W/Mo Build. Suggestions?

Class: Warrior / Monk

Attributes: (cost)
Strength: 1 (1)
Swordsmanship: 11 (77)
Protection Prayers: 10 (61)
Smiting Prayers: 10 (61)

Total attribute points used: 200/200


Skills:
1) Final Thrust (availability) - (10a,0,0) Lose all adrenaline. If Final Thrust hits, you deal 29 more damage. This damage is doubled if your target was below 50% health.
2) Galrath Slash (availability) - (8a,0,0) This attack strikes for +29 damage if it hits.
3) Gash (availability) - (7a,0,0) If this attack hits a bleeding foe, you strike for 7 more damage and that foe suffers a deep wound, lowering that foe's maximum health by 20% for 16 seconds.
4) Sever Artery (availability) - (4a,0,0) If this attack hits, the opponent will begin bleeding for 19 seconds, losing health over time.
5) Shielding Hands (availability) - (5,1,25) For 10 seconds, damage received by target ally is reduced by 13.
6) Mark of Protection (availability) (elite) - (15,1,45) For 10 seconds, whenever target ally would take damage, that ally is healed for that amount instead, maximum 42. All your Protection Prayers are disabled for 10 seconds. This is an elite skill.
7) Balthazar's Spirit (availability) - (10+,2,0) While you maintain this enchantment, target ally gains adrenaline and energy after taking damage.
8) Strength of Honor (availability) - (10+,2,0) While you maintain this enchantment, target ally deals 7 more damage in melee.

Damage:
Lots of it. The Strength of honor offers a bonus, but the balthazar's spirit also helps to generate a lot of adrenaline faster, allowing for more uses of swordsmanship attacks. so, bonus damage + quicker skill usage= acceptable damage output for a warrior

Health:
Health should be no issue for this warrior. As a warrior, the AL alone will hold up a substantial amount of health, but this warrior can also reduce damage taken using the low-energy, highly effective shielding hands. when things get risky, this warrior can also enter a sort of 10 second "God Mode" with the elite "Mark of Protection." This skill requires the enemy to hit for more than 82 damage per hit to effect the warrior. This warrior will "hang in there" in the tough times

Energy:
It seems very dangerous having no energy regen, doesn't it? but wait, Balthazar's Spirit regenerates energy. But how much? According to an alpha tester I recently chatted with, the amount of energy gained from a hit is around 2. So, within 3 hits, the mana will be regenerated for another 10 seconds of shielding hands, and Mark of Protection can be used when it's needed most: under heavy fire. of course, this is the weakest part of the warrior's build, but in most occasions you can expect the energy to regenerate fast enough for the whopping 2 skills that need it.

Allies:
Seems very self-sufficient, but not too helpful to the team as a whole. Until you realize that Mark of Protection and Healing Hands can be cast on other allies in the team when they are taking the heat. Enchantments can be taken off when heavy stress isn't on the warrior, as well, allowing for more energy to return.

That looks like a pretty solid build. I've played a W/Mo for the last 2 betas and have found it quite good at surviving, although people who know how to kill them can easily(conditions, hexes, elemental damage). My build is similar except I go the more traditional (can I say traditional if the game is still in beta?) way of Healing Hands, Healing Breeze, and Mending.

I'd suggest playing the build alot in March BWE and find out the weaknesses in this build and in your play style and then compensate for them with a few different skills. I've found Mending to be indispensible to me as a constant source of healing. Hamstring found its way into my build to stop those pesky monks from running away from me too.

You'll find that you won't have the best damage output but you can be quite annoying by sticking on the target and keeping bleeding/deep wound/cripple on them.

W/Mo are really good at resurrecting, so maybe you should add in a res to help your party a bit more. Other than that this build looks fine.

I wish there were room for rez.... and thanks for the good feedback! I love mending too, but I had to part with it to make this build.

I like Judge's Insight over Strength of Honor

Going with Hammers might be a good idea also with the amount of adrenaline that Balthazar's Spirit generates.

How much holy damage does judge's insight deal... seems like a lot to keep in order during a battle, IMO.

Judge's Insight causes your attacks to deal holy damage, so it doesn't actually add anything, you'll do the normal damage you did before you'll just avoid some resistances (and deal double damage to holy weak creatures like the undead and necromancers in certain armors) - holy's neither physical nor elemental so, for example, neither Ranger nor Warrior armor will have a bonus against your holy damage weapon. Where you do gain damage is in the fact that your attacks gain 20% armor penetration. So, you'll have a pretty good increase to damage, roughly comparable to what you'd get from a Conjure but you'll need to cast it a lot more often.

Go with Hammers if you want to flail ineffectually, you mean? Hammers are just awful, even with Balthazar's. They don't have very good skills. Their skills are clunky and expensive in terms of energy or adrenaline. They don't deal much more damage than the other one-handed weapons. And by taking a hammer you miss out on a shield meaning you have less modifiers on your character from items to boost your effectiveness. Go Hammers only if you have massive head trauma and have trouble separating your nice, personal reality from the actual one we live in.

Go Swords unless they change Cleave to something more reasonable. Swords have a lot of adrenal skills and Balthazar's makes adrenal skills even better. If you'd contemplate Hammers because Balthazar makes their ludicrous adrenal costs actually palpable then go Swords because Balthazar's will just super charge your adrenal gain so you could, say, get off Final Thrust on your 4th hit instead of your 7th.

Now, as for the build. There are problems.

First, you have Strength 1. That's a no-no. Strength adds armor penetration to all your attacks (well, just the skills, last I heard but that's still not to shabby). 1% per rank. At Strength 10 a character with 100 armor is a character with 90 armor. There are a lot of good skills in Strength, too, so you want to pump it up as high as you can. Likewise, you've left your Swordsmanship at 11 which is likewise a no-no. Check Chuck's opus but that means your sword is only at roughly 90% of its potential. If it says it does 10~22 damage you're only doing 9~20. You also want to pump that as high as you can. Doesn't matter what weapon you pick out, you want it at 12 or you're better off not bothering with it. The gold standard is Strength 12/Weapon 12. Typically that means a Warrior build has a 3 attribute build with a base of 11/10/10 before runes and headgear (Minor Strength, minor Weapon and weapon helment = 12/12/10). You can get away with Strength around 10, although you're giving up a bit of damage potential there, but you really really need Swords 12. That doesn't give you a lot to play with but fortunately Protection and Smiting don't absoluetly require being maxed out. You can go with a 11/10/8/6 build or something like it and still get a lot out of your Monk lines. Smiting is the more important of the two, though.

Running two maintained enchantments is probably a bad idea for anyone. And especially for a character that only has 2 pips of regen to start with. Balthazars will give you some energy but only when you get hit. Balthazar's itself will typically make up for the regen you lose. But unless you plan to get hit a lot (Not unreasonable, if you're tanking in PvE) you won't earn enough from Balthazar's to offset the additional maintained enchantment. I'd drop Strength of Honor which isn't all that impressive in the first place. With all that adren from Balthazar's you could replace it with Pure Strike and run a Pure+Galrath+Final combination to go with Sever and Gash. You should have enough energy then to run the odd enchantment. Drop Mark of Protection for Shield of Deflection if you're sticking with a Protection elite, though. Shield of Deflection isn't as effective a defense but you can keep it up a lot more often because of the low recharge time which is important if you happen to get stripped.

If energy proves problematic you can pick up a Zealous weapon and something like Frenzy. Or Warrior's Endurance.

And, as a Warrior, you must have a speed boost or a snare somewhere on your build. You are doing nothing if you cannot stay in melee range. Hence, you need something like Sprint or something like Hamstring.

I plan on using a swordsmanship helmet, which will put me at 12 swordsmanship, so that problem is cared for. With the changes in strength, I believe weaponry skill to be infinitely more important than strength, since strength only really offers the penetration with skills (one out of every 4 or 5 hits, and half previous armor penetration just isn't enough). Putting 10 points in strength will result in galrath slash only dealing 1 additional damage to a caster.

About strength of honor, I am really concerned about dropping reliable damage from the build. I haven't seen strength of honor, but dealing 7 additional damage per hit just sounds promising as is.

Here's the build how you described it, without the change in strength.

Class: Warrior / Monk

Attributes: (cost)
Strength: 0 (0)
Swordsmanship: 11 (77)
Protection Prayers: 10 (61)
Smiting Prayers: 10 (61)

Total attribute points used: 199/200


Skills:
1) Final Thrust (availability) - (10a,0,0) Lose all adrenaline. If Final Thrust hits, you deal 29 more damage. This damage is doubled if your target was below 50% health.
2) Galrath Slash (availability) - (8a,0,0) This attack strikes for +29 damage if it hits.
3) Pure Strike (availability) - (8a,0,0) If Pure Strike hits, you strike for +22 damage. If you are not using a stance, Pure Strike cannot be blocked or evaded.
4) Sever Artery (availability) - (4a,0,0) If this attack hits, the opponent will begin bleeding for 19 seconds, losing health over time.
5) Hamstring (availability) - (10,0,15) If this attack hits, your target is crippled for 12 seconds, slowing his movement.
6) Shielding Hands (availability) - (5,1,25) For 10 seconds, damage received by target ally is reduced by 13.
7) Mark of Protection (availability) (elite) - (15,1,45) For 10 seconds, whenever target ally would take damage, that ally is healed for that amount instead, maximum 42. All your Protection Prayers are disabled for 10 seconds. This is an elite skill.
8) Balthazar's Spirit (availability) - (10+,2,0) While you maintain this enchantment, target ally gains adrenaline and energy after taking damage.

Yes, this will give me more energy. But the issue is, now I need more energy to use Hamstring, which (IMO) ineffectively makes an attempt at providing more energy that was not required in the build. I like the addition of pure strike, though.

and just a question, if balthazar's can make up for one enchantment, wouldn't it be like having one enchantment on me anyways if I had two? I know it's unreliable, but it's kind of like getting adrenaline boost while still mantaining energy for 1 BiP

My only issue with your build is that you have no skills that use Smiting ... yes Balthazar's Aura is smiting, however it does not scale with smiting level, so really I can't see the point in having 10 smite.

[COLOR=DarkRed]Oops I meant Balthazar's Spirit above, I certainly have not noticed any difference in gain with smiting ... however I have not done independant lab testing[/COLOR]

I Would consider placing those points in Tactics or Strength. At the moment, you can't use a shield ... You are a sword weilder, so are you planning on using a focus?

are you sure about this? the skill description is vague at best and has no indication of whether it does or does not scale with attribute level..

Balthazar's Aura is definitely linked to Smiting doing, according to us, anyway, 3...15 holy damage.

Balthazar's Spirit is another story, though. It's not specifically stated to be linked to Smiting Prayers anywhere in its description. But, we all know how accurate those skill description are, don't we? I can't specifically point to anything, but I'd bet my bottom dollar that what Smiting does is to affect the adrenaline gain. It's subtle but more Smiting means you get more adren per hit.

I think that is a good build but perhaps you should switch to Hammers since shields are useless to you anyways(with no pts in tactics or str). Just my 2 cents

Why did you feel the need to res this thread?

Um... are we playing the same game? First off, Swords have the least amount of adrenaline skills out of the 3 warrior weapons. They are primarily energy based.

Second, the Hammer skills are probably the best skills out of the 3 weapons. Most of their skills are Adrenaline basd (Axe has most Adrenaline skills, sword has the least, hammer is the middle) Knockdown rules in the PvP. But perhaps you are not very familiar with PvP?

Furthermore, yes, Cleave is underpowered. Eviscerate, however, is not. Axes deal more damage overall because of Critical hits.


Because he did not specify whether-or-not this was a PvP or PvE build, I will just say that shields are not very usefull in PvP because the warrior is usually attacked last (although not always, obviously. If the warrior is giving more trouble than any other opponent, it's always important to keep in mind that taking out immediate threats quickly is just as important as say a healing monk).

Honestly, Sword's usefullness is limited in PvP because it's mainly a tanking weapon, yet even then not many other warriors will immediatly go for you.

Bigtru, you are responding to a post that is almost 6 months old. Most of the stuff he said applied then, but not now.

Oh, didn't notice how old this post was ^^

Who the hell dug this one up? And WHY!?

Yesh who dug that up!!

I was excited for a moment there to see Rex back in the forums!!! YEAH! But no!

Some things have changed a bit, since this was written..


ARGH Shame on you for bringing rex back from oblivion!


Ratatass

Keel the thread necro. I got all ??? seeing Rex bash hammers before I saw the post date. ARGH...

Try throwing in Judge's Insight... and switching your weapon from sword to hammer. There's really no contest between the two.