Rate the Primary Attributes

I still don't understand why some people don't want to include the primaries' skills in the ratings. It's contribution as a whole to builds is more important than singling out 1 facet of it's design.
Now I see why so many people have strong opinions on the usefulness of certain professions. It's tunnel vision. The ability to piece together all elements and see how they interact and support one another is important in order to properly gauge the value of each element.

Let's start a separate topic to discuss the pros and cons of each primaries' complete potential.

Edit: I posted in another topic about the strength attribute. If the passive effect were made to moderately increase damage output, coupled with the +13 strength armour mod, and the very wide range of strengths skills useable in just about any warrior build, would sadly make warrior builds with 13+ strength a 'no-brainer'. That's not good from a balance standpoint.

You could also consider the usefulness of attributes wile sinergizing with secondary professions.

-Fast cast rezzing
-Smite Ele
-Strength daggers
-And critical barrage of course

Well thats a very positive view on the matter. I will give my comment on primary attrbutes I've experienced

Fast Casting Not bad and there are some intruppts that benifit for it but it requires an indivdual to devote expoentally more skill points to fast casting for a liniar line of speed improvement, Therefore it's not really worth begin more than rank 7-10 in it.

Energy Storage Nowhere near as good as it looks on paper. It dosen't actually allow you to use 25e Spells as much as you'd think although it deepens your energy well it dosen't improove your energy regeneration. Its only real use is making you resistant to E-Denial And to give you a buffer to fall back on if you get interupted. Don't try to go above rank 12 in it if you do you will start sliding down the performance arc like the mesmer.

Strength Given what the class dose It's perfect +1% armor pen is perfect for a class dependant on melee and getting close to an opponent. Keeps your sustainable DPS frightningly high. Incredibly powerful as it and the fact it becomes more and more intimidating at higher levels is A warrior would need to have the Health Armor and The points in a Martial weapon attribute In order to use this to it's full effect forcing you to split it and keep it at a Rank12-13

Divine Favor The only real role this serves is to keep monks monking and to prevent other classes incuring into the healing role... Other than farmer bots... What else can you use a monk for? This is because the healing benifit applies only to MONK SPELLS Limiting the ablity to divert it's role to anything but use of monk skills. The oddness about it is that Divine Favor isn't considered healing... It's considered "health gain" Akin to life loss... DF is a both a blessing and a curse. You can go as high as you like in it without much ill harm.

Expertise This is a VERY powerful Primary attribute and has been changed subtly many times to give some kind of favor to other classes to prevent the ranger becoming a 1 man army, Unlike Energy storage whitch gives you more energy this Line lowers the actual cost of the skills This has a double whammy effect of making your energy well deeper aswell as reducing your energy Regeneration and time needed to refill your bar.
This is balanced somwhat by it's application begin conditional and only working on certain skills and not spells. But in many places you can see where this conditional aspect is bypassed in very powerful HA and PVP builds (Bunny thumpers, Touch rangers, ect)

Leadership deserves a higher ranking, sure its not as versatile as expertise but it allows paragons to have an unlimited source of energy if they do what they were made to do, spam shouts. When lvl 14 on leadership, you get WAY more than what you put into a shout, allowing you to not only fund other shouts, but spam what other skill you want as well

you can't rate the primary attributes like that since they all have a purpose very different from each other. However the thing they have in common is making the player use the primary profession skills a lot more than their secondary profession skills.

I agreed with you for the most part, but those two statements are ridiculous. Strength doesn't do diddly-squat for sustained DPS. With 2 energy regen, a warrior canNOT spam attack skills nonstop. The AP bonus ONLY triggers on attack skills, not on regular attacks. Even if Strength processed on every hit and not just skills, it would only go from sucking a big fat one to sucking a pretty large one.

DF only useful for farming bots? Check out just about any 55hp build and you'll see that DF is just the dumping ground for leftover points. The Divine Aura/ SoA build uses Divine Favor, but when SoA gets nerfed (more a when than an if) that'll just change anyway. I PVE and PVP, and there's no way in either facet of the game that one could say DF is anything even near useless. Right now we have 9 classes devoted to killing people in hundreds of different ways, and only one class designated to keeping them alive through all that. You need to play a monk, in PVE and PVP, invest some time into it to see just how hard it is, and then you'll appreciate DF a heck of a lot more than you do now.

I can spam attacks skills nonstop with a strength spec'd build! Maybe not very popular, but it's possible. I can spam dagger/strength attack combos with Warrior's Endurance Stance until the end of time.

Singling out elements of design is useful in its own way. Breaking down a complex system such as GW (any game is a system of rules) into the most basic components and understanding those components is a huge factor of your overall skill.

If I had to rank them, I guess the above is what I would pick.

I'm sorry I didn't get what you are saying there. A person is more skilled for singling out 1 facet of an attribute and judging the whole attribute based on that rather than everything that attribute affects? I don't think you meant that, but that's how I read that.

The idea here is to look at the passive aid the primary professions give to players. Sure skills are important, but that wasn't what was initially looked at.

Fundamentally, Primary attributes are different from normal attributes because they do more than make the skills in it's line better.

What people were initially looking at was what this 'extra' gave the player. Some extras are obviously far better than others. In this context, the skills are irrelevant...

edit: Before anyone comes and says "...but why look at just the attribute..." again, please consider the topic more carefully. It's not that difficult to understand. Why single out primary attributes for discussion? There can be only two reasons...

A. Only a proper Elementalist for example, can use the Energy Storage line.

B. The primary attributes offer something besides skills, and thus still benefit the player even if no skills in the line are used.

We were looking at B.

My list:

1) Divine Favor - free extra healing cant be beat
2) Expertise - cheep skills
3) Soul Reaping - free energy
4) Fast Casting - instant cast of a 2 sec spell
5) Mystism - free energy and health
6) Leadership - free energy
7)Energy Storage- extra energy - problem is high cost spells have exhastion negating this benifit somewhat
8)Spawning Power - stronger spirits/minions but too few skills affected for this
9)Critical Strikes - minimal energy gain, barely perceptible increase in critical hits
10)Strength - barely noticable increase in damage only when using attack skills


Imho all of the primary attributes should be balanced, REGARLESS OF SKILLS, so that every profession has a true benifit for using there primary attribute.

As it stands now the last 3 primary attributes ive listed could be changed to normal attributes and not be of any use to most all other classes.

The same cannot be said for any of the top 7 primary attributes.

I actually really dig Mysticism. In context with how Dervishes work the so called negligible health and energy gain is really just there for balance. Playing a dervish do you have any idea how many times you lose enchants? You are constantly applying them and losing them. Much more useful than soul reaping for energy gain in my opinion. On average I can actually use nothing more than my mysticism attribute to stay alive in a pitched battle just by the cycling of enchants. Soul Reaping is another godsend of a primary though. Strength is probably the least useful really followed closely by spawning power. That is not to say that Spawning power and strength have no use but their use is very specific. I've got a Golem Ritualist that uses spawning power and weapon enchants to create a Golem that can tank and lay down heavy damage. Some spawning power skills are also nice in conjunction with a bomber style build.

Expertise is useful, but not as useful since they nerfed it down.Energy Storage is great. Fast Casting is awesome. Critical strikes is fairly worthwhile. Leadership and Divine favor in my opinion are rather so so, useful but not must haves.

Just based on the inherent effects of the attributes, IMO:

Expertise
Divine Favor
Critical Strikes
Leadership
Mysticism
Fast Casting
Soul Reaping
Energy Storage
Spawning Power
Strength

I understand what you are saying. If the warrior community wants strength to specialize in raising their damage more than a weapon based attribute, they would have to balance the skill set quite a bit though.
They could raise the armour penetration to 2% for each point, for all attacks and not just special moves. They would take out sentinenal armour then. Take out Dolyak Signet, Endure Pain, Defy Pain, ect.
Strength would be specializing in damage, just like divine favor specializes in healing and energy storage specializes in energy. All armour buffing would be taken out of strength and seriously tweaked to fit into tactics to ensure that a warrior cannot specialize in armour and damage at the same time.
Or....
They could change Strength to Endurance and change the armour penetration bonus to a +AL bonus. 1AL per point in Endurance which is what I believe they would rather do. That would be more balanced.

It's a tricky pickle to balance. You can't have an attribute specialize in armour and damage at the same time because it would become a 'no-brainer' max for every warrior build from then on.
If you ask me I think the designers should have made the warrior primary Endurance instead of Strength from the get go. It's essentially what I see when using a lot of that attribute's skills.

The problem I think is Anet did not want Strength to specialize, the innate bonus was thrown in just to compensate for the decreased dps from less points being put into weapon attributes. I can say the same thing for Spawning Power. It's innate bonus is for minions and spirits, yet it's skills are for healing, spiking, melee damage buffs. The devs didn't look to want to have that primary specialized either.

when i rate anything, i try to be as comprehensive and objective as possible.
for me, ill rate 10/10, but heres how i break it down.
each primary should be ranked on its inherent effects, we'll give that 4 points, since its really the inherent effects that make them unique.
next, would be the skills they provide, i'll give that a rating of 4 points as well, afterall the skills are pretty darn important to the build.
and lastly, how well they play with seccondary professions. anet gave us seccondary proffessions and primary attributes, obviously they should be able to play well together. 2 points.

Expertise: 4/3/2 total 9/10. i would not say its the best, as thats subjective, but this one is certainly up there. its a great primary as it plays with so many skills that it allows the ranger an absurd level of versatility, and certainly the most far-ranging cache of builds available, almost sole due to this attribute. pairs very well with defensive skills for the ranger, allowing the ranger to invest points into a non-primary class for damage output, and a ranger-class line for defensive skills, or whatever the case may be. though, as far as direct-damage, its skill line lacks.

Critical Strikes 3/4/2 total 9/10. critical strikes make the assassin what it is, period. this is probably the best attribute line for the emagalation of damage output and energy regain in the game. the drawback, is that because of an assassins reliability on energy, if you can shut down an assassins ability to critical, you shut down the usefulness of this entire line, at least temporarily.

Soul Reaping 4/3/2 total 9/10. possibly the best primary in the game for a support character in a pve-heavy environment. built propperly a support necro will NEVER run out of energy, allowing them to "donate" it to their allies, and deal out considerable damage. in PvP its not quite as useful, but i personally believe its underrated.
unlike many other primary attributes, its still useful at a reasonably low-level. but at a high level, its better than expertise as far as team-support goes. in terms of individualistic bonuses, it loses out, mainly because it can often over-do itself so much that you end up feeling as if you've put too many points into it. in terms of the attatched skills...they have certainly gotten a MASSIVE boost since prophecies.

divine favor 4/4/0 total 8/10.
this is, over time, one of the most (if not THE most) useful primaries, hands down. and it is divine favor that makes protection builds possible. and the power it grants to healing, increases its effectiveness by leaps and bounds. and its pretty darn obvious that it has (skill for skill) the most useful skill-line attatched to it (yeah, strength overall wins this, but strength has a lot of total crap skills, divine favor doesnt have nearly as many).
the downside?
it does not play with seccondary class skills...at all, quite literally. thankfully most monk builds revolve only around monk skills, but its regardless of the point that divine favor is ONLY useful for monk skills. if this assisted with ANY skill that provides a direct heal or buff to an ally it would be powerful to the level of being highly rigged. but, when rating a primary, you do have to consider its play on seccondary professions' skills.

leadership: 4/3/1 total 8/10. a great one overall, good skills, a good bonus, but unfortunatly it doesnt really play with outside professions except the warrior.
what i particulrly like about it is that it is perhaps the only one that directly rewards a paragon who plays well, and punishes one who doesnt. a paragon that concistently spams shouts like an imbicil when out of an allie's range will quickly handicap themselves. and one who uses shouts in the propper area and timing, should not run out of energy easily, allowing them to continue their good work. more than any other attribute, i believe it helps the player learn to play the character.

fast casting: 3/3/2 total 8/10. absolutly makes the mesmer. as was previously mentioned; it makes mesmers both hard to interupt, and increases their ability to interupt others.
the downside is it doesnt have the best skill-line in the world, and because of diminishing returns, its benefit at a higher level leaves something to be desired.

energy storage: 3/3/2 total 8/10. allows the ele to use its high-energy skills and deal with exhaustion.
that having been said, i personally think if it werent for the direct NEED of this for an ele to really function, i'd rate it lower. why? because it just seems to me if you look at the skills of an ele, their skills basically forfeit any advantage you get from this to begin with. so, whats the point, really? i do think they could have done something a little better. on the other hand, it plays very, very well with non-ele skills.


strength: 2/4/1 total 7/10. most people here would think im nuts for giving this a half decent rating. fact is, strength is often underrated. it has the largest skill-line attatched to it, and while a lot of those skills are trash, a lot of them are gold too. and its inherent bonus, while its not the best in the game, certainly does add up.
it does play with outside damage skills quite well, but i gave it a 1 rating simply because no sane warrior should be using non-warrior attack skills...that just makes no real sense.

mysticism: 2/3/2 total 7/10. plays very, very well with outside enchantments, especially since its the only primary that will work off of skills cast on you by another character. works for keping up the energy bar though the health gain is hardly the highlight of the skill.
the attatched skills are quite good pound for pound, but the bar as a whole is slightly limited.

spawning power: 1/4/1 total 6/10. works alright with minions, but its main power is its effect on rituals. that having been said, not many rituals actually truly benefit from this. overall pretty weak, but it does have some half decent skills attatched to it, the skills are definetly a better motivation to use this than the inherent effect.

I won't be so detailed, but here's what I think.

1. Expertise: over, completely, strongest of all. Nerf it! (jk, maybe not =p)
2. Soul Reaping: conditional in some pvp setups, really strong in others. Very powerfull too.
3. Fast Casting: 2 edges blade, the faster you cast, the faster you kill, but the worst you manage energy.
4. Divine Favor: fits monk, well balanced.
5. Leadership: own power suply if support, little useless if spear master.
6. Mysticism/Critical Strikes: management for dervishes, they actually need it. Not over like in the first pvp event. C.Strikes make assassins threatening, help them with energy, sounds fair.
7. Energy Storage: considering the e-management skills they own, a larger e. poll is good. Allows them heavy casting, but that's about it. Could be better.
8. Strength: balanced and fits warriors whole, skills in this line are pretty good.
9. Spawning power: probably the weakest overall, but then, ritualists are a little broken, at times seems like a rushed job.