Don't Blame The Monk

Last night I caught a quick pick-up game in Kryta, Guild War's land to the west of Ascalon. I had spent some time wandering around but decided to do one of the cooperative missions.

It didn't go so well. The Gates of Kryta is a mission plagued by the undead and some of them fairly potent. I spent a lot of my time dead, and the point of contention here was that I was the only healer. So there was a lot of muttering about where people left their other resurrection signet (at least one had, well, left it at home). I'm certain a few in the party felt the monk let them down, but brother, I can only click on so many things at once. At one point I looked kinda dumb because I died while holding a quest item. Course, the thing is - I was spending so much time casting that a weapon wasn't going to do me much good. It was a common theme for the night.

So what went wrong? Well, let's get some tips from that.

1. Bring a full party: The party leader had gotten a full list, but the only primary warrior in the bunch dropped out as soon as we entered the mission. Definately should have gone back for another. I've spent a lot of time in GW just wandering about, and it's almost never a good idea to leave without a full complement, unless you're backtracking into an area you know you've seriously outclassed. Even low level monsters can swarm on an individual.

2. Bring a varied party: The party make up really sucked. No primary warrior. One monk. A mesmer, an elementalist and two rangers. In other words, no tank or way to keep a melee going so that the spellcasters could do their thing. Constantly, the spellcasters would get overwhelmed and end up going grey. When I hench it, I take another healer and two warriors and then mix up the rest with spellcasters. The goal is to keep the majority of reds away from your ranged attacks and spells, not to force the two together.

3. Make sure you've got the XP: Whisper is now lvl 16, about half of her points going into healing powers. One ranger was lvl 17 and actually ended up being the tank and eventually winning the mission for the rest of the party. The rest were 11 or 12 and simply didn't have the health points or energy to stay in the battle. At one point, Whisper casted a heal spell, a regen buff and a heal party all in an attempt to save one person. It failed. That's a losing strategy for any party, because I've now spent a large amount of energy and can barely even defend myself.

4. Stick together: As a monk, this is my biggest team pet peeve. First, it means that people are more likely to die because they're off fighting individually and can get easily overwhelmed. Second, I waste valuable time running back and forth between team sections to get into casting range. This happened no less than three times last night. Each time I ended up dying because once again, I had wasted all my mana trying to keep two futile battles going.

5. Be patient: Number two pet peeve. As soon as one battle is over, the team just keeps running over the hill for the next objective. Stop, take a breather. The difference between 15 energy and 33 energy is about two seconds outside of combat. It's also one more heal party, three more heal spells, or another regen buff and a heal spell. Any of those could keep someone alive.

I'm not sure if there's anything ArenaNet could do to help PUGs be better at this. It might be helpful to have and energy bar on the HUD so that the party knows when a spellcaster has been tapped. It also might be better to have level suggestions on some of the mission descriptions.

On a side note though, Kryta is quite purty.