RPers please, train me to become a monk

I have some questions about the monk discipline:

1-what are the "essential skills" for being a monk, the ones that all would agree on? Nobody would disagree for Fire Ele about having Flare and Firestorm (pheonix and fireball are my friends )
2-how do you arrange skills on your bar? 1,2,3,4 as healing/res? 1,2,3,4 as attack and 5-8 as res? no attack at all but with your wand? etc.
3-how do you most quickly select your allies/party? Do you use hotkeys or select their name in the task bar?
4-if you use hotkeys, how do you get all 8 party members hotkeyed without losing your 1-8 skill hotkeys (I'm VERY VERY interested in sorting this one out! it's my MOST IMPORTANT question!)

5-Can anyone give me good tips on using a monk in a party? I'm looking for experienced monks not /other/ who will advise me "heal often" or "don't forget res." These are common sense things to anyone who has played with a monk on their team, but I want good wisdom from someone who is a monk as their main.

1- There was a thread on here yesterday about how to chose skils and what not
http://www.guildwarsguru.com/forum/s...ght=monk+build

2- I usaly leave res as #8 because it isn't used as much durining a battle and can be farther away from the wsad keys. (an exception is vengance which has battelfield applications)

You should the nplace the skills were they make the msot sense to you but pick one order and stick to it again what you would do wit hany other build.

3- I use the hotkeys. I hotkeyed my party to the NumPad but hitting the right key requires good hand eye cordination so you should pratice before doing any hardcore PvP.
4- click on the little menu tab in the bottom left hand corner of the screen and bring up the options menu. Then look for an ingame controls menu/list (its there) just scroll down until you find were it has party members listed and assign the hotkeys.

5- First are you playing in a group with you as the only monk or with other healers/monks?

If you are the only monk manage your energy so that you always have enough left to cast Heal Other or Word of Healing to save the person who gets spiked and needs a quick major heal.

With the rest of your energy try to keep everyones health high enough so that no one is in danger of dying from one hit eg. above 50%.

If you are usted to playing an E/xx rember that energy is a lot more important now as you have about half as much.

Prioritize your heals lets face it if you can only save 1 person who do you save? The one who has the most potential for the rest of the mission.
One person has -30% DP and the other has +10% Moral bonus. Save the person with the moral bonus as they are more effective.

Now if you ar not the only monk or healer talk to the other ones and decied between you the following:

Will one of you do the keep everyone above 50% heals while the other person deals mostly with the spike heals?

Will one of you be protection and the other healing and thies kind of things.

If you want more advice either IM or message me as I am getting kinda tired.

Hope this helped

1: For healer, Word of Healing is essential, Also, Healing Touch for self-heal, Infuse Health is pretty good IMO, and Healing Breeze is great for reducing massive conditionings. Bring Mend Ailment cause it's the best condition remover, and something to get rid of hexes. Obviously, you're expected to res, and so on.

As for fire eles. Both Flare and Firestorm are horrible skills.

2: For me...

Insta-Heal Others | Healing Breeze | Heal Self | Condition/Hex Removal | Res

3: I just use clicking, most of the time. When it gets rough, I press 1-8 to select skills, but still click names.

4: f-1 -f-8? I dunno..

5: Don't heal excessively. If they have more health than the heal will restore, let them take a bit more damage or you're just wasting energy.
In most cases, never res until the threat is gone. This doesn't apply to PvP as much.
If some idiot is making you run a mile to heal them, just let them die. If you go after them, you are leaving the rest of the party for dead. It's not your job to keep up with idiots.

I keep my 4 most important (most often used) skills in 1-4, and res at 8 since it's used least (hopefully). I find that just clicking the life bars in the party window is the easiest way to choose targets.

Yeah, don't worry about keeping someone at max life: it's the monk newb mistake, they piss away all their energy early on and then have nothing later. Get a rough idea of how much each of your heals will do and use them accordingly: try to save Word of Healing for when they're under 50% life and use Orison or whatever otherwise. Like Weezer said, healing for 70 life when they're only down 20 is wasting energy.

Healing Breeze is not very useful except to maintain someone taking minor amounts of damage or to negate dots/conditions. In PvE, condition removal is more useful than hex removal--hexes usually get applied again right away. For condition removal, poison gets reapplied right away usually (Apply Poison), so removing it is sort of dumb.

I find that, for a healer, a couple levels in Protection to get Protective Spirit at a reasonable duration is very helpful, it gets rid of those crazy damage spikes and saves you energy in the end.

I read the build thread, but it didn't really help me as it discussed exclusively attribute distribution and spell list. But I'm looking for the essential skills, and the other questions above weren't really covered. TY for the answers, I have class at the moment so I can't read them, but I'll be checking it out when I get home later.

1) I always take Word of Healing, Orison, Healing Breeze and a res. Word for the big critical heals, Orison for top up, and Healing Breeze for DoT countering, pre-emptive healing and enchantment masking.

2) The four I've mentioned always sit in 5,6,7,8 in the order I typed. This is more a tradition though than a tactic. I'm an Mo/W, who used to have sword skills in 1,2, etc, so Orison and Healing Breeze have always been at 6 and 7. I tried moving them once and caused more harm than good. My advice - it doesn't matter where you put skills, but don't move the important ones around.

3) Sometimes hotkey, sometimes click. Depends whether my hand is on the mouse or not.

4) Numpad for the win (use 9 for self, 1-8 for party members).

5) My tip for being a good monk is not to just watch the health bars, watch the combat. If you know who is going to be hit before they are, then you can respond a lot more quickly. Casting spells like Healing Seed and Healing Breeze (aswell as any protection spells of course) can make your job much easier.

If I'm gonna go straight healing, I will usually set my toolbar up as follows

1.) Big ass heal: this is either heal other or word of healing (sometimes dwayna's kiss if you are in a heavy enchantment group)
2.) Secondary heal: Almost always Orison of Healing
3.) Signet of Devotion: you can almost always use this.
4.) Healing touch: For yours truely only
5.) Dwayna's Kiss: I usually put this here, unless I put some other type of heal.
6.) Healing Seed: Hardly ever used, but sometimes it can let you take a breather.
7.) Whatever
8.) Whatever (usually monks don't bring rezzes, secondary monks generally have them as they aren't healing. Rezzes take a long time to cast and should be done by non-healers)

I don't have any offensive spells as healing takes 100% of your attention. I attack with my staff/rod. Essential? Hrmm, I would say Orison of Healing is pretty much essential, Healing Touch (for yourself), and Word of Healing cause it's so cheap and useful, also Signet of Devotion cause it can't be interrupted and it is 0 energy to cast (when you get drained)

I use my mouse to highlight party members and my "above the letter" numbers to select the spells. So far, in my opinion, the best way to use your monk is to pair up with another monk who will have some complementary skills to your healing skills, a good example is a good protection monk with Protective Spirit and Aegis who can spam those, take out the spike damage on your team, which will allow you keep them alive much easier than without.

And the best training for your energy magnagement.....bad PUGs! If you can keep them going your the man.

You want a cheap, spammable heal, a larger heal, and a res at the very least. I like to use Reversal of Fortune, Word of Healing, and Rebirth for those. I also love Signet of Devotion, because it's a lot of free healing. It really helps your energy management if you use it a lot. Since you have limited amounts of time and energy, I wouldn't bring any offensive spells.
Put your most oftenly used skills near the front. I use my first few spots for heals, my next few for in-battle enchantments, then hex/condition removal, then maintained enchantments or long duration enchantments, then res.
I click their names, but I use the 1-8 keys to use skills.
[/quote]4-if you use hotkeys, how do you get all 8 party members hotkeyed without losing your 1-8 skill hotkeys (I'm VERY VERY interested in sorting this one out! it's my MOST IMPORTANT question!)[/quote]
Well, you could use WoW's system (i.e. using F1-F8).
One of the most important things is knowing when and how to cut your losses. If a mesmer is taking all the aggro and using up all your mana, then you should probably let him die. If several members are taking heavy damage, you may want to sacrifice someone. If your party is going to lose, then you need to know to run away (and hope you brought Rebirth).

Other than that, you need to know how to manage your energy. If you're out, then you're useless. Signet of Devotion, Divine Boon, Offering of Blood, and Peace and Harmony are great skills for this.

The most important thing is experience. You can't get good from theory alone.

BTW, Emperor Tippy linked my post about making your own build, which may be helpful:
http://www.guildwarsguru.com/forum/s...ad.php?t=22826

Here's my own PvE lineup

1. healing touch (self heal)
2. Heal other (big heal)
3. Reversal (spam protect spell)
4. mend conditions (one condition, other not self cure) with boon it's a heal.
5. Divine Boon (2 energy, high efficency heal to any monk spell)
6. Peace and Harmony (elite +1 regen)
7. Rebirth (res from a distance and pull body to you)
8. Aegis (group protection) I only use this at the start of a fight.

For PvE rebirth is good, but you have to watch out. It takes all of your energy to cast it. It's great for res'ing when monsters are near but if the person you res'd goes the wrong way you'll have no energy to heal with.

I hate Word of Healing and will never use it. It's just an average heal if the under 50% doesn't kick in. Even if the under 50 does kick in it's not a miraculous heal. One bit of lag or a group damage and Word users will lose casters.

I much prefer Heal other for hard hitting mobs and with divine boon going reversal works for a small direct heal.

I re-mapped my keys so my left hand targets the party. A-S-D-F, which are the left hand anchor keys for a typist, are 1-4 and Q-W-E-R are 2-8. I moved R and the others that were there to right hand keys, I use arrows to move and I don't have Strafe. In PvE i usually leave my cursor right over the pets so if I have abundant energy I can heal them cause they don't target.

If there are no pets I'll leave the cursor over my enchantment area so I can click off Boon if I start to get low on energy.

I agree with this statement whole heartedly for PvP. In 8 seconds if you or someone else is getting pounded on you or they are pretty much dead. Plus with 8 seconds to cast your an easy target for the Mesmer or the Ranger to interupt it. Sometimes I like to use Vengance cuz they dont get a DP but its a bit frustrating when someone is almost dead and the guy hitting him suddely dies when they had better than 50% health...A res signet can often help turn the table in PvP. But for PvE if your a monk with out a res people can get a bit ticked off at you.

For PUGs
1. Mend Ailment
2. Remove Hex
3. Orison
4. Signet of Devotion (emergency no-energy-cost heal)
5. Usually Reversal of Fortune or Healing Seed, depends on the makeup of the group
6. Protective Spirit
7. Aegis for that first few seconds of initial panic when the party realizes we've pulled two groups of mobs instead of one (again, this is a PUG, hasn't been working together, so I basically keep this for insurance. If I do two or more objectives with a group I generally swap this out for a complementary skill like Mending or a Mes skill like Channeling)
8. Res if the party does not have at least two people taking one. I find this is a waste because I'm usually the soft target if someone is going to die, and it's far more beneficial for me to take Retribution or Divine Boon or Balth's here instead. But if you have a party that panics at the idea of the monk not having a res, then that is what belongs in this slot.

Most people I've run with have had a bit of self-healing. If not, I swap out a protection spell for another heal, like Dwayna's Kiss or Healing Touch. I hardly ever take Heal Party any more because for a whole group to take brutal enough damage to need me to toss that, we are likely going to die anyway. It's too expensive energy-wise.

The key to my success in PUGs has been coordinating my skills with the rest of the party before leaving the city, and therefore not getting too devoted to one particular set up.

Good luck.

Here's how I set up my keys:

Right hand targets party members: J,K,L,; for 1-4 and M,<,>,/ for 5-8. Unfortunately there is no way to re-arrange the party window format to mirror this setup, so you will need some practice associating party members with these keys.

Left hand uses skills: A,S,D,F for 1-4 and Z,X,C,V for 5-8. Re-format the skill bar so that it's in two rows, corresponding to the two rows on your keyboard. That will speed up the association.

In addition, I set up several keys around these to perform some needed actions. Do this as you see fit. Here's what I have:

Y - cancel action
U - target called-target
H - target closest enemy
N - target next enemy
I - strafe left
O - strafe right
P - target self
' - activate mic for Teamspeak/Ventrillo
G - move forward
B - move backwards
W - turn left
E - toggle auto-run
R - turn right

Here are some guidelines for usage:

The target-self button is crucial. Get familiar with this because your position in the party window will change over time, and you'll need a way to quickly target yourself in some instances. For example, if you're running a Martyr build, you can use Martyr and then quickly target yourself and Mend Ailment. Or when you see your health bar (duplicated separately somewhere, the one with the numbers on it) getting low, do a quick target-self Healing Touch.

If there is not a willing & able target caller in the group, I will call targets. This is tricky to do as a monk, because in general you should be concentrating on your party's health bars... but I've found that it's better than no target-calling at all, especially if it's an area where certain mob types NEED to be targeted first (for example, Sparks in the last mission!). Find the next target using H (closest) and N (next), call it using Ctrl-Space, then if you don't want to actually attack it, then hit Y (cancel). Of course, it goes without saying that for this to be effective, you need to properly educate your teammates on how to follow your called targets.

If you already have a good target caller in the group, then you can add an extra bit of damage by following targets when you're not busy with heavy healing: U then Spacebar.

The movement keys (I,O,G,B) are great for escaping heavy aggro or AoE spell areas (such as Chaos Storm) without moving your hands too far from the main keys.

The W,E,R keys can be used to move around between battles. Or if you prefer, you can simply target a party member and follow them using the Spacebar.

The ' key (single-quote) is handy for activating your mic if you're using Teamspeak or Ventrillo and don't like using voice activation.

Q and T can be assigned to things like Open Map, Open Quest, Open Items, etc.

I forgot to add my build:
Orison of Healing/Reversal of Fortune
Dwayna's Kiss/Protective Spirit
Signet of Devotion
Vigorous Spirit/Guardian
Remove Hex/Mend Ailment/Vengeance
Offering of Blood (elite)
Divine Boon
Rebirth

Blood Magic 10
Healing Prayers/Protection Prayers 10+1
Divine Favor 11+3+1

This has served me very well in the Fissure of Woe. I keep Divine Boon up at all times and use Signet of Devotion as my primary heal spell, unless we're taking damage too fast for it, in which case I use Dwayna's Kiss or Reversal of Fortune. Protective Spirit, Guardian, and Vigorous Spirit are great because they reduce the amount of healing that I need to do. Orison of Healing, Vigorous Spirit, Guardian, and Reversal of Fortune are my self heals. Remove Hex gets rid of Spiteful Spirit, you can replace it with Mend Ailment if Conditions scare you more than Hexes or Vengeance if neither Hexes or Condtions are a problem. Offering of Blood is obviously used to generate mana. Rebirth is my favorite res spell, although it sucks in combat, especially without points into Protection Prayers.

1)The only skill you absolutely have to have as a monk is some form of ressurrection. If you go protection, I like Aegis (a lot) and shield of regeneration does wonders. If you go healing, breeze is usually a must along with some form of "insta-heal" (heal other, Word of Healing, etc.). Usually, monks go both healing and protection for PvE, unless you want to do some solo farming then you have to bring in smiting

2)Honestly, I arrange the skills in my bar to where I always think they will be. But generally, it goes (in this order from 1-8): Protection, Healing, Rezz. I group skills with a common attribute and a common function together. So, if I decide to protect, I go for the first half of the skill bar. When I need to heal, I go for the second half of the skill bar

3)To select allies, I just click their name. Hotkeys would get kind of complicated (IMO for my simple mind ), and on the party window you can watch their health and if they have conditions on them.

4)See #3

5)When playing as a solo monk in a party, don't forget to manage your energy. Never do "unecessary" healing. I.e., if a W/Mo is taking equivalent damage to a W/Me, heal the W/Me first. W/Mo most likely has better healing. Also when playing solo, esablish a solid heal order. Generally, if all are taking equal damage, heal: Tanks, Damage dealers (ele's), and then other. Although, more often than not, you enemy will focus fire on one or two people.

A generic tip whenever playing a monk: when rezzing, never rezz someone right in the middle of battle. Either wait till the battle is over, or stand far back and use rebirth if your healing skills are not immediately required (rebirth moves the person to where you are standing). Out of all the rezz spells, I like rebirth the best, even though there are some consequences to using it.

When playing with two or more monks in a party, it is integral to call spells. When I was playing Hell's Precipice with another monk, it seemed like we had Aegis on the party the entire time, when in reality we just managed the spells well. Calling healing is also necessary. If two people heal the same target (unless it absolutely needs it), then it is a waste of precious mana.

And last, make sure you have a good way to heal and defend yourself. Don't be foolish and let yourself die, because you are more important to your party than one of three or four warriors.

Wierd. Not one monk mentions healing seed.

I normally stack the fast cheap heals in the first slots, then more longer more expensive healing in the middle. For PVE I carry mend ailment and remove hex.

Word of Healing
Dwayna's Kiss
Orison of Healing
Heal Other
Healing Breeze
Healing Seed
Mend Ailment
Remove Hex or Life Bond

For PVP a few skills are changed, otherwise it's about the same.

Healing Seed - I can't believe any monk would NOT carry this spell. Single best healing spell in the game. If done properly, you cast the seed and sit back and watch the fight.

I also (when playing a monk) is move the party window next to my skill bar, and just click on names while using the number keys to select what spells I want to cast. Most of the time It's removing stuff like Blindness on the warriors.

If you monks are having to spend all of your time spamming healing spells, your group is doing something wrong.

I mentioned it. I carry it almost always. Depends on the group, though... if I have more casters than melee, it does me no good.

There are a couple other things that I'll add.

First, here's a picture of my UI. I have everything that I need to look at near each other. My Health, Energy, Skills, Target, and Party are very close to each other, so I can easily glance back and forth. If I need to look at my minimap, I can take just one arcing glance upwards and I'll be able to take in every single piece of information very easily.

Most of my keys are default. I move using WASD. F is self-target. Ctrl-# calls spells as I use them. I occaisonally have problems with hitting the wrong number on my keyboard, but it's not a big issue.

1. There are no "essential" skills. For any profession. Each profession has around 75 skills, and only 8 slots. Not one of them is necessity. Some work better with others, of course. For some zones, you might consider some skills necessary... like you'd want condition removal when fighting undead (they poison a lot), or you might want hex removal when fighting those floating eye things.

For PvP, you want one person in your group capable of removing conditions and hexes. But it doesn't have to be the monk. And certainly not every monk.

2. I put my most commonly used skills at 7 & 8, because I use my mouse side buttons to activate them. I then put the next 4 most commonly used skills at 1-4. 5 & 6 are usually the spells I use the least... like long duration enchants, or resurrection, stances, etc.

3. I use the party window to select players, f for myself, and c for the nearest enemy if I'm using something like Energy Drain.

4. I don't use hotkeys for targetting in general, so no comment.

5. General wisdom?

Learn when to keep healing, and when to let the person die.

Learn what the various colors and icons in the party window mean. Don't try to mend a condition when the person's suffering from a hex, or vice versa.

Divine Favor > Healing Prayers or Protection Prayers, in almost all cases. There are only a few spells where this is not the case. Some examples would be Healing Seed, Healing Hands, or Aegis. But for skills like Orison of Healing, Reversal of Fortune, Healing Touch, DF > *.

As for someone's comment about Healing Seed... it's a great heal in some circumstances. It's a completely useless heal in others. Just like many other Monk skills... Reversal of Fortune can be the best heal in the game... or one of the worst. It just depends how hard the mobs your fighting hit.

For my typical PvE PUG, I equip the following:

1) Peace & Harmony
2) Ward Against Melee
3) Glyph of Lesser Energy
4) Aegis (only in 6 and 8 man groups)
5) Divine Boon
6) Rebirth
7) Mend Condition
8) Reversal of Fortune

I usually run 11 Divine Favor, 10 Protection Prayers, 10 Earth Magic. I use a Superior DF rune, minor PP. And a +1 DF scalp tat.

Since you ask for "RPers", I assume you mean for PvE and not PvP.

The choices you make will change throughout the game, as different skills become available. I'm also assuming a primary monk, based on your question.

• Raise your Divine Favor attribute up pretty high. This is the only real benefit for being a monk primary, but it's pretty important and useful.
• Raise your Healing Prayers up high. Maybe this is obvious, but there it is.
• Orison of Healing is carried by nearly any character acting as a primary healer.
• Some kind of rez is carried by every monk, usually even secondaries. This should not be Ressurection Signet for a monk. Ressurection is fine for a long time, but take Rebirth when you can. Rebirth can ressurect from a distance, which can be vitally important in PvE when times are tough.
• Major single-target heal spell (often Heal Other)
• Party heal spell (surprisingly, often Heal Party)
• Signets for healing at good because energy management is vital.
• Many monks carry additional "cheap" heals to supplement Orison, which also combines well with Divine Favor. Dwayna's Kiss is a popular choice here.
• Some monks also carry Protection prayers, which makes Reversal of Fortune a good choice for a spammable. There's a variety of other useful Protection spells. This is hardly standard, however.
• Ultimately, the exact skill choice is pretty flexible. You don't even HAVE to carry Orison if you think you have something better.

Skill Bar: This is a pretty personal setup thing, but if you are really intending to heal most of the time, I'd put healing spells on 1-4, roughly. Like others, I agree that you shouldn't need your Ressurection spell in the middle of battle, only later, so make it #8. Preparation spells or other less used spells I tend to put in the higher numbers like 6-7.

Essentially, I put the most used and cheapest spells in the lowest numbers. Something like:

1. Orison of Healing
2. Dwayna's Kiss
3. Healing Breeze
4. Heal Other
5. Heal Party
6. Heal Area
7. <Misc>
8. Ressurection

I party members in F1-F8, and moved the weapon sets to F9-F12.

As far as general playing tips, I'm probably going to be echoing others here, but:

• Pay attention to the battle. This can be hard at first, but will ultimately make you a much better player and healer. It's easy (and often boring) to end up in a "red bar trance", just staring at health bars and healing repeatedly.
• When you get out of a red bar trance, remember to hold down ALT and look around for items that have dropped for you. Amazingly, I sometimes just plain FORGET that I have items to pick up, especially with a group that keeps running to the next battle, meaning that I never break out of the trance.
• Save your energy whenever possible.
• If you have at least one protection kind of spell (Healing Seed, etc.), that will give you a useful spell to cast at the beginning of combat, when you have a lot of energy and aren't immediately needed for healing. This can also save you from having to heal someone later. When I'm in primary healer mode, I always try to have one of these spells around.
• Don't heal someone who has taken a little damage but doesn't appear to be taking more. It sounds obvious, but at the start of combat you'll often be bored without anything to do and want to heal that scratch someone took. Let them bleed a little. Builds character.
• If someone is below 50% health, heal them. This is almost always a good idea.
• If *lots* of people are below 50% health, you have some decisions to make.
• If someone looks like they aren't taking more damage (because you see them fleeing past you, for instance), concentrate your healing elsewhere. Get to them when you have time.
• If it looks like someone is taking so much damage so fast that they are surely dead even with your healing, give up on them. That's right. Let that character die, so that you can keep everyone else alive.
• Important: When enemies attack YOU, run away. But don't just run into nowhere; they'll chase you and it will probably be bad. Run towards your other party members, preferably the warriors. If you circle them at a very close distance, you can "drag" the monsters onto other party members. It's your job to keep everyone alive, starting with yourself, and this is the easiest method. (When ranged attackers come after you, just run away and ping your health to let people know they should be getting in the way of the monsters.)
• It is primarily your job to call retreats, no matter what anyone else might think. You have to save your own skin, for sure, and once you decide to do that, no one else is really going to want to hang around. Other players can only see their health dropping; they don't have the knowledge that you aren't going to come through with that last-minute-heal THIS time. (This is more complicated with multiple healers.)
• When you are really low on energy, control+click your energy bar to ping it and let everyone know. People might not be paying attention, but the ones who are will know to kick in their own personal healing if they are wounded, helping you out.
• Don't rez in the middle of combat if at all possible. Keep other people alive instead (and away from Death Penalty).
• If there are other healers in your party, you should try to hold control while casting -major- heal spells so you don't duplicate effort. (Even better, if you are both on the ball, you can try to divvy up the party; i.e. Joe heals characters 1-3, Bob heals characters 4-6. This is hard to really make work, though, because monsters don't cooperate.)
• When the battle is winding down and no one is really in danger of dying, STOP HEALING. Seriously. Your patients will, in all likelyhood, go attack someone before your energy is fully back. They can at least obviously see their own health, while they can't see your energy. (Sure, you can tell them, but don't expect that they'll pay attention most of the time.)
• Signets are fine to use when the battle is winding down, since they are energy free. =)
• Make it clear that others should not use Ressurection Signets except in dire emergencies, or when all the monks with inifinite ressurections are dead. Many players understand this, but there's always a few who don't get it, and that can ruin a mission. (Story: One of my favorite missions ever was when I was the only healer, as the other one had left the game for some reason. We were in deep trouble, with half the team dead; only two people alive besides me, and they weren't monks at all. I was having a lot of trouble keeping those two alive, and definitely couldn't pause to ressurect someone, but we didn't have enough attackers to fight off the enemy, especially while guarding an NPC. I made the executive decision to tell them to use their rez signets in the middle of combat, and I'm pretty sure it's the only reason we survived. Things like that are extremely rewarding. =)
• If you go all-out healing and only have some lousy staff or wand to attack with, it's often a good idea to just NEVER ATTACK. Many monsters won't target you at all if you don't do any damage to them. Don't attract their attention.
• If the party is REALLY in trouble, hightail it out of there, even if there's a couple other people alive. It's more important for you to be able to sneak back and rez everyone than to valiantly and stupidly die with them. This is probably the most important job for a monk in a mission: making sure the whole party doesn't die. And when the rough times come, they come FAST. The whole problem is that you can't keep up the healing, so people start dropping. And you'll have to Pay Attention in order to see that you are in trouble early enough to Get Out.
• Lastly, and most importantly, have fun. You'll make mistakes, and people will blame you for things that aren't your fault, and it will be hard sometimes, and people will die.

PvE purposes

1. Healing Touch (self heal)
2. Orison of Healing (backup heal)
3. Balthazar's Aura (The best defense is a good offense =P Toss it on some warrior that's tanking a few monsters and let the numbers fly)
4. Words of Healing (Hands down best healing prayers spell IMO, with good timing and analysis of the battle situation, this + orison during the recharge times would be enough for almost any battle)
5. Storm Chaser (Ranger secondary for unlocking, good for running away from the battle when everyone else is dead, or throwing off melee chasers)
6. Mend ailment (a blind/weakened warrior is half useless, fix that =P)
7. Rebirth (Live and fight another day!)
8. Signet of Capture

11+4 healign Prayers, 10+1 smiting prayers, 10+1 Divine favor, 2 wilderness survival

Healing seed is very situational IMO. It's great with henchies or with a team who knows how to capitalize on it, but usually with random PUGs, I dont' even bother because warriors like to do their own thing and a lot of times its just wasted when monsters switch targets and the seeder is off chasing some enemy caster while the melee beats down on our elemenatlist.

I used Divine Boon for a bit and found that although its great for spike heals, the drain on energy was a bit too steep most of the times. You're going to really want to watch your heals to make sure you don't overheal, and turn it off if you drop to 0 mana to allow yourself to regen normally. Once I got Words of Healing I dropped boon =P.

I personally don't like running enchantments in PvE. Too many monsters have some sort of enchantment removal, but its mostly preference whether you can stand it or not.

Something very important: If there's a elementalist/necro/mesmer on your team who always seem to be going into the middle of the enemy groups and casting spells and rely on you to save their butts all the time, give them a warning. Tell them to stay back or you're going to stop healing them. A key step in staying alive is to not rely on the monk too much and try to keep yourself alive first. Casters who think they're tanks are stealing valuable heals away from the other players who need it.

This isn't necessary. I do fine as a primary healer using Divine Boon with Protection Prayers, Blood Magic (Offering of Blood), and Divine Favor.
This isn't necessary either. Reversal of Fortune works better than Orison in most cirumstances. With Divine Boon, any (5,1,2) spell can work as well or better than Orison of Healing.
I am almost never sitting around doing nothing. If your mana is full, even if your party is fully healed, then cast a 5-mana spell (something that isn't a direct heal, like Vigorous Spirit). Your mana regen is going regardless of whether you are casting or not. You might as well put it to use. Also, if anyone in the group has taken even 10 damage, I Signet of Devotion them. The only times that I am not constantly using Signet of Devotion is when everyone has 100% life or people are taking damage so fast that it can't keep up. Never just let people sit there taking damage, even minor amounts.
One of the most important skills for a Monk to learn is prioritization. Learning who to heal is important.
This is also very important. Even if you don't have any tanks around, you can circle around ally casters (if you have Word of Healing, or another "other ally" heal, then it's much more efficient to heal other people than yourself; plus you won't have to waste time running if the mobs are fighting another caster), or even other mobs.

a lot of great answers gang,

edit: read the whole thread... some really great advice in here for anyone wishing to take up the robe... thank you all very much I think that one thing the "monk builds" thread (and maybe other builds threads, don't know) neglects is that noobs can gain almost nothing from the advice given on the thread. The advice given on the builds thread assumes a basic knowledge of the skills and attributes, whereas the answers supplied here (probably by many of the same people who replied to the builds thread) are very noob-friendly and don't assume prior knowledge or experience in... monkery..

Thanks again. I'm about to ascend with my main but now I've got the urge to go back to Pre-Searing and continue along with my monk Any advice for secondary (I've already taken Mesmer... but I'm not fully confident that it was a good decision).

Ranger is a good secondary for monk. They have some pretty good nature rituals, and there was this one monk I played with that used a few rituals + protection very successfully.

Also, using necro as secondary can be good

You won't usually want to use bows, melee weapons, or shields, because you'll want good focus items and probably even wands or rods to increase your energy.

I have a couple different builds with my protection mo/me. One involves arcane echo to keep aegis going for 22 seconds straight (then an 8 second break before i get another 11... and using spirit of failure/energy tap to regen the total of 45 mana that takes. Usually i take shield of deflection with that build to put on the ally being attacked with the enemy hexed with spirit of failure to make sure i get my mana back. In the grand scheme of things, preventing damage > healing damage, as (especially in UW) things can hit for enough spike damage it's almost impossible to react and heal in time.

Another build i've been experimenting with is half-protection, half-healing using aegis and protective spirit as protection spells and dwana's kiss and heal other as healing spells. For energy management i bring the elite peace and harmony and energy tap, as well as vengence and another rez. The only problem with this build is that it has no self-healing as dwana's kiss and heal other are both target other ally.

If i get the chance to go straight protection (which i usually only do if there are TWO other monks in a party), Aegis, Sheild of deflection, reversal of fortune, protective spirit, mend condition, remove hex, vengance and rebirth is my usual build. For the past week or so i've been doing nothing with this build but going into UW/FoW, helping guildies, or capping skills though so i can't speak to its effectiveness in PvP. I can say that it certainly makes the healing monk's job a lot easier

1-Heal Party: Good for when everyone is taking poison or a AOE hit
2-Heal Other: Brings someone back from near death pretty easily
3-Healing Breeze: Use on ppl only getting hit by 1 or 2 enemies... keeps them up and I don't have to worry about them
4-Signet of Devotion: No energy, enough said
5-Dwayna's Kiss: Great when you got someone with hexes and conditions, otherwise it's a cheap minor heal
6-Healing Seed: Useful if everyone is fighting in close quarters
7-Mending: I put this on one of our tanks and I hardly have to worry about them.
8-Rebirth: res... duh

I'm surprised how many people are using Signet of Devotion. It doesn't gain the benefit of Divine Favor or Divine Boon. And it's a horrendously slow cast. I suppose you have to use it, when I see you're using almost all 10+ en heals; Heal Other, Healing Breeze, Heal Party, and Healing Seed are all energy hogs... I wouldn't ever suggest equipping them all.

Signet of Devotion costs nothing, end of story.

Well, with that kind of logic, maybe we should just equip only signets. They all cost nothing, so they must all be spectacular.

Sorry, but there's a lot more to that 'story' than just considering the energy cost. Like the 5s recycle, or the fact that it takes 2s to actually cast the thing. I'd recommend finding some method of energy management (Energy Drain, Channeling, Glyph of Lesser Energy, Offering of Blood... something), and not using slow casting, low heal per second signet. Especially for PvP.

I know someone who uses signet of devotion who NEVER runs out of mana, even with being the only monk on an eight person team, he never runs out of mana and he uses signet of devotion.

I'm not quite sure what you're trying to prove. You certainly aren't providing a convincing argument about how great Signet of Devotion is with second-hand anecdotes.

Regardless of their energy cost... those spells are pretty much necessary for a healer.

I've played quite a bit in random arenas, team arenas, and ToPK, and have never once used Heal Party or Heal Other (on my Monk). And Healing Breeze is really only worth using if you use other abilities that work off enchantments... like Dwayna's Kiss, or Contemplation of Purity.

Healing Seed is most definitely conditional, and not necessary. I can count on one hand the number of times I've found that skill a 'necessity'.

There are many skill combinations that work well. Signet of Devotion is useful if as an indirect energy management tool, and maybe is one of the better non-elite ones (Energy Drain and Peace & Harmony are both superior, IMO... but they're elites).

That's exactly it. Signet of Devotion is useful as part of an energy management scheme.

It's quite obvious that Signet doesn't heal as well as most spells. Also, not everyone is talking about PvP, and certainly not everyone is talking about maximum level characters. More meaningfully, this thread was asking about how to play a monk in PvE for someone who hasn't at all, so I assume tips and tricks for low level PvE monks are good to point out here. Not much point in telling someone how great Elite skills are; by the time the reader gets to them, they can probably figure it out for themselves.

For what it's worth, I like having Signet around on monk primary healers in general. It's slow, but a good heal near the start of PvE combat (when someone is slightly hurt, but you don't want to blow your mana too fast). You never worry about "wasting" it, and it's good to use when emergency healing doesn't seem needed right now. Sure, it's a slow two second heal, but most heals are one second, so it's not terriblyslow.

Also, there are plenty of times that I've run out of energy for one reason or another (usually due to mesmer interference, including in PvE), and it's nice to have SOMETHING useful to do while energy recharges.

Sure, once you have Elite monk skills, it's quite possible that Signet will get crowded right off the skill bar by more powerful options, but for a long time it's a fine choice in PvE.


Also, many of the more expensive skills (Seed, Breeze, Heal Other, etc.) are excellent for non-dedicated healers. No matter what your primary is, having a decent level of Healing Prayers can make having some of those powerful but expensive spells on the skill bar useful. You don't want to necessarily waste slots on cheap spammy spells, but if you want to help out with healing when time's are tough it can be useful to have one or expensive, two powerful spells on the bar. (I do this often with my Elmo in PvE, combination blaster / healer. Not much point in having the spammy spells when you aren't a monk primary, which makes the expensive spells seem that much better.)

Oh yeah, forgot to add, you should always take a condition remover, especially in PvP. Take a hex remover too if you have room. Hexes and conditions can screw over certain professions far more than straight up damage can. For example, if your warriors are blinded or weakened, they're not going to be doing damage. If your casters are backfired, remove hex will save you a lot of healing (especially if they're the ones that keep casting while backfired, ugh, had my share of those)

Heal Party is good, if only it didn't have the 2 second casting time. Not to mention its very rare for people to all get damaged around the same. Generally casters drop a lot faster than warriors, and a faster heal well help a lot more than heal party.

Sticking to 5 mana heals (orison, touch, words of healing, dwanna's, etc) allows you to not need any energy management spells if you plan your heals out, and leaves room for other spells that can probably go a lot more than more healing can.

Signet of Devotion is great. Much of the time, you don't need a quick heal. If your team is taking light to moderate amounts of damage, then you don't put your group in any danger by using Signet of Devotion, but you also don't use any energy. In most of my builds, it heals for 100, which is about the same as Orison of Healing.

If I use it, say, 4 times during a fight, I save 20 mana. That another Aegis, or Healing Seed, or 2 Protective Spirits, or 2 Heal Others, etc.

Hey, I'm sorry to hijack the thread, but which Elemental skills should a primary monk bring? I've been dissappointed with me Mo/R, so I just recently switched to Mo/E, and feel rather lost about which E skills complement the healing spells I have with my monk.

If you do choose to be Mo/R, then using F1-F2-F3 to switch weapons is fundamental. One needs to be a short bow (or equivilant), one needs to be a Long/Flat Bow, and the last needs to be your Wand/Rod/Staff/Energy supply weapon. If you use rebirth, make sure to switch to a bow before it drains your energy, then switch back to rod to get a quick energy boost to heal the rezzed player.

Going back to my question:
I've only been buying earth and water skills. Ward against Melee seemed like it would be the perfect choice, but I haven't found it to be as useful, since I'm never close enough to my melee party members. Aug has suggested "Glyph of Lesser Energy", but that seems to be a gimped skill, because it is only useful with healing seed. Using 2 skill slots to make a energy-efficient healing seed just doesn't seem worthwhile. Any more ideas?

Ward against melee, Ward against elemental, Ward against Harm (elite, highly recommended for Ring of Fire missions), and armor of Earth are all good spells to pack.

For the wards, you could try running close to the battle, dropping the ward, and running away. Or you stay close to the casters on your team and drop them.

Armor of Earth is good because it allows you to not waste energy healing yourself.

There are more 15 energy cost skills than just Healing Seed. I usually used Glyph of Lesser Energy to activate Aegis. They both had roughly the same recycle. Saving 10 energy every 30s can be pretty useful.

Ward Against Melee is also spectacular. You just need to run up to near the melee, as Eclair suggested.

For PvE, I don't recommend any of the self-targetting armors. If you're getting beat on as a Monk, run some picks against the Warriors or Rangers, so they pick up the aggro, or just keep falling back if it's a ranged mob, they'll eventually retarget and you can come back into healing range.