Two Suggestions: Smiting & Balthazar Faction

Hello together,

this is my first post on this forum. I´ve been playing my main character, a Monk named Jimiyu Essono, for a year now and tried out a wide variety of Protection and Healing Prayers builds. However i never found a viable idea for a smiting build, that would be worth playing for a longer while. I did some research and found out that most Smiting Prayer Skills got nerfed (i.e. higher energy cost mostly) because of overusage of E/Mo Smiting builds in the early days.

The problem with Smiting Prayers is, in my opinion, that Divine Favor has close to no synergy effect with smiting. Most Smiting Skills will be used on hostile creatures, who will (thankfully ;-) ) not be healed. My suggestion therefor is to improve Divine Favor to give it a purpose in Primary Monk Smiting Prayer builds. The easiest way would be a damage buff for holy damage derived from divine favor (this could also lead to interesting Mo/D builds) or just a damage bonus to all smiting prayers targeting a foe.

My second suggestion goes towards the usage of Balthazar faction after achieving UAS. Tournament tokens are afaik the only thing you can buy with them afterwards. I´d like to see another possibiliy here. My idea was to allow the purchase of Gladiatorpoints using Faction (10.000 Balthazar Faction per point). This would roughly be the equivalent of 30 - 40 wins in RA or TA, so you would still gain Gladiator points a lot faster with 10 wins in a row, but it would be another possibility to gain points in a, in my opinion ,very long titletrack.

Thanks for reading this :-) I´m looking forward to your comments,
Enas

You can gain Balthazar faction in more places than just TA/RA, so that will affect your idea involving the Gladiator title.

6 per kill in AB
6 per kill in Competitive Missions
40+ per kill in Training/Zaishen
20 per point/kill in HB

You could effectively get the title much faster than TA/RA with your method.

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I do like your idea of trying to take the fork out of Smiting though!

Thx for the feedback :-)

I picked the gladiator title because it is the most basic PVP title. I wouldn´t mind if ppl playing other forms of PVP would trade their faction for points in Gladiator. But actually any other idea for spending faction than comparatevely useless Tournament tokens would be worth hearing :-)

Glad you like the Smiting Prayers / Divine Favor - aspect.

Bad idea, sorry; it would ruin the title. Also, getting 10k Balth faction is far easier than winning 10 consecutive matches in RA/TA.

Smiting Prayers are also fine as they are- there's a lot of pressure if used properly. The only problem are the useless skills like Strength of Honour (even after the "buff"), but that's a whole different issue.

I do agree with you on the basis that Balth Faction should have a use after UAX; filling up your storage with stacks of Tournament Tokens is lame.

Balthazar faction has now one use: Tournamet tokens. Not much, but at least something.

I do agree with divine favor giving something for Smitting skills targetting enemies... something like +x% damage per each two ranks to skills that deal holy damage.

Wrong.
So far, there has only been one viable smite build, with different variations.
The build is: Zealot's Fire, two quick-cast/recharge spells to make ZF trigger very often.(Reversal of Fortune and Draw Conditions are good for this), Balthazar's Aura, and some form of extreme energy management. You can fill the rest of your bar with utility. The different variations are all the same, exept for different forms of energy management. So far we've seen Ether Renewal, Air of Enchantment and Master of Magic (afaik). This build probably pumps out the highest DPS in the game, or at least it used to if you happen to hit more than one person every once in a while, while providing nice healing and utility too (don't underestimate a DF bonus every second, plus keeping your frontline clean of all conditions). The Divine Favor bonus makes this build a lot stronger (AoE smiters, imo, were better than ER or MoM smiters), so Divine Favor is far from irrelevant for this build.

or you could just make it when you cast a monk spell that targets a foe, you are healed for the divine favor amount..... but that might get abused

Hell, how about making it so that divine favor is sort of like expertise for smiting. Since smiting is so expensive that when using it as Mo primary I am always /Me for inspiration skills which normally take up at least 3 slots on my bar depending on the type of build I am running.

Make all smiting skills do an additional 3.2 damage for every rank in divine favor (then balance them of course to make sure they arent overpowered with this).

I bolded the points I'm going to make. The statement "close to no synergy" made by the OP still holds true because there has been "only one viable build". If there were more synergy there would be more than one viable build.

Also, making divine favor more like expertise or adding the extra damage(with appropriate tweaks to skills) would level the need for extreme energy management while keeping it from being abused as a secondary class.

The way smiting is now, its like having an ele that can only use meteor. Divine favor works great with the primary purpose of monks, to heal and protect. Put that same attribute into an offensive role, and you suddenly find yourself with limited options. E/'s and Me/'s can flop easily into healing due to their primary attributes, the opposite is not true for a monk. I don't expect a warrior be a healer on par with a primary monk, and I don't ever expect a smiter to have the same firepower as a E/ or Me/(as our primary role is to heal/prot) but I would like a little more versatility. Anet has added some energy management skills to monks in the last little while, but I'd like some more tweaks to smiting to give that variety.

But that's just my two cents

Smiting could definitely use a fix, but it'll be hard to see how divine favor can be applied (maybe 2% more damage per level?). Also the thing is that many smiting prayer skills aren't direct damage, so it wouldn't help that.

As for trading balth faction, I think we're stuck with tourney tokens for now and greatly oppose trading it in for glad pts. I highly respect the rank 7 gladiators (even more so than rank 3 champions or whatnot) and don't want to see them lose value.

The solution for Non Damage Dealing Smiting Prayers would simply be a fixed-points damage ad for every point in divine favor.
After all, not every Protction Prayer heals, but DF does it here too :-)

@Balthazar Faction: Glad Point was just my first idea. I´d actually be happy if you´d have any other choice (Beer (Drunkard) or cake (Sweettooth) for the victory party as another example ;-).

Regards,
Enas

lol

Me and my guild agree that divine favor does need to work with smiting.

On the other note, me and some guildmates who are fully unlocked said that we would rather trade in 10k balth faction for a flame of balthazar than keep getting tokens =P