The level cap and your secondary profession...

I've been playing for 2 months and have really just played with my first character, Vala of The Fens. When I reached LV.20 last week I realized that my secondary profession had been short changed. Now I can only blame myself for that but it got me thinking. As a Necromancer you have to devote a great deal of Attribute Points to your Necro skills so you won't be decimated by guys like those annoying Moss Scarabs. *lol* But I took Mesmer as my secondary profession because I thought it would be helpful. And it was helpful for the first half of the game. But now my skills are unbalanced. My Necro skills are outstanding but too many of them depend on a corpse being nearby(I need Flesh Golem!!) and my Mesmer skills have so few AP attached to them that they hardly last long enough to be effective. I'd like to do PvP but my character is just too weak. I guess its good we still get Skill Points when we "level" after 20 but I would much prefer to get 3000 gold than 3000 XP. I'm hoping ANet will consider giving the option to recieve small amounts of AP(1-3 would good) for certain quests instead of XP in future expansions. Is it unrealistic to want a truly effective secondary profession?

Comments, opinions, maybe a rant or two...

this thread will not deliver.

infact, this thread will be most likely locked down by at least the end of the first page.

if AP were directly linked to XP - then every 55iron monk would have maxed out stats in every line.
infact, it would simply destroy any sembelence of balance.

I wish you the best of luck in your GW journey, youve just turned lvl 20 - GW has just begun.

A 9 or 10 in a secondary profession attribute is very reasonable. Just pick 2 primary profession attributes and 1 secondary attribute, then concentrate your attribute points there instead of scattering them around.

When you're low level it can be hard to find enough skills from 3 attributes to make a reasonable build. Now that you're level 20 it should be much easier. Remember that this is a team game and your 8 skills aren't supposed to cover all the bases. Focus on one or two things and do them well.

Try switching to a curse necro and play that for a while. The Necro curse skills really go well with many of the Mesmer skills. While a MM is more in demand for many missions, there are several missions where the enemies are in tight mobs where Spiteful spirit can do as much if not more dmg than a MM.

Whichever way you decide to play your Necro, you should max or almost max out the attribute you want to specialize in.

Check out the campfire area of the forum, there's plenty of alternate necro builds there that have been tested and lots of discussion about different ways to play and allocate your attributes.

I agree. But I'm talking about PvE, not PvP.

@ Trvth Jvstice-My Curses are at 9(actually 10 but I have a minor rune on my armor) but my Death Magic is also at 9. I'm kind of tottering between being a Minion factory and a Curse necro.

I tried playing a Necro/secondary prof build, it's very hard. I have now changed build to a SS PvEer, which is different to the Uw build (though i use that for UW, lol). I have 16 in curses, 10 in Domination and the rest in Soul reaping. Arcane Echo, SS, Empathy, Backfire, Reckless haste, Res signet make up the permo skills and i experiment with different skills for the last two slots. currently they are rend enchanments and shatter enchanments. They go ogether well i think.

You should concentrate more on finding a niche and doing it as best you can. Remember, you have a team to back you up on the things you don't bring. Consider making an all curses necro or an all minion necro. Minions scale up with more attributes put in than any other skill in the game. With 16 in death magic, you'll be able to control 10 minions instead of 4, and they'll be vastly more effective, allowing you to steamroll almost everything. There are many good options for a N/me curser, usually involving hex spam, with SS as the holy grail.

It's rare for most builds to split attributes over more than 3 lines. If they do, one of the losers is relegated to a purely support role, like energy management or self healing.

are you really saying you want extra points for your PVE character?

this has come up many times in the suggestion forum and always been shot down hard.

all the rest of us seem to make do with only 200

are you saying that you are trying to play MM as a mesmer? I appologize and i dont mean to be mean but just in case you dont know,it will be VERY difficult to join any group as a mesmer anyway and if you join and then tell them that your playing MM instead of interupt or something, you gonna get kicked...

Vala, you say you just reached 20th level...does that mean you have not done the bonus attribute point quests yet?

There are 2 quests that give you +15 attribute points each. Characters from Prophecies have to do the quests in the Desert, while characters from Factions do (much simpler) quests on Shing Jea. If you haven't done these quests, look for them in the wiki. It really helps to have 30 more attribute points than what you get by levelling alone.

It sounds like you aren't quite where you need to be skill wise or experience through the game. A necro doesn't need corpses nearby unless you are going MM or some builds of blood (wells) and a few other skills. You might not have the skills yet, depending on how far you have been through the game. You will get more. Try changing your build and stick to a particular line, blood seems to be the primary push through the early and middle part of prophecies.

As for your secondary, most of the time people don't use very many skills from their secondary profression anyway. There is usually a utility skill and you only need enough points in them to get the most affect you can while maintaning your primaries focus. You know you can change secondary at some point in both games right?

There's your problem. Pick one.

No, reread it. Mesmer is the secondary.

For PvP, you can just make a pvp only character which has max armor, your pvp char should be strong enough .

The main purpose (in my opinion) of the secondary prof is to help bolster or improve on your primary proffession, much like using inspiration magic line with monk (inspired, revealed hex, drain enchant..), or arcane echo (which has no attribute) when doing SS.

This will never happen. They already said the level cap would never be increased and what you are asking for is basically a level increase. They don't want a larger gap between top level and newbie level characters. There are PLENTY of attribute points to make your secondary profession very usefull. You just need to learn how to distribute those points.

I'm kind of a retard and haven't been able to beat all the co-ops(I've only completed Fort Ranik all the way!!) so I've had to get new areas the hard way: by walking there. *lol* Currently I'm at Bloodstone Fen, which is maybe a little under the halfway point. Thanx for the help.

This really makes me wanna flame... but I'm not gonna :/

I'm not really sure what to add, but you obviously have problems being creative if you have problems with using your secondary to any effect.

Personally I like to Play my necro two different ways

Offensive: Max Curses and Illusion - hex enemies to death.
Defensive: Max Death and inspiration - minion master with Flesh Golem/Bone Fiends/Vampiric Horrors, this requires a LOT of energy and thus I use inspiration to get some.

Hmm, do the missions, they get you far easily, and most groups need/want a MM in their grup to draw enemy attack away from them. So, just spam 'MM lfg' in game and you should get picked up pretty quickly for a mission.

I've only been playing a month. I can barely afford to buy any skills and missions that give them for free are dwindling. Plus my connection is so bad that I can hardly complete the co-ops without being cut off in the middle. PvP is out of the question too. GW is my first online RPG so please forgive me if I don't know what the heck I'm doing.

There are so many ways to deal with this. I re-roll my necro constantly with skills depending on whether I want to SS, MM, Orders, Battery, or bloodspike.

Use mesmer skills like Arcane Echo that don't require any attributes.

Switch your secondary. Once you switch you can switch back again easily as many times as you want. Just talk to one of the ghosts in the desert or the skills guy in Factions, although he may charge (I've never done it with him)

Use different weapon sets for what you are doing.

Get some bloodstained boots to augment MM skills.

Different scar patterns for your headpiece and switch it out with different superior runes depending on what you are doing.

I am sure there are more.