What is a good way to progress?

Right, so I'm a new player here, around 9 hours of playtime so far. Mage level 31 if it's of any importance to answering my questions.

Now I'm noticing these things called "professions", and it looks like not many people enjoy doing a lot of them (especially the one cutting wood; and as a hypixel skyblock player, I'm seeing a pretty funny trend going on lol)

What my questions are:
1. Do I do the main quests with lots of exp, or just complete the easy ones first before moving forward onto the more diffcult ones?
2. Should I work on professions, or is that best saving them for later?
3. With the ability tree (idk what it's called), is there a specific branch I should be following or is it pretty versatile?
4. And finally, my skill points, should they be balanced out, or should certain stats be focused on?

And yeah, I know how it feels when I see a person asking a lot of questions, so if you don't feel like answering, I completely understand! However, as a new player, I feel obliged to know how I can progress efficiently in this game.

Thank you in advance!

 

1. If you want to do quests for xp, keep in mind that the longer quests will give more xp. I would advise completi g all quests, but that is just personal preference. Nowadays caves/secret discoveries also give a lot of xp, especially in the higher levels.
2. Save them, for your first playthrough they are not important, only if you want to complete everything in the content book. But even then I would suggest waiting until level 103/105, since it is quite a grind.
3. Mage: arcanist for high dmg, but no healing spell. Lightbender is you like healing (quite easy to play). Riftwalker: decent damage, often combined with lightbender.
4. Mage generally likes high intel, in order to spam spells, but this also depends on your weapon/armour that you are using. I would suggest some intelligence gear, in combination with agility or defence to stay alive. If you have no problem with staying alive, invest more into strength/dexterity.

 

Don't do profs, unless it's a Guild Objective
I hold absolutely no bias

 

especially while you're leveling, the real answer to where you should put your skill points is "wherever they need to be in order to wear the cool piece of equipment you just found." higher level trumps almost everything up until level 70 or so, it's only then that you really need to start worrying about builds. (and even then, you can always just slap on the always-good morph set). Intelligence is always a must, though, especially for mage, so once you've put points everywhere you need for your equipment then put the rest of them there.

you'll be able to reset the ability tree pretty easily, esp. as you level, so like w/e. have fun trying things out. arcanist is the most fun one, but also i'm extremely biased, so take that with a grain of salt. most important bit of advice, if you're coming in from HSB: efficiency is a lie and the mind-killer. ignore it. you cannot optimize this game. find smth interesting in the book and meander on over. the leveling process is about exploration and discovery.

 

Being a new player, I would highly recommend doing every quest you have unlocked. Usually just completing quests and caves gives enough xp to level you up to endgame (I've tried before, it 100% works). But mostly do quests for the (other definition of) experience as well.