Easy-to-play Build

I'm playing again for the first time in years and am having trouble designing a workable PvE build. Looking at various posts and walkthroughs, I've become bogged down in acronyms and a billion different choices, so I thought maybe a kind and knowledgeable person could help me out.

I'm looking to play with only my wife and henchies/heroes. I'm a gamer and can fill any role, but my wife is less of a gamer. She loves games like Titan Quest, Torchlight, etc, but is not into complicated stuff (she is not a good Mesmer candidate).

AI 'bots are said to pull aggro poorly, so I figured I'd be a warrior tank. My wife is unlikely to enjoy healing, so I figured elementalist or ranger were the best options while also being simple to play. I'm worried she won't do interrupts well, however. How important is that function in a PvE, normal mode playthrough?

What is a good secondary profession for a ranger that focuses on pure damage and isn't super complicated? Is Ranger/Elementalist (Or Elementalist/Ranger) viable?

Thanks in advance!

First off, welcome back. Second, I am not a real expert, but I will throw out an idea or two.

First question - What campaign do you plan on starting in? Each have their own merits, but if you start in Nightfall (NF), you will be able to build a capable team fairly quickly. If you play together from the start, you will each gain a warrior, a dervish, and 2 monks on the starter island. There will be a point where you each get to choose between a necro and a ranger. One take the necro, the other the ranger. When you reach level 10, you can go into the Eye of the North and each get another warrior, monk, an Elementalist and a Mesmer. You will have the makings for a pretty good team.

As for your own characters, E/Mo and R/Mo, would pair up nicely. In my opinion, they are easy to learn. Early on, your secondary won't really matter, because you will be able to change it soon after you start building your Command Center. The Monk (Mo) secondary will let you carry a hard res.

As for interupts, let the mesmer heroes handle that. The monks can be set up to run heals and protections and the extras can run a smite build. The hero ranger can be used for spreading conditions, bleeding, poison, etc. With multiple warriors, you can experiment with swords, axes, and hammers.

I hope this helps some.

It does help some. I was planning to start with Prophecy, as I heard the learning curve was gentle. I'm not sure I need a super-easy learning curve, but it will definitely help my wife.

I was going to avoid monks as they don't usually do much damage; my wife is all about the damage. And for my own character, I was going full-on tank under the impression that bots don't pull well. Are you saying the bots do ok pulling? Or that monks aren't always dedicated healers?

Another thought. "Back in my day" certain pre-Searing items were worth a pretty penny, namely some dyes. These could be farmed early on and gave a substantial gold boost when sold post-searing. Is that still the case? Where can I get a reliable list of prices (to players) to work from?

Someone who has played a Warrior through all the campaigns will have to address the tanking issues. I do know that the mobs AI has been changed and it is harder for a warrior to take aggro and hold it. The mobs now run around you looking for the lower armor ratings, lower health, and your healers.

For the past 3 or 4 years, the only time I have a monk in my party, is for healing/protection, until I have 2 or 3 necros, or maybe a Restoration Ritualist. After that, I run a smite monk or 2 when dealing with a lot of undead. There are people that run Elementalists as healers. I mostly use the necros for heal/protect.

As far as the learning curve, I am not sure how to address that. In Prophecies, you level slower, less experience received as rewards for quests. In Factions and Nightfall, you receive more experience rewards, so you do level quicker, but Factions throws you into stronger mobs much sooner than the other 2. If you concentrate on all the quests and do a little extra mob killing, you will leave pre-searing, around level 6-8. In Factions and Nightfall, when you leave the beginner isles, you will be level 18-20. Early on in post-searing, you will still be fighting low level mobs. I would say, the first 14 of 25 missions are relatively easy. In Factions, the 3rd mission is a real challenge, and in Nightfall, the 4th mission is not easy your first time through.

Pre-searing dye drops- Dyes do drop frequently. All colors do drop, with orange and yellow filling my inventory quicker than the others. My experience shows that black dyes seem to drop more frequently than in post. I get one about every 10-15 hours of farming. Right now, there are people buying them up for as much as 13k each. They are the ectos of pre. White dyes are running in the 2k - 3k range, the others 10g to 200g. For best profitability, sell the black dyes in pre and take the others to post.

As a warrior, collect around 50 iron ingots, and the other classes, collect a few(10-15) tanned hide squares and some (5-10) bolts of cloth. These are for your first armor upgrades in post.

Don't make it too easy for her though, if you give her a role of mostly passively follow around and throwing some random spells, that's surely going to cause boredom.

Many women I played with were a lot more interested in the quests and scenery rather than just rush from point A to B. So take your time to enjoy the game and do the quests you come along.

As for builds there's basically. Starting with the mindless builds.
"1234.." - Just target something and hit the skills in sequence. With occational 5-6 or for buffs/enchantments.
"3654365635437645" - Builds designed where you can just mash keys on your keyboard. Not recommended for anything but monkeys.

Then there's of course the builds where you must pay attention to your environment. Interrupts comes to mind. This can be action based, or preventive. The preventive skills (ie. Shame/Guilt/Mistrust) are easier to learn and doesn't require quick reflexes.

All this said, here's some things she could do:

* Call targets. Hold CTRL, pick out the healer or target you want to kill quick, and CTRL-Space. Or Ctrl-Shift-Space if she's a support character staying away from foes.
* Enchantment removal, and spreading a bit conditions to soften up foes. Cracked armor, Weakened, or Deep Wound.
* Support role, removing hexes and conditions, maybe with prot skills like Aegis if party takes heavy damage, or Protective Spirit when a single player is, or about to take heavy damage.

Builds and Professions?
Some builds require a lot of setup and E-management which makes learning curve steeper. I would recommend starting with a Necromancer.

Why Necromancer?
- She can rely on passive E-management from Soul Reaping and thus just focus on other things.
- Necromancers can take on many different roles allowing her to try find a role that seems more fun.
- Female necromancers can be quite good looking. (hehe)

Did I say build? Ok, I'll make an easy Necromancer build using only Prophecies skills, and you can see if that's what you want or not.

Necro Protter

Or something more aggressive:
Necro Curses

I didn't add any elite skills and limited the skills to Prophecies, assuming you would begin there. They're by no means optimal meta-builds, but it might give you a start on what role she enjoys more.

I would say ele/monk as a good place to start (its where I did )
eles get to nuke stuff and in pre-searing have the best skills for doing so---
monk is a good 2ndary for just about anyone as you can put in a good rez (once you leave pre) and a healing skill (jic). As there are different elements for the eles I would try to stick to fire and the few fire skills that you get in prophecies --they are pretty good ones for a while there. Add skills when you can to that line (others will come thru quests).

necro would be my second choice only because eles have higher dps to start with, and the necro lines dont always work as well together (and ultimately making minions gets boring).
still would stick with monk as 2ndary in any case--its a good one to grab a heal from just in case your healer henchie decides to get themselves killed (Alesia you KNOW I am talking about you!)

though with more than one slot you can always let her try out ele, necro, or ranger and let her decide which she feels the most comfortable continuing on with (and you never know she might just go and make them anyways like I did for the fun of it).

Yes, Cosyfiep have some good advices, I suggest you follow that.
(I still miss playing with you Cosy, even if I'm guilty of my own advice, avoid rushing too fast from point A to B).

Forget about tanking. If all you do is load up on defensive skills the result will be foes running straight past you while you're completely unable to contribute. Unlike some other games, there's no (completely nonsensical) aggro button. A tank and spank approach works nicely when you structure the entire team to function that way, but even then running multiple defensive skills tends to be a waste. Fitting in a self heal is fine but I wouldn't recommend going further. What you should be aiming to do is pulling (requires nothing more than a longbow) and corner block when possible + necessary. A couple of prots from the Monk (or somebody running prot skills (which shouldn't be you)) such as Shielding Hands/Shield of Absorption and Protective Spirit will pretty much make anyone a tough target. Your focus should always be on killing things because that's your job.

Other than that, if you're concerned about how things are going to work out, you can always stay back in pre-searing a little longer than 'normal'. An extra level or two can make a big difference early on. It's not somewhere you can come back to so you'll want to enjoy it while it lasts anyway.

Would also recommend Necros, Eles and Rangers. What I enjoy most about them is the flexibility and number of different styles of build they can run.

Lots of really good advice here guys, I appreciate it.

I hadn't considered Necro for her, but with so many suggesting it I'll re-evaluate that one. I appreciated the builds, Bristlebane.

Perkunas, I think I would do Nightfall if I was by myself. Seems a little easier early on than Factions and gets Hero access quickly. But I think I'll stick to Prophecy for the reasons you outlined- easier early on. Good to know black dyes are still in high demand- I didn't want to farm them only to discover they're worth 500 gp or something.

I feel like I have some good ideas for what professions to have her try; now I need to figure out my build. If aggro control isn't a thing, then perhaps being a warrior is less important than I believed. Pulling can be done by anybody with a distance attack, right? So what profession do the bots perform the worst? What profession should I pick to help her have the most fun? (For her, fun is doing lots of damage and not dying- she isn't in to crazy combos or tweaking for the perfect build.)

Also, I had 4 characters on my account all these years and they all have a zillion of these birthday packages. I looked them up and seems they give miniatures. What the heck do I do with miniatures? Are they just for looks? I don't play GW2, so the Monument points-thing doesn't matter to me.

EDIT: Forgot to mention, but I'm a quest-guy myself, so taking time to "fetch the roses" will definitely happen. I feel no need to rush for super gear or lvl 20 or such. Also, a thought: would an ele/necro work out? I suspect the area damage spells will appeal to her, but necro offers some flexibility is she decides monk isn't for her.

Easy farm is actually runes. Go to the cave near Beacon's Perch and mass slaughter local troll population. Some of the boue runes have sky rocketed in price, some beyond 4000-6000 gold.

And if your accounts are new, don't forget to colkect your free 50 Tournament Reward Points, exchangable for 10 ZKeys. You should be able to sell keys for maybe 8-10k each. Check what others selling for first

Tournament reward points? ZKeys? Not familiar with either one. Seems I need some extra time reading stuff.

Read Notes section bottom of following wiki page, it explains how to collect your points.
After that exchange points to keys at Tolkano in Great Temple of Balthazar.
Tournament Reward Point

Zkeys, Zaishen Keys, are used to open a chest for random rewards. If you intend on working on Hall Of Monuments, you can save keys for that, otherwise other players are willing to pay 1 ecto per key, or about 8-11k depending on market. Personally I wouldn't sell lower than 10k each.

Personally i taught my GF to play a bit of GW on one of my alternate accounts while playing with me so i was in a similar boat once upon a time.

how i did it, being the more experienced gamer, i either played 1 of 3 proffessions, assassin-dervish-mesmer. i would run assassin imbagon (when she didnt run para) some weird and wacky varient of VoS spiker on derv or a bog standard shut down bar on a mesmer.

now i started off small, i taught my gf 2 really really easy rolls in the party but not so mind numbingly boring tht she wouldnt like it. i taught her to play paragon imbagon and actually contribute to the party while learning the real basics of GW play. the second one was Minion Master, this is a very easy roll and tbh the idea starting point imo, this teaches them to keep things going for instance a constant flow of minions using jagged bones as an elite, it helped her with the interface quite quickly aswell before i knew it she was figuring out death nova nuking the works, personally i would start here, teach her how to keep minions going then the fundamentals of death nova nuking, honour/wisdom placing (if using any sort of physical and wisdom helps mesmer nukers )

as far as necro goes it is fairly solid right from the start in most proffessions with minion builds available pretty much right from the off, imo its the best starting point for a less veteran gamer. and if yourr more seasoned ure fair more likely to get to grips with pulling and more essential roles in ure team so id give mesmer a try if i were u apart from that when your starting off like the others said cash in on ure z-keys make sure i research your drops before u sell them cheaply and have fun

if u need a hand at any point drop me a line

IGN : Alternate Wind /// Chronic Flames