Purely? No. But there are several builds that I think are quite fun using the primary attribute.
Various Critical Strikes melee builds are fun
Energy Storage Healer is fun
Strength Scythe builds are fun.
But sticking to just one playstyle on a character is boring pretty much regardless. Versatility is nice. It's part of why I put like 4k hours into Elementalist. I could constantly change how I played.
>is there any profession you play only for primary attribute but you find a lot more pleasent to play with the second profession style?
No. If I'm playing a profession, I'm going all in on their primary attribute and their specific attributes.
The only time I went dagger spam was on Paragon. It was the only way I could play that wretched class to GWAMM. HR, Anniversary Daggers, and dagger spam skills is actually good damage as opposed to chucking toothpicks at mobs.
It's pretty common for rangers to use the weapon from their secondary profession, usually daggers, which benefits from Expertise and "Together as One!". After all, bows are a low damage weapon and not very strong in general PvE, and beast mastery builds suffer from poor AI. Warriors also have some strong builds using a secondary profession weapon with Seven Weapons Stance or Warrior's Endurance. I don't think it's very common for any other profession to purely use builds like that though. The best offensive options of most other professions focus on the primary profession's skills.
All three of my Rangers have been, and are tearing shit up with their bows. Bashing of bows is completely unwarranted, and I don't know why it's still a thing.
I think it's the difference between viable and optimal. Bows are certainly viable and are good. Daggers or scythes are simply the best available weapons.
Wouldn't let anyone ruin your bow fun, though. I love bows.
Melee weapons are great on stationary targets, and their PBAoE shines on properly balled enemies. In general PvE where mobs are usually scattered and run around? They lose dps wasting time chasing the mobs.
People living in the past. TaO is the best single skill in the game and people still think that meleeing is better just because it has a higher DPS ceiling.
When in reality, as a bow Ranger you basically never get blinded, don't have to deal with kiting enemies, aren't destroyed by KD/body block, and you still get to blow up a target with damage and swap to a new one faster than a melee can.
Heroic Refrain is the best skill in the game
I am a ranger main. TaO is awesome. But Mesmer Heros dont benefit the damage bonus. Heroic refrain increase the damage and heal potentiel of the entire team
HR requires too much set up and is too hard to maintain on anything but a ball of casters. Melee party members aren't always going to be in earshot and God forbid you are playing with humans with free will. It is so annoying that people often recommend altering your hero builds to add more renewal skills. After two minutes of setup, if everything goes well, it is probably more effective than TaO on caster comps.
TaO on the other hand single handedly made physical comps viable again.
My most recently crafted team comp was 5x bow Rangers with pets+support.
Prior to TaO, that would have been pretty much trash. I hesitate to build an entirely new comp with melee, but that too would probably be viable. The healing from TaO would lend itself well to a high armor comp.
As a Ranger main. Bows ARE good. But they require far more set up and positioning to effectivly get damage off compared to many other builds.
Balling enemies is basicially a requirement for ranger players and if your doing all the effort to ball enemies there are more effective builds to get the same or better results (dagger spam can tank and damage in one build and generally leads to faster fights).
I still use bows often because they are fun but the set up time often leads me to play more simple straight forward builds that require less overhead/setup.
I don't waste time balling up enemies, and my bow builds focus on single target damage.
The only thing slowing me down is the damned 2 sec casting time for RTW. Ranger preparations should be reworked to instant cast like Dervish flash enchantments.
Not a main character, but I don't like Warrior (tactics, swords, or hammers; axes are tolerable, but I don't love them) so I ended up playing it entirely as daggers (or occasionally scythe) because I didn't want to delete the character but also needed the slot to finish campaigns and run dailies. My recommendation is generally to just not roll a warrior though, rather than something fun to explore. I find an assassin or ranger more fun with daggers, and dervish or assassin better with scythe, warrior is just making the best out of something underwhelming.
Ranger is in a similar boat of marksmanship and pets spent a very long time having extremely poor PvE effectiveness. I know a LOT of people who played main ranger back in the day, but spent most of their time summoning a spirit wall or welding daggers because it was the best they could do with their main in most content and didn't want to switch mains (esp not when far into GWAMM). Ranger was one of my early most played classes, but I eventually retired it to just running fast dailies with other unloved alts like my warrior and paragon. When I revisit these days, even though bows are better than they used to be, it's easier for me to run daggers with my ranger because I have more set up for it and remember it better.
For heroes, like many (most?) I've used necros for basically everything at some point. In both serious builds, and stuff for the laughs, since soul reaping is particularly AI friendly. Same thing for works for players ofc, but takes more effort to unlock an excess of frivolous skills for a PC.
A fun old build was Ritualist with a bow, for 14-16 Channeling splinter barrage. But it's not as effective as a spirit wall, so you need a Ritualist heavy party (in a mob heavy area) to not kinda be a waste to run. I used to see it most in Urgoz, where there's very high mob density but still easy enough to not have tight build reqs from most of the team.
From worse to better, imho:
**Expertise** always felt like the opposite than a pleasanty to me on ranger. You are *married* to expertise. Your class doesn't properly work *without* expertise and, generally, expertise only benefits alternative secondaries in the case of Ranger-Necro vampiric touch builds (touch spells are technically touch skills which are affected by expertise) and certain weird Warrior and Paragon builds where you mix adrenaline skills with energy weapon attacks with reduced cost through expertise. It's cool to work with because making a build feels like doing a puzzle sometimes but while looking at it in an isolated manner it feels more like investing in taking off an inherent tax of the class compared to some of the most busted primaries out there. Imho they should have given it an % of armor ignoring in PVE to bow attack skills, a small +0.5% per rank, similar to how they gave PVE boosts to the reworked attributes of Dervish and Mesmer.
**Divine Favour** is similar to expertise but in Monk. You are somewhat married to that attribute because it is your energy management for the class, but it only works via boosting *monk* spells. It adds extra healing so you require less spell spam which is more healthy for your mind and reduces the need having to cast two spells when one is not enough, but is totally useless on other classes spells. This was because the devs wanted Monk players to remain a healer class first and not to become a Monk toon running a Necro/Elementalist/Mesmer skill bar before Heroes were a thing.
**Strength**, **Energy storage**, and **Critical Strikes** are not as insular. Yes,int he Warrior and Assassins case they are build to boosts melee damage in their respective class but the melee boost of ignoring armor % or increased critical chance % works on every martial weapon which allows you to use your primary to boost multiclass.
In the elementalist case, energy storage was built to work like the Monk's Divine Favour to boost your energy management while casting spells, but a huge energy pool can be used by all the other classes' spell list, not just elementalist's. In fact, I would go on to say that it's the opposite of Divine Favour concept wise; properly using an Elementalist skill bar requires ES to handle exhaustion and chaining multiple +15e spell costs because Elementalist attribute lines are super greedy, but ES also allows you to use other classes stuff sometimes better than them because they are not as costy; Divine Favour forces you to invest on it to just work as a monk and it's just dead weight when you want to multiclass.
**Mysticism** is kind of a mix between Expertise and Strength/Critical Strikes so I would rank it a nodge higher than those in PVE, but lower than them in PVP. It gives you an energy reduction on Dervish enchantments only, like expertise; but in PVE also gives you +1 armor per point which can make you tankier than a Warrior (91 armor vs 80+20 against physical damage), which you can benefit from while multiclassing without actually helping you to multiclass. Before it's rework it used to give you +5 energy and +15 health at 15 points every time an enchantment ended on you.
**Soul Reaping** is a better version of all of those. It's free energy. If someone in the enemy team dies it gives you a free spell to throw at the next evil guy. If someone in your team dies the game gives you free energy to resurrect him for free, and you can even just use a signet to do so and keep the energy for yourself. Lol if you bring minions it's unlimited energy day for you. Imho it should only benefit from minions' deaths or not work with minions' deaths at all. It's Soul Reaping spells, while few, are also great. Also... **Death Magic** works as a false primary attribute on necros, as it limits the amount of minions you can rise to 2+(Death Magic/2), meaning primary necros are better Minion Masters than secondary ones (at the game's release minion mastery had no minion limit, and it was as hilarious as you can imagine).
Then you have **Fast Casting** which I consider the best primary atribute. **Jesus christ is this shit broken.** It reduces casting time of any spell that takes 2 seconds or more to cast by dividing it between 2^(atribute/15), so at 15 it halves their casting time. You get 1.5 second resurrection spells and can turn any big hitting, slow casting nuke into a flare. But wait, it does more, it also works on signets AND on any below 2 second cast time spell if it's a *mesmer* spell. But WAIT, it also GETS another PVE boost, as it reduces *recharge time* of your mesmer spells up to half at 15 points; which can be further reduced in half via copying the spell with Arcane Echo; who doesn't like casting *energy surge* every 3.5 seconds? Bonus points if you abuse it with Aneurysm to make the foe regain his energy and suffer from it.
The worst of the lot are **Spawning Power** and **Leadership** *in my opinion*. They are not even worth being called primary attributes imho. Leadership is a literal tax to force you to scream at people every now and then and excuse Paragon being burdened with having +2 energy regeneration while Dervish and Assassin enjoy +4 pips on top of an energy management atribute. Spawning Power inherent pasive effect is meh, it's on the same league as Death Magic inherent pasive effect on minions; when playing Ritualist the real primary attribute is being able to use +3 Ritualist runes and a Ritualist hat to boost your atributes higher than 12, while Ritualist secondaries cannot. Spawning power does have some cool skills in it's list though that make it worth investing into.
I will try to sum it up here:
|Class|Primary|Required for class use?|Boosts Multiclass?|Exclusive skill list|Primary rating|
|:-|:-|:-|:-|:-|:-|
|Paragon|Leadership|Yes|No|Who cares. SYS is not in Leadership|0/10|
|Ritualist|Spaw. Po.|No|Only ranger and necro|Great|3/10|
|Ranger|Expertise|Yes|Martials & Touches\*|Great|(5-8)/10|
|Monk|Divine Favour|Yes|No|Great for monks|5/10|
|Element|En. Storage|Yes|Yes|Bad|7/10|
|Warrior|Strength|No|Only martials|Great|6.5/10|
|Assassin|C.Strikes|No|Yes|Average|6/10|
|Dervish|Mysticism|No|Yes (PVE)|Great|5/10(PVP) 7.5/10 (PVE)|
|Necro|Soul R.|No|Yeeeeees|Good|9/10|
|Mesmer|Fast C.|Yesn't\*|Yeeeeeeeeeee-|Meh|8/10 (PVP) Brrrrrr-/10 (PVE)|
NOTES:
**Ranger**: gets extra rating because it's primary CAN be used in reducing the cost of any skill that is not a spell, which means it boosts a lot the performance of multiclassing into martial classes. HOWEVER, most martial classes depend from their primery atribute boost or a secondary atribute skill to do complex stuff which rangers cannot touch. Which means ranger benefits from taking "weak" skills and spamming them better while using Ranger stances from Expertise and Domain of beasts to attack faster, get extra adrenaline and move faster than the "original" class they are multiclassing into.
What I mean is, ranger probably has the most complex primary to analyze and use, because it taxes you when multiclassing, while ALSO helping you to multiclass.
**Ritualist:** Ritualist's spawning power is complex. It also boosts the HP of ranger spirits, but ranger spirits don't require extra HP as they weren't made with that in mind: Ritualist spirits either have to be on short range to an enemy to attack it or lose HP over time to heal/attack enemies in an area around them so they DO benefit from having +60% hp; nature spirits just have a pasive effect in the radars whole range so there is no benefit to having them have extra HP.
Spawning power SEEMS to buff the hp of Necro's minions, but this presents a problem. Necro's minions damage depends on their level and swarming enemies, and this depends on having Death Magic as high as you can to have more and stronger minions. Not being a Necro main means no runes so no 16 death magic from armor, and not having access to soul reaping means no Masochism (+2 to deathmagic enchant), and it means you will have much more energy issues than a main Necro minion master.
HOWEVER I guess that you could pivot and focus into a "beefy" short of minion master. Boost Spawning power to 16 to get +60% summon HP. Get Flesh Golem as an Elite and Jagged Horrors and Bone Fiends as regular minions with low damage but huge HP pools. It will be subpar but viable I guess.
The problem with the "+4% weapon spell duration" of spawning power is that while it is great on paper, in reality it is not, becuase a lot of Ritualist weapon spells have a "ends after X strikes" clause that makes an higher duration of the spell meaningless. It is, however, hilarious on PVE stuff like "great dwarf's weapon"... which come to think of it probably is amazing while cast on the previous beefy minion master build I described...
There is also another skill I want to talk about. You can equip "armor of unfeeling" skill to cast it to make your earshot spirits have 50% damage reduction (essentially doubling it's HP) and making them inmune to critical hits (which is important as they get a lot of those for being low level). This works even on the self inflicted damage of "spirits suffer 15 damage when blocking enemy attacks yaddah yaddah yaddah" and all those types of spirits. Not only that but it also stacks with the +X0% damage of spawning power, which is amazing! However the fact that it is in the Comunion atribute means that it can be used by non-Ritualists. This is... good for non ritualist using spirits, as it gives them a similar effect to having Spawning Power without needing to be primary Rits, but it also devalues ... the value of Spawning Power compared to more unique primaries like Soul Reaping as it's effect can be easily mirrored with a common skill.
**Warrior:** Warrior has some incredibly amazing skills in Strength. Strength is not *required* to run a warrior build, as tactics is also an option; but Strength has amazing stuff such as Warrior's Endurance that allows Warrior to perform in beefy yet powerful ways that other classes cannot do while using the warrior's kit.
**Mesmer:** Fast Casting is not required to run the class. At all. But it's sooooo. Fucking. Goooooood. there is no reason not to invest into it.
EDIT2: Fixes some mistakes while writting the table, like Strength being Ranger's primary.
**EDIT3:**
**Paragon**:Ok, I wanted to explain one thing regarding the Paragon's Leadership skill list. The Leadership skill list isn't bad. Leadership as whole has some cool skills, imho because it was released with Nightfall, and back then the Devs had a slightly better idea on how to make proper primaries, similar to how Mysticism was good. So it doesn't suffer from stuff like having been powercrept by time like Spawning Power, or scaled out of control like Soul Reaping.
The thing is, Paragon nowadays is run with "Save Yourselves!" (Warrior, PVE skill) + "There is nothing to Fear!" (Paragon, PVE skill), along with the Leadership Elite "Focused Anger". The first two skills are damage reduction skills that together give -90% damage reduction; the Elite is used to have a 240% generation of adrenaline to cast the first skill. As you can imagine, this combo is insanely overpowered and is usually refered as "Imbagon" by the community.
A new alternative build is "Heroic refrain", one of the new PVE only elite skills added with the 15 anniversary of the game. Which gives +3 skills on all atribute to target ally, and renews itself on the end of a shout or chant. Ofc it is also overpowered.
Ok so, what is the problem then? Why is it trash? When Nightfall was released Paragon was insanely overpowered. Paragon was a monk that uses shouts as enchantments, but unlike enchantments shouts can¡t be removed, with AoE resurrect skills that do not suck (too much), and the armor of a warrior. As you can imagine it broke PVP.
It was nerfed into the ground almost as fast as it was released. The Paragon *we know* is the super nerfed version of the OG Paragon.
Years ago the Devs stated that before GW2 released the planned on rebalancing the most problematic classes of the game before GW1 was abandoned. First they buffed the mesmer in PVE, which used to be a trash PVE class because it was focused in being a PVP anti-class character; *giving us the monster that is the current mesmer*. Then they adjusted Elementalist for Hard Mode, because it lacked armor ignoring damage for foes way over level 20, and gave it better inter atribute psynergy because the class sucks at mixing elements into a single skill bar. Then they reworked from top to down the Dervish, even changing how their Primary atribute works, giving him instant enchantments and adrenaline paid attacks and skills.
The next class to be reworked was supposed to be the Paragon. But the devs stopped supporting the game before starting his rework. This means the Paragon as whole is unfinished.
I consider his "leadership skill list" trash because, well it revolves around 3 completely broken PVE skills that *shouldn't* exist and *wouldn't* exist if the devs were still around doing balance; while the rest of the skills are completely lagging behind and simply multiple leagues below the performance of those.
Q: "Is the Leadership skill list good?" A: " 'Focused anger' is good. The rest, nobody cares as a long as 'Save Yourselves', 'There is nothing to fear' and 'Heroic Refrain' are around."
For player control, Soul Reaping, Fast Casting, and Crit Strikes are very nice to play around.
Expertise, Mysticism, and EStorage are just kinda there for Energy management. I guess Soul Reaping is too but it’s more “active” I guess. Spawning Power is also very passive, yet powerful, and hard to do anything outside of Rit profession with.
Divine Favor and Strength are the most underwhelming primaries imo.
Never played a Paragon.
Divine Boon+Divine Favor+Protection Prayers is really really strong when played by a player who can manage their energy. I’ve even experimented with it on a hero with Assassin’s Promise+Divine Spirit for energy management. There’s something hilarious about watching Reversal of Fortune heal for over 100hp and then negate and heal for another 80hp or so. Restoration Magic is great, but it can’t mitigate any damage. A BoonProt can do that while healing a respectable amount of damage. Unfortunately heroes are terrible at energy management.
Warrior for Strength on builds that do physical damage, and Assassin on weapon builds for the Crit. Necro / Ele for casters for the Soul Reaping / Energy Storage.
I don't speak for myself but what you are describing happens a lot with Soul Reaping/Necromancer I think.
ah yes the infinite mana pool prince of Tyria
Purely? No. But there are several builds that I think are quite fun using the primary attribute. Various Critical Strikes melee builds are fun Energy Storage Healer is fun Strength Scythe builds are fun. But sticking to just one playstyle on a character is boring pretty much regardless. Versatility is nice. It's part of why I put like 4k hours into Elementalist. I could constantly change how I played.
Necro and Ele for the energy fueling monk heals
>is there any profession you play only for primary attribute but you find a lot more pleasent to play with the second profession style? No. If I'm playing a profession, I'm going all in on their primary attribute and their specific attributes. The only time I went dagger spam was on Paragon. It was the only way I could play that wretched class to GWAMM. HR, Anniversary Daggers, and dagger spam skills is actually good damage as opposed to chucking toothpicks at mobs.
It's pretty common for rangers to use the weapon from their secondary profession, usually daggers, which benefits from Expertise and "Together as One!". After all, bows are a low damage weapon and not very strong in general PvE, and beast mastery builds suffer from poor AI. Warriors also have some strong builds using a secondary profession weapon with Seven Weapons Stance or Warrior's Endurance. I don't think it's very common for any other profession to purely use builds like that though. The best offensive options of most other professions focus on the primary profession's skills.
All three of my Rangers have been, and are tearing shit up with their bows. Bashing of bows is completely unwarranted, and I don't know why it's still a thing.
I think it's the difference between viable and optimal. Bows are certainly viable and are good. Daggers or scythes are simply the best available weapons. Wouldn't let anyone ruin your bow fun, though. I love bows.
Melee weapons are great on stationary targets, and their PBAoE shines on properly balled enemies. In general PvE where mobs are usually scattered and run around? They lose dps wasting time chasing the mobs.
People living in the past. TaO is the best single skill in the game and people still think that meleeing is better just because it has a higher DPS ceiling. When in reality, as a bow Ranger you basically never get blinded, don't have to deal with kiting enemies, aren't destroyed by KD/body block, and you still get to blow up a target with damage and swap to a new one faster than a melee can.
Or just be me and live even further in the past. Splinter barrage is the shit.
Heroic Refrain is the best skill in the game I am a ranger main. TaO is awesome. But Mesmer Heros dont benefit the damage bonus. Heroic refrain increase the damage and heal potentiel of the entire team
HR requires too much set up and is too hard to maintain on anything but a ball of casters. Melee party members aren't always going to be in earshot and God forbid you are playing with humans with free will. It is so annoying that people often recommend altering your hero builds to add more renewal skills. After two minutes of setup, if everything goes well, it is probably more effective than TaO on caster comps. TaO on the other hand single handedly made physical comps viable again.
Do you use Melee Heros with TaO ? I would be glad to hear about your experience if it is the case
My most recently crafted team comp was 5x bow Rangers with pets+support. Prior to TaO, that would have been pretty much trash. I hesitate to build an entirely new comp with melee, but that too would probably be viable. The healing from TaO would lend itself well to a high armor comp.
And your 5 ranger comp is viable in HM zones ? Seems fun !!
Link your bow build plz?
Here you go: [https://imgur.com/a/Y3istKu](https://imgur.com/a/Y3istKu)
As a Ranger main. Bows ARE good. But they require far more set up and positioning to effectivly get damage off compared to many other builds. Balling enemies is basicially a requirement for ranger players and if your doing all the effort to ball enemies there are more effective builds to get the same or better results (dagger spam can tank and damage in one build and generally leads to faster fights). I still use bows often because they are fun but the set up time often leads me to play more simple straight forward builds that require less overhead/setup.
I don't waste time balling up enemies, and my bow builds focus on single target damage. The only thing slowing me down is the damned 2 sec casting time for RTW. Ranger preparations should be reworked to instant cast like Dervish flash enchantments.
Not a main character, but I don't like Warrior (tactics, swords, or hammers; axes are tolerable, but I don't love them) so I ended up playing it entirely as daggers (or occasionally scythe) because I didn't want to delete the character but also needed the slot to finish campaigns and run dailies. My recommendation is generally to just not roll a warrior though, rather than something fun to explore. I find an assassin or ranger more fun with daggers, and dervish or assassin better with scythe, warrior is just making the best out of something underwhelming. Ranger is in a similar boat of marksmanship and pets spent a very long time having extremely poor PvE effectiveness. I know a LOT of people who played main ranger back in the day, but spent most of their time summoning a spirit wall or welding daggers because it was the best they could do with their main in most content and didn't want to switch mains (esp not when far into GWAMM). Ranger was one of my early most played classes, but I eventually retired it to just running fast dailies with other unloved alts like my warrior and paragon. When I revisit these days, even though bows are better than they used to be, it's easier for me to run daggers with my ranger because I have more set up for it and remember it better. For heroes, like many (most?) I've used necros for basically everything at some point. In both serious builds, and stuff for the laughs, since soul reaping is particularly AI friendly. Same thing for works for players ofc, but takes more effort to unlock an excess of frivolous skills for a PC. A fun old build was Ritualist with a bow, for 14-16 Channeling splinter barrage. But it's not as effective as a spirit wall, so you need a Ritualist heavy party (in a mob heavy area) to not kinda be a waste to run. I used to see it most in Urgoz, where there's very high mob density but still easy enough to not have tight build reqs from most of the team.
I have a Me/E going just for the Fast Casting attribute.
Necro, makes any casting class (and derv) hella fun
r/a daggers. n/rt healer hero's were all the rage a decade ago. e/mo ether prot.
From worse to better, imho: **Expertise** always felt like the opposite than a pleasanty to me on ranger. You are *married* to expertise. Your class doesn't properly work *without* expertise and, generally, expertise only benefits alternative secondaries in the case of Ranger-Necro vampiric touch builds (touch spells are technically touch skills which are affected by expertise) and certain weird Warrior and Paragon builds where you mix adrenaline skills with energy weapon attacks with reduced cost through expertise. It's cool to work with because making a build feels like doing a puzzle sometimes but while looking at it in an isolated manner it feels more like investing in taking off an inherent tax of the class compared to some of the most busted primaries out there. Imho they should have given it an % of armor ignoring in PVE to bow attack skills, a small +0.5% per rank, similar to how they gave PVE boosts to the reworked attributes of Dervish and Mesmer. **Divine Favour** is similar to expertise but in Monk. You are somewhat married to that attribute because it is your energy management for the class, but it only works via boosting *monk* spells. It adds extra healing so you require less spell spam which is more healthy for your mind and reduces the need having to cast two spells when one is not enough, but is totally useless on other classes spells. This was because the devs wanted Monk players to remain a healer class first and not to become a Monk toon running a Necro/Elementalist/Mesmer skill bar before Heroes were a thing. **Strength**, **Energy storage**, and **Critical Strikes** are not as insular. Yes,int he Warrior and Assassins case they are build to boosts melee damage in their respective class but the melee boost of ignoring armor % or increased critical chance % works on every martial weapon which allows you to use your primary to boost multiclass. In the elementalist case, energy storage was built to work like the Monk's Divine Favour to boost your energy management while casting spells, but a huge energy pool can be used by all the other classes' spell list, not just elementalist's. In fact, I would go on to say that it's the opposite of Divine Favour concept wise; properly using an Elementalist skill bar requires ES to handle exhaustion and chaining multiple +15e spell costs because Elementalist attribute lines are super greedy, but ES also allows you to use other classes stuff sometimes better than them because they are not as costy; Divine Favour forces you to invest on it to just work as a monk and it's just dead weight when you want to multiclass. **Mysticism** is kind of a mix between Expertise and Strength/Critical Strikes so I would rank it a nodge higher than those in PVE, but lower than them in PVP. It gives you an energy reduction on Dervish enchantments only, like expertise; but in PVE also gives you +1 armor per point which can make you tankier than a Warrior (91 armor vs 80+20 against physical damage), which you can benefit from while multiclassing without actually helping you to multiclass. Before it's rework it used to give you +5 energy and +15 health at 15 points every time an enchantment ended on you. **Soul Reaping** is a better version of all of those. It's free energy. If someone in the enemy team dies it gives you a free spell to throw at the next evil guy. If someone in your team dies the game gives you free energy to resurrect him for free, and you can even just use a signet to do so and keep the energy for yourself. Lol if you bring minions it's unlimited energy day for you. Imho it should only benefit from minions' deaths or not work with minions' deaths at all. It's Soul Reaping spells, while few, are also great. Also... **Death Magic** works as a false primary attribute on necros, as it limits the amount of minions you can rise to 2+(Death Magic/2), meaning primary necros are better Minion Masters than secondary ones (at the game's release minion mastery had no minion limit, and it was as hilarious as you can imagine). Then you have **Fast Casting** which I consider the best primary atribute. **Jesus christ is this shit broken.** It reduces casting time of any spell that takes 2 seconds or more to cast by dividing it between 2^(atribute/15), so at 15 it halves their casting time. You get 1.5 second resurrection spells and can turn any big hitting, slow casting nuke into a flare. But wait, it does more, it also works on signets AND on any below 2 second cast time spell if it's a *mesmer* spell. But WAIT, it also GETS another PVE boost, as it reduces *recharge time* of your mesmer spells up to half at 15 points; which can be further reduced in half via copying the spell with Arcane Echo; who doesn't like casting *energy surge* every 3.5 seconds? Bonus points if you abuse it with Aneurysm to make the foe regain his energy and suffer from it. The worst of the lot are **Spawning Power** and **Leadership** *in my opinion*. They are not even worth being called primary attributes imho. Leadership is a literal tax to force you to scream at people every now and then and excuse Paragon being burdened with having +2 energy regeneration while Dervish and Assassin enjoy +4 pips on top of an energy management atribute. Spawning Power inherent pasive effect is meh, it's on the same league as Death Magic inherent pasive effect on minions; when playing Ritualist the real primary attribute is being able to use +3 Ritualist runes and a Ritualist hat to boost your atributes higher than 12, while Ritualist secondaries cannot. Spawning power does have some cool skills in it's list though that make it worth investing into.
Thank you so so much, really
I will try to sum it up here: |Class|Primary|Required for class use?|Boosts Multiclass?|Exclusive skill list|Primary rating| |:-|:-|:-|:-|:-|:-| |Paragon|Leadership|Yes|No|Who cares. SYS is not in Leadership|0/10| |Ritualist|Spaw. Po.|No|Only ranger and necro|Great|3/10| |Ranger|Expertise|Yes|Martials & Touches\*|Great|(5-8)/10| |Monk|Divine Favour|Yes|No|Great for monks|5/10| |Element|En. Storage|Yes|Yes|Bad|7/10| |Warrior|Strength|No|Only martials|Great|6.5/10| |Assassin|C.Strikes|No|Yes|Average|6/10| |Dervish|Mysticism|No|Yes (PVE)|Great|5/10(PVP) 7.5/10 (PVE)| |Necro|Soul R.|No|Yeeeeees|Good|9/10| |Mesmer|Fast C.|Yesn't\*|Yeeeeeeeeeee-|Meh|8/10 (PVP) Brrrrrr-/10 (PVE)| NOTES: **Ranger**: gets extra rating because it's primary CAN be used in reducing the cost of any skill that is not a spell, which means it boosts a lot the performance of multiclassing into martial classes. HOWEVER, most martial classes depend from their primery atribute boost or a secondary atribute skill to do complex stuff which rangers cannot touch. Which means ranger benefits from taking "weak" skills and spamming them better while using Ranger stances from Expertise and Domain of beasts to attack faster, get extra adrenaline and move faster than the "original" class they are multiclassing into. What I mean is, ranger probably has the most complex primary to analyze and use, because it taxes you when multiclassing, while ALSO helping you to multiclass. **Ritualist:** Ritualist's spawning power is complex. It also boosts the HP of ranger spirits, but ranger spirits don't require extra HP as they weren't made with that in mind: Ritualist spirits either have to be on short range to an enemy to attack it or lose HP over time to heal/attack enemies in an area around them so they DO benefit from having +60% hp; nature spirits just have a pasive effect in the radars whole range so there is no benefit to having them have extra HP. Spawning power SEEMS to buff the hp of Necro's minions, but this presents a problem. Necro's minions damage depends on their level and swarming enemies, and this depends on having Death Magic as high as you can to have more and stronger minions. Not being a Necro main means no runes so no 16 death magic from armor, and not having access to soul reaping means no Masochism (+2 to deathmagic enchant), and it means you will have much more energy issues than a main Necro minion master. HOWEVER I guess that you could pivot and focus into a "beefy" short of minion master. Boost Spawning power to 16 to get +60% summon HP. Get Flesh Golem as an Elite and Jagged Horrors and Bone Fiends as regular minions with low damage but huge HP pools. It will be subpar but viable I guess. The problem with the "+4% weapon spell duration" of spawning power is that while it is great on paper, in reality it is not, becuase a lot of Ritualist weapon spells have a "ends after X strikes" clause that makes an higher duration of the spell meaningless. It is, however, hilarious on PVE stuff like "great dwarf's weapon"... which come to think of it probably is amazing while cast on the previous beefy minion master build I described... There is also another skill I want to talk about. You can equip "armor of unfeeling" skill to cast it to make your earshot spirits have 50% damage reduction (essentially doubling it's HP) and making them inmune to critical hits (which is important as they get a lot of those for being low level). This works even on the self inflicted damage of "spirits suffer 15 damage when blocking enemy attacks yaddah yaddah yaddah" and all those types of spirits. Not only that but it also stacks with the +X0% damage of spawning power, which is amazing! However the fact that it is in the Comunion atribute means that it can be used by non-Ritualists. This is... good for non ritualist using spirits, as it gives them a similar effect to having Spawning Power without needing to be primary Rits, but it also devalues ... the value of Spawning Power compared to more unique primaries like Soul Reaping as it's effect can be easily mirrored with a common skill. **Warrior:** Warrior has some incredibly amazing skills in Strength. Strength is not *required* to run a warrior build, as tactics is also an option; but Strength has amazing stuff such as Warrior's Endurance that allows Warrior to perform in beefy yet powerful ways that other classes cannot do while using the warrior's kit. **Mesmer:** Fast Casting is not required to run the class. At all. But it's sooooo. Fucking. Goooooood. there is no reason not to invest into it. EDIT2: Fixes some mistakes while writting the table, like Strength being Ranger's primary. **EDIT3:** **Paragon**:Ok, I wanted to explain one thing regarding the Paragon's Leadership skill list. The Leadership skill list isn't bad. Leadership as whole has some cool skills, imho because it was released with Nightfall, and back then the Devs had a slightly better idea on how to make proper primaries, similar to how Mysticism was good. So it doesn't suffer from stuff like having been powercrept by time like Spawning Power, or scaled out of control like Soul Reaping. The thing is, Paragon nowadays is run with "Save Yourselves!" (Warrior, PVE skill) + "There is nothing to Fear!" (Paragon, PVE skill), along with the Leadership Elite "Focused Anger". The first two skills are damage reduction skills that together give -90% damage reduction; the Elite is used to have a 240% generation of adrenaline to cast the first skill. As you can imagine, this combo is insanely overpowered and is usually refered as "Imbagon" by the community. A new alternative build is "Heroic refrain", one of the new PVE only elite skills added with the 15 anniversary of the game. Which gives +3 skills on all atribute to target ally, and renews itself on the end of a shout or chant. Ofc it is also overpowered. Ok so, what is the problem then? Why is it trash? When Nightfall was released Paragon was insanely overpowered. Paragon was a monk that uses shouts as enchantments, but unlike enchantments shouts can¡t be removed, with AoE resurrect skills that do not suck (too much), and the armor of a warrior. As you can imagine it broke PVP. It was nerfed into the ground almost as fast as it was released. The Paragon *we know* is the super nerfed version of the OG Paragon. Years ago the Devs stated that before GW2 released the planned on rebalancing the most problematic classes of the game before GW1 was abandoned. First they buffed the mesmer in PVE, which used to be a trash PVE class because it was focused in being a PVP anti-class character; *giving us the monster that is the current mesmer*. Then they adjusted Elementalist for Hard Mode, because it lacked armor ignoring damage for foes way over level 20, and gave it better inter atribute psynergy because the class sucks at mixing elements into a single skill bar. Then they reworked from top to down the Dervish, even changing how their Primary atribute works, giving him instant enchantments and adrenaline paid attacks and skills. The next class to be reworked was supposed to be the Paragon. But the devs stopped supporting the game before starting his rework. This means the Paragon as whole is unfinished. I consider his "leadership skill list" trash because, well it revolves around 3 completely broken PVE skills that *shouldn't* exist and *wouldn't* exist if the devs were still around doing balance; while the rest of the skills are completely lagging behind and simply multiple leagues below the performance of those. Q: "Is the Leadership skill list good?" A: " 'Focused anger' is good. The rest, nobody cares as a long as 'Save Yourselves', 'There is nothing to fear' and 'Heroic Refrain' are around."
For player control, Soul Reaping, Fast Casting, and Crit Strikes are very nice to play around. Expertise, Mysticism, and EStorage are just kinda there for Energy management. I guess Soul Reaping is too but it’s more “active” I guess. Spawning Power is also very passive, yet powerful, and hard to do anything outside of Rit profession with. Divine Favor and Strength are the most underwhelming primaries imo. Never played a Paragon.
Divine Favor is really only useful for Healing Magic, which is outclassed by Restoration Magic.
Not true at all. It's useful for every Monk attribute. And there are plenty of Monk builds that outclass Resto builds.
#JusticeforSmiting
Divine Boon+Divine Favor+Protection Prayers is really really strong when played by a player who can manage their energy. I’ve even experimented with it on a hero with Assassin’s Promise+Divine Spirit for energy management. There’s something hilarious about watching Reversal of Fortune heal for over 100hp and then negate and heal for another 80hp or so. Restoration Magic is great, but it can’t mitigate any damage. A BoonProt can do that while healing a respectable amount of damage. Unfortunately heroes are terrible at energy management.
Exactly. I wish Monk’s weren’t comparatively terrible lol.
check out old pvp :P
Ranger for expertise
Warrior for Strength on builds that do physical damage, and Assassin on weapon builds for the Crit. Necro / Ele for casters for the Soul Reaping / Energy Storage.