Build submission

Hexes are a rather soft counter. Hit through shadow of fear. Hit through price of faliure. Hit through reckless haste. At worst you stand there and body block. What better time than to show off your snazzy new shield at your opponent's face? I love how I missed that.

Firstly, appreciate that you use skills on a 8 second recharge. For full effectiveness, you're going to use those skills on recharge, which in turn gives a spike every 8 seconds, a 3 second spike with 5 seconds in between. I don't care if you call it pressure or what, it's still damage on a recharge.

Secondly, appreciate that Warriors deal 5 DPS less when they don't use any attack skills, and a Warrior without obstruction is going to charge his spike in 5 seconds or so, however unlikely that is.

Then appreciate that Warriors are a much larger threat when attack skills are factored in play, as it has slightly lower DPS when not using skills, and when using skills it can spike really hard. It also requires sustained hate for it to be reduced to a level where the effective damage is insignificant.

Now let's talk about the hate. Your build is easily hated out by template mesmers and/or rangers. A Warrior is also easily hated out by a template melee hate character, but take in mind that the melee hate character is dependant on other characters to do stuff - it does nothing but shut down melee. Melee can also be nullified somewhat by cripple - however, that requires quite a large investment.



And no, Diversion does not affect Warriors as much. You can't Divert a normal attack. Even if you divert Rush, he'll still be hitting your face, and you'll still be kiting. He just doesn't have the tools to chase you anymore.

Besides, a Warrior getting diverted...?

A minor point to consider that all your skills are armor dependant, while a Warrior's spike is not as much.

If a single one of your skills is diverted, then you lose quite a bit of your damage. Not so for a Warrior.





And you still haven't responded to your damage being vastly more inflexible. I'll go through and address the points you raise.

I'd like you to keep in mind that we are comparing a two different styles of pressure here however. One is a midline character.

He has to be dealt with, because just like a warrior, if left alone he will really put some hurt on anyone he catches out. He is quite difficult to deal with because the more effective ways to do so require midline characters to extend further than they would have to if they were trying to deal with the melee.

What I would have really liked is for a few people to look at it and say 'not a bad idea, let's see if I can make it work in x environment with a few changes'. See the reason I would have liked that is because I have had a lot of success with it, so I know the idea is sound, it just needs some purpose.

I know it would be a bad runner even with armor of mist and mending touch or something, because rangers would still rape you. I know it can't stand in the front line, even with 102 armor from armor of mist it simply doesn't have the survivability of a warrior. Besides, even with an enchanting mod, armor of mist has 5 seconds downtime in every 30, and pausing to reapply alleviates pressure on the enemy.

If you are anywhere near it, you are just as vulnerable as though you were standing right next to a warrior. That's not going to force people to kite though, since they can't really.

It spikes harder than a warrior, and it deals more consistent damage, being that it is able to do so against targets that are blocking, kiting, etc.

I know you don't agree with me on this but simply from my own experience I have found myself able to deal my damage much more consistently than when playing my warriors, so at least give it a try before you decide that. Even on targets with prot spirit up the damage is quite respectable. 2 of the sources won't deal much more than 10% anyway, 1 is 7 points of constant degen.

Without a whole lot of team effort, my warriors haven't come close. In ideal situations, my warriors can match the average output, but that isn't consistent, and usually only happens during spikes, at which point this build overtakes again. It's simply a matter of watching enemy monks. If they are standing still spamming like crazy, you're doing better than if they are throwing a prot, waiting for it to get stripped, then throwing another, or kiting around regaining energy.

The debate here is really whether it does sufficient damage to be considered good pressure. One of us is presenting hypotheticals, one of us has played both pressure melee and this build. All too often enemy monks assume the worst is over once the glowing gaze burning wears off, only to see someone get hit in the face with another shatterstone 3 seconds later.

Yes the damage is largely frontloaded, but it's high enough that even over the course of the recharge it averages out to pressure comparable to a warriors. Most caster builds that can manage that run into energy trouble, which is where they fall down next to adrenaline/normal attacks. With the attunement up, which it isn't always of course, this build regains more energy over the course of the recharge than it spends.

As for diversion, it's no different. You are looking at it from the perspective of 'well warriors can always just do normal attacks'. I am looking at it from the perspective 'well I always have 4 other spells'. There's only 3 skills here that really hurt the builds output. Glyph of immolation being disabled prevents you from blinding and prevents 131 damage. Shatterstone being disabled prevents 210 damage. Steam being disabled prevents you from blinding and prevents 104 damage.

Disabling shatterstone is the only way to slow down the damage more than disabling rush on a warrior, both steam and glyph are comparable, because not only do you lose the speed boost, your frenzy becomes a lot more dangerous to use. So while disabling glyph of immolation may at first look like a great idea, it's not really more harmful to the build than disabling a warriors rush. Who does that? I think it's a lot more resilient than you realize. Of course pb hurts, but that's a pb being used defensively at least. There's a whole list of stuff that hurts melee just as bad, a few of them in the same attribute line :P

Yes, it is true that a warriors skills provide armor ignoring damage, and that's one of the advantages a warrior brings to the table. It's not the only one, this build hardly makes warriors obsolete, they are different classes and have different means of applying their pressure.

The damage is more resilient than it looks at first glance, just because there is strong synergy between some of the abilities doesn't make them reliant on each other. Yes you depend on glyph to apply your conditions, yes those conditions make some of your spells stronger, yes you can still cast them for damage in their weakened forms.

I haven't yet read anything that makes me think 'oh, hmm, the build isn't that good in that situation', any moreso than any other build. Everything has a counter, the build is solid in play. It just lacks purpose, which I was actually hoping to find some help with here, but I guess I'll have to come up with something on my own.