oh the touchie our good ol' friend

Like JR said it is a team game and what is your team doing if they aren't helping you stop protecting them.You could use shield bash and bash them or sprint away.

Lol, gg Apple.

Aren't you slightly late for this debate? After 3 whole months of people whining and bitching about Touch Rangers 'pwning' morons in control of warriors, guess what changed? Erm... the description of 'Expertise', which now clearly states 'Touch Skills' are included and will NOT be getting changed.

No-one gives a toss about RA or AB as far as skill balancing goes. Touchers making it to higher level HA would get destroyed by a good team. Its a powerful build... but vs snares, degen, anti-spam, shutdown, etc, its useless. Fought many of them in ABs recently... they really don't do much when your playing cripshot.

I doubt Can't Touch This was to stop Touch Rangers. Seems much more likely to counter Blackout, Shock, Starburst, etc

or maybe you could learn to not whine about RA? that could work also...

beside you missed the boat on this discussion, by about 6 months. gw is a team game. no build is greater than all others. your prot monk does well against warriors, rangers, and other melee classes but not against touchies? well, duh! touchies are not overpowered (against a good team, at their best, they can be an annoyance. against a bad team, they can be somewhat effective). and they are only truly useful in large numbers (i recall an ab from a few months back where the other team had 8 touchers and 2 MMs). but you dont see that anymore, they are few and far between these days.

and again, its RA. Random Arena. you dont know what you are going to get, so you wont always have a counter for everything. thats what RA is. deal with it.

Touchers are fine and players who know what they're doing don't lose to them.

A monk dying to a toucher as stated in the original post means there is something seriously wrong with the monk's skillbar or the monk's understanding of the game, because the best toucher build does not do enough damage to kill a properly-played monk.

Touchers will get especially creamed in HA and only reign in other areas because the other players are especially bad and do not bring counters or competent builds of their own.

People should really stop complaining about touchers and instead learn how to play properly.

Wha....? Touchers deal about as much damage to you as a mending wammo slamming away with power attack. That is to say, not much. If you can't muster up the healing power to negate a toucher, there's a MAJOR problem with your build.

And why run anything but ZB on a monk in RA?

+
I'm getting mixed signals. If there are so many other "better" builds out there, wouldn't the prove to be more difficult to you then a toucher? Just kind of curious.

I certainly don't think a nerf laser is needed. And saying you can't kite cuz they could have an assassin on their team says nothing about the touch rangers. In fact, I think thats mentioning assassins.

Its funny. I monk a lot in AB and sometimes in RA, but I haven't really run into touch rangers lately. I kinda thought that build was losing popularity.

Anyway, I personally have never really had many problems with touchers. However, I'm sympathetic to the OP because its never fun to get totally beat up when one plays monk

The problem I guess is the fact that your a prot monk. Thats perfectly fine, but its always kind of a gamble when you choose a build as it's really hard to create a build thats good against anything. My advise to the OP is to ignore the snarky comments disparaging your playing ability and check out some of the skills mentioned. Experiment to find what is right for you!

First off to clear up anything about me and my monking abilities. I'm a R2 glad and R7 hero. I got both of thsese by playing monk. I am not a noob and I love my build. My build counters everything besides a touchie and a mes. I guess the only reason I posted this was because I had a string of bad luck against touchies. Secondly, I said I played against a group of touchie's in HA. We won against them but it still annoyed me that they were even there. I have also heard much in these posts about touchies dealing damage. They do not deal damage they use life stealing. So, a prot monk prevents DAMAGE no effect against life stealing. Lastly, I was using the assasin scenario as a hypothetical situation.

Saying his problem is he is a prot monk is totally incorrect. I play boon prot monk in RA all the time (just like the OP does according to the OP) and not once as a boon prot monk have I ever died to a single enemy toucher. It would be impossible for a single toucher on his own to kill a boon prot monk with a proper skillbar and proper understanding of the game.

I've also played as the ideal toucher build in RA all the time, and the only time it ever kills enemy monks, even if they're not boon prots, is if the enemy monks have a very whacky, ineffective skillbar.

ZB + return like earlier stated. As a monk there is little you can do to help your team except try as you might to keep them alive and pray that they do enough damage and/or shutdown the touch rangers.

boon prot was nerfed beyond belief in case you haven't noticed.

What is the date of the nerfing that you are referring to?

The one where Divine boon costs 2 energy when triggered. So your spamming 7 energy when you use RoF and Guardian. No one plays that build anymore.

It's always been like that. The "nerf" that they did on Divine Boon was increase it's recharge time to make CoP less useful on the build.

Divine Boon was always like that. The reason boon prots arent run any more is due to the nerfing of all elite energy management in addition to the fact that the actual heal from boon has been reduced a lot.

oh well its not played anyomre. there.

while i dont run boon any longer (zb + GoH ftw!), you can still run them in lower end pvp. the battle duration is short enough that the lack of energy management shouldnt effect a monk that knows how to effectively distribute the heals.

the two biggest reasons why boons went out of favor had little to do with the changes to boon specifically, although that did contribute. the first was the changes to the inspirations line and if you want to go way back to the OoB change. and second reason was the introduction of better skills. boon required you to invest your secondary and your elite into an energy management skill. with new elites, as well as the rise in popularity of different secondaries, investing so many points into a line and locking up your secondary just for a now gimped energy management skill made little sense.

and as for the adding +2 energy to boon, its always been +2 energy. the skill balance that changed things was the 9/14/06 skill balance, along with the before mentioned changes.
if you are going to whine, at least get it right...

Just because it's not popular doesn't mean you can't use it.

1) Divine Boon was played in GvG/HA/TA/RA/AB even when it took away 2 energy per cast. They found a way to keep up their energy.

2) Boon Prots were nerfed 4 months ago (or earlier than that) when Anet reduced the energy gain from Inspired/Revealed Hex, Drain Enchantment, Mantra of Recall, and Energy Drain. Once again, the -2 energy never bothered anyone.

3) Touch Rangers are not even a threat anymore. All you have to do is heal over the life-stealing, then pound their face in. Yes, I am well aware of their defensive stance, but with the new additions from NightFall, Grenth Trains and Melandru tanks and the new Monk skills just flat out gimp them.

Fail.

OP, as Brother Andicus have previously advised, please take this bar to RA, you will be set for most things (including touchers - OMG HAX!!11!!!) it'll even be quite useable in HA as well:

Monk/Assassin

Divine Favor: 9 (8+1)
Healing Prayers: 9 (8+1)
Protection Prayers: 15 (12+1+2)
Shadow Arts: 9

Zealous Benediction [Elite]
Gift of Health
Sheild of Absorption (or Reversal of Fortune)
Protective Spirit
Dismiss Condition
Holy Veil
Dark Escape
Return