Need expert advice

Please note I am a complete Guild Wars n00b. I want to make a healer as my second factions character and I was speaking to someone in the game who said that an elemental / monk is awesome because he has tons more energy to heal with. This sounds good and makes sense but I see tons of people with monk as their primary class so there must be an advantage to this too. Any advice would be great.

This is because E/Mos are mostly used in PvP to spam Heal party, and Extinguish, even Aegis...

If you want to actualy be a healer, I highly reccomend Monk/Mesmer, or Monk/Necromancer, as they have the strongest energy managment options. Monk/Mesmer has the most, and the strongest(after the oob nerf).

There simply is no debate regarding your inquery: Mo/Me--Plain and simple.

When you make it to the GvG level you can then contemplate the suport role of a E/Mo build even then it will never be as fulfilling as a Mo/Me.

Mo/N maybe for farming, but as far as true monking goes that went the way of the dinasour ever since the OoB nerf.

Go Monk/Me it own. kthxbai

The advantage to monk primary is the Divine Favour attribute. This boosts your healing power and makes you a more efficient healer. It also governs several useful skills (Divine Boon for example) used in monk builds. E/Mo can work as a healer, but a monk primary will be far better at it.

Edit: Forgot to mention runes as well. With a monk primary you can use runes to boost your healing/protection attributes higher than an E/Mo could manage.

Yep, the runes and Divine Favor bonuses are the main for reccomending a Monk over an Elementalist primary. Personally I find Mo/Me and Mo/N to be essentially equal for straight spot healing. Though if you are bonding, or boon protting some prefer one or the other. Its mainly personal preferance though, usually.

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It's true that E/Mo's were the preferred healer class at one time (Before Divine Favour was implemented), but these days there's really little point in using anything else besides a monk primary as a healer. E/Mo's are still good GvG support characters, but you won't really find them in many other places. If you check the stickys at the top of the page you will find some very useful builds to start out with. I'd suggest going with a boon/prot at first since it's a relatively easy build to run and it's pretty much unequaled in versatility. As for your secondary it's really up to you. Most boon/prots these days are using Mantra of Recall and Inspired Hex for e-management. However, there are equally strong arguments for using E-Drain, and in certain cases Offering of Blood. Try them all and see what you feel most comfortable with. Good luck.

Um, yes. Mo/Me is pretty much what you want to do, no matter what kind of monk you want to play. Boon Prots benefit hugely from from the energy management that the /mes have. Healingmonks less so, but still, Revealed/Inspired Hex is a nice way to go.