7H HM UW Primary Profession most efficient?

Assassin is the best if you like to ball up targets and let your Heroes rip them to shreds.

Mesmer is the best if you like to run in and effectively engage/shutdown a group.

Necromancer is the best if you want to watch a movie while playing.

Elementalist is the best if you like damage.

Ritualist is the best if you just wanna drop Spirits (if you really get into trouble, you can Shelter spam and still be useful/damaging, unlike a Hero).

Dervish has the easiest Deep Wound application (but requires party specialization in most cases).

Paragon has the best party-wide damage mitigation (Imbagon).

The rest are pretty lackluster.

Going to be aiming for 50/50, so was leaning towards Ranger or Ele for the Armor set prices (they seem by far easiest to obtain)...

thanks for the list Kaida!

Don't be lazy and micro your panic.
its not that hard to select a target then use a hotkey/mouse click for panic.
Most enemy groups tend to ball together at certain points during their patrols anyway, so usually all you have to do is wait.

Most skills are as good as the player that uses them.

My hero(merc but that should not matter) uses keystone a lot better than panic. Might be because you really notice when they misuse panic. But keystone is almost the same as panic + damage so I like this way better.

Using Panic (or other interrupts) effectively usually requires you to micro them, which somewhat defeats the point of putting them on a hero. I can micro a bonder, but that's frankly not a very fast nor compelling way of playing through HM, and solo 7Hing the UW as a bonder frankly sounds extremely annoying.

I can equally contend that the difference between maining a Mesmer and having a hero do it is as night and day, especially versus boss casters. The problem is a majority of HM isn't particularly difficult enough to warrant bonding (which is generally a tactic done in teams or small party farming).

As for elite areas, you could bond through the FoW, but you don't *have* to - shelter is perfectly sufficient for it. Bonding is somewhat ok in the UW (although it's typically done with 2 humans) but it's almost completely impractical in the DoA thanks to spawn sizes and damage frequency. To make matters worse, it's not a particularly engaging playstyle while being a highly involved one - and typically only has space for one abusive PvE skill. To make matters worse, there's large sections of the game where Bonding is extremely annoying in HM thanks to factors such as lifesteal, nature spirit spam, environmental effects, enemy mesmers, etc (any centaur infested stretch of Tyria will do).

As an aside, personally, I think the biggest gap between Hero and Player capability is in Paragons. No build you can put together with a hero paragon is even halfway as effective as an Imbagon. That's another note I disagree with on the simplification of "Assassins, Elementalists and Dervishes".

Most efficient is a hard question (assuming by efficient you mean time). I don't think anyone knows or cares to debate which class is fastest to complete UW with 7H because anyone speed running does it with SC groups much faster.

Now, if your real question is "what primary profession is easiest?" then let me simplify that question for discussion: The only difficult part of UW is 4 Horsemen, any group that can beat 4H can easily beat the rest of the UW (assuming you know how to do them correctly). Therefore this thread should be directed towards strategies for 4H and which class makes this quest the easiest.

There are literally dozens of "tricks" to make 4H fairly simple with any class. If you just want a stand and fight approach, you really need either an E/Mo prot or ST rit, as Imbagon won't work at all on the reaper who isn't a party member (and a good amount of the damage is armor ignoring as well). If you have one of those, know how to micro well, and have a decent amount of offense to kill enemies at a quick pace, it shouldn't take you more than a few tries to master the quest. It should be noted that you don't have to be the E/Mo or ST rit yourself, you just have to have one in your party and micro them decently.


As for hero paragons, I have actually had success with multiple paragons + conjure + EBSoH + GDW (running an E/Mo or ST Rit/AP Rit to provide the GDW yourself). Each Paragon averages ~62 DPS, chain defensive anthem + SYG+ whatever and between that + E/Mo or shelter protting against all spell spikes you don't die. Also lolspamknockdowns everywhere (I take a Rt/P Spirits Strength rit Earthbind as well since Earthbind both makes knockdowns 3s AND lets you knockdown every foe in the game). It's not the fastest build by any means but could certainly beat elite areas that aren't HM Gloom. Another option is Bow paragons + Ignite Arrows which does about an extra 15 damage per hit and 30 AoE damage per shot, but with slower bow attack speed.

Yeah, its hard to make a hero paragon as strong as an imbagon. Its almost equally hard to do so with a hero warrior vs warrior with SY or hero ranger vs ranger with SY. Fact of the matter is that ANY physical that doesn't have SY is a lot weaker because SY is an invulnerability mode switch.

As far as weakest hero class goes, I have to nominate assassins because they can take 10s to complete a 2.5s chain, and since the Crit Scythe nerf there isn't anything else they can do except Crit Barrage (which is only slightly less of a joke than Crit Wand) (Note that I have beaten Slavers with Crit Wand, its actually awesomely cool and not too ineffective with the right build).

I sense a lot of hurt egos and pros in this thread, why though? This guy simply asked a question about a profession.

Setting aside for a moment my objection that the question isn't worth answering (since anyone who has any hope of completing UW HM 7H can figure out the answer for his or herself).....

The discussion here has been terrible. Most of the posts have not related to UW at all. The few that have related to UW make no sense. (Ranger, lulwut?)

Since no one else is answering the question that was asked, I'll give a brief answer:

If you want to get past 4H, you're probably going to need to take the lead on damage dealing. That's going to mean either running a warrior and using Jack-style micro-intensive tank-n-spank, or using a high-damage AoE build. Assuming the 1/5/12 update hasn't introduced any surprises that means necro (AP-MoP) or ele (AP-earth, AP-air, maybe SF (but SF is worthless at Dhumm) or one of the new elites post-update). Conceivably a derv could reach comparable levels of damage if you could be sure of getting proper balls every time you needed them (PR or VS with Reap Impurities, probably Sand Shards too); it might also be able to tank like a warrior if protted. Same could maybe be said for a JS-FS-DB sin. Everything else is probably too weak to kill one side fast enough.

(I suppose you could maybe run a build for tanking one side (or making the reaper tank) and hope 7 heroes can manage the other side without your input. To the best of my knowledge no one has ever done this. That would mean assassin (SF), ele (obby flesh or ER to make reaper tank), monk (Spellbreaker, SoA to make the reaper tank), or maybe Rit (spirit spam; very dicey since full human teams have trouble killing one side with the amount of time spirit spam is able to buy). The serious downside to this approach is that your build is going to be pretty worthless for everything else (except the ER ele).)

Beyond the "do a lot of damage really fast" aspect of 4H, warriors and warrior secondaries are at a big advantage with SY!.

Finally, abusing Earthbind is very, very helpful with Dhuum. That's an advantage to anything with spammable KD. The most obvious choices being hammer stuff (warrior), Brawling Headbutt (melee), and GDW (casters with good e-management (aka necro)).

So, I'd say warrior, necro, or ele would be your best bet.

(Btw, the three people who I'm aware of actually doing UW 7H used warrior, ele, and necro (although the necro used cons for Dhumm)).