Most fun DPS class.

jackfoxhound · August 2016

Hey guys I want to start an alt DPS class.

For your experience and opinion which is the most fun class dps? For fun I specifically refer to:

-fun/unique class mechanic
-skills
-aoe damage( i really like aoe damage)

carl103 · August 2016

CW is the opposite of fun, it's made of glass with very few ways of mitigating the damage. Once geared i'm sure it's great fun, the process of getting that far, painful.

shiva79 · August 2016

Hr trapper is my favorite
took some time to grow into it, but i never had more fun with a class, in any game i played so far

jonkoca · August 2016

Hr full trapper, with a good bonding pet, can really kick out the damage. But you'd have a long grind ahead to start one from zero.

A CW with dread, good crit and pets is probably cheaper.

akoran · August 2016

CW is by far the most fun. and saying getting it to good gear is painful, no. getting it to good gear if you lack the skill might be painful. but if you're a decent player that understands the game and how the class works, its fun and easily worth it. want to be top of paingiver? go SS CW

kvet · August 2016

My main is a SS CW - I love it. But to be perfectly honest, I think the funnest DPS class is TR for me. TRs can be very effective even at lower item levels even.

kvet · August 2016

Yup - although there are some very effective AoE encounters for TR - smoke bomb or path of the blade, also dailies Bloodbath and Whirlwind of blades. True, not as AoE oriented... And again, my main is a CW and I really enjoy it. The playstyles are just different though...

My advice is to try out both and decide. SW is a solid choice too, but relies too heavily on bugged powers for my taste.

carl103 · August 2016

CW is by far the most fun. and saying getting it to good gear is painful, no. getting it to good gear if you lack the skill might be painful. but if you're a decent player that understands the game and how the class works, its fun and easily worth it. want to be top of paingiver? go SS CW

No it's just painful period. A class that loses half it's health in the first 5 seconds of the fight is not fun to play because your allways balancing between dying and surviving. You spend your entire time on that knife edge and thats just not fun. It stops being a game and starts becoming a job.

Maybe your one of those people flush with AD and hand me downs that made your fresh 70 CW a complete boss. I'm not, nor are most people. For them the CW throughout EE and beyond is going to be one continuous massive dose of pain because a basic on gear and level PVE mob pack can kill you in under 10 seconds, (which is less time than it will take your anemic DPS to kill them), if you don;t abuse icy terrain + icy veins to keep them frozen, even then you'll lose most of your health and there's a good share of stuff that has splats so powerful they will one shot you.

I mean a great example of exactly how bad it can get is my current CW vs the Fomorian warriors at the end of Sharandar. Being CC immune the only thing that keeps me alive vs them is the fact that their kick tends to prevent them hitting on me as much as they otherwise would, which when they're dealing as much damage per hit as they do is really good news. Conversely my similarly geared GWF is having absolutely no issues with them and is into dread ring allready, (1850 GS on oth), i wouldn't dream of taking my CW anywhere near DR right now because whilst my GWF rarely gets into serious trouble there Sharandaar gave me fair warning, anything my GWF can't faceroll is going to be hard for my CW and anything my GWF finds challenging but not painful is going to be instant death for my CW. Thats what a 20% difference in damage resistance is worth.

It's funny because anything my CW can kill inside one freeze cycle now, (like redcap packs), is actually easier on her than my GWF, but anything thats CC immune or that can last more than one cycle is considerably harder because she'll just take that much more damage.

p.s. see my sig for paingiver.

Agreed. But failing that since the OP wants an AoE class, CW is probably the best choice for him.

Fair's fair, CW or GWF are the only options there, i'd recommend GWF myself but that's rough till you get the destroyer capstone because the DPS is so bad till then.

ironzerg79 · August 2016

carl103 said:
No it's just painful period. A class that loses half it's health in the first 5 seconds of the fight is not fun to play because your always balancing between dying and surviving. You spend your entire time on that knife edge and thats just not fun. It stops being a game and starts becoming a job.

Your quote summarizes everything I love about the CW. It is that dance along the razor's edge. The ability to to deliver fantastic amounts of damage without making that one mistake that puts you on the floor is what separates the great CW's from the "also casted".

ironzerg79 · August 2016

You're talking to the guy who wrote the book on SS Renegades.

niadan · August 2016

All you peeps that complain about CWs...please learn to dodge. Then if you need further help, read two guides from Sharpedge and Ironzerg.

durugudesu · August 2016

all i can say is you want a fun alt, dont make a gwf. not fun if not geared enough to melt mobs in a few strikes. I have found my OP devotion(or popularly referred as heals) to be fun. i scatter enemies for fun and i get ap really fast.

P.S. you can have fun without minding damage chart and stuff. Just go try a class and know its mechanics and boom == fun.

zibadawa · August 2016

GWF is definitely the funnest for me. Obscene damage? Check. AoE? Check. Tank anything except a boss (because those are designed around you having a shield to give an extra DR layer) like a boss? Check. Overhead murder swing with an axe? That's a big check.

carl103 · August 2016

You should really give renegade CW a try. Icy veins is overrated. Not that you can't make it work. I've seen some very good refrigerators out there. But Renegade+Spell Twisting or even full renegade (both with lifesteal in their defensive slots and boons) is much easier on the nerves and more effective. There's a few good builds in the CW section.

I was renegade when i started the EE campaign, i specced out because i was dying every 4 fights to basic drowned shore groups. Renegade is less survivable than Thaum with Icy Veins, (assuming you're using icy terrain), because unless you use Steal time it's a DPS race between you and the mobs, and it's one you flat out will lose. Steal time can and does work, but your completely reliant on nothing happening to interrupt that, or the enemy getting a lucky crit string, or again you die.

Again i think your confusing your gear with my gear. When i hit 70 during the last 2x event i had 1550ish gear score, mix of green drops and the reclamation rock gear from the first two-thirds of that campaign line. Went to Sharandar to work on boons. Wiped feydark breech 3 times before beating it after burning all my CD's and having one hell of a time overall, (after that i ground out the crescents and got her the full sharandaar CW gear which got her upto on par with the normal finish 70-gear you get from Spinward Rise.). Now at 1850 he can't get me below half health before i burn him down. But in the gear your provided with getting from 60-70 is rough as hell because mobs hit for 8-10% of your maximum health per swing, (i ACT logged it), soem like crumblechasam can flat out one-shot you on level. Whilst Spinward had a couple of enemies that did that to my GWF nothing else in the EE campaign came anywhere near that close to bothering her, (my other 70 is a paladin, and well, lol paladin).

Your quote summarizes everything I love about the CW. It is that dance along the razor's edge. The ability to to deliver fantastic amounts of damage without making that one mistake that puts you on the floor is what separates the great CW's from the "also casted".

I'm fine with a challenge like that in group play, thats what you do group content for IMO, but i like my solo play to be relaxing, it should be challenging enough to keep me honest, but i should never feel like i really have to work just to do the content. Thats not relaxing for me. Now i'm not claiming to speak for everyone with that, but even the people who love that sort of thing don;t describe things like the souls series as anything but rough. It may be enjoyable if you like your stuff rough but what i wanted to get across is that it can be rough.

I'm actually going to link a 40 second video clip of my CW for people to see. The first is a very typical example of me vs 4 redcaps. Not as good as it gets, (i had a fight a little later thats not on the clip for size reason where i managed double the encounter DPS according to ACT), but not the worst. The second part is me vs one of the fomorian warriors. Now this is definitely a close to worst case scenario, you can see this scenario if the warrior crits you on every hit and you play perfectly, but usually you do have to make a mistake to get a result this bad at my gear level, (emphasis on this, 150GS ago this was normal for me on a perfect run). Thing is we mostly don't play perfectly, weather because of derp or enemy action messing up a well laid plan.

To analyse them. The first was not noticing FtF hadn't gone off, which cost me a LOT of DPS overall, i honestly thought it had and by the time i realised, too late. The second was miss timing my dodge, i thought i had enough time to get off disintegrate and then dodge and i miss guessed. You can see me start the dodge animation just as i get hit.

Link:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/0Bw33FqTXxM80WmViQ0FDNEtVMDA/view?usp=sharing

Also here's the ACT log data, for reference i had 65k health after level scaling, which is about 10k more than i had when i was using iliyanbruen gear all over, (got the elemental chest and head via my paladin).

all i can say is you want a fun alt, dont make a gwf. not fun if not geared enough to melt mobs in a few strikes. I have found my OP devotion(or popularly referred as heals) to be fun. i scatter enemies for fun and i get ap really fast.

P.S. you can have fun without minding damage chart and stuff. Just go try a class and know its mechanics and boom == fun.

Sorry but no, properly specced feat wise a GWF is fine, (at least so far for me, which is through to dread ring stuff atm), I actually found the hardest part to be 1-35, once you get WMS it gets a lot easier, and getting the destroyer capstone at 55 really sealed it, the back end of spinward rise still gave me issues, but thats a content design issue, not a class issue, some of the late spinward rise mobs and especially bosses do far more base damage than they should, nobody's fault but the content there.

That said, yes chasing the DPS numbers isn't the be all and end all. WHilst the crowd control effect spam is infuriating on my prot paladin, being the center of all that hostile attention and laughing all the while is a great feeling.

heimdali · August 2016

I enjoy playing as Scourge Warlock (Soulbinder). As for the feats the bulk of the points are in Damnation and 10 points in Fury. The build I'm using I gain action points very quickly. Let's say I use my daily skill to kill a group of monsters. By the time I get done killing the next group of monsters I tend to have my daily ready again.

As for a AOE type skill I use Dreadtheft which you unleash a beam at them. It takes down groups of monsters like a hot knife through butter. Also part of my build I get healed for 10% of the damage my soul puppet does.

In a PVE standpoint I find Scourge Warlock soulbinder fun to play overall. You got your soul puppet and your normal companion with you as well. As for PVP I can't really comment on that since I don't do PVP.

gabrieldourden · August 2016

You can have quite some fun with all DPS classes in this game. Some impression from my toons, keeping in mind your AoE remark. By the way this is a PvE discussion (AoEs in PvP do little in most cases).

1) Trapper HR: plays different from other classes as it is based on encounter/daily spamming. Use of at-wills is very limited. Mix of ranged and close powers. Short dodges and relatively low speed. Comes together only above level 50 when the main feats become available. Your AoE damage mainly comes from roots, a dot. Once you get to level 70 it becomes very relaxing when playing solo as your control powers really help and you can spam them and also beacuse root powers are almost fire and forget. Keep in mind tough that your control becomes almost useless in dungeons where mobs are far too resistant and the duration of you controls is close to zero, so over time you'll be forced to go full dps. Moves relatively slowly even with the movement feats. My favourite class/feat tree.
Some really good group buffs too (Longstrider's Shot and Fox's Cunning for example).

2) CW: really nice AoE and very good control. Plays more static than Trapper HR tough, as Icy Terrain is something you place on the ground and stays there. For this reason it works better when you can decide how to run your battle like in a DG where you decide your pulls, and less in skirmishes like Throne of the Dwarven Gods or Prophecy of Madness where mobs decide how the fight goes. More reliable and longer dodges than Trapper HR and longer control durations. CW has probably been the best and most consistent DPS class over the whole life of this game in PVE. There never was a mod where CW was a bad choice.
Anyway as people pointed out the CW needs a bit of time to setup its powers and the first seconds of the battle in solo may be critical for survival. HR Trapper and TR have ways to start the fight in an easier mode (stealth for the TR and long ranged control powers like Constrictive and Cordon for Trapper, or even stealth via Forest Ghost). Group buffs are maily a Renegade thing.

3) TR: it's a pretty solid class. Smoke Bomb is an extremely good AoE damage+control power, but I can't say that the class revolves around AoEs. Single target damage is still a big part of a TR arsenal. Long dodges and stealth. Less relaxing in solo than HR Trapper but more than CW.

4) GWF: at lower item levels it's a bit more difficult to play than CW, Trapper or TR, but when you gear it up it basically facetanks and melts everything except some dungeon bosses. AoE though is short range (sword swinging) and based on at-wills so if you look for long or wide range AoE you won't really find it with the GWF. Single target damage is also high and spike damage too. Currently the highest DPS class in the game at high item levels. Moves really fast. As it is based on stacks than disappear it tends to promote a certain "run to the next mob pack as fast as you can" pattern, don't know if you'll like it.
Basically no control or group buffs.

5) HR Combat: in most cases also the HR Combat tends to be an AoE class with close range AoEs (Plant Growth and Clear the Ground). In PVE honestly as of today I see no reason to take an HR Combat over a GWF Destroyer. In PvP though Combat HRs seems to be quite popular now due to piercing damage.

6) SW: another good choice for AoEs. It has been completely reworked recently and I still struggle a bit making my head around it. It is very low on the control side so a little bit more difficult in solo, but tankiness seems to be better than before so you can sort of tank your way trough solo stuff now. Moves very fast.
Some solid group buffs/debuffs now especially Pillar with the Damnation feats.

jackfoxhound · August 2016

Thank you all For the inputs and For sharing your experience, very nice discussion

thinking on going HR trapper maybe.

mmm1001 · August 2016

Depending of your connection speed, LAG issues.
With low lag, CW is best choice, but with LAG, CW is really bad (you jump forward to dodge AOE and you are teleported back. You case some encounter, you see animation twice, etc.
If you have lots of LAG, GWF is your choice it it least affected by lag (still lag is quite annoying but you won't die so much because of it).
About AOE damage - CW has bigger range for AOE (Oppressive force/Steal time), but GWF does more AOE damage if enemies are closer. All depends on situation.
TR is most fun as moving mechanics, but not easy to do as much damage as other DPSs. It can't do not lots of AOE damage.
HR has terrible mechanic - definitely not fun to play - requires lots of clicking.
SW .... Not sure what happened with them in mod 10, I'll try it once i finish campaign with other classes.

silverkelt · August 2016

All classes are viable , all classes are fun , what is more fun to one person, maybe less fun to others.

No class however, requires as much actual keyboard input and mouse clicking as the hr trapper.. if that is what you consider the most fun, then have a ball.

I find it fun, but say, if its the only class im grinding with, at the end of a few hours.. yours wrists can hurt.

btw GFs can be DPS now.. so you can add that to your option.

thefabricant · August 2016

carl103 said:
You should really give renegade CW a try. Icy veins is overrated. Not that you can't make it work. I've seen some very good refrigerators out there. But Renegade+Spell Twisting or even full renegade (both with lifesteal in their defensive slots and boons) is much easier on the nerves and more effective. There's a few good builds in the CW section.

I was renegade when i started the EE campaign, i specced out because i was dying every 4 fights to basic drowned shore groups. Renegade is less survivable than Thaum with Icy Veins, (assuming you're using icy terrain), because unless you use Steal time it's a DPS race between you and the mobs, and it's one you flat out will lose. Steal time can and does work, but your completely reliant on nothing happening to interrupt that, or the enemy getting a lucky crit string, or again you die.

Again i think your confusing your gear with my gear. When i hit 70 during the last 2x event i had 1550ish gear score, mix of green drops and the reclamation rock gear from the first two-thirds of that campaign line. Went to Sharandar to work on boons. Wiped feydark breech 3 times before beating it after burning all my CD's and having one hell of a time overall, (after that i ground out the crescents and got her the full sharandaar CW gear which got her upto on par with the normal finish 70-gear you get from Spinward Rise.). Now at 1850 he can't get me below half health before i burn him down. But in the gear your provided with getting from 60-70 is rough as hell because mobs hit for 8-10% of your maximum health per swing, (i ACT logged it), soem like crumblechasam can flat out one-shot you on level. Whilst Spinward had a couple of enemies that did that to my GWF nothing else in the EE campaign came anywhere near that close to bothering her, (my other 70 is a paladin, and well, lol paladin).

Your quote summarizes everything I love about the CW. It is that dance along the razor's edge. The ability to to deliver fantastic amounts of damage without making that one mistake that puts you on the floor is what separates the great CW's from the "also casted".

I'm fine with a challenge like that in group play, thats what you do group content for IMO, but i like my solo play to be relaxing, it should be challenging enough to keep me honest, but i should never feel like i really have to work just to do the content. Thats not relaxing for me. Now i'm not claiming to speak for everyone with that, but even the people who love that sort of thing don;t describe things like the souls series as anything but rough. It may be enjoyable if you like your stuff rough but what i wanted to get across is that it can be rough.

I'm actually going to link a 40 second video clip of my CW for people to see. The first is a very typical example of me vs 4 redcaps. Not as good as it gets, (i had a fight a little later thats not on the clip for size reason where i managed double the encounter DPS according to ACT), but not the worst. The second part is me vs one of the fomorian warriors. Now this is definitely a close to worst case scenario, you can see this scenario if the warrior crits you on every hit and you play perfectly, but usually you do have to make a mistake to get a result this bad at my gear level, (emphasis on this, 150GS ago this was normal for me on a perfect run). Thing is we mostly don't play perfectly, weather because of derp or enemy action messing up a well laid plan.

To analyse them. The first was not noticing FtF hadn't gone off, which cost me a LOT of DPS overall, i honestly thought it had and by the time i realised, too late. The second was miss timing my dodge, i thought i had enough time to get off disintegrate and then dodge and i miss guessed. You can see me start the dodge animation just as i get hit.

Link:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/0Bw33FqTXxM80WmViQ0FDNEtVMDA/view?usp=sharing

Also here's the ACT log data, for reference i had 65k health after level scaling, which is about 10k more than i had when i was using iliyanbruen gear all over, (got the elemental chest and head via my paladin).

all i can say is you want a fun alt, dont make a gwf. not fun if not geared enough to melt mobs in a few strikes. I have found my OP devotion(or popularly referred as heals) to be fun. i scatter enemies for fun and i get ap really fast.

P.S. you can have fun without minding damage chart and stuff. Just go try a class and know its mechanics and boom == fun.

Sorry but no, properly specced feat wise a GWF is fine, (at least so far for me, which is through to dread ring stuff atm), I actually found the hardest part to be 1-35, once you get WMS it gets a lot easier, and getting the destroyer capstone at 55 really sealed it, the back end of spinward rise still gave me issues, but thats a content design issue, not a class issue, some of the late spinward rise mobs and especially bosses do far more base damage than they should, nobody's fault but the content there.

That said, yes chasing the DPS numbers isn't the be all and end all. WHilst the crowd control effect spam is infuriating on my prot paladin, being the center of all that hostile attention and laughing all the while is a great feeling.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ke5jPAZuI_M&feature=youtu.be

CW isn't as terrible as you make it out to be. Like seriously, that gear I used there is terrible (costs 5k AD for all of it) and any new player could get better gear quickly, at which point you could ditch shield. The mount power was irrelevant as it only activates on artifact use and well, I had no artifacts or shirt+pants in that video. Also, it was done on preview so no VIP and a lot of lag. I went for a 3 man HE because its harder than redcaps. I could demonstrate WoD or IWD as well if you like.

As for which class is the most fun? Its purely subjective. I enjoy CW the most, its my own choice based on my own preferences but there is probably a valid reason for you to enjoy any class in the game. There is no, "most fun class" but there is, "which class you enjoy the most." I personally find GWF boring, but that is just me, I know other people who find the class to be fun. The class you find fun will depend on what you looking for in a class.

qexotic · August 2016

I have three characters: an HR, a CW and a SW. They are all fun to play, can all do a good level of DPS and all offer different play styles which keeps the whole game interesting to play. I started out nearly two years ago with an HR. I picked it without knowing anything about the game and how it was played. My choice was decided by two things: my friend who introduced me to the game had already picked a CW, so I wanted something different, and I saw that the HR had a bow and the idea of running around pinging arrows at things in the game was appealing. The HR is a keyboard hammering class. I have replaced two since I started playing NW mainly as a result of the playstyle required by my HR. The CW I went for next simply because I wanted to be a spell wielding Wizard in the game. That it turned out to be a really fun character to play dealing lots of damage and turning things into big ice cubes didn't hurt the enjoyment of playing it either. I'm one of those strange people who has never been able to get along with spell twisting, so my CW is an SS Renegade/Oppressor. Icy Veins is just so useful, especially in things like defending the Clerics in Tiamat and soloing stuff in general. Finally, I plumped for an SW simply because it was a bit different. The playstyle is unlike either of my two other characters and has proved to be a lot of fun. All three can be a bit squishy but learning how to dodge and keep avoiding being hit too much is part of the fun.

It's unlikely that I will be starting another new character any time soon as none of the remiaing types hold much or any appeal. There is an outside chance of making a Cleric but that would be more for the Sigil it can obtain than because I want to play that role. In my personal view of RPG, I think of GWF and GF as simply armour wearing, sword-swinging, barbarians, or cannon fodder depending on which way the wind is blowing at the time >:) Hm...maybe one day I might take a TR for a spin. I don't know.

My point is, there is no definitive answer to the OPs original question. Everyone has their own point of view and reasons for liking one class over another . The best advice given on this thread has been to give a couple of different classes a try and see which you like

grimah · August 2016

Depends what you are looking for, if you are not very good at games and just want simplicity, choose GWF. You can get high damage and use the same approach/set of spells for every encounter.

CW/TR/HR are the most reactive classes to play, theres a little dance you need to play which for some people is fun and engaging, Of the three, HR is more about keeping to a rotation so that could get boring compared to the other two i mentioned (once you work it all out), but has the most balanced set of spells/skills (damage/aoe/cc/survivability).

thefabricant · August 2016

peterparker#7238 said:

grimah said:
Depends what you are looking for, if you are not very good at games and just want simplicity, choose GWF. You can get high damage and use the same approach/set of spells for every encounter.
Thats excactly the reason why we got so many bad GWFs ingame. If you think you can play a GWF like that you will allways be a decent but never be a real good player.
And sry....but which class changes his approach/set of spell all the time? Did i miss something? Where is the difference to other classes? Can you enlight me plz?

CW changes it spell setups fairly often.

carl103 · August 2016

CW isn't as terrible as you make it out to be. Like seriously, that gear I used there is terrible (costs 5k AD for all of it) and any new player could get better gear quickly, at which point you could ditch shield. The mount power was irrelevant as it only activates on artifact use and well, I had no artifacts or shirt+pants in that video. Also, it was done on preview so no VIP and a lot of lag. I went for a 3 man HE because its harder than redcaps. I could demonstrate WoD or IWD as well if you like.

As for which class is the most fun? Its purely subjective. I enjoy CW the most, its my own choice based on my own preferences but there is probably a valid reason for you to enjoy any class in the game. There is no, "most fun class" but there is, "which class you enjoy the most." I personally find GWF boring, but that is just me, I know other people who find the class to be fun. The class you find fun will depend on what you looking for in a class.

I'm in the process of grabbing the video from youtube with my downloader, but you've allready seemed to miss a thing. The clip i provided starts with a redcap pack, but i just left that in because it was easier cutting point, the main part is the bit vs the fomorian warrior, which is an example of a mob i could easily find that if things don't go perfectly gives me a rough fight. The clip i provided shows that, there isn't really any arguing with it. Give me 10 minutes to grab the video and another 10 or so to watch it and i'll comment on it.

Depending of your connection speed, LAG issues.
With low lag, CW is best choice, but with LAG, CW is really bad (you jump forward to dodge AOE and you are teleported back. You case some encounter, you see animation twice, etc.

Thats the thing i don't have a lot of lag, bearing in mind i'm in the EU so i have the usual ping of an EU based player playing on US based servers. But that shouldn't count as a lot as a good chunk of the playerbase will have it or worse.

Most fun DPS class.

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