Curse

Silmor · Jun 28, 2005, 10:48 PM // 22:48

Right now there are two popular farming tricks that tend to exploit leniency in certain monk skills which, when harnassed correctly, makes them abusively more powerful than most other monk skills, and I believe Guild Wars would be more enjoyable if these skills are refined to block off these abuses in a way that does not hinder their intended use, thereby encouraging players to be more creative/diverse in their character builds.
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The first issue is with Protective Bond and Protective Spirit. These both put a cap on the maximum amount of damage one hit can inflict on a character, thus shielding them from spike damage; Protective Bond offers the best protection but at the expense of energy for every time damage is shielded this way, Protective Spirit is less effective but does not deplete energy with every shielding.

The problem with the skills is that they cap based on the maximum amount of hitpoints on a character. Bond caps at 5%: if you have 400 hitpoints maximum, you can only get 20 damage per hit. Spirit caps at 10%: with 400 hitpoints, you can only get 40 damage per hit. The skills therefore become more effective when a character has less health: although a character will still be able to survive the same amount of hits, a supporting monk will need to heal less to recover the damage done, and heals-over-time will become more effective as maximum health drops.

This mechanic is currently being abused however by drastically lowering the maximum amount of hitpoints on a character through runes of superior vigor, gear that lowers maximum health and in some cases even death penalty. As a result, a character could walk around with only 8 hitpoints total, and with P.Spirit or P.Bond on him would not get hit by regular means at all, and could use for instance Healing Breeze to counter any DoTs that would bypass this mechanism, thus becoming nigh indestructable.

I can't imagine this was an intended effect of these protection skills, and I'd like to suggest a rebalancing that addresses only this specific type of abuse: put in a linear minimum cap on top of the percentage-based cap. A sensible level 20 character would be very wary of having less than 400 hitpoints, so I would propose the minimum amount of damage Protective Bond could reduce to would be 20, and 40 for Protective Spirit. This would not affect people playing in a regular fashion at all, only those who artificially lower their maximum health with the intention of abusing this mechanic.
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The second issue is with Divine Boon. Right now it's quite popular in solo smiter-farming setups to use a combo of Divine Boon and Zealot's Fire, using the 1/4s casttime and instantaneous recharge of Divine Boon to spam-trigger Zealot's Fire repeatedly, thus causing a wave of area damage to emanate from the smiter while simultaneously healing him. Since Divine Boon was designed as a maintained enchantment that gives additional heals on targets you cast spells on, I doubt this was the intended use for this skill.

My suggestion would simply be to either make Divine Boon cost 10 energy to cast like most other maintained enchantments, and/or increase the casting time to 2s to force monks to precast this instead of using it as a spamming skill.

A slightly less abuseable issue exists with Draw Conditions: 5 energy, 1/4s casttime, instantaneous recharge, but at least this requires an ally to cast it on, and there appears to at least be a valid reason for the recharge to be so swift (drawing similar conditions which will not stack, thus reducing their overall effect). Nevertheless, it might be justified to slightly adjust this skill as well to stem possible spamming abuse.

Alternatively, both skills could go unchanged if Zealot's Fire was adjusted to not trigger on those skills exclusively.

Arthas006not7 · Jun 28, 2005, 10:57 PM // 22:57

Protective Bond - Enchantment Spell
While you maintain this "Enchantment", target ally cannot take more than 5% damage at one time. When Protective Bond prevents damage, you lose 6-3 energy or the spell ends.

Now, i think this means that you can only take 5% of the dmg done to you. I'm not sure, the way its worded is misleading. But anyhow, it is unnecessary as there is already a spell for this, Prot. Spirit, i agree, shouldnt be able to stack these two. Like the Warrior Stances, can't cast two stances at a same time. But instead of not being able to cast two enchanments, just get rid of Prot. Bond.

Silmor · Jun 28, 2005, 11:01 PM // 23:01

The issue isn't with Protective Spirit/Protective Bond stacking or anything, because they quite simply don't: even if you have both on you, Protective Bond will lower all excess hits to 5% of max health, so Protective Spirit will never come into play. They both have something going for them and definitely both deserve a place in the game, but currently there's no limit to how low either of their damage caps go, and that is abuseable.

Blahofstars · Jun 28, 2005, 11:52 PM // 23:52

It's called "destroy enchantment."

Aidan Gawain · Jun 29, 2005, 12:46 AM // 00:46

My suggestions:
Protective Bond/Spirit:
Make them based off of your max health not counting runes, equipment, and death penalty/morale boost.

Zealot's Fire:
Make it once per skill per ally per x seconds, so that if you used the same skill on the same ally repeatedly, it would only trigger Zealot's Fire once every x seconds.