one. Never die. Never.
Necromancer - Shroud. Shroud. Shroud. Maybe die if you run out of life force, but is highly unlikely.
Warrior - Unless you did something like me, which is to try to face tank everything and forgot to bring a condi cleanse, you are unlikely to die. Not impossible, but unlikely.
Thief - Actually, once you figure out you can just short bow everything to death and stealth out of combat, things become very easy. When faced with a boss, just double pistol it to death. Or, if you're slightly more savvy, dagger/pistol and never die, unless you're faced with dredge. Fuck the dredge.
Guardian - You'd think the heavy armor would prevent more deaths, but it doesn't. You actually need to pay attention to your health and use your active skills and figure out how to kill things fast if you don't want to be spiked down. There's no easy get out of "I made a mistake oh shit" card, so you gotta perform well.
Mesmer - Early on, it's a drag. But once you figure out how to generate phantasms and clones, it's just a matter of letting your clones do the work. You still need to dodge out of attacks in a timely manner, but all you have to do is focus on staying alive and your phantasms will do the rest of the work for you. Sadly, staying alive is not as easy once you've blown your cool downs.
Elementalist - As long as you can figure out how to make the NPCs tank for you, just meteor shower away. However, more often than not, you'll get targeted and then it's a matter of trying to stay alive on the squishiest class while trying to do damage with a skill that roots you in place. Yay.
Engineer - Ahahahahaha. The skill floor is the skill ceiling. There is no such thing as a mediocre engineer, for they are the dead ones. Get a friend to carry you through.
Effort to effectiveness ratio:
This actually takes into consideration two different things. First, how much effort to be generally competent, which is kind of address in the skill floor comment. The next is how effectiveness scales with the amount of effort, which is what this section is looking at. The high scaling (thus easy) classes tend to see better payout with slightly higher competence, while the low scaling (thus hard) classes require getting much better to see some mild improvement.
Warrior - Every little thing you improve, every little synergy you inject, will increase your damage out put by a lot. There is no wasted effort.
Guardian - Also fairly straight forward, with needing just a little more reading and thinking and realizing which utilities are must haves and which ones need shelving. Otherwise, pretty easy to get good at.
Mesmer - Earlier on, every time you unlock a trait, things get easier. Once you've learned the sword/focus and greatsword clone spam, it becomes about learning timing. It's one of those accelerated curves that slowly levels out to a more linear curve later on.
Thief - At first, there doesn't seem to be much improvement. But then, once you understand positioning, you start to be able to get more and more out of the mechanics. However, getting better at mechanics requires a lot of practice to see some improvement, so it's a very low curve. A genuinely good thief requires quite a bit of practice.
Elementalist - Practically the inverse of a thief. Learning positioning is about how to stay alive, so mistakes are usually punished with death. Which means having to overcome a very large hurdle before seeing payoff for effort. However, once you get over that hurdle, things accelerate quickly in terms of combos and skill synergy and every new synergy gives a new bonus to things you can do. But the biggest hurdle remains staying alive.
Engineer - Now hear me out. The problem with engineer is that you can put a ton of effort in and see a very slight increase in how well you're doing. Camping flame thrower with the juggernaut trait is only slightly less effective than a 4 kit rotation, and neither is very likely going to get you through to the end of the story instance without dying. You don't get better at being an engineer so much as you get better at knowing the game mechanics. It's the "skill floor IS the ceiling" problem.
Ranger&Necromancer - Yeah, I think these two classes actually give the least effort to effectiveness. Mostly because I don't think you ever get more effective. You can change up how you play, but in the end, the main class mechanic (pets and minions) doesn't change with your skill, since it's controlled by the AI. No amount of effort on the player's end is going to change how effective pets/minions become.
Strategy Complexity:
By strategy, I'm referring to the general approach to problem solving. So a strategically complex class is one that has multiple solutions to a single problem, while a strategically simple class is one that has a single solution to every problem. Pretty straight forward, so here's how I rank them, from simplest to most difficult.
Warrior - Rely on passive buffs, hit things to build adrenaline, burst, burst burst. That's pretty much it. Every problem is solved in the same way, be it CC, DPS, or support.
Guardian - Use utility for emergencies and maybe change up the utilities depending on game mechanics. Should know how to use reflects and protection and grant stability on demand.
Thief - Kill or sneak. Or sneak then kill. Two threads of decision making instead of one, otherwise similar to the previous two classes. However, also has to manage initiative and know when to disengage. Also time steal skills. However, 90% of the time, auto attack.
Necromancer - Use wells or life-leech or hexes. Bomb minions or keep them alive for extra toughness. Passive health leech, active heal, or minion heal. Spread epi or rely on jagged horrors, etc. Can play minion-less!
Ranger - Can choose to go melee or range, use pets for damage or CC, choose the right spirit for the right support, etc. Slightly more complicated than necromancer minion management due to opportunity cost considerations when choosing the pet combination and utility skills.
Engineer - Kits adds a ton of complexity, but going kits is almost always the better choice. So a lot of the decision comes down to: how many kits, what utilities do I need to bring that isn't covered by kits? Kit dependence reduces an otherwise ungodly amount of choices to make.
Mesmer - Must determine when to shatter and when not to shatter. Bring support utilities or survival utilities? How to upkeep buffs? Timing, timing, timing. Almost every skill has an opportunity cost, increasing the difficulty of every decision.
Elementalist - A class that is viable at all ranges, all hitbox size, and all numbers of enemies, plus can cc, dps, or support on demand, with all different combinations and fairly similar effectiveness. Yeah, this class was specifically designed for complexity and unsurprisingly is very good at it.
Skill Ceiling:
Actually surprisingly hard to define. Is it talking about knowledge and synergy or execution of the synergies? Well, to make it easier on myself, I'm going to define it as the level at which you start getting minimal pay back and when you start hitting that particular point. This is a comprehensive balancing of skills needed to survive + not losing DPS + keeping up boon duration as much as possible. The following is ranked from lowest ceiling to highest.
Necromancer - Not hard. Not hard at all. Very little frantic button pressing and as long as you know when to shroud to tank damage, you're good.
Ranger - Pop your spirits. Keep your pet alive. Throw in necessary skills in between. Oh, and occasionally dodge when you get aggro'ed.
Guardian - Mostly because right now, scepter is an extremely high DPS weapon with minimal positioning required. So as long as you use damage skills on cool down, you should be good. Utility skills require more brain work and figuring out how to keep boons up, which runs into the need for hammer, thus positioning does become an issue. But for the most party, it's about timing your utilities.
Warrior - Passive boon generation, but keep up DPS is slightly harder on moving mobs. Gotta keep chasing down those mobs so you can hit them. Stunning, leaping, and other CC and positioning skills require some brain and thought process.
Thief - You have to be constantly moving to stay alive and do high damage, make sure you're to the side or behind the mob which turns faster than you can usually react. Thankfully, you don't have to think about boon duration at all as a thief and your only real group contribution is get basilisk venom in at the right time.
Mesmer - High level play means knowing when to shatter, when not to shatter, your defensive skills ARE your offensive skills, so know when to use/not use them. Oh, and everyone is looking to you for quickness, hope you have that on your bar! Also, keep your ethereal fields out of the ele's way please.
Engineer - I hope you're ready for a 42-chain rotation just to be able to damage at the same level as other classes. And make sure you don't blast the ele or mesmer or necro or guardian's fields by accident and destroy your DPS. You also need to be in melee range, so hope you brought good healing...what's that? You need to blast healing turret? No, but ele is stacking might, what are you doing?!
Elementalist - All the issues of the classes above and also your defensive skills are all on long ass cooldowns, plus you have the lowest HP pool and armor ranking. Good luck and god speed.
Effort on optimization:
This might seem the same as skill ceiling, but slightly different. The question of skill ceiling address how complicated things could theoretically get. This addresses the practical. In practice, how much effort does it take to reach the maximum output of your class in its designated meta role? This includes things like, getting the actual gear to maximize the necessary stats, how much switching around is expected of your class, and how difficult is a practical rotation in a PvE setting? How much situational awareness do you need to do what you need to do? Here's my list from least to most.
Guardian&Warrior&Thief - In practice, the optimal output from these classes are pretty much auto attack. While theoretically they could be doing other stuff, auto attacking is still the optimal for the most part.
Ranger&Necromancer - They're actually just slightly more complicated than the previous because utility skills are kind of necessary, so they actually have to bother to use the other half of the skill bar to make their pets/minions effective at what they do.
Elementalist - In practice, it's about standing back and getting as many of your high hitting spells off as possible. Survival is the challenging bit here.
Mesmer - High level mesmer play requires situational awareness to a high degree, know when to use utility skills, when to shatter for defense, when to shatter for offensive, etc. Practical mesmer use is very close to the theoretical.
Engineer - The theoretical IS the practical. If you're not playing optimally, then you're not effective. Single most punishing class ever.
And that is...longer than I wanted to go on. I'm gonna leave the elite specializations for a later analysis. @_@
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