S-Tier is reserved for classes that everyone should pick, regardless of who else is in your party.
Monster Wrangler
Monster Wrangler is the new class in Dragon Quest III HD-2D, and boy howdy is it a monster (pun absolutely intended, how dare you doubt me).
Monster Wrangler is the Red Mage of Dragon Quest III. It can inflict decent physical damage, especially since it can equip strong whips that damage entire groups of enemies. Additionally, Monster Tamer learns healing abilities in the form of Emergency Groom and Soothing Song, which offer single-target and party-wide healing respectively. Not only is this the only source of party-wide healing in the early game of Dragon Quest III, these also work in instances where magic is blocked since they are classified as Abilities. Monster Wrangler doesn’t scale as a healer into the later game, but it fills a powerful niche early on.
That said, it’s the new collectible monsters that elevates Monster Wrangler from good to great. As you explore the world, you’ll find friendly monsters that you can typically recruit by either using the correct item or skill to get them to talk to you. Not only do Monster Wranglers let you automatically catch monsters without fulfilling these prerequisites, collecting a large roster will grant Monster Wranglers new skills as well. This critically includes Monster Pile-On, a powerful attack that scales with the total number of monsters you’ve collected. As long as you explore and use the Monster Wrangler’s Animal Instinct Ability to track down recruitable monsters, you can easily learn this skill by the time you can change class.
If you plan to speedrun the game and don’t want to track down monsters, then Monster Wrangler admittedly won’t impress as much. Otherwise, this class covers so many early-game niches and learns such strong Abilities that it will find use in any party you stick it in.
Mage
Mages have always been good in Dragon Quest III thanks to their access to powerful magic attacks. However, Dragon Quest III HD-2D gives all magic users an inadvertent buff, since all level-ups will fully restore that character’s HP and MP. This means Mages can use their most powerful magic with only the slightest restraint in dungeons, since they’ll usually receive full restoration before their MP runs dry. In other words, Mage is easily a top DPS pick and one of the best damage dealers to start out with in Dragon Quest III HD-2D
Even without this boon, Mage would still be a good starting class. It excels at damaging groups of enemies, which you’ll be dealing with way more than single targets. It’s also a great candidate to turn into the mighty Sage class thanks to its naturally high Wisdom and MP stats (see the Gadabout description later on). Mages aren’t quite as useful if you change them to any class that isn’t a magic user, but overall this is an obvious class to pick.