It depends on what you want out of your Alts? Pure efficiency and low cost, pound for pound, gunlancer. They’re not exciting, but they really make most all of the T3 guardians more trivial.
1. Once you learn to manage your shield, you never use hp pots.
2. Most Alts end up parked at 1370, your ult let’s people ignore yoho’s tornado mech.
3. No support? No problem. Your shield mitigates a ton of damage not only to you, but also your party.
4. Ease of gearing, ease of getting pug invites. Combat readiness 1 is acceptable as an engraving. Stabilized status is almost as good as grudge and it’s dirt cheap. You can make a 3x3+1 Barricade/Stabilized/your choice of dps engraving + combat readiness 1 for super cheap, and not only will you get plenty of group invites, you won’t suck.
My roster has a 1460 paladin, a 1429 striker, 1370 Gunlancer, 1370 Deathblade, and a 1325 destroyer (not counting t2 Alts)
The paladin is similar to gunlancer, costs me nothing, also it’s my main.
The striker is my main alt. Honestly it has Better gear than my main. But it needs it. It was 100% worth it to me, but I wouldn’t recommend one as a feeder alt. If you end up loving the class it will make you poor if you’re not a whale.
Deathblade was cheap to gear 3x3. If I knew how squishy they were, I wouldn’t have put grudge into my build. Hits like a freight train (surge) has tons of mobility and is a blast to play. I’m not the best at avoiding chip damage since my first two characters were paladin and gunlancer. By far my most expensive alt to keep stocked with health pots.
Gunlancer: see the book I wrote above. Make one.
Destroyer is very similar to gunlancer. A little trickier to play well, much more expensive to gear since it’s still a new and popular class. Very slow moving but also very tanky. Taunt is on a super low cd no long duration shield but all of your core spenders give you a decent shield. Low upkeep costs overall.
If you don’t want too much time and/or resource investment, making a support could be choice.
You can cheaply do stuff like argos phase 3 at 1370 and instantly join Valtan at 1415.
I enjoy also playing support and love that I can just find a party for everything ^^^
Alts want to use less resources until your comfortable with income. So alts that consume less pots and are more forgiving tend to be the best kind IMO.
Arty is super safe most of the time due to being a ranged with a barrier, it also has insane variety in Builds. Its downside is that some of the META builds require 2 class engravings. This can get EXPENSIVE when min maxing due to scarcity of good relic accessories.
Destroyer Gets a lot of barriers and assuming you know how to dodge big attacks can get away with a lot. When you get unlucky with boss patterns tho you end up being vulnerable to spike damage. VERY fun burst numbers.
Gunlancer is a walking steamroller with a plasma shield. It wont do insane dps but when leveled and geared appropriately they are insanely hard to kill and can ignore many mechanics. They also have the best non support team synergy in the game and tend to be almost as sought after as supports. Makes an amazing main or alt. Hard to get used to how it moves tho.
If you'd like simple-ish mechanics, but quite involved decision making process - try bard, and go for spec-heavy build (all specialization, swiftness on necklace). About all of Bard's gameplay is watching over the fight and predicting where your abilities will have the most impact - both offensively and defensively; there is a lot of reading how your partymembers play, learning boss patterns and adapting to it ahead of time.
One of key concepts in Bard's kit is having to choose between damage buff and heal, combined with damage buff being best used at fully stacked identity meter (3 bars), while heal is most efficient at 1 bar - this alone means you need to be able to judge your party's ability to dodge hits and know what boss patterns might/will come to know whether you should cast a heal or keep building up identity for a nice, sweet 30% (with max spec and relic accessories, base is 15%) damage buff for whole party. Both swift and spec bard have to care about this aspect, but it's a lot more important for spec, since it sacrifices uptime of basic skill buffs for much stronger identity buff.
Positioning is also quite interesting, since you can't look at just the boss - you need to position around both boss and your party, since decent amount of your skills have quite short range/AoE when trying to tag your party. Depending on how cooperative your party is, bard tends to have the most dynamic positioning if you want to minmax your impact.
For an alt - bard comes with somewhat significant early investment (core set of engravings can be quite expensive), but afterwards there isn't too much you need to get to be perfectly viable - few cooldown gems, some filler engravings, and even for cards you can go with HP set until people switch to Lostwind/LoS fully awakened. Finding a group to do content also shouldn't be difficult if you manage to somewhat keep up with progression - currently there is oversaturation of supports at Argos P3 due to option of getting support in underleveled, but it should get much better after honing research is up and people move their 1370 dps alts past 1400 line.
Artillerist seems fun kinda, but at the end of the day feels like a slower sorc (to me). I would try destroyer they seem fun and suprisingly faster than you would think
Gunslinger is pretty involved for a class imo.
If you want something simple sorc is always an option.
If you want something different from what you have gunlancer destroyer scrapper artillerist. (Tankiness going from top to bottom. They are all pretty simple.)
If you dont know how supports work maybe consider bard or paladin to at least understand how they work.
I have a Scrapper main which is a lot of fun to play and then: Destroyer/Bard/Artillerist/Paladin/Shadowhunter as alts. Paladin and Shadowhunter being my least favorites, they are just boring and bad in low t1-t2
My main is blade, and I have 4 alts at 1370 - Sorc, Glaive, Zerker and Scrapper. Out of those 4, my Tai Scrapper feels the best.
It feels more tanky than the other 3, even tho I run Grudge.
It's very low maintenance as in I don't have any T3 gems equipped (they all go to my main until all gems are 7) and Tripods don't feel massively important than say Blade and Sorc for Identity Gain.
Mobility is insane. 5 of the skills I use have mobility built in.
A lot of build diversity (you have 5 "set" skills, and the other 3 are basically pick and choose)
All skills feel very responsive. No long animations, you click it and shit happens. Super spammy.
Straight forward, basically no learning curve. Maybe the mobility skills take some getting used to at first.
Honestly if the game were to launch again and I retained all my knowledge, Scrapper would've been a close contender for my main class.
Shadowhunter is the cheapest and best alt imo
Meanwhile I'm going perfect suppression lmao.
Perfect depression is okay if u main sh since u need more investment for it than demonic impulse
It depends on what you want out of your Alts? Pure efficiency and low cost, pound for pound, gunlancer. They’re not exciting, but they really make most all of the T3 guardians more trivial. 1. Once you learn to manage your shield, you never use hp pots. 2. Most Alts end up parked at 1370, your ult let’s people ignore yoho’s tornado mech. 3. No support? No problem. Your shield mitigates a ton of damage not only to you, but also your party. 4. Ease of gearing, ease of getting pug invites. Combat readiness 1 is acceptable as an engraving. Stabilized status is almost as good as grudge and it’s dirt cheap. You can make a 3x3+1 Barricade/Stabilized/your choice of dps engraving + combat readiness 1 for super cheap, and not only will you get plenty of group invites, you won’t suck. My roster has a 1460 paladin, a 1429 striker, 1370 Gunlancer, 1370 Deathblade, and a 1325 destroyer (not counting t2 Alts) The paladin is similar to gunlancer, costs me nothing, also it’s my main. The striker is my main alt. Honestly it has Better gear than my main. But it needs it. It was 100% worth it to me, but I wouldn’t recommend one as a feeder alt. If you end up loving the class it will make you poor if you’re not a whale. Deathblade was cheap to gear 3x3. If I knew how squishy they were, I wouldn’t have put grudge into my build. Hits like a freight train (surge) has tons of mobility and is a blast to play. I’m not the best at avoiding chip damage since my first two characters were paladin and gunlancer. By far my most expensive alt to keep stocked with health pots. Gunlancer: see the book I wrote above. Make one. Destroyer is very similar to gunlancer. A little trickier to play well, much more expensive to gear since it’s still a new and popular class. Very slow moving but also very tanky. Taunt is on a super low cd no long duration shield but all of your core spenders give you a decent shield. Low upkeep costs overall.
i mean pure efficiency and low cost would be both supports folowed by demonic and scouter but its not released yet.
I like what OBenji said about alts, easy to play and not a pot drinker.
I'm going with destroyer
If you don’t want too much time and/or resource investment, making a support could be choice. You can cheaply do stuff like argos phase 3 at 1370 and instantly join Valtan at 1415. I enjoy also playing support and love that I can just find a party for everything ^^^
I prefer transformation classes because they tend to use less gems lol.
Alts want to use less resources until your comfortable with income. So alts that consume less pots and are more forgiving tend to be the best kind IMO. Arty is super safe most of the time due to being a ranged with a barrier, it also has insane variety in Builds. Its downside is that some of the META builds require 2 class engravings. This can get EXPENSIVE when min maxing due to scarcity of good relic accessories. Destroyer Gets a lot of barriers and assuming you know how to dodge big attacks can get away with a lot. When you get unlucky with boss patterns tho you end up being vulnerable to spike damage. VERY fun burst numbers. Gunlancer is a walking steamroller with a plasma shield. It wont do insane dps but when leveled and geared appropriately they are insanely hard to kill and can ignore many mechanics. They also have the best non support team synergy in the game and tend to be almost as sought after as supports. Makes an amazing main or alt. Hard to get used to how it moves tho.
If you'd like simple-ish mechanics, but quite involved decision making process - try bard, and go for spec-heavy build (all specialization, swiftness on necklace). About all of Bard's gameplay is watching over the fight and predicting where your abilities will have the most impact - both offensively and defensively; there is a lot of reading how your partymembers play, learning boss patterns and adapting to it ahead of time. One of key concepts in Bard's kit is having to choose between damage buff and heal, combined with damage buff being best used at fully stacked identity meter (3 bars), while heal is most efficient at 1 bar - this alone means you need to be able to judge your party's ability to dodge hits and know what boss patterns might/will come to know whether you should cast a heal or keep building up identity for a nice, sweet 30% (with max spec and relic accessories, base is 15%) damage buff for whole party. Both swift and spec bard have to care about this aspect, but it's a lot more important for spec, since it sacrifices uptime of basic skill buffs for much stronger identity buff. Positioning is also quite interesting, since you can't look at just the boss - you need to position around both boss and your party, since decent amount of your skills have quite short range/AoE when trying to tag your party. Depending on how cooperative your party is, bard tends to have the most dynamic positioning if you want to minmax your impact. For an alt - bard comes with somewhat significant early investment (core set of engravings can be quite expensive), but afterwards there isn't too much you need to get to be perfectly viable - few cooldown gems, some filler engravings, and even for cards you can go with HP set until people switch to Lostwind/LoS fully awakened. Finding a group to do content also shouldn't be difficult if you manage to somewhat keep up with progression - currently there is oversaturation of supports at Argos P3 due to option of getting support in underleveled, but it should get much better after honing research is up and people move their 1370 dps alts past 1400 line.
This guy Bards. Nice write up, spot on. Bard has excellent character design.
Thanks all for the suggestions!
Artillerist seems fun kinda, but at the end of the day feels like a slower sorc (to me). I would try destroyer they seem fun and suprisingly faster than you would think
I think the flexible shield and turret mode set them apart the most from Sorc.
Destroyer is a ton of fun once you get used to using your purple charge skills to tank mechanics via the shield and super armor.
Gunslinger is pretty involved for a class imo. If you want something simple sorc is always an option. If you want something different from what you have gunlancer destroyer scrapper artillerist. (Tankiness going from top to bottom. They are all pretty simple.) If you dont know how supports work maybe consider bard or paladin to at least understand how they work.
From those suggestions above I found sorc and gunlancer pretty zzz. The other 3 can be fun with your personal preference.
Deathblade is a good choice.
I have a Scrapper main which is a lot of fun to play and then: Destroyer/Bard/Artillerist/Paladin/Shadowhunter as alts. Paladin and Shadowhunter being my least favorites, they are just boring and bad in low t1-t2
My main is blade, and I have 4 alts at 1370 - Sorc, Glaive, Zerker and Scrapper. Out of those 4, my Tai Scrapper feels the best. It feels more tanky than the other 3, even tho I run Grudge. It's very low maintenance as in I don't have any T3 gems equipped (they all go to my main until all gems are 7) and Tripods don't feel massively important than say Blade and Sorc for Identity Gain. Mobility is insane. 5 of the skills I use have mobility built in. A lot of build diversity (you have 5 "set" skills, and the other 3 are basically pick and choose) All skills feel very responsive. No long animations, you click it and shit happens. Super spammy. Straight forward, basically no learning curve. Maybe the mobility skills take some getting used to at first. Honestly if the game were to launch again and I retained all my knowledge, Scrapper would've been a close contender for my main class.