Curse

reaper with no name · Dec 21, 2010, 02:58 AM // 02:58

Your secondary should be /W. Replace Antidote signet with a defensive skill like Bonetti's Defense or Balanced Stance.

Get a shield. Remember, the entire enemy team is likely gunning for you. You need to be as tough as you can be.

Where is your prot? Where is Guardian? Or Shield of Absorption/Shielding Hands? Pure healing isn't going to be enough. You need prot to bring incoming damage down to a reasonable level so your healing can keep up with it.

jrmunch · Dec 21, 2010, 03:09 AM // 03:09

OK. The one thing I just don't understand is how does using draw condition work with no other condition removal?

Cool Name · Dec 21, 2010, 03:32 AM // 03:32

Draw condition: Works because you use disciples insignia, giving you more armor when you get conditions. It isn't the best way of dealing with conditions, but it is cheap spammable and quick, and when you only have 1 monk it is a way of dealing with conditions and only using 1 skill slot. Also remember the same condition won't stack. If you have poison on you for 10 seconds duration, and you use draw conditions on someone who also has poison for 10 seconds, you will have it for 10 seconds, not 20. Having every condition on one player means less effect that on every player.

reaper with no name says you need prot. I don't really agree with this. I have played both pure heal and prot and just find it depends what team you go against (which of course is random). If you go against two mes, a nec and monk then you're going to wish you brought heal instead. If you go against two warriors, assassin and a monk then obviously you will be very happy.

My point is don't be convinced prots are compulsory. Try pure heal and prot/heal split and decide for yourself. It makes you split your attribute points and is still in discussion (see here).

I do agree with going /W. Other good skills are shield bash (as said, you will need a shield set, and will need to switch to it) and dolyak signet. Both of these skills are aimed at preventing knock lock, so keep your eye out for warriors build adrenaline and charging at you.

Final point: Though I don't, it is often common (and very useful against nec/mes teams) to have holy veil. Helps when you get Visions of Regret or Backfire. Also Contemplation of Purity can be useful to deal with this, but isn't seen much.

jrmunch · Dec 21, 2010, 05:13 AM // 05:13

thanks to both of you!

Seraphim of Chaos · Dec 24, 2010, 05:01 AM // 05:01

eh

E/W

Ebon Hawk
Stoning
Glowstone
Grasping Earth
You're All Alone
Aura of Restoration
Earth Attunement
Sig

good shit good shit

reaper with no name · Dec 24, 2010, 05:41 AM // 05:41

Quote:

Originally Posted by jrmunch

OK. The one thing I just don't understand is how does using draw condition work with no other condition removal?

Honestly, I would replace Draw Conditions with some other condition removal skill, like Dismiss or something.

Corporeal Ghost · Dec 26, 2010, 02:13 AM // 02:13

That Mo/R bar is fine. It really isn't super important what you have as long as you have a critical mass of good, synergistic skills and know what to do with them. It's mostly a question of playstyle. Many of the better monk skills get significantly worse if you're not comfortable using them at a high level. The /W dual-stance bars are probably the easiest to play at a reasonably high level, but frankly you can run just about anything and streak in RA with some smart play. My favorite bar for awhile was:

Heal Other
Mend Condition
Patient Spirit
Distracting Shot
Spirit Bond
Guardian
Peace and Harmony
Natural Stride

So just find something you're comfortable playing and enjoy and think about what you could change whenever you take a brutal loss that you feel a bar tweak could have prevented. If it was a really close loss, it probably means you can just play your bar a little better in that situation in the future.

Draw is frankly the best removal for actually removing conditions. Other removals are easier to play and have more utility, but if you want to actually get conditions off of people, it's the best. It just takes a fair amount of practice to learn what needs to be drawn, what has risks/benefits to be drawn, and what you should just let stick. One of the better examples here is you generally want to just ignore ranger poison spread, although some removals like Dismiss and Mend Condition are pretty good at combating it.

As for prots...depends on both how good you are with them and how bad the average team you're willing to stay with is. Prots get much more efficient with good kiting and with no kiting, but are almost unusable with poor kiting. Prots, especially Guardian, also have the added benefit of allowing you to free up stance slots. I often run Guardian + Return instead of dual stance.

urania · Dec 26, 2010, 09:27 AM // 09:27

draw is an energy vampire (which you can only really afford to spam under divine spirit). foul feast has outclassed it ever since it got out.

in all honesty, its curse necs with ff+ps and good r/mo's that drag teams to 25 wins, not so much monks or frontline. they eat monks with guardian or stances for dinner while at the same time giving amazing control over conditions, physical shutdown as well as enchantment control (rip+ce rape the mo's patient and lets the r d shot word with ease) for attunements, derv enchants (on ws derv), monk enchants, conjures etc.

i also see that bar dying like a fly, especially after patient has been hit.

jrmunch · Dec 26, 2010, 11:50 PM // 23:50

Thanks for the continued advice!

I did try out some prots with this setup:

healing 12+1+1
divine 9+1
Prot 9 +1
healing burst
patient spirit
Reversal of fortune
Guardian
spotless mind
cure hex
draw conditions
antidote signet

I love rof and could never use vigorous right past the start of the match.

Practice practice!

I Echo Dshot · Dec 28, 2010, 09:06 AM // 09:06

RoF is bad, just spam patient.

You should really get used to vigorous, it helps negate a lot of pressure on spammers/melee.

your going to be dropped fast if you dont have a block stance.

Corporeal Ghost · Jan 01, 2011, 11:06 PM // 23:06

Quote:

Originally Posted by urania

draw is an energy vampire (which you can only really afford to spam under divine spirit). foul feast has outclassed it ever since it got out.

No doubt Feast is full-on better now--I feel the 2r on Draw was often better before--but it's a luxury you don't always have. You spam Draw when it's necessary, and there aren't many builds that will both tax your energy AND require to to Draw on recharge.

Quote:

Originally Posted by urania

i also see that bar dying like a fly, especially after patient has been hit.

If you're talking about that bar I posted, it's quite fragile. I actually ran it mostly before the PnH nerf awhile back, but it is (was when I last played) still semi-viable. You need to pre-kite literally everything, and if your bow set runs out of energy against non-physical pressure builds, you can't really gain it back like a "normal" bar can. DShot is your energy management. It's one of the hardest bars I've ever played, which is probably why I enjoyed it so much. You have to pay attention against all but the worst of players.

RoF is actually awesome, but you need to have the correct attribute spread and playstyle to support it, and there really aren't that many people who can correctly play it anymore, especially in a 4v4 setting.

jrmunch · Jan 02, 2011, 03:34 AM // 03:34

Quote:

Originally Posted by Corporeal Ghost

RoF is actually awesome, but you need to have the correct attribute spread and playstyle to support it, and there really aren't that many people who can correctly play it anymore, especially in a 4v4 setting.

Could you expand on this? By playstyle do you mean ability to watch the field to predict where to place it? What attribute spread did you have in mind?

Thanks!

Corporeal Ghost · Jan 02, 2011, 07:06 AM // 07:06

Quote:

Originally Posted by jrmunch

Could you expand on this? By playstyle do you mean ability to watch the field to predict where to place it? What attribute spread did you have in mind?

Thanks!

Sort of. It's not just about watching the field; it also has a lot to do with keeping peoples' life in the ~80% range and actively preprotting a ton to reduce damage instead of just catching spikes and redbarring everything back up. The last time I remember seeing this in high-level play was dR's backline, although admittedly I don't observe a ton anymore.

Beyond that, RoF (in 4v4) generally goes on pretty bizarre bars. It's a decent skill for filling holes because it's so versatile (at the cost of energy). But unless you're playing a bar with a ton of energy or a bar with more than sufficient redbar capacity (you generally aren't), you really need to be hitting money skills with it the majority of the time, and this takes a lot of focus that most people either aren't willing or aren't capable of playing with. It also takes a very high Prot spec and a Divine spec higher than what most people are running. So you generally only see it on off-the-wall/outdated stuff like Blessed Light with Return. The skill, the bars, and the playstyles are still viable, though probably not optimal. The major reason people aren't running them that I can tell is simply that you need to play at a much higher level to do so, and there just aren't that many people playing to improve anymore.

It's also less versatile than raw healing by nature as it's bad against small packet damage and degen, but you're generally using it to fill a healing deficiency on a bar that is overflowing with utility to handle the other stuff.

As far as I can tell, people are using it primarily as an oh shit button in 8v8, although as I said, I've not observed in awhile, and it's been even longer since I specifically watched monks.

thedeadlyassassin · Jan 03, 2011, 04:37 PM // 16:37

Here's one that I had fun with.

A/any

Dagger - 12+3
Crit - 11+1
Shadow Arts 6+1

Skills

Shadow Burden
Black Mantis strike
Jungle strike
trampling ox
falling spider
twisting fangs
Fox's Promise (Elite)
Res sig

It's just another common sin build, but uses the elite Fox's promise to get rid of any annoying Monks/Rangers/Warriors that like to stack blocking skills. A full rotation can kill any monk, which is nice, especially since most think they're protected by Guardian.

However it extremely lacks in defenses, and has lots of counters (like all sins do).
Common anti melee hexes and conditions really hurt this build, again, like all melee builds.
If you think you're good enough you can remove res sig and put deaths charge or another shadowstep, but you may run out of energy.

Speaking of which, I use zealous daggers with +5 energy, so my energy is around 34 and my health is around 520. If you fail getting a critical strike, you might not be able to complete the rotation.

You can also use this build quite often without needing your elite. It's just there to counter any blocking skills.

jrmunch · Jan 09, 2011, 04:04 AM // 04:04

I really appreciate the advice you are all giving me. I am having fun using the synergy between melandru's resilience, draw conditions, and divine boon. I have been using this bar:
divine 12+2
prot 10+1
wild 8

melandru's resilience
reversal of fortune
guardian
shield of absorption
shielding hands
deny hex
draw condition
divine boon

Of course if I don't prekite I am in a world of hurt usually, but I do like how this seems to force me to pay attention to things other than just redbars.

Is there a way I can improve this without giving up the 3 skills I mentioned?

urania · Jan 09, 2011, 08:55 AM // 08:55

my bar since boon days uses:
mel resilience, boon, divine spirit, sig of devotion, guard, draw, rof and deny hexes.
and i'm usually pretty much the only one who runs boon on mel resilience (or was until lately).

divine spirit lets you hold out a bit longer when pressure is highest (first 10-20 s of a match) and there isnt many conds or hexes to keep your e regen up or when there is stance removal in opposing team. divine spirit and sig of dev are also great for pumping deny as tripple or even quandruple (if boon is recharging too) hex removal.

ofcourse, you're free to take cop for signet or divine spirit to get rid of hexes or conds you dont wanna keep on yourself.

Corporeal Ghost · Jan 10, 2011, 03:41 AM // 03:41

I don't really like Deny Hexes on that bar. Seems like you're going to have to burn Boon quite a bit to get the 2 proc, but that takes casting time and energy you probably don't have.

That bar looks like it can't really redbar people back up without destroying your blue bar (unless they're feeding your Resilience), so even if you can play at a high enough level to prot all the prottable stuff, you're still going to be behind the non-prottable stuff that has big numbers. I love running a million small prots, but you really need an efficient redbar skill to back them up, especially if you don't have enough hex removal to actively fight hex teams.

There are a lot of routes you can take to plug these holes: add energy (Divine Spirit, Signet of Devotion), add efficient redbar (Divine Healing), add hex removal, etc etc. Your bar also seems a little weak to strips. I don't know if people still run Corrupt necros but they look like they eat you for breakfast.

urania · Jan 10, 2011, 01:14 PM // 13:14

guess you didn't read my post, did you.

kedde · Jan 10, 2011, 10:48 PM // 22:48

There's divine spirit in the build, so using boon over and over isn't really needed give it also contains sig of devotion. How often do you really need 4 hexes removed on one target?

jrmunch · Jan 11, 2011, 12:54 AM // 00:54

Quote:

Originally Posted by Corporeal Ghost

I don't really like Deny Hexes on that bar. Seems like you're going to have to burn Boon quite a bit to get the 2 proc, but that takes casting time and energy you probably don't have.

That bar looks like it can't really redbar people back up without destroying your blue bar (unless they're feeding your Resilience), so even if you can play at a high enough level to prot all the prottable stuff, you're still going to be behind the non-prottable stuff that has big numbers. I love running a million small prots, but you really need an efficient redbar skill to back them up, especially if you don't have enough hex removal to actively fight hex teams.

There are a lot of routes you can take to plug these holes: add energy (Divine Spirit, Signet of Devotion), add efficient redbar (Divine Healing), add hex removal, etc etc. Your bar also seems a little weak to strips. I don't know if people still run Corrupt necros but they look like they eat you for breakfast.

Thanks, I will try a bar similar to Urania's for a bit. I appreciate all the help!