At the heart of Dragon’s Dogma 2‘s excellent combat system are its Vocations, which essentially serve as character classes that both your player character and your main Pawn can spec into.
When Vocations determine everything from how you fight to the gear you can equip to the level of difficulty posed by certain quests, having the right class for the right situation is essential. There are 10 Vocations this time around as opposed to the first game’s nine, and while that may sound like a paltry upgrade, each one has been thoroughly remixed with redundant classes cut and new ones introduced in their place.
With so many options, choice paralysis may begin to set in, but worry not—there are a few classes that stand out from the rest as the most beneficial.
Every Dragon’s Dogma 2 class, ranked
You can switch classes on the fly in Dragon’s Dogma 2 without impacting your stats and even bring perks from one class to another, so the choice isn’t a particularly dire one. Even so, there are some you should make a beeline for first.
To help resolve some of that choice anxiety, I’ve ranked every Dragon’s Dogma 2 Vocation from worst to best.
10) Fighter
The Fighter isn’t bad, per se, but it’s certainly the blandest class on offer. The standard sword-and-board setup you’ve seen a thousand times before is perfectly serviceable in the early game, but as the enemies get too big to block and the range of your sword grows woefully inadequate, graduating to something more specialized is likely the best move. It’s not that the Fighter fails at being a jack of all trades, but that it lacks even that distinction to help it stand out.
9) Archer
This Vocation is decent at ranged combat, albeit with one major limitation: All of an Archer’s most effective attacks require special arrows that need to be bought or crafted. The fact that an Archer is the only class in the game that can run out of ammunition severely hampers its potential, as suddenly finding yourself without arrows in the midst of a dungeon will limit you to weaker options.
8) Mystic Spearhand
The Mystic Spearhand feels like a weird, last-minute addition worked in so DD2 could boast more classes than DD1, and for the most part, it plays like that too. Like the Warfarer, it’s an attempt at a jack-of-all-trades archetype, serviceable both at range and in melee combat without really excelling at either. Unlike Warfarer, its moveset is locked to only a single weapon type so you’ll either love it or hate it.
7) Trickster
Like the Mage, the Trickster is a support Vocation that focuses on buffing allies and distracting enemies with a curious censer full of magical smoke. Rather than outright damage-dealing or straight healing, a Trickster’s strength lies in augmenting the rest of the party. As it is exclusive to the player character, you won’t get much use out of it unless you’re supremely confident in your Pawn’s abilities. It’s certainly fun to disorient your enemies and let your party clean them up, but if you like dealing damage yourself you may want to look elsewhere.
6) Sorcerer
The Sorcerer is like the Mage’s bigger, angrier cousin. Rather than support, the Sorcerer goes all in on magic damage to help you live out your evil wizard fantasies. If you’ve ever watched Lord of the Rings and wanted to be Saruman, the Sorcerer is the way to go—but the lack of versatility and survivability paired with long spell windups mean you’ll also have to lean on your party to keep the bad guys out of melee range.
5) Mage
The Mage is by far the best support option in DD2 boasting a dazzling array of buffs and healing to keep the party alive and dealing the most damage possible. If you don’t feel like chewing through your finite supply of curatives, having a Mage in your party is downright essential for staying afloat. This was also the case in the first game, and time clearly hasn’t dulled the Mage’s effectiveness. Mages are more than capable of defending themselves as well, albeit not quite with the potency afforded to the Sorcerer.
4) Warfarer
If you’re shooting for a jack-of-all-trades approach, forget the Fighter or the Mystic Spearhand: The Warfarer is where it’s at (not to be confused with the Warrior). Although this Vocation’s strength and health are a touch lacking, the ability to use every single weapon in the game more than makes up for it and the ability to mix and match weapon skills ensures that a well-practiced Warfarer can be the linchpin of any party. It may be trickier to master than most classes, but the high skill ceiling means the Warfarer can eventually be immensely gratifying if you’re willing to put the work in.
3) Warrior
Forget magic. Forget fancy censers. Forget fiddling with bows or staves. The Warrior Vocation is good at one thing and one thing only: Hitting enemies really hard with a really big weapon until they stop moving. Unlike the other one-note Vocations, the Warrior’s colossal health pool and overwhelming damage lend them the ability to simply steamroll through any obstacles in their path. A tank is essential to any classic dungeon-crawling party, and you can’t get much better than the Warrior.
2) Magick Archer
The Magick Archer is essentially all of the good parts of the base Archer with none of the bad. Case in point: No more running out of arrows! This Vocation has access to a wide range of elemental and status effect-inducing spells ensuring you’ll have something in your quiver to exploit any enemy weakness. The only drawback is that it’s only available to the player character, likely because the Pawn AI would struggle with so many options.
1) Thief
The Thief is one of the basic classes available for Pawns and Arisen alike from the very moment the game begins, but that’s no reason to underestimate it. Light and agile, the Thief has a wide range of gadgets and tools to take on enemies even many times larger, from sticky bombs to rope traps to powerful parkour moves that help you navigate the battlefield with ease and outwit your foes.
Many of the skills from the first game’s Assassin Vocation have been folded into the Thief, giving this class an unprecedented edge in subterfuge and decisive strikes. As if that’s not enough, the Thief also plays into DD2‘s enemy-climbing system beautifully, with many of its signature skills available while clinging to monsters. Whether it’s Shadow of the Colossus-style cyclops wrangling or split-second midair attacks, the Thief will let you kill your enemies before they even know they’re dead.
With your Vocations all picked out, you’ll likely want to have the gear to match. Don’t be afraid to spend the Discipline or Gold to experiment with your build—as they say in Vernworth, misers don’t last long.
