Group of GW2 Players Rank the Spears l GW2: Janthir Wilds Beta Review (2024)

Fun ele playstyle with spear, but the damage felt super weak.

As scrapper, I loved spear. It shreds. Yes, it needs a little boost to dmg, and some of the animations felt buggy at times but A tier. It's really good, it's a more aggressive hammer. I loved having explosive entrance ready and dropping my floating spear on my focused target. Thief I'd honestly still say A tier, it feels good, but in PvP really good players can avoid the combos and that resets them, it feels s tier for pve.

S: Thief, Ele, Mesmer A: Necro, Engi, Ranger B: Guardian C: Warrior D: Rev I liked Necro even though it's pretty much a GS variant. Mesmer has the coolest animations, Ele has incredible power fantasy, Thief feels super versatile, Ranger is just cool, Guardian is cool too, Engi feels substantial, Warrior is boring, revenant is slow and underwhelming.

almost started writing an essay in the comments section 12:08 but then i realized you were toying with me😂

Engi Spear is my personal favourite. It needs some adjustments but it's so fun

Thank you all for sharing your thoughts on the spear for each class, I'm glad the Thief is lookin good! What's really turning me off from the spear is how the weird hunched forward pose looks really unbalanced. When you attack with it it just doesn't look like it would be an effective stance for a solid attack. There are so many cool poses they could have gone for for the default stance on these. Hopefully enough people other than me can give Anet the same feedback and get them to make it look better. They may have even addressed this already, but I'm not sure

Found this, enjoyed and had to sub. Had a break from GW2 for a while (hit by car and cracked my noggin) but back, all-be-it a bit slower, but managing. It’s my escape from reality. Came back to new weapon options which I’m getting round, and now Spears!!! Maybe controversial, but I wish Spears were a 3rd weapon. Like some quests get you to kill ‘X’ with ‘Y’ but you still have option of our own weapons. Not long ago people had to craft, quest or pay for new weapons, now we are doing it again. Just too much too soon. Love my Reaper and Chrono, tried Spear Beta and totally agree with everything said. Reaper needs more and Condi is meh! Just my crazy cracked noggin thinking. Great work tho.

I didn't test any combat or such but I hope that the chain attack for guardian doesn't auto target allies since it has a heal on it

You do a really good job.

From the perspective of a group PvE player who's mostly judging these on "feel" more than #'s since they can change on the time: S: Ele, Mesmer, Ranger, Thief A: Guardian, Engi, Necro, Rev B: Warrior Agree with most of the general sentiment. I think I like Rev and Necro a lot more because while I agree they don't really bring something brand new to the table, they just feel and look good. Warrior is a tough one as well. They have SO many weapons, its difficult to really mix it up at this point. SUPER impressed with Spears. That Warrior is hands down my least favorite and its still FAR from something I dislike is a huge compliment to the design team. Impressed with the vid too! Would love to see you bring on your friends for more of this "Tier List" content. I'm a simple creature. Give me Tier Lists. RANK THINGS.

I think the most surprising thing for me was how enamored I was with engi spear. I rarely ever play engi but I think I’m gonna have to get more into it!

Hi hello, your GW2 Spear Tier List video popped up as a suggested video. This lead me to your Twitch so I started watching a few past streams. I previous played GW2 up until the release of End of Dragons. So I'm a few xpacs behind, but looking to jump back in. I only have a 80 Ele, but your streams got me interested in starting/making a Guardian. Even with the newest xpac coming out shortly would you recommend playing through Guard from level 1? or use my boost to 80 for it? My apologies for the massive wall of text, but curious as to what you might suggest. Anyway I look forward to watching some of your older YT videos as well as trying to catch your stream. Cheers! 💜

i know it would be a nightmare for devs but what if condi/debuff on spears or any other weapon would be tied to the trait you equip in the first slot and buffs on the second one?

which character costume is that

I love GW2, but in my oppinion none of the profession capture the essence of a spear (except maybe guardian with the cone of light). All these weapons feel like javelines or greatswords, I don't want to slash my ennemies I want to pierce them...

the most resent(?) patch is overshadowing the Spears for me ... Why? HoT's Power Fresh Tempest is back ❤ you run Scepter/Horn with Water Traits which is so stupid. All you do is overload Air and tip Water 23 or Fire 32 based on cooldowns WITHOUT any conjured weapons 🤤 it is now rather simple build to play and really strong.

Not a bad list, and I like hearing what resonates with other players. Instead of a tier list, I ranked them with reasons for their placement and what they need to advance higher. 1. Thief: Very fun mixing combo chains. The weapon has a lot of tools, and mobility is amazing. The full package. Needs visual cues on the field of play for tracking steps in the chain skills. 2. Ranger: Also has a great mix of tools, and the stealth mechanics are wonderful. Not quite as fast or fluid as thief. 3. Mesmer: Great concept and beautiful skills. I agree clarity effects and graphics need to be enhanced. Also needs a better visual cue for when you have clarity (the little ball was hard to see). Biggest issue is that clarity was difficult to land on mobile enemies, and skills #4 and #5 feel clunky when trying to combo into #2. 4. Elementalist: Fun ranged gameplay, with awesome visuals. Etchings were too short. Felt like too much glass and not enough cannon. Etchings, while beautiful, need less opaque backgrounds; they hide mechanics. 5: Guardian: Another great concept. Fun skills with good damage and some support. #4 looks great! Desperately needs self-sustain on the kit. Lower CDs for #4 and #5. Helio Crawl is too slow. Illuminated skills could use a bit more effects and graphics. 6: Warrior: Nice, clean weapon, with purposeful skills and no gimmicks or mini game. YAY! Good heft that can do mid-range kiting or closer AOE in one kit. Needs better tracking and less animation locks. Could use some boons and lower CDs on #3 and #5. 7: Revenant: Big, slow, bruiser weapon. Graphics look great and the weapon feels like it's dropping massive bombs on foes. But it needs to be a bit faster, and animations need fined tuning so they look more like building power than moving in slomo. Not sold on the main mechanic of spamming #5. Maybe if had a more pronounced effect? I didn't play necro or engi enough to get a good feel for them. The others were all fun!

Interesting that you guys didn't like Necromancer. My favorites list was Engineer, Necromancer, and Mesmer - in no particular order. I didn't like Elementalist - the 5 key effect is just too big. I agree Revenant felt so slow I could have tabbed out to file my taxes between casts. Ranger stealth - I never got this to work right so didn't "get it". Thief was fun, and I will be checking it out more. I really want to like warrior because that's where they put GW1 Paragon - but I worry I will find it as 'unrelatable' as I did Paragon back in the day (Paragon is the only GW1 class I never finished the game on but I was never able to figure out just why I didn't like it). Guardian left no mental impression with me - I can't even remember what it was like playing it. I didn't play any of these with their suggested specs. I changed them to my preferred elite specs and tried them there. For some I tried them both. Necromancer on Harbringer and Mesmer on Virtuoso. Engineer I forget which is odd given how I liked it - maybe that one I stuck with it's default, I certainly didn't do mechanist because that robot is too big. Warrior on spellbreaker and bladesworn. Guardian... ok I do remember doing this one on dragonhunter. Ranger on Soulbeast because if I could delete the pet permanently I would. Revanant didn't matter - with 5-minute long cast times what does spec matter if the game servers have already been shut down because 2070 has arrived before you finish your animation.

I liked the ele spear effects, and the etching idea is cool, but I'm not sure the 'meh' feeling it gave me was just because of the lack of damage. Maybe cos it has pretty moderate AoE as well. I went with Cata because summoning the jade sphere procs the etching, so that, plus the three skill, plus casting anything else at all would power up the haboob or whatever more or less immediately, so I didn't particularly feel the etchings were too short. I was kinda struggling to make any of the cata traits actually work with it though. The weaver skill three seemed interesting... but then having all the weaver skills more or less just allowing you to unweave and double attune sort of negates the whole point of that spec a bit. I do kind of want to have some dual attacks in there. Not sure about Tempest, but Tempest is sort of weird with all weapons just by its very nature. I reckon one (or even two) of the other etching spells need to have a bit more damage potential, cos volcano can't do it all on its own. Fulgor (air2) is weird cos it doesn't crit at all... I think in general ele feels most fun when there is a sprinkling of good damaging spells across all the attunements. I find this whole "fire is the damage one" design pretty uninspiring, so I am kinda hoping they make the ice beam on water 2 do some truly brutal damage or something :D And make haboob some epic pulsing AoE cloud of damage - put earth in the power damage rotation for a weapon that isnt hammer. Thief spear was also cool, but it was totally busted on deadeye and I think the optimal damage rotation was more or less spam 2 and occassionally 4, so I'm not sure they quite accomplished what they aimed to do with the weapon. I guess that's perhaps mostly a deadeye problem, and not a problem with the spear itself though. Very much agree with what was said about Necro. Condi or at least hybrid (I guess if you are a condi reaper it will do bleeds...) would have been better imo. Rev spear also felt pretty weak. I thought the idea was to spam 5 as much as possible, then once you are out of charges/ways to recoup charges you switch weapons for the free extra attack at 5 stacks, rather than trying to maintain 5 stacks and camping spear. I think if the idea is that you want to maintain 5 stacks indefinitely then they need to last long enough to allow for a weapon switch, because it seems totally insane to me to design a weapon that requires you to camp it.

I love the idea of Spears as a power weapon for Ele, but it made me wish that Tempest's overloads were either also ranged or had an expanded radius to match. I originally wanted to run Fresh Air but the Air Overload is of course melee and the Air spear skills have too long of cooldowns. The only way to play like this is if I wanted to forgo range entirely, at which point there are better options for melee.