Curse

Drewfense · Jul 04, 2006, 09:11 PM // 21:11

There are numerous things that make a good monk in PvP and PvE, but one of the most important is energy management. One of the easiest ways to effectively manage your energy is through spell selection. The rest of this post will be mainly concerning pve monking, but I use the same principles when I run a heal monk in HoH and GvG. **All numbers refer to Healing Prayers level 16...which I view ideal for PvE, Divine Favor is assumed +30**

My outlook towards monk spells is that Heal Other/Healing Breeze and Orison of Healing are some of the worst skills in the game. The first scenerio is the most common. A monk will lean on both of these spells which are very heavy heals (10 energy 220 health), but will almost always run out of energy very quickly. The second scenerio results in your not having enough healing output to keep up with the party. Compared to a heal other, 2 orisons have a significantly slower cast and are have have slightly less healing at 206. The problem often occurs with dealing with spike damage and massive aoe. The solution I find most effective is to use neither type of spell, but rather to have several skill slots devoted to situational healing. The 4 healing spells I often use as my core healing (but by no means are the only 4 that would work with this strategy) are:

Word of Healing <elite>
Healing Whisper
Dwayna's Kiss
Signet of Rejuvenation

If you just spam WoH, Dwayna's, and Sig of Rej without any consideration, you in essence have 3 Orisons on your bar and will run into the same problems as mentioned earlier. If you use these spells to fit their specific texts, you will greatly increase you healing output, but will be able to almost spam healing spells because they are only 5 energy. Word of Healing is an automatic 220 if you use it to catch a spike. Dwayna's Kiss should never drop below a 140ish heal if used on hexed/enchanted targets. In some builds, the healing output of Dwayna's is incredible (in Sorrow's Furnace you will often see 350ish point heals). Sig of Rej is great on warriors and rangers for a free 117 point heal. Healing Whisper (Ethereal Light works just as well, both are about 135) is great for picking up minor healing when people hit about 70% health and don't fit into one of the above situations.

Using spells situationally gives you significantly more healing power per point of energy that heal other/healing breeze. The other nice thing about this strategy is it isn't hard to run. You can simply lock onto the health bars in the party screen (this is fine for PvE, but as you progress in monking, you will benefit greatly from being more aware of where everyone is and what is happening). One thing that is commenly mentioned for energy management that deserves to be mentioned is do not over heal. There is nothing wrong with people being at 80-90% health, save your heals for the people who need them. I always consider a good heal to be one where every point of health from the spell is used.

Disclaimer: Before I get people yelling at me that I am a newb (I already know someone is going to say "but orison can be used on yourself!!!!"), this forum is not to give a full build, but rather things to consider in designing your own monk builds. It is only one of many styles of monking that I find effective. If you don't agree with what I say, instead of complaining, please post your own methodology. Also if anyone finds this helpful, please say so and I will post other tactics for effective monking.

Edit: Yea, I think for that "mop up" healing spot it can come down to Orison, E. Light, Signet of Devotion, and Whisper. All have their advantages and disadvantages. Personally, I am addicted to Whisper and use it everywhere...but I suggest to try each of them and pick the one that fits your needs.

Vahn Roi · Jul 04, 2006, 09:17 PM // 21:17

very interesting.

I recently made the "all 5" switch, but I still have Orisan on my bar, which up until now I had not considered bad...

I don't like E. Light because of the "easly interrupted" line in the disription, and I don't care much for Whisper due to it's range.

I have yet to try Sig of Rejuvenation, I will give it a swing tonight.

Isil`Zha · Jul 04, 2006, 09:28 PM // 21:28

Ok, I've posted my build in other threads, but here, I'll copy it from my Guild's forum here:

Monk/(Not important)
Level: 20

Divine Favor: 15 (11+4)
Healing Prayers: 13 (11+2)
Protection Prayers: 9 (8+1)

Signet of Devotion (Divine Favor)
Heal target ally for 100 points.
Energy:0 Cast:2 Recharge:5

Dwayna's Kiss (Healing Prayers)
Heal target other ally for 54 points and an additional 32 points for each Enchantment or Hex on that ally.
Energy:5 Cast:1 Recharge:3

Healing Touch (Healing Prayers)
Heal target touched ally for 54 points. Health gain from Divine Favor is doubled for this Spell.
Energy:5 Cast:0.75 Recharge:5

Vigorous Spirit (Healing Prayers)
For 30 seconds, each time target ally attacks or casts a Spell, that ally is healed for 18 points.
Energy:5 Cast:1 Recharge:4

Aura of Faith [Elite] (Divine Favor)
For 60 seconds, target ally gains 50% more Health when healed.
Energy:10 Cast:1 Recharge:15

Heal Party (Healing Prayers)
Heal entire party for 71 points.
Energy:15 Cast:2 Recharge:2

Mend Ailment (Protection Prayers)
Remove one Condition (Poison, Disease, Blindness, Dazed, Bleeding, Crippled, or Deep Wound) from target ally. That ally is healed for 44 points for each remaining Condition.
Energy:5 Cast:0.75 Recharge:5

Protective Spirit (Protection Prayers)
For 16 seconds, target ally cannot lose more than 10% max Health due to damage from a single attack or Spell.
Energy:10 Cast:0.25 Recharge:5

Ok, here's how to use this.

Put Aura of Faith and Vigorous spirit on a melee fighter just before they start combat. Preferably whoever's going to be attacked first. Stick vigorous spirt on everyone else while you're waiting on Aura of Faith to recharge. When Faith is recharged, stick it on the next person, ect. Now the difficult part is telling when Faith has worn off cause you should be keeping Vigorous spirit on everyone. The best way to tell is knowing either how much an ally is healed from your divine favor bonus or even better, how much Vigorous Spirit heals them for per hit with Faith added in. Basically, if vigorous is healing for more than what it's supposed to, Faith is still there. Also you can obviously just use your judgement of when you think it's worn off. Also, if there's no need to put it on someone else, like another spellcaster, just renew it on the melee fighter.

I won't keep Vigorous on myself as much as on others, or Faith. But once everyone else has it I'll usually stick both on myself. If you see someone coming for you, definatly stick faith on yourself, though it's not necessary unless you get attacked by 3 or more people.

Now, not only is Vigorous healing for around 27 for every attack or spell your allies cast, but it turns Kiss into an extremely powerful, and cheap, healing spell. With both vigorous and Faith on, that's a bonus of 64 added to Kiss's 54, for a total of 118. Then you add in the bonus from Faith, for a total of around 177 from kiss. Then there's your divine favor bonus of 48.. now increased to 72 for a grand total of 249 healing! All for 5 energy. Now, being in the midst of battle, it's pretty common for your ally to have a hex or two on them, making it even more powerful - for each additional hex, Kiss will heal for an additional 48 - basically lots and lots of various healing bonus stacking = uber healing at low energy cost.

Now, Signet of Devotion is there for a few reasons. Mostly to conserve energy, and to avoid taking damage from things like backfire. But usually, if your ally isn't really taking damage fast, or if only one ally is really taking damage at all, I'll throw in a few Devotions for some free healing to regain some lost energy - with Faith on it'll heal for a nice big 150 - for free.

Healing touch is there pretty much only for yourself. With faith on you'll heal yourself for about 230, almost instantly - very useful. I don't really use it on allies unless I happen to be close, and both devotion and kiss are recharging.

Heal Party is mostly optional, but so far it seems to be a good choice - it's simple, if whole team is taking damage, hit em with a heal party - use conservitively. If you have Faith on most of your party members, which you should, you get a good 130 or so to each member this way - Alternate: Stick a hex remover here.

Mend ailment is rather obvious - having some condition removal is nice, especially some that you can use on yourself to remove crippled status. It's a good idea to remove pretty much anything with it. Again, with Faith on it'll heal for around 70 just from your divine favor, and if they have a lot of conditions, it can be just as effective as kiss.

Protective spirit is there mainly for yourself for when you come under attack, a MUST with your low armor - the build is balanced in energy use so that you shouldn't really use it on teammates much - you have PLENTY of healing power anyway. So unless the situation really calls for it (IE: There are so many people attacking one person with so much spike damage that they'll go down from full health in under 1 to 2 seconds), don't use up energy on it - this is a sure way to run out of energy when it isn't even necessary.

And that's basically how it's used, hopefully your teammates will help you when you come under attack, mostly so you can continue healing them - since if you do it right you can keep yourself alive from pretty much anyone trying to take you out alone - you can even last quite a long time against 6 people after you, if you just keep up protec. spirit and hit yourself with Healing Touch when you get low on health.

Following these guidelines and played properly you should rarely ever run out of energy.

Alternate for amusement: Stick Life Attunement in there as well. This is only really for PvE with constant massive spiking from huge numbers of monsters, but I had it set up so that the combined power of LA and AoF made it so my healing was 90% more effective - this is really just overkill, I had kiss healing for 750+.... I came up with it for Oro farming before the gear thing was "fixed." I did find that the basic build idea was extremely effective in both PvE and PvP though, so I ran with it.

Age · Jul 04, 2006, 09:47 PM // 21:47

There is nothing wrong with Orisons it is a very good skill at only 5 enrgy for those spammable heals.When I heal it is my most used skill.

Vahn Roi · Jul 04, 2006, 09:54 PM // 21:54

I use it most for the 2s recharge mostly...

chippxero · Jul 04, 2006, 10:33 PM // 22:33

The only problem i see with your build Isil`Zha is that there is a lack of a res.

It's just my opinion but every build for any class should include some sort of res.

sno · Jul 04, 2006, 10:54 PM // 22:54

Quote:

Originally Posted by chippxero

The only problem i see with your build Isil`Zha is that there is a lack of a res.

It's just my opinion but every build for any class should include some sort of res.

It's fairly understood that monks should never use res. The reason for this (beyond the obvious "8 skills is better than 7" argument) is that if the monk spends time ressing during battle, he's not spending time healing, which often results in more death, and more ressing. If an offensive character resses, that offense is taken away, but nothing negative happens to the team.

In PvE, monks often bring rebirth, because it's a great res to use after a battle. It can remove a corpse from aggro and allow the group to continue where otherwise impossible. This can just as easily be taken care of by a */mo with rebirth, but especially with pugs, you can't usually rely on others to do anything useful.

Isil`Zha · Jul 04, 2006, 11:00 PM // 23:00

Quote:

Originally Posted by chippxero

The only problem i see with your build Isil`Zha is that there is a lack of a res.

It's just my opinion but every build for any class should include some sort of res.

That's the PvP varient, depending on the type of PvP. The core build consists of AoF, VS, DK, and SoD. The rest are changeable. In PvE for instance, a Monk pretty much stays unnoticed, so you can drop Protective Spirit and put a Rez there - you can also move those attribute points from Protection to Healing.

Drewfense · Jul 04, 2006, 11:06 PM // 23:06

Well the idea with using several situational heals over orison is that it replaces the spammability of orison with the spammability of several stronger heals. The most important things you use with this strategy is 1. the self heal of orison which can be more than replaced by heal touch, a second monk, or even effective kiting. Personally, in PvE I just use Prot Spirit to escape nasty situations and then kite till my natural regen picks up. 2. The biggest negative is the use of multiple skill slots.

As for that Aura of Faith build, I have seen variants before...perhaps it was you posting in other forums. The two ways to play that build would be to throw up Aura when healing is necessary, but that makes you weak to spike healing. The other possibility is to maintain Aura on as many people as possible (which would be 3-4 peeps). At higher levels of PvE, there is massive enchant stripping (thanks to 55 monk farming) so you will have further problems keeping the Aura up. If you are going to use enchantments, use cheap stuff that you can cast and forget. As listed in your build, prot spirit and vigorous spirit are great options, especially with assassins.

And just because I feel like I always have to answer everything...Sno is completely correct. In PvE, everyone should have atleast a rez sig and the monk should only have to rez after aggro has been broken. The one exception is PvP...but thats another topic.

Isil`Zha · Jul 05, 2006, 12:11 AM // 00:11

Quote:

Originally Posted by Drewfense

Well the idea with using several situational heals over orison is that it replaces the spammability of orison with the spammability of several stronger heals. The most important things you use with this strategy is 1. the self heal of orison which can be more than replaced by heal touch, a second monk, or even effective kiting. Personally, in PvE I just use Prot Spirit to escape nasty situations and then kite till my natural regen picks up. 2. The biggest negative is the use of multiple skill slots.

As for that Aura of Faith build, I have seen variants before...perhaps it was you posting in other forums. The two ways to play that build would be to throw up Aura when healing is necessary, but that makes you weak to spike healing. The other possibility is to maintain Aura on as many people as possible (which would be 3-4 peeps). At higher levels of PvE, there is massive enchant stripping (thanks to 55 monk farming) so you will have further problems keeping the Aura up. If you are going to use enchantments, use cheap stuff that you can cast and forget. As listed in your build, prot spirit and vigorous spirit are great options, especially with assassins.

Oh yes, thanks for reminding me.

Vigorous is not only there to heal, but to act as an enchantment-stripping buffer. So you should always apply AoF first, then VS. VS is cheap, recharges fast, and lasts a long time. *Whoops, misread something, see bottom for keeping up with more people.*

As for varients, I've actually, truthfully, never seen anyone else use Aura of Faith in any way. I completely thought up this build myself with no outside influence, but I wouldn't find it too unlikely that others may have thought of it as well. Like I said, doing Oro farming I came up with it as the healing monk - I looked to see how I could.. exploit the bonus from AoF the most - and what better way than to stack it with other bonuses?

Also, what do you mean by "varients?" Just slightly different, or by varient do you just simply mean a build that uses AoF as the elite? Cause I wouldn't really consider that a varient of my specific build here. The only other person I've ever seen use a close varient was my friend, who wanted to use the build after he saw how awesome it was when I used it with his Assassin.

Quote:

And just because I feel like I always have to answer everything...Sno is completely correct. In PvE, everyone should have atleast a rez sig and the monk should only have to rez after aggro has been broken. The one exception is PvP...but thats another topic.

Exactly, I always carry a rez in PvE, this build I posted happens to be a PvP varient - in PvE you can dump the Prot. Spirit for a rez. Prot. Spirit is definatley neccessary in PvP though, or you go *squish* real quick (or something comparable.) As I mentioned though, the original incarnation of this build was a PvE build, and had life attunement as well.

Another use for Life Attunement to go along with this though: If a teammate starts taking heavy damage but AoF is on the recharge you can stick LA on them until they're out of danger cause LA has a short recharge, or until AoF is ready and can be applied, and then you can stop mantaining LA. This also allows you to keep a healing bonus on more than 3-4 people at a time.

However, note that you only really need to constantly maintain it on your melee fighters, as they take the blunt of most attacks. Spell casters are situational, they come under heavy attack, then you stick AoF on them. Where with your melee fighters you stick it and VS on them before they run in. However, I would still apply VS to all members of the party, except yourself.

B Ephekt · Jul 05, 2006, 01:50 AM // 01:50

I'm sorry but I kind of stopped reading when you said Orison was one of the worst skills in the game...

As far as heal other, it is a very good skill for use with an elite energy management skill; it heals for the exact same amount as WoH would if the person was at or below 50%. In pve I usually use Mantra of Recall with Heal Other as a direct replacement for Word. With MoR I can heal even the most horrible groups almost indefinitely, whereas you would probably run out of energy spamming 5 energy heals.

As for monks rezzing, I never carry one in pve if I'm with friends or guild mates - it's just uneeded. However, if I'm pugging I generally bring rebirth since pubbies will cry and complain if I don't.

jesh · Jul 05, 2006, 08:36 AM // 08:36

I admire open minded people.

Eneewayz. I use Aura of Faith quite a bit when I'm playing in PvE with a friend I trust. I'll go DF/Prot/Ins and bond with Life Attunement and Aura of Faith, he'll take Dwayna's or whatever else with 2 sup runes.. healing and DF.

Sounds hillarious, but it works. I can afford to waste all that energy because of the bonds, so AoF is on at least 3 people with a +20% enchant mod. I just have the party members call out when it's not on them, not too hard. (ping HP is usually what we agree on)

The idea was.. we don't need to spend too much effort monking if we can pretty much res a person for 5e. =P

I think the best heal we'd gotten in just a normal battle was 1040+ or so, extra from boon. It's just rediculous what you can do with a little communication in PvE.

Ah.. almost forgot the glory of pre-nerf healing seed. When I had that on me, I'd tank with protective spirit and he'd usually echo a second copy onto the main tank. The whole screen was filled with +33 or whatever it was/is.

Oh, and for that last slot you use for heal party, Drewfense, I find I like heal area more. With a little care, it's sooo nice and sexy. Heal Party's not bad though, I've found it to be very useful more than once.

Drewfense · Jul 05, 2006, 05:26 PM // 17:26

I will give the Aura build a try, but I am still very skeptical. The number of people you can maintain it on is still 3 and with the AoE of Cantha, I rarely am in missions where there is not a necessity to heal multiple targets. I also doubt the energy management in maintaining the Aura since you only net about 80 energy per minute. If you have 3 Aura per minute + 3 vigorous covers applied twice (that is if you don't maintain vigorous on everyone as mentioned earlier), then you just spent 60 energy. That is without having to counter stripping. The best way to play it would really be in response to damage, but again it would take 2 seconds casting to respond to a spike. I see this build working in the desert of prophecies or Sorrows Furnace, but not in any advanced areas and definitely not in top 100 PvP.

The only reason I am argueing against this build is it seems detrimental to good monking. From the looks of it, you are trying to achieve "big heals" that have no real function. It is more of a measuring contest than anything else. What is the point of using a build that can heal for 750, if most PvEers have health in the lower 400s and it is weak to spike healing. It is just silly. It is like eles going into a match and pinging that they have 100 energy or a warrior showing off that he has Victo's blade. If you want to continue talking about this Aura build, please put it in another thread.

Speaking of measuring contests...if you want to see a truly big heal...

http://www.supersecretsquad.com/inde...view_photo.php

Isil`Zha · Jul 05, 2006, 06:06 PM // 18:06

700+ was only in the Oro run and I even pointed out that it's pointless.... The 249 from Kiss is plenty, and with Vigorous on them they can keep their own health up pretty well too.

You said effective healing through 5 energy spells, and this is very effective.

Again, the only way you'd be constantly maintaining it on 3 is if maybe in a 4 party team they're all melee - in an 8 member team you should have two monks anyway, but it'll still work well there. Usually I just stick it on whoever goes in first/takes the most damage. Which will usually be melee fighters.

Now, that's nice with the math and all, but in the place it truely counts, that is, in practice, it works very well and I rarely run out of energy and can keep my team alive against rediculous odds.