So you’re back in Guild Wars 1 because of Reforged. Or maybe this is your first time even looking at the original game. Either way, you’ve got ten professions to choose from, and picking the right one for the way you want to play matters a lot. Especially for your main.
This guide will help you pick a class (or profession as we call it in Guild Wars), that fits your playstyle!
What are Primary and Secondary Professions?
Before diving in, one ground rule. In Guild Wars 1 you pick a primary profession at character creation. That locks in your armor type and your unique primary attribute.
Later in the game you unlock a secondary profession, which gives you a second skill set to mix in. You can put points into these attributes, basically a skill tree, to improve skills, damage and healing tied to that attribute.
Take everything here with a grain of salt. These are opinions formed after years with this game. Don’t let the word “harder” discourage you from a profession. Hard doesn’t mean bad. Hard means rewarding when you get it right.
New to Guild Wars: Reforged? Check out my full overview of what Reforged actually is before diving in.
Warrior
Want to know which profession hits the hardest in melee, can take a few hits, and has straightforward mechanics? That’s the Warrior.
The Warrior is the heavy armor melee profession. You walk into the fight, not around it. You have the highest base armor in the game alongside the Paragon, and you pick one of three weapons to specialize in: axe, hammer, or sword. Each weapon has its own unique skills.
Your primary attribute is Strength. Every point gives you 1 percent armor penetration on your attack skills. At 12 points in Strength, you cut through 12 percent of an enemy’s armor on every swing. That matters in the late game, where enemies can be seriously tanky.
Beyond Strength you have three weapon attribute lines: Axe Mastery, Hammer Mastery, Swordsmanship, and a utility line called Tactics. Pick one weapon and max it. Don’t try to do all three. Axe gives you high spike damage and adrenaline combos via the Eviscerate skill. Hammer is your knockdown specialist, brutal in PvP and great for control. Sword is for bleeding, deep wounds, and sustained pressure. Tactics improves your shouts and stances, which are instant skills with no cast time and immediate effects.
What makes the Warrior genuinely unique is that most of your best skills don’t cost energy. They cost adrenaline. You build adrenaline by hitting things and getting hit. The longer the fight goes, the more you accumulate. You start at zero, swing a few times, your bar fills, then you spend it on a finisher. It’s a build-and-spend rhythm, and once it clicks, the whole profession clicks.
The downside: if a fight ends in two seconds, or you get kited or slowed, you don’t get to fire your best skills. Warriors thrive in sustained engagements. Also, watch out for skills like Frenzy. It increases your attack speed but makes you take double damage. High risk, high reward.
Pick Warrior if you want straightforward gameplay, big damage numbers, and no energy management. It’s one of the best entry points for new or returning players, and one of the easier professions to survive on while you’re still learning the game’s other systems.
Ranger
The Ranger is your archer profession. But that’s only half of it. The Ranger is also the only profession that can charm an animal companion and use nature rituals, summoning spirits that change the entire battlefield. You’re not just an archer. You’re an archer plus a pet plus a battlefield manipulator.
You wear medium armor, better than a caster, worse than a Warrior. You fight from range with a bow, which means you get to pick your engagements. Your primary attribute is Expertise, and it’s one of the strongest in the game. Every point reduces the energy cost of your attack skills, touch skills, nature rituals, and Ranger-specific skills by 4%. At rank 12, most skills cost roughly half as much energy. You’re spamming bow attacks while every other ranged profession is carefully rationing their energy bar.
Beyond Expertise you have three lines. Marksmanship is your bow damage line, and every dedicated bow build maxes this. Beast Mastery makes your animal companion stronger and unlocks pet attack combos. Wilderness Survival covers your traps, defensive stances, and most of your nature rituals, the spirits that block enchantments, slow enemy casting speed, or support your party.
What makes the Ranger genuinely compelling is flexibility. The same character can be a pure DPS bow user, a beastmaster who lets the pet do the killing, a trapper who nukes a chokepoint before the enemy even arrives, or a spirit-spam support that locks down enemy casters. Same primary, four totally different builds.
The trade-off: bow damage isn’t the highest. You won’t out-DPS an Elementalist. But you are consistent. You deal damage from range, your pet adds another body to the fight, and you rarely run out of energy.
Pick Ranger if you like flexibility, want to play at range, and the idea of an animal companion leveling alongside you sounds appealing.
Monk
The Monk is the healer. The protector. The reason your party doesn’t wipe at the first mob.
Monks wear light armor, so yes, the healer is somewhat of a glass cannon. Enemies usually go for the frontline first, but if you draw aggro, you back off fast. Positioning matters more for this profession than most people expect.
Your primary attribute is Divine Favor. Every point adds a flat extra heal on top of any spell you cast on an ally. A Monk with 12 Divine Favor is throwing free healing on top of everything they do. It’s clean, reliable, and compounds with everything else you cast.
You have three other prayer lines. Healing Prayers is the obvious one: direct healing and regeneration. Skills like Word of Healing, Healing Breeze, and Patient Spirit show up constantly. Protection Prayers is more interesting, because instead of healing damage, you prevent it. Spells like Reversal of Fortune and Shield of Absorption cancel out hits before they land. A Protection Monk can be arguably stronger than a Healing Monk at high levels, because preventing 100 damage is better than healing 100 damage after the fact. Then there’s Smiting Prayers, holy damage that ignores armor and hits hard against undead. A Smiting Monk farming mobs is a Guild Wars classic.
Here’s the mindset shift that separates good Monks from great ones: react-healing is fine, but predict-protecting is what the profession is really about. When a Warrior charges into three enemies, you pre-cast Guardian or Protective Spirit on him before he gets there. You don’t wait for the damage. You prevent it.
The downside: you don’t kill things quickly on your own, and the moment enemies see you healing, you become the target. You need a frontline. If you want more damage in the mix when playing solo, pick a secondary like Elementalist or Mesmer. That secondary skill bar exists exactly for situations like this.
Necromancer
The Necromancer is the profession that gets stronger as things die. Curses, life-stealing, raising the dead, and an energy economy that lets you keep casting long after other casters have gone quiet.
You wear light armor. Your damage comes from spells, not weapons. And your identity is built around two things: sacrifice and undead magic. Some of your best skills cost a chunk of your own health to cast. In return, they hit hard, they last long, or they regenerate.
Your primary attribute is Soul Reaping. This is the secret that makes the Necromancer the king of energy management in the game. Every rank gives you 1 energy whenever a non-spirit creature near you dies. In a fight with multiple enemies, your energy bar refills constantly. As long as your party is killing, your energy stays high. That’s why Necromancers were often paired with a Ritualist or Monk secondary, using Soul Reaping to fund the energy cost of those support skills.
Beyond Soul Reaping you have three lines. Death Magic is your minion line. Every point lets you control more undead servants raised from corpses, gives them higher levels, and makes them hit harder. A maxed Minion Master walks into a mob with five minions and walks out with eleven. Curses is your debuff line: Spiteful Spirit, Reckless Haste, Suffering, hexes that wreck enemy builds, strip enchantments, and deal damage over time. Blood Magic is life-stealing. Vampiric Spirit and Vampiric Touch take from the enemy and give to you.
The Necromancer doesn’t burst. A Necromancer layers damage and pressure that an enemy team can’t deal with all at once. By the time they realize what’s happening, half their party is hexed, your minions are on them, and you’ve stolen health back to yourself.
Pick Necromancer if you like setup-heavy, slow-burn classes that build up over the course of a fight. And if managing an army of minions sounds genuinely cool, because it is.
Mesmer
The hardest profession in the game, and the most satisfying.
The Mesmer doesn’t kill you with damage. The Mesmer kills you by making sure you can’t do anything. Interrupts, hexes, energy denial, degeneration. If the Necromancer is the slow build-up, the Mesmer is a chess match.
You wear light armor. Your skills are fast, your effects are subtle, and most of what you do is invisible to people who don’t know what to look for. Other professions watch HP bars. The Mesmer watches enemy skill bars.
Your primary attribute is Fast Casting. Every rank speeds up the activation time of your spells, and in PvE specifically, every rank also reduces your Mesmer spell recharge by 3%. A maxed Fast Casting Mesmer is throwing two-second spells in under one second and recycling them faster than any other caster in the game. That speed is what makes interrupting possible. You need to cast before your enemy finishes their cast, and Fast Casting makes that window much more forgiving.
You have three magic lines. Domination Magic is the interrupt and punishment line. Skills like Power Block, Diversion, and Backfire shut down an enemy’s ability to cast. Illusion Magic uses hexes that drain HP, slow enemy attacks, and confuse enemies with skills like Conjure Phantasm, Migraine, and Clumsiness. Inspiration Magic steals energy from enemies and gives it to you: Energy Drain, Energy Tap, Power Drain, interrupts that also pay you back.
Here’s why the Mesmer is the hardest profession in the game. You need to know what many enemy skills do on sight and decide whether to act on it. Because you’re not just playing your own build. You’re playing against theirs. A good Mesmer recognizes an elite spell mid-cast and burns Power Block on it. A bad Mesmer wastes their interrupt on a one-second nothing skill.
That said, you don’t have to play it at that level. You can run damage-over-time skills and let them tick. Cast Backfire on a caster and they deal themselves enormous damage every time they cast a skill until they remove the hex. There are multiple ways in.
Pick Mesmer if you love games where the win condition is denying the enemy.
Elementalist
The Elementalist is the nuker. Big spells, big numbers, big cooldowns. If you want to feel like a powerful wizard, this is your profession.
You wear light armor. Your damage comes from spells across four elemental lines, and the choice of which line to focus on shapes the entire feel of the class.
Your primary attribute is Energy Storage. Every rank gives you 3 extra maximum energy. You start the game at 30 base energy. A fully invested Elementalist sits at 66 energy. That pool is what lets you chain Meteor Shower into Searing Flames into Rodgort’s Invocation back to back. You actually have the energy to do it.
The four magic lines are Fire, Earth, Air, and Water.
Fire is your AoE damage line: Meteor Shower, Searing Flames, Lava Font, wide-area destruction.
Air Magic is single-target lightning that pierces armor, blinds enemies, and knocks them down. Air Elementalists are the spike specialists, bursting one target down before a Monk can react.
Earth Magic is partly defensive with skills like Obsidian Flesh and Armor of Earth, and partly armor-ignoring damage with Eruption and Stone Daggers.
Water Magic slows and snares enemies, dealing cold damage. It’s the kiting and control line.
One notable fact: Elementalists are the only profession in the game with no Signet skills, and the only profession that gets Glyphs. Glyphs modify your next spell. You can make a 25-energy Meteor Shower cost zero, or halve its cast time. Other professions pick up Elementalist as a secondary just to access those Glyphs. Monks use them to cut the cost of their heaviest healing skills.
The downside: even with Energy Storage, your big spells drain your bar quickly. Most Elementalist spells have long activation times, which makes you a stationary target. Mesmers have no trouble shutting you down. Positioning matters more for an Elementalist than most players expect.
Pick Elementalist if you want to deal massive damage, you like the elemental theme, and you don’t mind a profession that punishes mistakes hard but rewards good play even harder.
Assassin
The Assassin is the burst class. It’s also the foundation the Thief in Guild Wars 2 is built on. Daggers, medium armor, and attack chains that build through a specific combo sequence: Lead Attack, Off-hand Attack, Dual Attack, each strike unlocking the next, building toward a finisher that can take a target down fast. This is the class that demands the most planning and delivers the highest reward when you execute it correctly.
Your primary attribute is Critical Strikes. Every point gives you 1% extra chance to score a critical hit. And here’s the key: every critical hit also gives you energy back once you’ve invested enough into Critical Strikes. Your dual-dagger combo, which crits frequently because of Dagger Mastery, is funding your next combo. You keep gaining energy as long as you keep hitting critically.
Beyond Critical Strikes you have three lines. Dagger Mastery is the obvious one: more dagger damage, more crits, more chances to land a Double Strike where both daggers hit simultaneously. Deadly Arts is your hex and debuff line, skills that lower a target’s defenses and set up your spike. And Shadow Arts is your defensive and mobility line, which includes the iconic Assassin mechanic: the shadow step. Shadow steps are instant teleports. Press a button and you’re behind the enemy backline.
Here’s how the Assassin plays in practice. You pick a target, usually a healer or caster. You pre-cast your defensive Shadow Arts buff. You shadow step in. You fire the chain: Lead, Off-hand, Dual, then a finisher like Twisting Fangs or Death Blossom. The target drops. You shadow step out before the enemies can react.
When it works, it’s the most satisfying gameplay loop in the game. When it doesn’t, your chain gets interrupted, your finisher is blocked, you get snared mid-combo, and you die in two seconds. There is almost no middle outcome.
Pick Assassin if you like high-risk, high-reward gameplay and the pre-fight planning that comes with it. Just know it’s one of the harder professions to play well, and the easiest to die on if you commit to a bad target.
Ritualist
The Ritualist is one of the most flexible professions in the game. Three classes in one, really. You can build it as a healer, a spellcaster DPS, or a spirit-spammer. Same primary profession, completely different gameplay each time.
The Ritualist wears light armor. But the toolkit is anything but standard. You have three unique skill types that no other profession uses. Binding Rituals summon spirits that, unlike Ranger nature rituals, actively attack enemies or protect allies. Weapon spells are single-ally buffs that enhance their weapon for a set duration. And item spells work like this: you literally pick up a holy ash urn and walk around with it in your hand for as long as the spell lasts, channeling its effect.
Your primary attribute is Spawning Power. Every rank gives any creature you summon 4% more health, and any weapon spell you cast lasts 4 percent longer. A maxed Spawning Power Ritualist has tankier spirits and longer buffs than anyone else.
Beyond Spawning Power you have three lines. Channeling Magic is your damage line: lightning damage spells, energy management, and some of the Ritualist’s most efficient damage skills. You can also summon damaging spirits like Bloodsong and Agony from this line. A pure Channeling Ritualist can out-DPS a Fire Elementalist in certain situations.
Communing is the spirit-summoning line, making every spirit stronger, more durable, and longer-lasting.
And Restoration Magic is the healer line. A Restoration Ritualist is one of the strongest healers in the game, arguably easier to play than the Monk and more effective in long fights.
Here’s what makes this profession special: it’s all about placement. You drop two or three spirits before a fight even starts. You position your team around them. The spirits work passively while you cast. You weapon-spell your Warrior for bonus damage, weapon-spell your Monk to make him uninterruptible, and meanwhile your spirits are healing or attacking on their own. It’s macro-level gameplay.
The downside: spirits are stationary. If the fight moves, your spirits don’t follow. You learn to anticipate where the fight will happen and place accordingly.
Pick Ritualist if you want flexibility, enjoy setup gameplay, and don’t want to be locked into a single role.
Paragon
The Paragon is a spear-throwing battle commander. Think of a paladin, but instead of casting heals, you shout buffs that hit your entire party at once from range. The Paragon’s reputation is “imbagon,” and there’s a very good reason for that nickname.
You wear heavy armor, like the Warrior. Solid protection plus a shield in your offhand. You fight at range with a thrown spear, keeping you out of melee. Your skill bar is dominated by Shouts and Chants, party-wide buffs that fire across the entire team within range.
Your primary attribute is Leadership. At rank 12 Leadership, you gain 2 energy for each ally your shout affects, up to a maximum of 6 energy per shout. In a full eight-person party, you’re effectively casting for free. It’s hard to run out of energy on a Paragon.
Beyond Leadership you have three lines. Spear Mastery is your weapon damage line. Command is the buffing and defensive line: shouts that reduce incoming damage, increase armor, or position your team. And Motivation is the energy management and healing line, chants that give back energy or health to your party over time.
The playstyle is straightforward: you stand at the back, throw spears for chip damage, and keep a rotation of shouts and chants active at all times. Shouts like “There’s Nothing to Fear!” reduce incoming damage. “Go for the Eyes!” increases your allies’ critical hit chance. “Stand Your Ground!” gives your whole party an armor boost when stationary. Cycle them, and your party doesn’t die.
The reason “imbagon” became a meme is exactly this: a Paragon stacking enough defensive shouts can make a party effectively invincible against most PvE content. Whole hard-mode missions become manageable. ArenaNet nerfed the Paragon several times because of it. It’s still one of the most wanted support professions in PvE.
The downside: the Paragon can feel slow, and your value is tied almost entirely to group content. But for anyone who loves buffing allies, this is the ultimate expression of that playstyle.
Pick Paragon if you want to be a support powerhouse, enjoy buff stacking, and want a profession that scales massively with group size.
Dervish
The Dervish is the holy warrior. Scythe in hand, robes on, enchantments stacked. The Dervish hits multiple enemies per swing by default, transforms into a god as a core mechanic, and rewards enchantment stacking more than any other profession in the game.
You wear armor that looks like a Monk’s robe but has a medium rating, similar to the Ranger and Assassin. You’re frontline melee, but you use self-buffs to become surprisingly durable.
Your primary attribute is Mysticism. Every rank reduces the cost of your Dervish enchantments by 4%, and in PvE specifically, you also gain 1 armor per rank as long as you’re enchanted. With three enchantments active and Mysticism maxed, you’re approaching Warrior-level armor with caster-level mobility. The whole class is built around staying enchanted, and Mysticism rewards that constantly.
Beyond Mysticism you have three lines. Scythe Mastery is your weapon line, and the scythe itself is what makes the Dervish stand apart. Every scythe attack hits up to three adjacent enemies in front of you. Your auto-attack is AoE. Even basic swinging is more efficient than any other melee profession in the game. Some Scythe skills require adrenaline, similar to the Warrior and Paragon, so you need to be in the fight to use them.
Earth Prayers is your defensive and earth-damage line. And Wind Prayers covers your mobility skills, cold-damage attacks, and some of your best speed buffs.
The core mechanic is enchantment stacking and consumption. You cast two, three, sometimes four enchantments on yourself before the fight. Then you fire skills that consume those enchantments to deal massive damage or trigger powerful effects. Skills like Mystic Sweep, Eremite’s Attack, and Wearying Strike scale with how many enchantments you have active, and using them removes one, increasing your outgoing damage in the process.
Then there are the Avatar forms, the part the Dervish is most known for. You can take an elite skill that transforms you into one of the five gods for a short period. Avatar of Balthazar gives you physical damage resistance and faster adrenaline gain. Avatar of Dwayna heals you when you lose a Dervish enchantment. Avatar of Lyssa drains energy from enemies when you lose a Dervish enchantment. Avatar of Grenth lets you steal health on every attack. Avatar of Melandru gives extra health and elemental armor, and whenever you lose a Dervish enchantment, your entire party sheds a condition.
The downside: without active Dervish enchantments, you’re below average. Enemy enchantment removal is your worst nightmare. A Mesmer or Necromancer stripping your buffs leaves you exposed.
Pick Dervish if you want melee with a magical flavor, enjoy self-buff gameplay, and the idea of literally transforming into a god mid-fight sounds as good as it actually is.
So, what do you think? What profession fits your playstyle the best? Let me know in the comments or on YouTube!
