The level cap and your secondary profession...

I've been playing for 2 months and have really just played with my first character, Vala of The Fens. When I reached LV.20 last week I realized that my secondary profession had been short changed. Now I can only blame myself for that but it got me thinking. As a Necromancer you have to devote a great deal of Attribute Points to your Necro skills so you won't be decimated by guys like those annoying Moss Scarabs. *lol* But I took Mesmer as my secondary profession because I thought it would be helpful. And it was helpful for the first half of the game. But now my skills are unbalanced. My Necro skills are outstanding but too many of them depend on a corpse being nearby(I need Flesh Golem!!) and my Mesmer skills have so few AP attached to them that they hardly last long enough to be effective. I'd like to do PvP but my character is just too weak. I guess its good we still get Skill Points when we "level" after 20 but I would much prefer to get 3000 gold than 3000 XP. I'm hoping ANet will consider giving the option to recieve small amounts of AP(1-3 would good) for certain quests instead of XP in future expansions. Is it unrealistic to want a truly effective secondary profession?

Comments, opinions, maybe a rant or two...

this thread will not deliver.

infact, this thread will be most likely locked down by at least the end of the first page.

if AP were directly linked to XP - then every 55iron monk would have maxed out stats in every line.
infact, it would simply destroy any sembelence of balance.

I wish you the best of luck in your GW journey, youve just turned lvl 20 - GW has just begun.

A 9 or 10 in a secondary profession attribute is very reasonable. Just pick 2 primary profession attributes and 1 secondary attribute, then concentrate your attribute points there instead of scattering them around.

When you're low level it can be hard to find enough skills from 3 attributes to make a reasonable build. Now that you're level 20 it should be much easier. Remember that this is a team game and your 8 skills aren't supposed to cover all the bases. Focus on one or two things and do them well.

Try switching to a curse necro and play that for a while. The Necro curse skills really go well with many of the Mesmer skills. While a MM is more in demand for many missions, there are several missions where the enemies are in tight mobs where Spiteful spirit can do as much if not more dmg than a MM.

Whichever way you decide to play your Necro, you should max or almost max out the attribute you want to specialize in.

Check out the campfire area of the forum, there's plenty of alternate necro builds there that have been tested and lots of discussion about different ways to play and allocate your attributes.

I agree. But I'm talking about PvE, not PvP.

@ Trvth Jvstice-My Curses are at 9(actually 10 but I have a minor rune on my armor) but my Death Magic is also at 9. I'm kind of tottering between being a Minion factory and a Curse necro.

I tried playing a Necro/secondary prof build, it's very hard. I have now changed build to a SS PvEer, which is different to the Uw build (though i use that for UW, lol). I have 16 in curses, 10 in Domination and the rest in Soul reaping. Arcane Echo, SS, Empathy, Backfire, Reckless haste, Res signet make up the permo skills and i experiment with different skills for the last two slots. currently they are rend enchanments and shatter enchanments. They go ogether well i think.

You should concentrate more on finding a niche and doing it as best you can. Remember, you have a team to back you up on the things you don't bring. Consider making an all curses necro or an all minion necro. Minions scale up with more attributes put in than any other skill in the game. With 16 in death magic, you'll be able to control 10 minions instead of 4, and they'll be vastly more effective, allowing you to steamroll almost everything. There are many good options for a N/me curser, usually involving hex spam, with SS as the holy grail.

It's rare for most builds to split attributes over more than 3 lines. If they do, one of the losers is relegated to a purely support role, like energy management or self healing.

are you really saying you want extra points for your PVE character?

this has come up many times in the suggestion forum and always been shot down hard.

all the rest of us seem to make do with only 200

are you saying that you are trying to play MM as a mesmer? I appologize and i dont mean to be mean but just in case you dont know,it will be VERY difficult to join any group as a mesmer anyway and if you join and then tell them that your playing MM instead of interupt or something, you gonna get kicked...

Vala, you say you just reached 20th level...does that mean you have not done the bonus attribute point quests yet?

There are 2 quests that give you +15 attribute points each. Characters from Prophecies have to do the quests in the Desert, while characters from Factions do (much simpler) quests on Shing Jea. If you haven't done these quests, look for them in the wiki. It really helps to have 30 more attribute points than what you get by levelling alone.

It sounds like you aren't quite where you need to be skill wise or experience through the game. A necro doesn't need corpses nearby unless you are going MM or some builds of blood (wells) and a few other skills. You might not have the skills yet, depending on how far you have been through the game. You will get more. Try changing your build and stick to a particular line, blood seems to be the primary push through the early and middle part of prophecies.

As for your secondary, most of the time people don't use very many skills from their secondary profression anyway. There is usually a utility skill and you only need enough points in them to get the most affect you can while maintaning your primaries focus. You know you can change secondary at some point in both games right?

There's your problem. Pick one.

No, reread it. Mesmer is the secondary.

For PvP, you can just make a pvp only character which has max armor, your pvp char should be strong enough .

The main purpose (in my opinion) of the secondary prof is to help bolster or improve on your primary proffession, much like using inspiration magic line with monk (inspired, revealed hex, drain enchant..), or arcane echo (which has no attribute) when doing SS.

This will never happen. They already said the level cap would never be increased and what you are asking for is basically a level increase. They don't want a larger gap between top level and newbie level characters. There are PLENTY of attribute points to make your secondary profession very usefull. You just need to learn how to distribute those points.

I'm kind of a retard and haven't been able to beat all the co-ops(I've only completed Fort Ranik all the way!!) so I've had to get new areas the hard way: by walking there. *lol* Currently I'm at Bloodstone Fen, which is maybe a little under the halfway point. Thanx for the help.

This really makes me wanna flame... but I'm not gonna :/

I'm not really sure what to add, but you obviously have problems being creative if you have problems with using your secondary to any effect.

Personally I like to Play my necro two different ways

Offensive: Max Curses and Illusion - hex enemies to death.
Defensive: Max Death and inspiration - minion master with Flesh Golem/Bone Fiends/Vampiric Horrors, this requires a LOT of energy and thus I use inspiration to get some.

Hmm, do the missions, they get you far easily, and most groups need/want a MM in their grup to draw enemy attack away from them. So, just spam 'MM lfg' in game and you should get picked up pretty quickly for a mission.

I've only been playing a month. I can barely afford to buy any skills and missions that give them for free are dwindling. Plus my connection is so bad that I can hardly complete the co-ops without being cut off in the middle. PvP is out of the question too. GW is my first online RPG so please forgive me if I don't know what the heck I'm doing.

There are so many ways to deal with this. I re-roll my necro constantly with skills depending on whether I want to SS, MM, Orders, Battery, or bloodspike.

Use mesmer skills like Arcane Echo that don't require any attributes.

Switch your secondary. Once you switch you can switch back again easily as many times as you want. Just talk to one of the ghosts in the desert or the skills guy in Factions, although he may charge (I've never done it with him)

Use different weapon sets for what you are doing.

Get some bloodstained boots to augment MM skills.

Different scar patterns for your headpiece and switch it out with different superior runes depending on what you are doing.

I am sure there are more.

ValaoftheFens, disregard a lot of thie garbage advice some of these posters are giving you. They don't understand that you're only talking PvE and you haven't gotten past Bloodstone Fen - due to the fact that their reading comprehension is limited.

Play your character through. Go MM necro, don't bother with points in your secondary unless you find a skill that needs a few to get bumped up a bit that you like.

You should go back and complete the missions - you can do most of them with henchies up to the Crystal Desert.

In the desert you'll get some quests for skills and the first 15 attribute quest. Do these, and you'll progress at a good rate and unlock skills as you go along and have the attributes to use them properly.

Above all - have fun playing!

PvE characters can participate in PvP so I fail to see the distinction.

@Vala - for the time being, forget about minions. Being MM typically requires 16 Death, and 10+ Soul Reaping, which doesn't leave much left for hexes. And you don't get all the MM skills until later anyway.

Go Blood or go Curses+1 Mesmer line. Try to keep SR at 5ish. Try to use skills that compliment each other, rather than each skill being an isolated damage dealer.

Hehe, no problem maybe you should just have posted in the Q&A forum and asked for advice instead of making it rant in the discussion forum - but that's just my view.

But I think you made a good choice by picking mesmer, in my opinion it's the best secondary for a Necro - many like monk, but I find that having monk as a secondary is "cheap" it's picking the easy way out, again just my view.

For now I think something like this should work for you (I assume you have all these skills and you can of course replace one of them with an elite).

This is a defensive build, where you just manage your minions and don't do any direct damage (I'm not saying this is actually good, it just an example on how to use the secondary to do something that works, in this case getting a lot of energy).

Animate Bone Minions
Animate Bone Fiend
Death Nova
Blood of the Master
Taste of Death
Spirit of Failure
Energy Tap
Res. signet.

Soul Reaping: 8
Death Magic: 16 (12+3+1)
Inspiration Magic: 10 (or 7 if you didn't do the attribute quests).

All skills are from Prophecies, I guess you have both games since you mention Flesh Golem!

Btw. you should ALWAYS go all out in one attribute if you want to be effective.

I currently play a N/Me curse necro, and she's been most effective at higher levels actually.

So here's some things to consider:
-You can adjust your attribute points however you want whenever you're in a town or outpost; you might know this already, but I figured it didn't hurt to mention it. You can change your build to whatever you want that way.
-Switching out scars like Grif Mon mentioned is awesome
-Experiment! I started as a death magic necro (as I think many do), and then I went almost entirely blood (still love blood), but eventually settled on curses. Nothing in regards to your stats is permanent - GW is very "forgiving" in that regard, if you allocate your points badly, just change them around. Toss in the Mesmer ones for fun - I personally love Illusion magic for hexing up enemies, and I used to do some interrupts (dom magic) in my early days (now that I play a mesmer, I can't go back to a non-fast casting char for it I'm afraid ). And Inspiration is awesome for energy management.
-As also mentioned, you'll have two quests later to get +15 attribute points each (for a total of 200) - this will help you a lot.
-Don't spread yourself too thin - most people recommend you go with 2-3 attributes.
-Just play and have fun - if you want to try PvP with a character with all the attribute points, try creating a PvP only char as they'll have access to all the skills your PvE chars do, and they're already level 20 and have all their attribute points.

Hope some of these tidbits help.

No one mentioned runes? I'd suggest that you get a a few minor runes to boost you're necro attributes (maybe a major for your main attribute). They're fairly cheap and it'll give you a bit of flexibility when distributing your points. Id wait on getting any superior runes until you get your max armor set (first available at collectors in the Desert or from crafter in Droknar's Forge.) The nice thing about minor (attribute) runes is that they have no health penalty. Majors have a -35hp, while Superior ones have a -75hp penalty.

Hmm, personally I'd see what I could do to get your connection fixed. Sounds like you are having a really hard time because of constant err7s. Even when I was on dial-up (and less than a 28k line too I might add) I could still manage to complete missions 90% of the time without lagging out.

If you are on dial-up, then I suggest you:
1) check your settings to see if it is kicking you at regular intervals and try to change that, mine used to kick me once every 3 hours.
2) look around at other providers. If the err7 is provider related then it isn't worth staying with them. Dial-up is one of the easiest internet modes to maintain if they keep causing you err7 they aren't doing their job.
3) do you commonly get phone calls on your internet line? See if you can't install a new line with a different number for gaming/internet.

If you are on DSL or cable, you shouldn't be getting err7 so frequently, so take a stick to your provider.