Class Tier List

[Krenzin]

A Tier - Ranger, Guild-Magos

Rangers are probably the best overall combat class. They don't have the same damage potential as a thief, but they are not bogged down by game mechanics like a thief is (more on that later) and still have very excellent output (second only to the thief) coupled with unexpected (more on that later) versatility with buffing, healing, aoe immobilize and even summoning. Their only real downside is that they cannot specialize in heavy armor, which isn't that huge of a downside. They can still wear plate, they just lose some skill and dodge bonus while wearing it. Realistically it's not that hard to stay away from melee anyway. Summon cannon fodder and aoe immobilize. Enemy AI attacks the closest thing to it.

Guild Magos is not the stereotypical big booms that people tend to expect. Mages in this game are far more along the lines of Dragon Age Origins in that they are really excellent buffers and debuffers and also happen to be capable of flooding the field with cannon fodder that can also be used to put a target as vulnerable due to flanking. While their DPS output is nothing special, their ADPS is something to be admired as they control the flow of battle. Their downside is sustainability, as the manapool in this game is rather low, but resources for resting and mana potions are extremely plentiful.

B Tier - Armsmaster, Hospitaller, Heirophant, Thief

Armsmaster is the best specifically melee combat class. Where rangers focus on the bow, the armsmaster can specialize in two-handers of any melee weapon type. Coupled with the fact that they can specialize heavy armor, they are the perfect class to wade into the middle of a group of enemies. The problem is that they just aren't as good as rangers. In an ideal sitution, their DPS is comparable to a ranger, but because rangers use agility as their main stat, a ranger is more likely to crit, and because movement (for reasons unknown) takes away your multi-attack, rangers don't have to worry about losing attacks by moving up to an enemy. They also lose out to a ranger on general versatility. No spells, means no healing, buffing or summoning. The only upside is they have a heavy armor tree and they benefit from buffs like heroism. They mantain their unmaxed agility dodge bonus and I have to use my cleric's turn to give them +2 damage. Huzzah. They aren't a bad class, thus B tier and not C, but if you want to be a melee class, just be a ranger and get the point blank feat.

Hospitaller and Heirophant are the best of the 3 cleric classes, and which one is better is really up to personal preferance. Heirophant is the backline healer, and Hospitaller is the frontline healer. The major difference is cascade, armor types, which in this particular case does matter because the difference is light vs heavy, and some spells. Hospitaller loses out on an aoe cure spell and an aoe stun spell, but can get the aoe club stun, so realistically it's the not-oft-used cure they lose. If you want to do more spells in one turn, be a heirophant, if you want a meat shield to take the heat from backliners and flank for a thief, go with the hospitaller.

Thief was a hard one to place for me, because it's such a good bad class. The rogue has an absolutely insane DPS output, but it is a slave to game mechanics. Under the condition that you meet the conditions for the potential to get that output, a rogue is a little grim reaper. There's just so many issues with the rogue that it's honestly probably easier to just swap it out to an almighty ranger and not deal with the conditions. Which stat do you want to focus, strength for the drop in the ocean bonus to damage but the absolutely necessary bonus to hit? Or agility for that sweet sweet crit backstab, but less chance to hit from not maxing strength? You could go agility and use a bow, but bows don't have the same crit modifier of daggers, meaning you do less damage, and you can't flank an enemy with a bow, meaning you're relying on multiple allies to flank an enemy before you can backstab. Being a rogue means utilizing both, really. Melee when you can, range when you can't. But it's like playing a game of chess with allies that move when they kill and enemies controlled by the opponent. Often combat is a wall of enemies vs a wall of allies and flanking is just out of the question until late game when you can boost your base movement by enough to matter. Starting combat stealthed and stealthing on the first damage taken really helps but it's still just a strange class. Nothing is better than having a frenzied rogue sweeping a battlefield, and nothing is worse than using your rogue to deal 5 damage. That's a sad rogue.

C Tier - Officer, Champion, Battlemagos

I hesitate to call any class bad, because the game is not so hard that playing any class is going to make things more difficult, but these are really the wasted potential classes. The funny thing is that they're so very very similar to each other and so very very similar to the almighty ranger, thus the reason the ranger being so effective is unexpected. I feel like the devs were somehow opposed to a spellsword type class and ended up making these 3 duds, but somehow a spellbow class that can bow in melee is perfectly acceptable.....

The champion is the "battle cleric" paladin type and gains the heavy weapon tree in exchange for losing tier 3 and 4 spells. But it lacks the warrior multi-attack and the heavy weapon multi-attack requires you to kill an enemy. Meaning you have 1 shot to kill an enemy to multi attack and then the multi attack has to be on an enemy that's adjacent to the enemy you just killed because you step into the space of a killed enemy. What a niche condition. With the armsmaster, the heavy weapon cleave is just a little potential bonus cherry on top, on the champion it's a worthless conditional ability. While cleric tier 3 and 4 spells aren't super amazing, losing the aoe heal is not worth the tiny extra damage you get from the heavy weapon tree. Can't even use the club aoe stun. Just pass on this absolute dud. Rangers use some divine magic and their own unique nature magic and get multi-attack and extra crit attacks, just be a point blank ranger instead. Why make a ranger but not a divine spellsword?

The Battlemagos makes sense on paper but in practice it's just not great. They lose tier 3 and 4 of 2 spell schools in exchange for a tiny bit of focus on weapons, and, for some reason, fewer development points to spend on the extra trees. You lose out on some of the best spells, lose points that you could just spend on getting more mana. Potions are plentiful and resting is easy, why bother with this? Mages are very obviously not meant to be DPS in this game, having them do a tiny bit of extra bow damage in exchange for some of their best spells is just silly. Just make a warrior class that can use some fire mage spells. Several of them are melee range anyway, problem solved. Why make a ranger but not a spellsword?

The Officer. The best of the worst, and a bit of a tragic class, really. I feel like this was meant to be the full "tank" class. They are a warrior class with access to axe/sword, heavy armor and shield focus but no heavy weapon. They can multi-attack in between using their abilities. Send it to the front line and just let enemies beat on it while it does cool things like aoe defense and aoe frenzy. So why is it C tier? Mainly because it doesn't get frenzy until level 15 (pretty late game unless you do some heavy grinding) and it can only frenzy every 3 rounds. Early game it's a bad armsmaster, which is a bad ranger, and late game, mages are just significantly better buffers who can cascade from frenzy into an aoe stun or something and not just lose their own turn. Why not just make a warrior class that can use some mage spells like frenzy? Why make a ranger but not a spellsword?

Alternate title of this post is "jerking off rangers" I guess lol. But seriously it's an extremely effective class that other classes should be compared to and the others fail to measure up. They made rangers so damn good the best group is probably 4 rangers 1 mage and 1 hospitaller to tank, which funnily enough is probably fine for story too, considering the only companions that have much dialogue are the hospitaller and the mage...

[IlluminaZero]

Officer is purely superior to Arm Master UNLESS you go two-handed. However Two-Handed weapons have by far the least weapon availability both in early game and via RNG.

Ranger is busted but it lacks both Two-Hander and the Shield trees. Basically they are objectively inferior melee to Officer and Arm Master. Its just that Bow; barring ammo concerns, is purely superior to melee anyways. Doubly so with point-blank and rapid-reload passives. The only real argument against bow is the poor critical multipliers + ammo. With even 1 Ranger you will likely rapidly meet ammo concerns let alone multiple Rangers.

People WANT Champion to be a "battle-cleric" but its in actuality the most defensive cleric (IE true shield tree) with the most attunement. Combined with how poor most lv 3 and esp lv 4 spells are and Champion is actually not far behind Hospitalier.

Guild mages are actually extremely competent DPS with the Lv 1 Earth Gnats spell. Its very easy to get x4 castings per turn at a reliable ~15 damage. Spell stun; unlike martial stun, also never misses.

Thief is amazing against enemies vulnerable to crit. Unfortunately the end game loves to swarm you with crit immune enemies. Still amazing but they fall off bad in the end-game.

Heirophant is purely inferior to both Champion and Hospitalier until Lv 10. Then afterwards it becomes debatable due to the questionable value of most Lv 3 and ESP lv 4 spells. One thing to note is that both Champion and Hospitalier can Stun Touch -> Cascade -> Attack. As before stun never misses.

[Krenzin]

I did not intend to say mages couldn't DPS, I think I was more addressing comments I've seen before complaining about mages being bad. I agree, Gnat Swarm is great single target DPS, but given the choice of that, or frenzy and thunderclap, I'd rather do those. Give allies an extra attack and take a turn away from my enemies, or do some low cost single target damage.

The party make-up comment of 4 rangers was mostly speculation. I agree ammo is a concern. Honestly I played on a harder-than-normal-not-as-hard-as-hard custom difficulty and I never had an issue with defenses, so I really don't place a ton of emphasis on it, maybe it's worse if you make enemies always do max damage or something. But between stuns, diamondskin buff and/or stoneskin potions, defense was a joke and it became a question of how fast can I DPS, and the ranger really came out on top of that one.

[Wlerin]

The only upside is they have a heavy armor tree and they benefit from buffs like heroism. ... I have to use my cleric's turn to give them +2 damage.

Pre-buff. Zero turns wasted.

Thieves can backstab way more than just Flanked enemies, the easiest alternatives to apply being Stunned, Blinded, or Panicked.

[Krenzin]

Cannot prebuff heroism

[IlluminaZero]

If it wasn't for the swarm of crit immune enemies in the end-game my ideal party composition would likely be something like:

2-3 tanks/utility:
- Hospitalier is overall the best (Stun Touch, Mace stun with +Aura, and buffs)
- Champion can fit this role as well. Technically they are tankier and have more attunement for casting so its nowhere as bad as people keep saying it is.
- Officer fits this role as well and can DPS better end-game due to Multi-attack. Also STR/AGI means they can prioritize damage and dodge.

1 Thief: (Thieves will basically 1HKO most enemies that aren't crit immune. Later on its primarily for utility - IE stealth basically gives you a free first turn)

1 Ranger: Reliable Ranged DPS. However it will be mitigated by phs resistant enemies later. Ammo is also just... Really annoying. Rangers are REALLY arrow hungry.
1 Guild Mage: Reliable Ranged DPS + utility. You can do stuff like 3 Gnats -> Stun AOE. Later enemies tend to be either vulnerable to (element) or gnats just bypasses damage resistance (IIRC)

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Arm Master is weird IMO. Early game; due to lack of two-hander weapons, they are effectively identical/inferior to Officer unless you want to use clubs.

For MOST of the game their DPS even two-handed is outshined by both Thief and Ranger.

End-game however when you are facing extremely tanky enemies that are both stun/crit immune Two-handed Arm Master sustained DPS becomes pretty valuable... Assuming you can actually FIND a good two-handed weapon. (I did tests where I was forcing endgame merchants to restock and the rarity of two-handed weapons is ridiculous. Especially Two-Handed Club weapons).

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The real worst class IMO is Hierophant. Why does Hierophant have less attunement than Champion? Most of the good spells are Lv 1-2 anyways. Champion is arguably a better caster than Hierophant atop of a competent martial.

[Wlerin]

Rip me, you're right. I could have sworn the Aura version could be cast outside of combat.

[Flexiglass]

I wanted to "but wait, you forgot about x," but nope, this is spot on. My only gripe is that officers have to wait until 15 for group frenzy, otherwise they would be way more fun to use

I actually tried to make an "optimal" comp and I used 3 rangers and ranged thief. It was absurdly broken, the free thunderclap every turn is just a bonus

edit: Also, if you just want fire magic (like for frenzy and a summon), then the Battlemagos is just better than a regular mage by losing no feats and being able to wear light armor

[rane]

From playing on medium difficulty...

Officer is great. With axes and swords he's on par with an Armsmaster, and gets really fun command abilities on low CDs, that are not limited to aura or touch range.

Ranger is good, but not overwhelmingly so. He's very gated by arrow availability so until mid to late game you can't just shoot blindly, and his Attunement pool is very low so you have to use that sparingly as well. I have also found out that past the really early game summons are getting suboptimal compared to just flat out marking and firing 2-3 shots every turn.

Priestly classes seem to be low usefulness most of the time. Status effects are minor most of the time, and touch limitation on most healing spells also puts a dampen on his utility. They only really shine against sublime weak enemies, who only start appearing late. Other than that you're just doing a single club attack every turn when everyone else goes crit, bleed, backstab, panic, 2-4x more damage per turn.

Guild magos is kinda mediocre until T3 of magic. Before that you're going to swarm of gnats (cascade) every turn pretty much. After that sure the fun begins, you can Poison Globe stunlock, or better yet Thunderclap though you run out steam very quickly.

Battlemagos just plain sucks. Fire magic is just not very good for anything, and what little weapon focus they get doesn't do more than a regular magos could do untrained when pressed enough.

I'd rather the classes thus:
Thief - S (backstab) / C (no backstab)
Ranger - A
Armsmaster - A
Officer - A

Hospitaller - B
Guild magos - B

Battlemagos - C

[Krenzin]

I guess I didn't really go into it much, but the best part of clerics are pre-buffs, stuns and debuffs, similar to mages. Driina would pretty much aoe stun followed by aura of fear or something similar, then single target stun until I can aoe stun again. Kat would miss fairly often for me early on, so giving her bear strength and reducing the enemy's defenses goes a long way to making Kat not miss, thus at least a portion of her DPS can be attributed to the cleric.

It's not necessarily that the ranger is overwhelmingly better, it's just that it is better. This is from a purely min-maxing standpoint, mind, not necessarily what is most fun. Summons aren't great, but if they take 1 hit, that's one hit not against the rogue. It's not so much that it's an amazing ability, it's the fact that they CAN do it. They CAN summon a decoy, they CAN Force of Nature, etc on top of the fact that outside of rogues, they top the DPS charts. They're fairly significantly more likely to land fairly significantly more hits that have a fairly significantly higher chance of being crits than any other class, and they don't really lose anything for it, they just need the ammo. They're even capable of buffing their own DPS with serpentsomething.

From a purely min-maxing standpoint officers are worthless. The armsmaster does slightly better DPS via 2 handers, and by level 15 mages should be able to frenzy every turn, vs the every 3 turns, making the officer's special ability very not special. Due to this, it's strictly worse to have an officer in your party. Like I said, it's not that the class is bad, it's just that it's not as good.

[IlluminaZero]

As before unless you go two-handers (which has extreme availability issues) Officer is actually purely superior to Arm master. They have the same shield+weapon tree and their unique skill tree gives additional passives.

Addendum: It should also be noted that two-handers don't make Arm Masters "better" than Officers. It is just the one thing they can do better. Two-hander obviously won't tank as well and furthermore Two-handers have worse critical modifiers. So unless you are fighting crit immune enemies the damage numbers are questionable as well.

The Fire tree minor frenzy isn't actually as "hot" as one would think. For one Fire is inferior to Earth and Wind.

Secondly its specifically party wide +Attack. Every -1 Martial; such as the guild mage, makes +attack less potent. Part of the benefit of +Attack on the Officer is actually that the Officer is one of the best classes to benefit from it. Worst case scenario +Attack basically means the Officer has ++Attack every three turns.

+Attack in general might actually be a bit overrated due to move canceling it's effect. So basically - Melee has to be in perfect position to benefit from it. Rangers have the easiest benefit but multiple Rangers WILL lead to arrow issues.

For 20 attunement (iirc) it has pretty questionable value barring special circumstances like a thief chain backstabbing. But that requires specific positioning and isn't really a "spam" thing. And if you are using it selectively the Officer can do that for free while tanking and doing no cost DPS.

[gallaghan2000]

Honestly? In my opinion, lack of spellsword class was probably the thing Anders pushed the most for. Lore wise a magos is supposed to be a decrepit wreck, not kind of, not maybe, flat out as they reach grandmaster and higher.

The reticulum magic is intended to degrade the body and mind.

Unfortunately, we don't get to see that with our characters. Even spellburn, which should be a core ability and not some offshoot I want to bypass, is the only thing I've seen coming close to that lore.

Quite honestly in my opinion, every class should have gotten an extra two points worth of attributes. Then he'd have had the basis to have each tree charge a stat point in strength or fortitude to hit master. Maybe also have a debuff that makes it harder to use diplomacy. Yeah it wouldn't be too popular, but players could get a feel for that piece of lore and see it in action.

At that point you're trying to have the mage avoid being attacked, anyway.

[Krenzin]

There's no reason, outside of availability of a 2 hander, not to use a 2 hander on an armsmaster. I don't know how you're both agreeing with me and not agreeing with me at the same time here. If I'm being honest I did not have an issue finding a 2 hander. They weren't as common as the others, but I got a really excellent 2 handed axe pretty early on, which I thought was cool because I was specing Roland in axes due to not knowing how loot worked (Iago would get special swords, Driina clubs, Roland axes, Kat daggers and Iben bows) But it turns out loot is randomized, there's not really legendary super weapons like there is in a game like Baldur's Gate. I would see them here and there after that, they weren't as uncommon to me as they seemed to be for you, maybe I got lucky.

Despite whether or not frenzy gets cancelled, a mage is not limited to using it once every 3 turns. If it gets cancelled twice, it's the same as an officer, if it doesn't get cancelled, it's better. You also don't have to gun it down the fire tree to start. The officer doesn't get the ability until level 15, there's only as much rush on the mage as you want to make it. I could be wrong, but it also seems like you're suggesting an officer replaces a mage, thus having the extra melee dps to benefit from the buff, but I would have to honestly say, probably obviously, that one mage is a mainstay in my group, and the officer would be replaced by something that does better DPS. And once again, I really don't put much stock into defense abilities. Shield specialization doesn't really mean a fig to me when buffs and stunlocks make regular defenses just not nearly as necessary.

[IlluminaZero]

Regardless of how you feel about Officer the concept of Officer being C while Arm Master is A is ridiculous. Officer is basically just a better Arm Master unless you REALLY love two-handed - and that is just bias.

The difference in DPS between One-hander and Two-hander isn't that extreme even IF we ignore crit modifiers. Cleave is way too situational to be a consistent source of additional DPS.

[Krenzin]

I really feel like you're not reading what I'm typing, so I'm wondering if I should even reply. First armsmaster is B tier, not A. That's one above officer, not 2. Second I have specified this is from a purely min-max standpoint. In a situation where the officer's ADPS ability is useless (almost always with a mage that has frenzy) and the 2 hander does more DPS than the one hander (almost guaranteed), the class capable of wielding the 2 hander is better. IF we happen to have no mage or no frenzy spell on said mage, you're absolutely 100% correct.

You are more than free to love the officer, I'm sorry I insulted what is obviously your favorite class, but you can't come in saying "kind of maybe, but also nuh uh" it's a little weird.

[IlluminaZero]

In a general sense after testing the weapon RNG I just feel that two-handers are wildly overrated. It is likely the chief reason people keep demanding Champion get multi-attack - They want a competent Two-hander Champion while ignoring that Champion is equally competent at tanking with the shield tree. Cascade -> Attack is arguably better in most circumstances as Attack+ requires the melee not move.

If anything I think its more odd that everyone dislike the Champion while excusing the Hierophant. As before the Hierophant has less attunement than the Champion and the best spells tend to be lv 1-2 anyways. If anything I find it wild that Hierophant is on the same tier as Hospitalier.

And I do admit I forgot that Arm master is "B" and not "A." I admit I may be projecting some earlier discussions I've had here.