I've been leveling a necro and I'm curious, should I be just using the "Solo Leveling" AA path that is preset or should I be making one of my own? Also; in the grand scheme does it really matter what spells I Grandmaster while leveling up until later levels?
#1, depending on your level, it might not be anything to worry about now, at 100+, yes, do work on an AA profile you like. #2, for AA's, look to the u.eq2wire.com profiles for necros that you know, or know are decent on your server, the basic auto-generated ones pretty much are meh, at best. #3, I really wouldn't GM anything unless you are at the level cap, up until then, experts are good enough, and you can research them up. Do GM the basic AA lines though, that you feel are most important.
What I do is pick my AAs to REACH max level and AAs and THEN redo them once I am at max level and AAs, by picking what I want with what I need to qualify for the next level of AAs. Some AAs are good for leveling but not so good once you are maxed and you can drop the leveling ones. Just take your time and know that you can redo your AAs at a whim, pretty much. So don't fear you will make a mistake you cant undo, because you CAN undo them!
For those grandmasters, take ones that you use regularly or are important for your class. So for instance on my priests I will often take a heal of some variety for the 4 level grandmaster choice if there is one available and I don't already have a master for it. They make no difference in the long run since you'll out level them, but it makes quite a difference as you are leveling up to have useful spells maxed out.
I've detested the "we know what's better for your character, so follow the trees we pick out for you. Or else." ever since I first noticed it as a thing (I'd had a hiatus during the time that came out). So now, every time I create a new toon, it's one of the first things I do on first coming into the game: go into the AA trees and at the very least, Roll Back (not Remove; good lord, that's a stupid option, why would anyone do that??) all the points back to the start, so I can choose what I want to do with them when I get them (especially if it's for a class I haven't played before, but at this point, that's only the Channeler. If it's a class I'm familiar with, I'll lather-rinse-repeat, or maybe try something new and see how it goes). With the Tradeskill AA (and later, Tradeskill Prestige; my game, dammit, I will play the way I want to, just like in the ads), I immediately dive into the tree there, Roll Back everything, and plonk 5 points into whatever increases/maintains Durability. If the next row requires more points in the top row (can't recall if they're all "disconnected" now...brilliant idea on that! ), I'll put them into "increase the speed at which I progress through doing combines so my Tunnel Carpal doesn't suffer any more." Same thing on the second row: whatever helps with Durability. Then I'll go back and feed points into whatever helps with Rare harvesting and/or multiples in a node ("You've gotten 4 harvests out of a standard 3 harvest node! Rejoice! "). I like the idea of sneering at the laws of physics and getting all my materials back, but I've always been leery about increasing the potential for critical successes, because whenever I've just let them be at the "default setting" of the AA tree, my potential for critical failures (especially when I've done nothing wrong, which is just infuriating beyond level 20) also goes through the ceiling. No point love for that stupid thing. :-/ If they were trying to be helpful to newb players as well as newb characters, they really should have made it more intuitive to start with (oh, who am I trying to kid; if they did that, the people who had to struggle to figure it out can't be all elitist), or just let us have our accumulating pile of points and let us decide where they go from the get-go...refresh my memory, didn't we have a system like that before? :-/ Uwk
