Archery - Tamer Fiasco

First of all, I never have money. So bought skills and arrows. Popped the bear, which turned out to be a bad idea. His existing takes all my focus. Auto attack takes all my arrows and raises nothing. The only way I see to raise Taming is to summon and I can only summon once an hour. I get the idea of raising skills by doing them, but I am getting the shot-in-the-foot feeling.

My only solution seems to be to find some way to raise focus. The only way I know to do that is with spells. So I buy life, death, fire and earth. Broke again. I stood and spammed soul tap and heal for a bit. This raises my focus but not my money. Now what?

 

THIS. All of this and more! I'm in the same boat. Things feel really, really, REALLY out of balance. Why do summoned pets drain so much mana? Why is the cooldown on summoning them so long? I don't even gain anything in Swiftness for running around. So, what, I need mana to level up in running around? Or is something else happening? I don't know. Leveling skills seems so arbitrary and weird.

DO. NOT. WANT.

 

you can raise focus by killing things and leveling up, which raises it more than the focus skill does

 

As a whole, I like the system. There could be a couple tweaks. The way I play, I don't expect to level quickly. I don't actually mind grinding a bit, if the area is interesting enough.

I could have turned to my guild for help, or pinged some friends who are in the combat scrum. But I feel I am a valid type of player to be considered. On release day, I wanted to see how a total newbie would scope things out on thier own. I hear I missed a great tap soul/heal fest by staying in single player. It took me three quarters of the day to finally wonder if I could raise my focus that way.