Primary vs Secondary profession with skill sets analysis Part II

Warrior:
Primary attribute
Strength.

Basis for many of warrior's skills, especially his running duration skills. With loads of strength, the warrior becomes a distance runner.

In addition, every level of strength adds to the warriors critical hit chance with weapons, so in effect strength adds to overall damage of a warrior in addition to his weapon choice, equipment, and skills.

Warrior Armor: is quite simply the best in terms of armor rating and damage reduction. Looks? Arguable. Caster +energy +energy regen bonuses? None, but it does the job its suited for--protection via damage reduction.

Warriors have many status and condition inducing attacks centered around their weapons of choice, either axe, sword or hammer. In addition, there are advanced skills that require various enemy conditions to be effective, such as knockdown--which Hammer warriors can easily achieve.

Warriors weapon based skill attacks are sometimes based on adrenaline, which is charged by the warrior hitting the enemy, or being attacked from said enemy.

Warriors also have tactical shouts which enhance armor or speed of nearby allies, and many defensive stances that allow the warrior to spring into or out of battle, or hold their ground with +evade +block +parry a high percentage of ranged, melee or a combination of both attacks. These defensive stance skills sometimes requiring shields or swords to function.

Ranger:
Primary attribute:
Marksmanship

Armor: Rangers have the second best armor in the game, and can be easily customized against elemental damage. Some +energy regeneration, some +max energy, good armor rating, and +elemental armor. What's to complain about? Not as much as pure casters, but overall very good.

In terms of primary attributes, Ranger's sort of gimped. Marksmanship doesn't do much, and I've seen marksmanship on a secondary ranger--basically where it doesn't belong. Ranger should have a primary attribute exclusively to their own Primary that does something in addition for rangers.

This is not the case, however Rangers get very useful attributes in general. Beast mastery does a myriad of effects increasing critical and normal hit chance of your pets in addition to helping all those much needed beast mastery pet skills. Expertise reduces preperation time for many bow skills.

Many bow based skills that do +damage of various types, AoE, over time (poison + burning), and do status attacks like cripple.

Traps skills, which means mines. Very interesting. AoE Damage layed down on areas with a delayed contact charge. I like it.

Pets: Wolves, Lynx, Warthog and Moa bird. Many beast mastery skills. Basically your own personal frankenstein animal, as it can be ressurrected without penalty and tank better than most warriors! Not superb damage from pets, but very reasonable. Watch out for Beastmasters, they rock.

Rangers are also Escape artists. Rangers have a few skills that both increase speed and dodge/evade attacks for short periods of time. These become very useful in hairy situations. Outrunning rocks. Outrunning AND auto-dodging enemy arrow fire has saved my ranger's cute bum many many times. No arrow stuck in that soft fleshy bottom! Not as many, anyway.


Monk.
Primary Attribute: Divine Favor
This gives a bonus to healing, but there is rumour and reports of a bug that this bonus heal does not always properly work, in particular with healing targets other than yourself. As such, this attribute may be bugged, and I cannot recommend using Monk as Primary at this time.

There are many useful protection and healing skills as a monk. I highly recommend monk as a secondary to Me/Mo or El/Mo, to focus as a healer type.

Most noteworthy skill at this moment:
Vengeance resurrection: 8 second cast time, ranged. Ally is ressurrected for only 30 seconds, then dies and suffers no death penalty while alive this way. Not very useful? He is resurrected with FULL HEALTH and ENERGY. 100% health isn'tvery useful for fighting if he's only going to live 30 seconds, but it is of greater use to pull that corpse out of hairy situations.

Imagine the corpse deep into enemy territory surrounded by mobs. With Vengeance, this is not a problem if your monk with vengeance can safely angle a cast. Once alive, he'd better be instructed to run to safety as far as possible. Of course, the nastier the situation, the less he'll be able to run, but eventually his corpse will be able to run somewhere safe.


Necromancer
Primary Attribute: Soul Reaping

Gain mana for each death? I am unsure from memory at this time. This will be corrected.

I'm afraid I am less familiar with Necromancers than the other professions. Necromancers are another 'advanced profession' which I do not recommend to newbies to set as their primary, as they do not do much visible damage, nor have obvious supportive defensive capabiilties.

They have a variety of hexes, curses, land life siphoning skills which can be a boon to warriors. Their skills do not output a whole lot of damage by themselves, but can hold their own in tanking terms and additionally may summon minions and cause other interesting effects from corpses.

I need a necromancer expert to write this one.

Forthcoming: Further skill analysis of warriors, rangers and monks

http://realmsbeyond.net/gw/strat.php?subaction=showfull&id=1107830747&archive=&start_from=&ucat=25&