Malic
12-01-2006, 01:01 AM
ok i had some issues with my monk once i loaded up from 16 months of moth balls..... and well here is a good article i thought i'd share.. as time goes on i shall post more of these and originals of my own design, well as original as one can get when everyone has the same skills lol...
Freyas Theme Builds #1
"Hello! I'm wanting to do weekly articles focusing on strange builds centered around odd themes and utilizing skills that aren't used in many builds. This week, I'm going to do a build based on using monk enchantments while using Blessed Aura to the greatest effect. For future articles, I'll try to cover other classes, other themes, and most importantly, make builds based around interesting skills that are suggested to me by the visitors of the site! So, if you've got some skills you'd like to see put to use, or interesting concepts for builds that you'd like to see, either PM me or post on the forums here, and I'll be happy to see what I can come up with.
So, with no further ado, here's my Blessed Aura Enchantment Healer!
Monk/Mesmer
Attributes
Divine Favor{P}: 12(11+1)
Healing Prayers: 14 (12+2)
Inspiration Magic: 6
Skills
Blessed Aura (Divine Favor)
Peace and Harmony{E} (Divine Favor)
Divine Spirit (Divine Favor)
Healing Breeze (Healing Prayers)
Healing Seed (Healing Prayers)
Vigorous Spirit (Healing Prayers
Orison of Healing (Healing Prayers)
Inspired Hex (Inspiration Magic)
With 11 points in Divine Favor, Blessed Aura will increase the duration of your enchantments by 30%, which means that you'll gain the highest benefit from using this skill in conjunction with long-duration enchantments. The downside to Blessed Aura is that it reduces your energy regeneration by one, so to counteract this, I chose Peace and Harmony for the elite skill. Peace and Harmony gives an extra arrow of energy regeneration for 78 seconds, before Blessed Aura takes effect. This means that while you're using Blessed Aura, Peace and Harmony now lasts for 101 seconds, during which time Peace and Harmony will counteract the cost of maintaining Blessed Aura. One thing to watch for, however, is that Peace and Harmony will end if you attack, so it's best to avoid attacking enemies with your weapon. It will also end if you use a skill targetting an enemy, which is why all of the skills that I have chosen only target allies. Another skill to help out with this setup is Divine Spirit, which decreases the cost of your spells, which will help you keep recasting your enchantments as soon as you can without running out of energy. Divine Spirit will be effective for nearly 60 seconds with your Blessed Aura bonus, so you'll be able to recast it very soon after it expires.
Once you get into battle, your improved enchantments should be considerably more effective than they would otherwise be. With these preparations, your Healing Breeze will cost 8 energy, and be effective for 13 seconds, which at 9 arrows of regeneration, gives you an additional 54 health, at 2 less energy cost than a normal Healing Breeze. Healing Seed would normally last 20 seconds with a 25 second recharge, leaving you without the benefit of the enchantment for 7 seconds every time it expires: 5 seconds until the skill recharges and 2 seconds to cast it. With Blessed Aura, Healing Seed will last for 26 seconds, meaning that if you start recasting it as soon as it recharges, there will only be one second where your ally does not have the benefit of Healing Seed. This can be extremely helpful in situations where you have to protect one ally, such as the quests where you have to keep a suicidal NPC alive, healing the Ghostly Hero in PvP missions, as well as in general when one character is tanking a large number of enemies. Due to Divine Spirit, Healing Seed will only cost you 10 energy as well, giving you the benefit of the longer-lasting enchantment at only 2/3 the normal price. Vigorous Spirit doesn't get as much of a boost as these other enchantments, but it does gain an extra 9 seconds of duration. This enchantment can help immensely when cast on characters that are continuously attacking or casting spells, such as a warrior or healing monk. In addition, it's rather spammable, so if you are fighting against opponents that use enchantment removal skills, you can cast Vigorous Spirit on your allies after using Healing Seed or Healing Breeze on them in order to provide extra healing, and if an enchantment gets removed by your opponents, they will remove Vigorous Spirit instead of your longer-recharging enchantments.
Instead of using the Healing Prayers enchantments, you could also make a variant of this build focusing on the Protection Prayers attribute. In this case, I would suggest dropping Peace and Harmony in order to take one of the elite Protection enchantments such as Shield of Deflection or Shield of Regeneration. If you do this, however, you will be losing the arrow of energy regeneration provided by Peace and Harmony, so you will either have to cast less often to conserve energy, or gain energy by other means, such as Blood is Power from an ally, or by incorporating other methods of energy management from your secondary profession. Other enchantments that would be useful from the Protection Prayers line in this build would be Shielding Hands, Protective Spirit, and even Guardian. However, if you decide to take the Protection route, you will be more reliant upon having an allied healer to restore lost life, as the Protection Prayers line is short on means of healing your allies. Finally, you could make a pure Monk build, utilizing both Protection and Healing Prayers. Each of your enchantments will be less effective than they would be focusing on only two attributes, Divine Favor and either Healing or Protection Prayers, but you will have a larger selection of enchantments to choose from.
Here are some additional possible setups:
Monk/Mesmer
Divine Favor{P}: 12 (11+1)
Protection Prayers: 14 (12 + 2)
Inspiration Magic: 8
Blessed Aura (Divine Favor)
Divine Spirit (Divine Favor)
Shield of Regeneration{E} (Protection Prayers)
Protective Spirit (Protection Prayers)
Guardian (Protection Prayers)
Shielding Hands (Protection Prayers)
Mend Condition (Protection Prayers)
Energy Tap (Inspiration Magic)
This focuses on the Protection Prayers skills, and works similarly to the healing build. You will not be able to provide as much healing, but you will be able to reduce the damage taken by your team significantly.
Monk/X
Divine Favor{P}: 11(10+1)
Healing Prayers: 13 (11+2)
Protection Prayers: 11 (10+1)
Blessed Aura (Divine Favor)
Divine Spirit (Divine Favor)
Shield of Deflection{E} (Protection Prayers)
Shielding Hands (Protection Prayers)
Healing Breeze (Healing Prayers)
Healing Seed (Healing Prayers)
Dwayna's Kiss (Healing Prayers)
Mend Condition (Protection Prayers)
This variant is a pure monk, ignoring the secondary profession. It combines the Protection and Healing enchantments in order to provide excellent relief from focused fire. Dwayna's Kiss can be very useful for healing an ally who you've cast several enchantments on, as it gains effectiveness from each enchantment and hex that is affecting that ally. Obviously with the large energy costs of many of these enchantments, you won't be able to cast them extremely often, but with their increased duration and lower cost, you should be able to continuously prevent focus-fire, even in the face of enchantment removal from your enemies.
As with any build that relies on enchantments, enchantment removal can be a large threat to your effectiveness. However, this build does work well in the face of enchantment removal due to the large number of enchantments that you can use, while the skills to remove the enchantments have a long recharge timer. However, be wary of using all your skills at one time, as if your enchantments get stripped, you'll need to wait for your energy to regenerate and skills to recharge before you get the opportunity to recast them. This build also works best with another character on your team that can heal the team directly, who can restore lost health cheaply and efficiently, to help counter damage that is dealt to multiple members of your team, as the build works best ensuring the survival of a smaller number of characters.
Please feel free to provide feedback for this article in this thread in the forums, as well as make suggestions for different types of themes or skills that you'd like to see me use for one of these articles!"
Originally Published by Freyas
url:http://www.guildwarsguru.com/content/freyas-theme-builds-1-id1099.php
Freyas Theme Builds #1
"Hello! I'm wanting to do weekly articles focusing on strange builds centered around odd themes and utilizing skills that aren't used in many builds. This week, I'm going to do a build based on using monk enchantments while using Blessed Aura to the greatest effect. For future articles, I'll try to cover other classes, other themes, and most importantly, make builds based around interesting skills that are suggested to me by the visitors of the site! So, if you've got some skills you'd like to see put to use, or interesting concepts for builds that you'd like to see, either PM me or post on the forums here, and I'll be happy to see what I can come up with.
So, with no further ado, here's my Blessed Aura Enchantment Healer!
Monk/Mesmer
Attributes
Divine Favor{P}: 12(11+1)
Healing Prayers: 14 (12+2)
Inspiration Magic: 6
Skills
Blessed Aura (Divine Favor)
Peace and Harmony{E} (Divine Favor)
Divine Spirit (Divine Favor)
Healing Breeze (Healing Prayers)
Healing Seed (Healing Prayers)
Vigorous Spirit (Healing Prayers
Orison of Healing (Healing Prayers)
Inspired Hex (Inspiration Magic)
With 11 points in Divine Favor, Blessed Aura will increase the duration of your enchantments by 30%, which means that you'll gain the highest benefit from using this skill in conjunction with long-duration enchantments. The downside to Blessed Aura is that it reduces your energy regeneration by one, so to counteract this, I chose Peace and Harmony for the elite skill. Peace and Harmony gives an extra arrow of energy regeneration for 78 seconds, before Blessed Aura takes effect. This means that while you're using Blessed Aura, Peace and Harmony now lasts for 101 seconds, during which time Peace and Harmony will counteract the cost of maintaining Blessed Aura. One thing to watch for, however, is that Peace and Harmony will end if you attack, so it's best to avoid attacking enemies with your weapon. It will also end if you use a skill targetting an enemy, which is why all of the skills that I have chosen only target allies. Another skill to help out with this setup is Divine Spirit, which decreases the cost of your spells, which will help you keep recasting your enchantments as soon as you can without running out of energy. Divine Spirit will be effective for nearly 60 seconds with your Blessed Aura bonus, so you'll be able to recast it very soon after it expires.
Once you get into battle, your improved enchantments should be considerably more effective than they would otherwise be. With these preparations, your Healing Breeze will cost 8 energy, and be effective for 13 seconds, which at 9 arrows of regeneration, gives you an additional 54 health, at 2 less energy cost than a normal Healing Breeze. Healing Seed would normally last 20 seconds with a 25 second recharge, leaving you without the benefit of the enchantment for 7 seconds every time it expires: 5 seconds until the skill recharges and 2 seconds to cast it. With Blessed Aura, Healing Seed will last for 26 seconds, meaning that if you start recasting it as soon as it recharges, there will only be one second where your ally does not have the benefit of Healing Seed. This can be extremely helpful in situations where you have to protect one ally, such as the quests where you have to keep a suicidal NPC alive, healing the Ghostly Hero in PvP missions, as well as in general when one character is tanking a large number of enemies. Due to Divine Spirit, Healing Seed will only cost you 10 energy as well, giving you the benefit of the longer-lasting enchantment at only 2/3 the normal price. Vigorous Spirit doesn't get as much of a boost as these other enchantments, but it does gain an extra 9 seconds of duration. This enchantment can help immensely when cast on characters that are continuously attacking or casting spells, such as a warrior or healing monk. In addition, it's rather spammable, so if you are fighting against opponents that use enchantment removal skills, you can cast Vigorous Spirit on your allies after using Healing Seed or Healing Breeze on them in order to provide extra healing, and if an enchantment gets removed by your opponents, they will remove Vigorous Spirit instead of your longer-recharging enchantments.
Instead of using the Healing Prayers enchantments, you could also make a variant of this build focusing on the Protection Prayers attribute. In this case, I would suggest dropping Peace and Harmony in order to take one of the elite Protection enchantments such as Shield of Deflection or Shield of Regeneration. If you do this, however, you will be losing the arrow of energy regeneration provided by Peace and Harmony, so you will either have to cast less often to conserve energy, or gain energy by other means, such as Blood is Power from an ally, or by incorporating other methods of energy management from your secondary profession. Other enchantments that would be useful from the Protection Prayers line in this build would be Shielding Hands, Protective Spirit, and even Guardian. However, if you decide to take the Protection route, you will be more reliant upon having an allied healer to restore lost life, as the Protection Prayers line is short on means of healing your allies. Finally, you could make a pure Monk build, utilizing both Protection and Healing Prayers. Each of your enchantments will be less effective than they would be focusing on only two attributes, Divine Favor and either Healing or Protection Prayers, but you will have a larger selection of enchantments to choose from.
Here are some additional possible setups:
Monk/Mesmer
Divine Favor{P}: 12 (11+1)
Protection Prayers: 14 (12 + 2)
Inspiration Magic: 8
Blessed Aura (Divine Favor)
Divine Spirit (Divine Favor)
Shield of Regeneration{E} (Protection Prayers)
Protective Spirit (Protection Prayers)
Guardian (Protection Prayers)
Shielding Hands (Protection Prayers)
Mend Condition (Protection Prayers)
Energy Tap (Inspiration Magic)
This focuses on the Protection Prayers skills, and works similarly to the healing build. You will not be able to provide as much healing, but you will be able to reduce the damage taken by your team significantly.
Monk/X
Divine Favor{P}: 11(10+1)
Healing Prayers: 13 (11+2)
Protection Prayers: 11 (10+1)
Blessed Aura (Divine Favor)
Divine Spirit (Divine Favor)
Shield of Deflection{E} (Protection Prayers)
Shielding Hands (Protection Prayers)
Healing Breeze (Healing Prayers)
Healing Seed (Healing Prayers)
Dwayna's Kiss (Healing Prayers)
Mend Condition (Protection Prayers)
This variant is a pure monk, ignoring the secondary profession. It combines the Protection and Healing enchantments in order to provide excellent relief from focused fire. Dwayna's Kiss can be very useful for healing an ally who you've cast several enchantments on, as it gains effectiveness from each enchantment and hex that is affecting that ally. Obviously with the large energy costs of many of these enchantments, you won't be able to cast them extremely often, but with their increased duration and lower cost, you should be able to continuously prevent focus-fire, even in the face of enchantment removal from your enemies.
As with any build that relies on enchantments, enchantment removal can be a large threat to your effectiveness. However, this build does work well in the face of enchantment removal due to the large number of enchantments that you can use, while the skills to remove the enchantments have a long recharge timer. However, be wary of using all your skills at one time, as if your enchantments get stripped, you'll need to wait for your energy to regenerate and skills to recharge before you get the opportunity to recast them. This build also works best with another character on your team that can heal the team directly, who can restore lost health cheaply and efficiently, to help counter damage that is dealt to multiple members of your team, as the build works best ensuring the survival of a smaller number of characters.
Please feel free to provide feedback for this article in this thread in the forums, as well as make suggestions for different types of themes or skills that you'd like to see me use for one of these articles!"
Originally Published by Freyas
url:http://www.guildwarsguru.com/content/freyas-theme-builds-1-id1099.php