Numas Guide to Easy PvE.

After 200 hours and five different PvE characters, I feel I should summarize my findings regarding how to best and most efficiently do PvE.

1. Be a Monk.
Be a W/Mo, E/Mo, Mo/E, Mo/Me, N/Mo or whatever, they all have their strenghts and weaknesses, just make sure one of your professions is Mo.

That's it.

It will be possible to complete the PvE campaign with other characters, but for PvE the simple truth is that being part monk just makes things so much easier.

That has to be one of worthless "advices" I have ever seen. Yes offence.

Well....it is nice to have your own mending/breeze/whatever to use, not to mention endless resurrect.

until you get to the later part of the game... when everymob has some sort of strip enchant every few seconds or so =_=

<shrug>
It's true, though. The PvE is much, much, much, harder if you're not part monk. What other part you are doesn't really matter, but be a monk.

I couldn't agree more. My monk breezed through the game so easily I was shocked at how fast it went by. With my other characters 90% of the pick-up groups I got into were terrible but for some reaosn my monk always gets into good pick-up groups. The only mission I had to do twice with a pick-up groups was Hell's Precipice.

It's a 'OMG Nerf The Monkzors' thread in disguise as a player guide.

LOL! I was thinking the exact same thing.

"Efficient" OR "Easy" /= "Best"

This thread would be extremely useful if 1) we didn't know being part healer didn't make things easier already, and 2) the assumption that we all want an "easy" PvE experience was actually correct.

I happen to like knowing that whatever missions I do in the game, if I'm not running with a healer in some respect, I'm screwed. It makes me appreciate the teamwork dynamic even more.

And Lost, the reason your PUG experiences were better when you were a monk is because you made a crappy tank, nuker, caster, or whatever in the first place and didn't keep your monk out of harm's way.

Hehe, just messin'.

Good advice I would say it is. But guide? It is barely even a guide, all you said was to be a monk anyhow, no offense, but this just looks like advice not a guide. Besides, playing secondary monk does not guarantee PVE will be easy.

Consider playing a primary monk, and get into really bad PUGs, yes, there are some really really bad PUGs out there, that no matter how good your monk skills may be, it might be impossible to rescue the whole team let alone finish the mission. Maybe its just my luck, 50% of the time, PUGs dont have teamwork. Half say A, Half say B, argue bla bla bla, f**k you, you s**k, XXX has left the game. Oh look, someone left, we cannot finish this, I'm out too. Poof, another one leaves the game.

I have played with PUGs, everyone fought to the death, and there were 2 people left alive, so 1 decides to distract the mobs so the R/Mo could escape and res the whole team back later. Guess what, after everyone dies except the R/Mo, he says, "Sorry team, no res" Well, at least he apologizes, but he did not bring a res signet, or even res spell him being a secondary monk. @.@

I play a ranger monk myself. Concentrating fully on ranger skills, I only bring 1 monk skill, rebirth, for PVE of course. A good player can play any profession easily, being a monk secondary does not make it easy for the common lot.

Strange as it may sound, the most "efficient" of my characters to get to the southern shiverpeaks was my mesmer/ele, followed by my ranger/nec. I found that my monk/me was at times exasperating, although ultimately rewarding, and certainly was not able to rapidly breeze through missions in a staccato-like string of victories.
My warrior/mo, although the most durable clearly, did take me the longest and features the most deaths, however he was my first character, and as such, I suppose it's to be expected.
My mesmer primary was a real pleasant surprise, and made every mission and quest shockingly "easy" by comparison to some of the others in my stable.
I like each of them for different reasons, and each have their own efficacy in certain situations, but as to the original poster, at least in my experience, having monk on your character's resume has not proved to be the secret to success. At least not for me.
Other's experience surely will vary, I'm well aware.

It may be easier with a 2ndary Mo but a Primary Mo has things somewhat difficult. Dealing with idiots, watching the Red Bars O' Life & nothing else, getting abused by players, the stress of keeping ppl alive & more. Primary Mo is not a easy job.

I agree Teufel Eldritch,
I lost count of the times that I have run into peeps that constantly rush into Mobs and not think before a battle. A Primary Monk can not keep a whole team alive when you have to play with Idiots like that, then they try to blame the Monk...lol well the solution I have found is when you get bitchers that start screeming at you, hell I just leave them there and do not res them..lol

Eh, although I disagree, it's still better than the Prima guide.

-Diomedes

Mesmer is actually my favorite class. It's great fun playing mesmer, because there's sooo many options, but it's also perhaps the hardest class to play (I've not played any Ranger past lvl 10, so I don't know about them... Warrior is my least favorite class - they just don't do enough damage, and tend to die a lot).

The monks ability to do unlimited res, keep other players alive through dropping some healing/protecting spells (even a secondary monk can do decent job unless conditions get too ugly), various pretty brutal PBAoE and interrupt spells, and double damage against undead just makes adventuring so much easier.

I don't at all mean that monks are too uber and should be nerfed, but anyone wanting to do PvE with the minimum amount of aggravation should be part monk, whether primary or secondary.
IME it's the single most important advice wrt PvE difficulty, especially if you're going to do any significant soloing, what other profession you select has a much smaller effect on difficulty (although the style of play will of course be different).

In hindsight, though, sojen is right - I should've named the thread advice instead of guide.

Agreed.
How boring GW would be if everybody had Mo.

Call me wacky but some people actually play for a bit of a challenge, not to say any other combo is particulary bad but to play something just to breeze through is silly. Oh I keep forgetting that people need to get those skills!

Monk may be the easiest class to do whatever with, but IMO it's the most boring. I had MUCH more fun with my R/N than I'm having with my Mo/Me. It's not boring because it's repetitive, it's boring because I have to stare and people's health bars the whole dang time. Practically no strategy, just click, heal, repeat.

My W/N did a lot better than my E/Mo

Soul Feast heals a lot better than a low level osiron or breeze

ummmm not even close lol. i have finished the game with 3 characters all 6 professions (that means i had only one monk and he was secondary)

i found that all three were just as easy to finish the game with. no difference at all.

it is not what profession you play it is how you play that profession.

It probably is true it is the easiest. I did start a W/M as a farm build (back when I thought there was a decent economy), but I definately have much more fun with the much maligned N/W. It all a matter of rethinking the stategy, and it hasn't really been that hard at all.

Seems to me anyone on thier 2nd or 3rd character it would be alot easier simply for the fact that they know what to do and where to go.