Best archetype for each class and your reason?

For me is below:
Warrior's best archetype is paladin for the insane survivability and with good builds still deal 100k+ DPS.
Archer's best archetype is trapper. It deals high damage without having to hug your enemies.
Mage's best archetype is Riftwalker, thanks to gust and Flash freeze major ID you can max out winded in seconds, it has both heals and damage.
Haven't played shaman or asassin since I quitted the game and deleted all my classes a few years ago.

 

Fallen because funny damag and dopamine hits
I like boltslinger because hit pings=dopamine
Uhh arcanist because same reason as bolt
Prob acoylte because funny abso damag
Acrobat because fly also jasmine bloom has a lot of damage pings so more dopamine

 

- Mage: Basically everything is solid. I prefer Lightbender for their buffs and defences.
- Warrior: Paladin. You have enough defences to shrug off damage from tough bosses and Taunt can glue greg onto you, letting allies easily do damage. However, sometimes these builds sacrifice most damage to be that tanky.
- Archer: Boltslinger. The most popular, and for good reason, it's a *lot* of damage. Though, I personally prefer HMelee Sharpshooter to do solid damage without breaking my hand.
- Shaman: Acolyte. Damage and healing. PBomber builds are also solid right now, but that is getting kind of gutted in less then a month.
- Assassin: I have not played a high-level assassin yet. Acrobat and Trickster both seem solid though.

 

acknowledging that there is no best archetype; riftwalker, because timelock can be so funny for a dps burst. boltslinger because arrow storm could always use more arrows (its not called arrow drizzle now is it?). paladin, theres no more aura than ignoring kb, taking aggro, and also taking an allies hp and doubling it. acolyte, because it has the best healing. shade, also because funny dps burst (honorable mention to trick for what i hear it being really cool too)

 

The only archetype I've maxed a class on is Lightbender. It's extremely clean overall; the heals are powerful, which is super convenient for basically everything in the game you can do. A Lightbender with the most basic possible build (I run Morph+Cascade) can beat basically anything in standard content except for, like, the Orange Wybel. (And in fact it can even trivialise the Panic Zealot because you can outheal the 90% health slashes that are the fight's main gimmick.) Clears raids very easily unless gambits are bad, although low damage contribution; flags in Lootruns eventually, but Lootrunning is designed to get harder and sloggier as you go along, and it clears the early challenges very well. Basically, it's probably the most friendly archetype to playing through the game (healspam gets you through any fight, the damage isn't abysmal, and Teleport is obviously an excellent movement spell), and it's not shabby at endgame.

I had a lot of fun playing Sharpshooter to level 90. Everyone loves a good stealth archer.

 

I fail to understand how the Orange Wybel is the hardest thing for Lightbender

________________________________

Mage: N/A / New Riftwalker - Playing the new rift on the beta is the most fun I've had with mage combat since before 2.0
Assassin: Acrobat - flying & I hate not getting mana back in vanish
Archer: Sharpshooter (?) (I play a Watchman's Vendetta build, so it's not very standard) - Grounded archer dies so quickly (when I play it) it's not even funny
Warrior: Paladin - Being able to do every single piece of content in the game (except for TNA I haven't tried it there)
Shaman: Ritualist - Jumping 6 blocks into the air to have emeralds from shatter spam fly up and make you basically immortal is the best

 

summmmonnneerrrrr bc fun :3 and eveyrone loves flying around lettingm my slave do work

 

Seriously, new riftwalker feels so good.

I'd go riftwalker for mage (obviously), boltslinger for archer, and acolyte for shaman.
I like it in its current form, just because I've always liked the classic mage combat loop, but it feels a bit lacking. I dislike the way winded interacts with it and encourages weird burst damage blasts. New riftwalker however, feels amazing, both in terms of the damage ramping actually mattering, so the longer a fight goes the cooler it feels, and how it very much feels like you can really control enemies with your AoE effects. It's easily my favorite gameplay for any archetype I've tried.

Boltslinger is just satisfying. Not really anything else to say about it. I like using several thousand arrows to turn enemies into past-tense.

Acolyte is also really satisfying, and it just kind of clicked with me. I like the basic loop it has. I also really like summoner, purely because it's really funny to waltz into a room and be like "here, take care of them" and let your minion go ham while you jump around with olympic or something.

Right now I'm honestly not sure with warrior or assassin.
I liked fallen, but it feels a little underwhelming, and like the majority of its perks just play into the gimmick of "take damage, deal damage" and offer very little in the way of an enjoyable gameplay loop outside of that. It doesn't have fun perks, like mobility or a weird rework of a spell. It's just kinda stock warrior with more damage and less health sustain sometimes. The risk-reward concept of corrupted is nice, but it feels too slow to build up for how long it lasts. Also the battlemonk rework is really nice and having everything that it offers makes the gameplay more enjoyable on a moment-to-moment basis. Paladin also is pretty good, but not usually how I want to play.

Assassin feels weird. Shadestepper would be really fun, but spellshade feels half-baked (backstabs really suck as a mechanic when enemies sometimes just randomly turn around, so setting up a long combo culminating in a flop is way too common, and the damage is just kinda pathetic unless you really commit) and melee isn't all that fun for me. Acrobat is too carpal-tunnely, and trickster is... yeah, it just feels kinda weird and like it doesn't really know what it wants to be, despite having a really clear identity as "the gimmicky one".

 

I can speak a lot about assasin cuz thats my main class and has been since spellbound
I played Acrobat early game till the rework, at whcih point the lack of good mana sustainbility earlygame meant its perks did little for me. Then Shadestepper... It was nice if I wanted single target damage but the setup was painful. Getting enemies marked, then getting knives (a process that you have to repeat if there is only one mob marked), followed by just backstabbing. And god forbid you need to use a health pot on a glassy cannon and a lot of the setup (knives) is now gone. Just started trickster. Seems fun rn tbh.