Curse

zaboomafoo · Aug 02, 2006, 08:08 PM // 20:08

I'm having a great time playing a boon/barrier/bonder monk with a friend of mine.

My comments are playing only from D'Alessio to Droks. In particular, it's been fun in the desert because I play as a boon/bond team with a friend who is another monk (boon/barrier/bond) so we can get boon and barrier up on all players easily.

Attributes: +12 prot, +10 boon, +7 Inspiration - for MoI. These low numbers are
what I have now at this stage. Please leave the discussions about what could
be achieved with greater attributes to another thread.

Life Barrier
Life Bond
Mantra of Inscriptions
Balz Spirit
Blessed Signet
Divine Boon
RoF
Mend Condition (never ailment)

First some math:

To make it easy, assume 50% for barrier and 100 damage to the ally. The bonds stack, but not 50 + 50 = 0. It's 50%, then 50% of what's left. So getting hit for 100 is:
100dmg @50% = 50dmg -> 50% of 50dmg == 25 dmg to the tank(whomever).
For a tank with 500 health this (5% of max health) is the same as PB (5% of max health).

If you have a barrier/bond stack order you'll see a "-25 Life Steal" message in red when this happens. Note: this is rare because the 100dmg is _after_ the tank armour/shield/runes absorb dmg from the hit. Most of the time you'll see a red "-0" and you won't be taking any damage at all. If we take a more realistic number (wars feel free to comment) of 40 dmg/hit @50%=20dmg -> @50% = 10dmg per hit (or 2% of max health).

Any tanks with 80AL-100AL care to comment on how much the Ataxes hit for in UW without any bonds/spirits on them? It would be useful to compare PB/PS vs dual bonds.

Here's another useful thing to note: Balth's still gives you energy even though you are taking zero damage.

Boon/Bonders can make good healers too. Here is some math to back this up:

RoF: Ally doesn't get hit (so pick some number here, which will depend on the bonds on the ally) - I'll say 20 dmg saved. It's only fair to include damage saved that you would have to heal otherwise. I won't disagree to other numbers tossed around here. Now add Divine Favor: 38, plus Divine Boon bonus: 55 plus RoF: 20 (reversed) for a total HEAL of 20 + 38 + 61 + 20 = 133.

Mend Condition: HEALs for: 57 + 38 + 55 (MC + DF + DB) = 150
Warriors are always getting blinded, folks are always getting poisoned - great! Remove the condition and heal for 150 at the same time!

Mend Condition IMHO is _required_ over Ailment because of the 2 second recharge time. I find I almost always need to cast at least two - sometimes more - of these in succession which isn't possible with Mend Ailment.

In groups of 6 I find two boon/bonders working in tandem work really well. My friend takes 2 (dual bonds both) and I do the same. We both use Balths for nrg. I use MoI/BS for nrg management. We use RoF and MC for healing. Sometimes I drop Balths for Hex management and do fine (bit harder). The bonds we maintain are:

2xbarrier, 2xlife bond, BS, DB. That's an _easy_ -2 degen to maintain. BS/Balths gives virtually infinite energy we can use to spam RoF/MC. Enchant stripping is manageable in PvE simply because we have so much nrg available. One just has to carefully pay attention.

So everyone but the monks have dual bonds, and it wouldn't be a problem to keep up two Holy veils to cover enchant stripping and hex removal. Subst Balths for HV. -3 degen during battle is still fairly easy with MoI/BS.

Groups of 8 make it harder so the strategy I use is to put life bond on 3, and only put barrier on the guys getting hammered. Balths to manage energy helps a lot, and other members of the party should bring hex removal if necessary. I'm still playing with the tradoffs here.

While I'm at it I do have one gripe about GW - it's too hard to tell which person had the HV | bond stripped. I wish the enchantment was displayed beside the person's health bar - that way I'd know immediately who to re-bond or re-HV. The single yellow triangle is meaningless with multiple enchants.

BONDER HEALING VS PURE HEALER

Take a look at a standard spell a healer will normally spam: WoH. 67 + 55 + 38 = 160. That's not much more than MC(condition removed) or RoF healing.
Granted, it's +83 == 243 if the target's health is < 50%. It just seems that playing a boon/bonder (esp with two of us dual bonding) health rarely (if ever) goes below 50% anyway. And <50% health is usually bad because a number of weapon/armour upgrades usually stop working at <50% health...

Spamming Orison is very close to the heals one gets with MC/RoF healing.

The problem I have with a pure healer build is that MoR just doesn't provide anywhere near the amount of energy that MoI/BS provides so I can't spam healing spells nearly as much (as I could spam RoF/MC). The difference (bonder heals / minute plus bonds advantage vs pure healer heals / minute) is so large I wonder if I'm missing something. Playing a dual Boon/bonder team is harder, but based on the math presented the boon/bonder team makes a vastly larger difference to the overall health of the party. I think it would truly be interesting for someone to provide a mathematical case that shows the reverse.

YOUR PERSONAL EXPERIENCES WITH DUAL BOON/BARRIER/BOND BUILDS

I'd be curious to hear comments about how easy/hard it is for other folks who have played with groups (size 8) and worked as a boon/barrier/bonder team with one other monk, maintained (three allies each) ~2 bonds + HV (or other cover ench - which?) to help negate ench stripping and how well this has worked for them. In the crystal desert missions when my friend and I team up no one dies and the team is basically invincible. It's a seriously different experience than playing a pure healer and I find it a lot more fun.

COMMENTS

All comments welcome, but please back them up with some numbers if possible. For example, I read a lot that Aegis sometimes helps, and Guardian is required to keep the ghostly hero alive in HoH(?), but I don't see the math working out in favour of these approaches (vs 2 boon/barrier/bond monks working in tandem). Maybe ench stripping is a bigger problem than I realize - but the necro strip enchantment has a 20 second recharge! [define/desecrate] enchants wouldn't seem to be a problem either coming from a single necro. A suicidal Necro casting rend enchantments would cause a problem - is that used by any mob in PvE? Any thoughts on how common that is in PvP?

Thanks for reading.

Carth` · Aug 03, 2006, 12:45 AM // 00:45

I haven't played a boon/bonder, but I've played a regular bonder loads. I think by diversifying your skills you are spreading yourself a bit thin. Divine boon is going to be eating up your energy every time you cast a monk spell.

It would be much more efficient for one player to be a bonder, and bond everyone in the team (you can have -5 or -6 energy degen), then the other monk as a healer or maybe prot to heal anyone. Your job is reducing damage so that the other monk doesn't have to heal as much. Once you're in battle and you have lots of -0 +1 on your screen, you can cast some RoF and Mend Condition to help the monk out. With Divine Boon on you'd be losing more energy every time you do that, and would probably not be able to maintain as many bonds (which you said, only... 3?). That's why you need two of these people.

You should try it with one person concentrating on keeping bonds on everyone (with enchantment strippers you will have to recast them... Life Barrier in particular is expensive).

Finally, although bonders still seem to be in high demand in UW/FoW/SF, a ritual lord spirit spamming ritualist can in fact do just the same job, but without enchantments that can be stripped. They keep a protective spirit (shelter), shielding hands (union) and also prevent damage entirely by making attacks miss. With a good ritualist I see people getting hurt less than with a bonder. But... all it takes is for something to attack a spirit, and then it all goes bad. In high end areas the spirits can die in one hit, and suddenly the whole team becomes squishy. Long battles might be harder too, I don't know because I haven't played a ritualist myself, only observed them.

You asked about numbers in UW with Aatxe hitting a warrior. Well first of all, if the warrior is hitting the Aatxe, the results will be very different. A typical UW tank will bring Dolyak Signet, maybe Watch Yourself too, to have over 120 armour vs physical. He will probably take 40-50 damage without bonds. If he attacks, he will get hurt by riposte and deadly riposte, which I see take a warrior's life down to a quarter of full health. So much so that the bonder will be getting hurt by quite a bit from Life Bond.

There's some thoughts. I haven't tried your build, but if you say you are keeping your team alive, then that's all they ask.

Warpy · Aug 03, 2006, 03:57 AM // 03:57

All your acronyms make the post impossible to enjoy reading; I have absolutely no idea what you are talking about. Please make it easier for other n00bs like myself, not everyone knows what the following means which you have in your post.

PB
MO1
UW
NRG
RoF/MC
BS
DB

Please speak English, you have obliviously spent a lot of time writing all this but I bet it only makes sense to those who know all these acronyms.

Carth` · Aug 03, 2006, 06:06 AM // 06:06

Quote:

Originally Posted by Warpy

PB - Protective Bond, a monk skill
MO1 - Mantra of Inscriptions, a mesmer skill
UW - The Underworld, a location in the game
NRG - energy (en r gee)
RoF/MC - Reversal of Fortune/Mend Condition, monk skills
BS - Balthazar's Spirit, a monk skill
DB - Divine Boon, a monk skill

The skill abbreviations are easy to work out because they are all skills in his build which he lists at the start of his post. But I agree, it doesn't help readability.

zaboomafoo · Aug 03, 2006, 03:34 PM // 15:34

Thanks for the response Carth.
I'll try to define the acronyms as I use them. Thanks Warpy for pointing that out - and thanks Carth for defining my acronyms for me.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Carth`

I haven't played a boon/bonder, but I've played a regular bonder loads. I think by diversifying your skills you are spreading yourself a bit thin. Divine boon is going to be eating up your energy every time you cast a monk spell.

True. Still, I'm not having energy problems yet primarily because of Balths Spirit. I'm simply hoping it won't be a problem in UW and areas like that. It will be fun to test.

Quote:

It would be much more efficient for one player to be a bonder, and bond everyone in the team (you can have -5 or -6 energy degen), then the other monk as a healer or maybe prot to heal anyone. Your job is reducing damage so that the other monk doesn't have to heal as much. Once you're in battle and you have lots of -0 +1 on your screen, you can cast some RoF and Mend Condition to help the monk out. With Divine Boon on you'd be losing more energy every time you do that, and would probably not be able to maintain as many bonds (which you said, only... 3?). That's why you need two of these people.

I would bond 3 people (6 bonds total), my friend would bond the other 3 people. That's -6 degen each with BS/Balths Spirit and DB/Divine Boon. This makes it a bit hard to spam MC/Mend Condition or RoF/Reversal Of Fortune and I agree I'm starting to get spread a bit thin at this point.

However, there's usually a smart ranger who stays in the back (has TU/Troll Unguent) and who doesn't need both bonds all the time so that's -5 degen.

The key reason why this build seems to work so well so far is because the bonds negate such a large % of damage, and Balths + MoI/Mantra of Inscriptions + BS/Blessed Signet provides so much energy. At this point in the game, this vast energy pool seems to let me spam heals (RoF/Reversal of Fortune=130+ and MC/Mend Condition=150+) more than the healer.
I know that's quite a statement and perhaps my MoR/Mantra of Recall Healer could do better, but I don't know how at this point.
Again, enchant stripping could be a huge problem. So can hexes - so other party members would have to bring hex removal.

Quote:

You asked about numbers in UW with Aatxe hitting a warrior. Well first of all, if the warrior is hitting the Aatxe, the results will be very different. A typical UW tank will bring Dolyak Signet, maybe Watch Yourself too, to have over 120 armour vs physical. He will probably take 40-50 damage without bonds. If he attacks, he will get hurt by riposte and deadly riposte, which I see take a warrior's life down to a quarter of full health. So much so that the bonder will be getting hurt by quite a bit from Life Bond.

Thanks for the insightful info. riposte/deadly riposte seem pretty brutal. 50 dmg - 50% = 25 dmg - 50% is 12.5 dmg to the warrior == 0 damage to the bonder monk. More than 25 dmg must be inflicted on the war for the monk to get the life steal damage.

I note the deep wound from deadly riposte. However, please note that a simple 5 nrg MC/Mend Condition removes the deep wound (+100 health on a 500 health war) and heals for ~150 for a total swing of +250 health. MC has a 2 second recharge too so it can be spammed a couple of times inbetween Bs/Blessed Signet recharges.

I realize the MC will have to be delayed if the war is blind and silly enough to keep damaging himself via [deadly]riposte. Hmm I can see how incredibly damaging that can be if the war doesn't realize what's going on. Now I understand your comment about winding up with a quarter health - and a long lasting deep wound.

Ultimately, on condition heavy PvE areas this monk build can seriously heal _and_ prevent damage. I'm still thinking about ench stripping...

[edit] did I calculate the [deadly]riposte damage correctly? Can those stack and cause damage in addition to regular sword damage and other skills? If so, that would be painful...

ender6 · Aug 03, 2006, 07:11 PM // 19:11

I'm only taking the time to post this reply because the op is using the exact same boon bonder build that I use for SF farming (5-man/4-man/3man).
Yeah it works wonders. Heals are unbelieveable, energy supply is endless.

Quick recount (positive note). During a 5 man run, we were overrun by dredges, at least 20 of them. The SS didn't bring a cover hex, so the dredge shaman that happened to spawn kept smiting the hexes. "We" also overaggro'd probably, which led to having 3 priests in the mix. The battle reached a point where the MM was down to 2 minnions, our heal monk kept pinging 0 energy. Everyone's health was going up and down like yo-yo's. It must have lasted literally 15min, till we finally killed the priests followed by the shaman, and actually got things undercontrol. The entire time I was clicking from health bar to health bar hitting either RoF or Mend Condition. Simply, a great feeling. I have similar accounts that have happened throughout my farming expeditions into SF. With that said....

To answer the ops question regarding the power of the boon bonder and will it work in most places -- not really. The above scenario depicts a specific epidsode that was devoid of enchant strippers. I've had horrible episodes where my bonds were being stripped, i was being targeted, party members were squishies/leroy's, and all of a sudden you can't keep up. You simply can't get the bonds up quick enough, continue to heal, and maintain energy.

So places like UW/FoW/Tombs/higher lvl missions. Forget about it. Boon Bonder is for the most part worthless. Usually in FoW for example the bonder will simply cast life barrier on the entire party and will be responsible for maitaining those enchants. While the heal monk heals. The reason is as explained above, you can't maintain enchants (from stripping) and heal party members. Even if you split the workload between 2 boon bonders. Or at least, i don't think it would be the practical approach to questing in those areas.

The other scenario for bonding in areas like FoW is the Bonder will bond one party member, the tank, and will only be responsible for that party member. Makes it easier to recast bonds. But that really wasn't what you were asking.

zaboomafoo · Aug 04, 2006, 01:44 PM // 13:44

Quote:

Originally Posted by ender6

... our heal monk kept pinging 0 energy. Everyone's health was going up and down like yo-yo's. It must have lasted literally 15min, till we finally killed the priests followed by the shaman, and actually got things undercontrol. The entire time I was clicking from health bar to health bar hitting either RoF or Mend Condition. Simply, a great feeling. I have similar accounts that have happened throughout my farming expeditions into SF. With that said....

That sounds like fun, and is similar (better even) than a number of experiences I've had. When my friend and I play dual boon/bonders scenarios like the above are even easier - you had to do it all yourself (which may be a lot of fun too).

Quote:

members. Even if you split the workload between 2 boon bonders. Or at least, i don't think it would be the practical approach to questing in those areas.

You could be right, but I still have this uncertain feeling. Let's say a group of 8 stumbles into 10 mobs, 5 of which can strip enchants. I notice mobs like to strip enchants first before much else - at least at the start of the battle. I'm currently thinking:

(2 boon/bonders working in tandem)
1. cast life bond on my 3 guys
2. cast HV/Holy Veil on my 3 guys
3. on myself: divine boon, balths spirit

That's only -4 degen. At the start of the battle at least 3 HVs will be stripped. If I can put back the HVs before they are stripped again - which may be hard because of the HV 12s recharge. Hmm ... scratch that. Dumb idea - 12s recharge is an eternity and ench stripping will easily wipe out all enchants. I need a good cover enchant. Aha: Live Vicariously - 5 nrg, zero recharge. Plus I get healed a little with a few attribs in healing prayers - which may negate the life steal from the bonds and a little damage from wars rushing the monk. :-)

So I would have:

1. cast life bond on my 3 guys
2. cast Live Vicariously on my 3 guys
3. on myself: divine boon, balths spirit

As each Live Vicariously is stripped I should be able to put it back.
My energy degen swings from -1 to -4 at different parts of the battle, and MoI/Mantra of Inscriptions will give me 15-20 nrg every ~8s depending...

I wonder if the health swing works out better if I keep the enchant strippers busy stripping enchants vs vamp gaze/vamp touch etc. Dependent on a number of things - the primary one being wether or not it winds up being possible to replace Live Vicariously fast enough.

I wonder if this will actually work. It will be fun to try.

zaboomafoo · Aug 04, 2006, 01:49 PM // 13:49

Quote:

Originally Posted by ender6

... our heal monk kept pinging 0 energy. Everyone's health was going up and down like yo-yo's. It must have lasted literally 15min, till we finally killed the priests followed by the shaman, and actually got things undercontrol. The entire time I was clicking from health bar to health bar hitting either RoF or Mend Condition. Simply, a great feeling. I have similar accounts that have happened throughout my farming expeditions into SF. With that said....

That sounds like fun, and is similar (better even) than a number of experiences I've had. When my friend and I play dual boon/bonders scenarios like the above are even easier - you had to do it all yourself (which may be a lot of fun too).

Quote:

members. Even if you split the workload between 2 boon bonders. Or at least, i don't think it would be the practical approach to questing in those areas.

You could be right, but I still have this uncertain feeling. Let's say a group of 8 stumbles into 10 mobs, 5 of which can strip enchants. I notice mobs like to strip enchants first before much else - at least at the start of the battle. I'm currently thinking:

(2 boon/bonders working in tandem)
1. cast life bond on my 3 guys
2. cast HV/Holy Veil on my 3 guys
3. on myself: divine boon, balths spirit

That's only -4 degen. At the start of the battle at least 3 HVs will be stripped. If I can put back the HVs before they are stripped again - which may be hard because of the HV 12s recharge. Hmm ... scratch that. Dumb idea - 12s recharge is an eternity and ench stripping will easily wipe out all enchants. I need a good cover enchant. Aha: Live Vicariously - 5 nrg, zero recharge. Plus I get healed a little with a few attribs in healing prayers - which may negate the life steal from the bonds and a little damage from wars rushing the monk. :-)

So I would have:

1. cast life bond on my 3 guys
2. cast Live Vicariously on my 3 guys
3. on myself: divine boon, balths spirit

As each Live Vicariously is stripped I should be able to put it back.
My energy degen swings from -1 to -4 at different parts of the battle, and MoI/Mantra of Inscriptions will give me 15-20 nrg every ~8s depending...

I wonder if the health swing works out better if I keep the enchant strippers busy stripping enchants vs vamp gaze/vamp touch etc. Dependent on a number of things - the primary one being wether or not it winds up being possible to replace Live Vicariously fast enough.

I wonder if this will actually work. It will be fun to try.

ender6 · Aug 04, 2006, 02:58 PM // 14:58

Keep in mind, you can make almost anything work. The real question you need to ask yourself is, is it a practical solution? Boon Bonding in heavy enchant stripping areas is not a smart idea. It becomes more of a headache than a benefit.

Since you seem to like bonding, might I suggest you contemplate more unique builds that are interdependent. For example a 3 bonder backline. Where each bonders enchants boost and support the others. From covering enchants to enchaning protection to healing to smiting...Think about it, it could become quite complex and interwoven.

Age · Aug 04, 2006, 09:02 PM // 21:02

Like C said I wouldn't use boon on a bonder as you will run out of enrgy.I would use balthazars spirit and blessed signet.