Effective monk guide

''Note: This article is intended to provide guidance for experienced characters playing new monks or experience monks looking for additional options. If this is your first time playing Guild Wars, please see Getting started in Guild Wars Prophecies/Getting started in Guild Wars Factions.''

A Monk's Place
Monks are the lifeblood of all parties, healing wounds or preventing damage. Monks are primarily support characters, acting to enable the rest of the party. As non-combat casters, monks are usually well away from the thick of battle.

Being a monk
Playing a monk can be a rewarding experience, or an extremely frustrating trial. Having few direct damage skills, monks are dependent on the rest of the party for damage and defense, but the healing and protection they provide can provide the sliver of difference between victory and death.

Monks, unlike most other professions, are expected to fit into a narrow set of primary support categories. There are 4 predominate monk roles.

Healing Monk
The Healing Monk combines inexpensive healing spells with high divine favor to provide fast, repetitive heals to the party.

Attributes for Healing Monks
Healing Monks usually focus on two attribute lines: Healing Prayers and Divine Favor. Several Healing Prayer spells provide the basic setup of the Healing Monk, while Divine Favor is mainly choosen for the additional bonus health it gives the character. Some Healing Monks choose a third attribute line, mainly one from a secondary profession that provides skills to regain energy.

Suggested Strategies for Healing Monks
Attempt to keep allies within your casting range, and foes outside your aggro circle, be the backline. Watch the health meters of your party, and cast healing spells when a party members health meter begins to approach 75%. It may be helpful to select party members with the mouse, and queue skills with the keyboard.

Protection Monk
The Protection Monk combines protection spells that prevent damage with skills that keep the party free of conditions. Unlike the Healing Monk, Protection Monks dont wait till after the damage is done to heal the character, instead the spells are pre-applied to the team mates to prevent the damage from happening.

Attributes for Protection Monks
Protections Monks will mainly rely on Protection Prayers with some Divine Favor bonus, since protection spells themself do not offer any healing. As with Healing Monks, a third attribute line might be used for energy reasons.

Suggested Strategies for Spam Protecters
Attempt to keep allies within your casting range, and foes outside your aggro circle. Watch out for party members taking damage and use your protection skills. Unlike the Healing Monk, do not wait till they have taken considerable damage, cast your spells right at the first sign of trouble.

Boon Prot Monk
Boon Prot (Protection) Monks combine the preventive power of protection spells with the huge healing bonus of Divine Boon, essentially filling both the role of a traditional Healing Monk and Protection Monk at once. That power comes at a price though, Boon Prot Monks run out of energy very fast

Attributes for Boon Prot Monks
Boon Prot Monks use Protection Prayers in combination with Divine Favor. A third attribute line (usually Inspiration Magic) for energy management is much more important than for other forms of monks and almost never ommitted.

Suggested Strategies for Boon Prot Monks
Like all monks, Boon Prot Monks should try to stay in the backline and avoid getting targeted as much as possible. Unlike other monks, the Boon Prot must be very conservative with the use of spells. Team members should not be healed at the first notch in their health bar. Wait for the bar to drop quite a good bit before giving it a big boost with your Boon-enhanced protection spells. Use whatever energy management skills you have often, to be able to keep up casting.

Bonder Monk
The passive protection monk, or "Bonder Monk", uses maintained enchantments to provide continual protection. A speciality, the Bonder Monk does not actually cast spells during combat. Instead, Bonders cast maintained protection enchantment on party members before the battle starts and concentrate on keeping those enchantments up.

Interesting Skills for Bonder monks
All Bonding Monks use a fairly standard set of skills from the Protection Prayers line, combined with the skill Balthazar's Spirit (but without any attribute points in Smiting Prayers) and the skill Blessed Signet from Divine Favor. Additional attribute points are used for secondary profession line Inspiration Magic, which provides a few skills that help to speed up Blessed Signet.

Suggested Strategies for Bonder Monks
Cast your chosen bonds and stay well clear of combat. Cast Blessed Signet as quickly as posibly to prevent your energy from reaching zero. Watch your maintained bonds and the party status window for stripped enchantments and replace them as soon as posible.

Other monk roles

 * Smiting monks, though rare, can be extremely destructive in areas populated by Undead creatures.
 * Invincimonks, or 55 tank monks, use protective spirit, low health, and powerful regeneration spells.

Armor & Runes
Monks are in a sense the most important part of any team: No other class will contribute as much to the fall of any team by dieing as monks do. That means that monks should take the uttermost care not to die. Part of that is not using superior and major runes (which carry health mali) unless really needed. As a rule of thumb, no monk should carry more than one superior rune and even monks with only minor runes are very common. Of course runes of vigor are an exception to that rule, since they actually boost health. There is not commonly agreed on "best" monk armor, however most opt for armor that adds energy, since monks are always in need of that.

Weapons
The choice of weapon is less important for monks, since they are not the main attackers. More important than the actual damage are the upgrades (like additional health, armor and energy, or reduced casting and recharge time of skills). Note that most weapons have a requirement in attributes. High-end "green" weapons come with maximum upgrades (be aware that a few green weapons that dont) and are usually cheaper than similar non-green weapons.

Combat Tactics
A monk has 2 roles in combate: Staying alive and keeping the team alive. Since the second requires the first, staying alive should always be getting a priority.

Positioning and Kiting
The easiest (and at the same time hardest) way to stay alive is by not being hit. Monks dont need to be close to the enemy, they can affort to stay back behind the attackers just in range for heals, but out of range of enemy attacks. Good attackers will position themself such that they block the enemy from the monk and keep the aggro on the attacker instead of the monk. In case someone still breaks through, or you get targeted by ranged attacks and spells, dont hesitate to run. You are more valuable to the team when running away compared to dead. Run away from the fight (so to prevent getting targeted by even more enemies) and try to lose the enemy. If you are a monk with Protection Prayers you can also try to stay and tank, but that is risky and should only be done if you are sure of surviving.

Hex removal
Hexes are a special type of spell that affects enemies for a period of time. Some of these are minor annoyances, but some have devastating effects. Since removing hexes is time consuming and hex removing skills can not be spammed, it is important that you learn to tell harmless hexes from bad ones and only remove the latter. Affected persons can help by "calling" (CTRL + left click on the hex icon) bad hexes.

Condition removal
Conditions are less severe than hexes (still some are more troublesome than others), but they can be applied to enemies at less cost. It is especially the role of Protection Monks to keep the party free of conditions.

Resurrecting
Some very few special cases apart, it is not a reasonable thing for monks to resurrect team mates during battle. Monks should be carrying a resurrection spell for the worst case (PvP is an exception here), but only use it after the battle. If the fight goes really wrong, run away and wait for the enemy to scatter before ressing. Resurrecting takes a long amount of time, so if a monk resses during battle, usually other team members die before the spell is finished.