A few questions...

Greetings all,

I’m relatively new, and while I have perused some of the sites out there, I do have a few questions. This will be my first character above level 11. My playtime is limited and I may or not may look for a guild as a result. PvE will be my focus (I like the storyline of the original game).

If I use henchmen for quests and missions, will I be better off with a monk secondary regardless of the primary profession? Being able to run away and survive the fight means I can res the group and not have to re-start the instance (which could get very tedious). Very tedious means I won’t stick around long.

I like the concept of the mesmer, but it seems that an elementalist with a mesmer secondary might make a better PvE mesmer. (In PvE) how does energy storage compare with the mesmer’s fast casting? Does the mesmer’s inspiration line compensate for the lack of energy management? If a monk secondary is the way to go for play style reasons, then I guess these questions are moot.

What I have in mind is a character that uses 3 attribute lines: energy storage (energy management and regens), illusion magic (drains and AoEs), and the third line could be defensive or offensive as needed.

Well, thanks for your time and input.

1) Get a longbow or flatbow. If you get some buffer space and pull one group at a time, you should be able to handle anything out there. I've yet to find a single mob that a full henchie group can't handle.

Also, NEVER take a monk secondary for self heals. For a rez or condition is fine, but if you're dumping points into healing prayers, you're gimping your own offense and not helping the team at all.

2)It's been parroted on this board repeatedly, fast casting is a little bit underpowered in PvE. As a mesmer, you'll need to split points between 3 attributes, 1 offensive, Inspiration for energy management, and fast casting. With eles, you only need whatever offensive attribute, and energy storage to be effective.

3)You're only level 11, expiriment with whatever you want at this point. As a caution, I'm not sure what illusion magic AoEs you're referring to. Also, as you get farther on in the game, as well as into HM, drains and the patitically low damage that the illusion magic line dishes out ends up pretty useless. If you really want good damage, bring a necro secondary so you can slot Weakened Armor /w a few points in curses and nuke mobs with your primary ele skills.

Beginners often take monk as a secondary profession, put a few points into Healing Prayers and put Healing Breeze on their bar. For survival purposes.

Don't do this.

Dedicated healers are more than good enough to keep your party alive. Take 2 monks (henchmen are good enough if you don't have enough skills to make effective heroes yet) in your party and you shouldn't die if you play it smart (don't fight too many groups at once for instance). In normal mode you shouldn't have troubles with a full group of heroes/henchmen.

Thanks for the input. I'll go without the Monk secondary. I had already discovered the beauty of pulling with a flatbow.

Clumsiness and wandering eye are the illusion line AoEs I was alluding to. I read about them on the GW wiki, I don't actually have the spells yet so ignorance is bliss.

I personally like Illusion more than Domination for PvE. I enjoy skills like Clumsiness, Wandering Eye, Frustration (powerful when combined with Daze), Arcane Conundrum, and for specific places, Crippling Anguish, Shared Burden, and Migraine. Even in HM where monsters have a faster casting speed, the Illusion line offers nice options to make those spells easier to interrupt. And you may notice most of the monsters that are Mesmer run Illusion skills like Conjure Phantasm, Phantom Pain, and other degen skills that pressure. Taking Inspired Hex and/or Revealed Hex with an Illusion build allows you to make use of those skills while assisting your team healers.

When in doubt, Monk is always the best secondary option. Resurrection skills alone make it useful, but as noted already, the condition and hex removal skills are also beneficial to any class.

There's some nice illusion based build with ignorance and wandering eye (even if these aren't certainly the most effective damage builds around), but IMHO they make sense only if played with a primary mesmer. The fast casting attribute is only useful in PvP to avoid interrupts, in PvE it's pretty much useless, and the energy management (which is different from having a lot of energy) of elementalists (not considering attunements, as you were thinking about mesmer skills, nor ER if you use few enchantments) is pretty much limited to GoLE, which doesn't need any investment into Energy Storage to be effective, so IMHO it would make more sense to go Me/E with GoLE instead of E/Me, if you really want to play as a mesmer.

Also, i suggest you to go monk as secondary (or ritualist if you have access to it) for the hard resses (mainly Rebirth), which could become very useful expecially if you aren't much experienced with the game (unless you have already picked up another secondary for some other reason).

Another good thing to know to reduce your chances of being wiped by monsters is how to flag your henchmen on the map (use the green flag under you radar).

Hope that helps.

It seems PvE mesmer are going to get some love soon. So a mesmer primary might be more viable in a short while.

I think you may be a bit confused by something here. Basically, all of GW is "instanced", but only missions fail and require a restart if the party wipes. The rest of the time you simply resurrect at the nearest shrine. The main advantage to being able to rez the rest of the group would be to avoid getting a (greater) DP yourself. Many people take Monk as a secondary just for the "hard" rez (Rebirth or Resurrect for example), but you could just carry a rez signet if you are careful enough not to need to use it more than once.
And, of course, given the ability to use Templates, you can use a Monk secondary and hard rez for missions, and some other secondary and/or a rez signet during ordinary PvE.

Basically, things are designed to work best with their primary attribute. That is to say, many of the elementalist skills require large amounts of energy and therefore having a large pool of energy from Energy Storage is good. Many Mesmer skills have a long casting time, so they work well with Fast Casting.
So it all depends upon what skills you use, how much energy they require, and how long they take to cast.

My advice for new players is that you concentrate on your primary's skills and attributes until you have the skills, attribute points, and level to fully utilize a secondary. Early on you tend to spread too little resources over too many attribute lines to be really effective.