Curse

Milo Benjamio · Feb 05, 2006, 09:44 PM // 21:44

I was recently in a good spike group in HA when we encountered a very unusual (to me) build that i have never seen before. It owned us so easily that i would like some holes filled in and some analysis on whether it is really a good build or not.

There appeared to be 7 monks and 1 W/E. The seven monks would all put on zealots fire (for 60 seconds, whenever you use a skill on an ally, all foes adjacent to your target are struck for 5-29 fire damage)...with 16 smiting this is 37 damage. Then the W/E would run into our group like a nub and the monks would spam cheap quick recharge skills that targeted an ally on that warrior, like draw conditions, reversal of fortune, mend ailment, etc.

The result was the warrior using gale and crippling attacks on our party while hacking at them. The 7 monks spam their skills, and assuming 3 skills per monk at 37 dmg per zealots fire is 777 dmg to that target...and ALL targets standing nearby! Add in some balthazars aura and symbol of wrath for those too slow on the run and u have some quick killing. Some monks were ranger secondary and cycled frozon soil since they were not dying much but we were.

Staying alive shouldnt be a problem for them unless u ran across a team of 7 edenial or caster harrassers as all 7 monks can heal eachother. This build should own spikers (as we discovered) as u can split up ur monks into SB/infusers, prots, healers, etc. IWAY should be no problem as the warrior just rushes into the mob of their wars and takes em all at once. balanced wouldnt be too bad as no amount of normal monk shutdown could stop this team from healing.

So what do u predict as weaknesses? What about energy management for monks (spamming low cost spells will eventually lower u significantly...channeling may work as long as enemies are close enough)? Also, I was a pve-er until just a few months ago, and missed a bunch of various FOTMs that ppl talk about...smite, spirit spam, air spike, etc..so pls excuse me if this build is something that is common knowledge. Pls leave good feedback, dont flame me. Also if ppl want to try this ingame pls msg me because i would love to give it a shot!

scars of insanity · Feb 05, 2006, 11:11 PM // 23:11

haha i saw this one on Observer mode a few days ago. First time i saw it and i havnt seen it since. The weakness could be umm well of profane, dont bunch up, Nature Ritual. Could run around like crazy people like i see alot of teams do vs a ranger spike. Im not actualy sure how to counter this but i saw it loose in Hall of Heroes to one of those top guilds.

Vindexus · Feb 05, 2006, 11:40 PM // 23:40

Snare the Warrior.

JR · Feb 05, 2006, 11:52 PM // 23:52

Quote:

Originally Posted by Vindexus

Snare the Warrior.

QFT.

The build you are describing is I believe the build that iQ ran in tombs for a joke. It relies almost entirely on the warrior as a smite beacon for damage. Snare the warrior, kite it, kill the monks.

KallDrexx · Feb 06, 2006, 12:11 AM // 00:11

Quote:

Originally Posted by JR-

QFT.

The build you are describing is I believe the build that iQ ran in tombs for a joke. It relies almost entirely on the warrior as a smite beacon for damage. Snare the warrior, kite it, kill the monks.

If your talking about the "Only Pally" build then thats not this build. Only pally had necros for OOV and OOB and actual monks iirc. It wasn't 7 smite monks and 1 warrior.

Though, 7 zealot fire monks and one warrior is quite amusing.

Greedy Gus · Feb 06, 2006, 12:14 AM // 00:14

Snare the warrior with what? Any self respecting zealots spammer is using draw conditions and smite hex anyway. Your only hope is playing ward of foes tag.

Yabba · Feb 06, 2006, 01:22 AM // 01:22

I don`t know if it was the same team but we faced a grp running the same build in tombs today with our guildgroup.

we first thought it`d be a monk spike build but we were wondering why they had a warrior in their team.

well, we were running a fun testbuild with 3 aftershock warriors (2 axe, 1 hammer), an ele with earthquake and ward vs foes and a mesmer with burden.

don`t remember if we won flawless but they dropped very very fast.

i guess we were lucky to find something like the perfect victims for our fun build

Milo Benjamio · Feb 07, 2006, 06:52 AM // 06:52

Well i tried running this last night with a pug (took 1.5 hr to organize yikes!) and it was not pretty at all. There is what i had going: I was Mo/Me and used restore conditions...that replaced one of my spammables and covered condition removal at once. I put in channeling and drain enchantment for energy management. I ran out of energy far too quickly than i should have, u simply have to be too close for channeling to kick in, and if ur that close to 5 targets (5 energy per spam) then ur probably not gonna last long. We ran 2 mo/n for corpse control, as we decided IWAY's well of profane would be bad news. These 2 used OoB as energy management, and im pretty sure they ran out very quickly also. The other 4 were mo/e and used builds like the one posted in that link (thanks for that btw, quite helpful). They used Glyph of Renewal and Divine spirit as energy control. I didnt play this and forgot to ask, so dont know how that did for them...i do know, however, that even glyphed, spirit only will last 30 secs with a 60 sec recharge. That 30 secs of costly spamming most likely killed them.

Healing was the other problem. With 7 monks i thought this would be no worries, but i was wrong. With 14-16 pts into smiting, about 10 pts into ur energy management attribute (like blood or channeling), there was not much left for protection...Reversal was supposed to handle all healing. Also i couldnt get people to quickly switch from warrior spam to a quick RoF on a certain member. If everyone used 1 RoFs, that should heal pretty much anyone fully even at low protection. Protection maybe was the problem, as the only immediate healing from it was from divine favor...perhaps try to switch it out for orison instead and put ur points into healing at the cost of and extra .75s casting time. Also, if multiple ppl are taking heavy damage (very likely) it is very difficult to keep all of them healed and smite spam at the same time.

I looked a bit at Ele skills later, and maybe i should try an old E/Mo build. With Ether Renewal and Aura of Restoration on, with every spam u gain 38 Health and 6 Energy (at 14 energy storage). This helps with healing (some) and regains all 5 energy per smite. However, again u have a short enchantment time (7 secs) and comparatively long recharge (30 secs) on the Ether Renewal. Also, this reduces damage from zealots pretty significantly from 37 with 16 smite to 29 with 12 smite.

Im starting to think this is mostly impossible to work on with pugs that take over an hour to organize. You would need a guild group that would be willing to tweak it a bit every night until it was effective enough to work well. I think a few of our players hadnt run any smite builds before and didnt understand the purpose of zealots and spamming on the warrior, even after several detailed explanations. Any more suggestions would be greatly appreciated!

EDIT: I was in HA for a few mins killing time today and saw 2(!) groups organizing groups using zealots smiters and a warrior! I would have tried to join in and get the specifics of what they were running but i had no time.

tafy69 · Feb 07, 2006, 07:59 AM // 07:59

lol nice try for running this with pugs. Talk about failing before you even began.

ubard · Feb 13, 2006, 07:17 PM // 19:17

Ohh baby, good times. Me and my fellow guild members ran this build just a short time ago, exactly the way you described it there.

It's quite entertaining, we won a few flawless mathces against until a good obsidian spike was smart enough to drop around 5 ward v foes on our warrior.

check out the link above mentioned link, it's quite enformative.

yeah, as also mentioned, trying this with a pug group is only a waste of time.

cheerio

The Great Force · Feb 16, 2006, 05:46 PM // 17:46

A while back when you could stack baths aura I know the smite build was almost all E/Mo. They would sit there and use draw conditions and remove hex and other spells along that lines. What if you had 1-2 of the smiters run Infuse, and make the infuse monks go self suffecient and carry healing touch and other self heals. You could run 4-Mo/N, 2 E/Mo, and 2 W/X. The E/Mo can draw all the conditions and hexs. This would leave all the lower protection prayers to the monks. The warriors can run crippleing attacks and KD.