Vigorous spirit - good, bad or ugly

Not a skill I've seen mentioned much, and I'm wondering what people's opinions of it are. My monk's current skill bar looks like:

[skill]word of healing[/skill][skill]signet of rejuvenation[/skill][skill]dwayna's kiss[/skill][skill]vigorous spirit[/skill][skill]guardian[/skill][skill]shield of absorption[/skill][skill]mend condition[/skill][skill]cure hex[/skill]

has become a cheap cover enchantment with some healing over time
It's still bad if you actually want to heal with it

It's pretty good if your build has a lot of physicals and if used as a cover enchantment.

If your a healer focused on healing a tank or tanks, it's a good combo with healing seed. Combine those two with the elite Healing Hands and you've got a perma-full HP smiling warrior.

I don't like it, tbh.

It's useable if your team is physical-heavy and has enchantments worth covering, as it can provide quite substantial healing over time if your physicals don't suck and are actually hitting things

However... heals-over-time are generally either wasteful - the target doesn't need the heal and VS is doing nothing - or not strong enough... that 20 health gained per swing isn't going to save anyone from the wrath of an Ele boss.

On top of that, there's generally stronger, more flexible skills you could bring instead to an already-packed monk bar - for example, on your build, a massive prot like Aegis or Protective Spirit will go a long way to reducing the pressure you have to deal with.

if people flare spam (lol) or use attacks (physicals) it pays off its cost. If your team is mostly casters it is a waste other than triggering Dwayna's Kiss.

There's better enchantments tbh (Just not in Healing prayers, surprise surprise).

I forgot to mention that bar goes on my hero monk. Prot spirit and aegis I normally give to my ele hero (if I take two the other gets prot spirit and extinguish) since they have mind blast to power it.

Its good anti pressure and lasts forever, so I would say its decent, the problem with the skill is that the target its most effective on, warriors, aren't the ones who are going to be dieing first. Its rather rubbish on casters since they are casting maybe once every 2 or 3 seconds vs a warrior attacking in 1 second. Pressure generally isn't what gets you in pve anyway, its overpowered 'x' one-shotting your backline.

Ugly Ugly Bar. In this bar, Healing Light > Woh.

Quote: Originally Posted by Solus Spartan

Quote: Originally Posted by Solus Spartan

VS is a "bar-topper." It doesn't provide the sort of acute healing you need to pull someone back from the danger zone, but it does provide a cheap way to consistently move up the bars people who are in no immediate danger so that they are more likely to stay out of immediate danger.

In that sense, it's best compared to other bar-toppers. Sig of Rejuv has pretty much replaced Sig of Devotion as "the" bar-topper, so that's the first comparison to make.
Another interesting comparison is VS versus LoD. (I've always considered LoD as more of a party-sig-of-devotion-ish bar-topper than anything else.) These days LoD is costing you ~.71 e/sec and ~.39 cast-time/sec for a party heal of ~9.43 heal/team member/sec (at rank 14) with a heal/team member/e of 13.2. Maintaining it across the whole party, VS costs ~1.3 e/sec and ~.27 cast-time/sec for a party heal between ~7.0 (hornbow) and ~14.3 heal/team member/sec (sword/axe/daggers (excluding double strikes)) (at rank 14) with a heal/team member/e of between ~5.3 (hornbow) and ~10.71 (sword/axe/dagger).

I like to use vigorous spirit with dismiss. I don't use VS for the healing, but rather to cover prot spirit and provide a cheap enchantment to trigger the healing bonus of dismiss condition

Vigorous works as an assassin self heal, before factions though I used to use it on my monk all the time, reason was it worked well in combination with [skill=text]Divine Boon[/skill] and [skill=text]Symbiosis[/skill] which I was running at the time.

With [skill=text]Divine Boon[/skill], it wasn't the healing of VS that offered the perks, it's a quickly recharging 5 energy enchantment, the healing boon and favor offer covered what I wanted to heal mostly, then VS would keep that person health from dropping too drastically until [skill=text]Dwayna's Kiss[/skill] was ready.

Quote: Er, no. It completes the circle.

I tend to not like VS because it doesn't usually heal people when you want them healed. It's good enough for PvE, I guess, where damage is pretty sporadic and spread out.

Vig Spirit is one of this skills that looks good on paper, but doesn't really have much use on the battlefield.

Basically, all it really does for you is fuel Kiss and Dismiss while giving you small top-off heals here and there.
It's certainly not a bad skill; it's decent enough as a slot-filler fluff kind of skill if you can't find anything else to run with that slot. But there are certainly better options out there for that slot.

I tried using it on a monk hero after the cast time buff, but I found it of little relevance.
Heroes use it poorly anyway. They cast it the same way they cast Shield of Absorption, Shielding Hands, and Guardian: as a damage reducing prot on a target taking sizable damage, which is NOT how Vig Spirit should be used.

I used to use Vigorous Spirit quite a bit back in the day, even before the buff. I've also been playing around with it a bit since the obliteration of LoD.

It isn't horrid. One of the more attractive things about it is how you can maintain it on a ton of people before engaging to get a long lasting effect out of your energy. It's also really nice for the early stages of a fight, as it gives a little top off heal when it goes on, and continues to do so, cleaning up a lot of incidental damage as it comes in - so you don't have to spend time casting if people start taking actual damage.

Thing is, when you start taking actually dangerous amounts of damage, enough that you're not perpetually riding the top of your energy, you stop using Vigorous Spirit entirely. It's a fine skill when you're just trying to clean up meaningless damage as cheaply as possible, but it's useless when people are in danger of dying. I found that in crunch situations, the skill might as well have not been on my bar. It probably delayed the crunch a bit longer; but for the most part, it's a skill that performs very well at a largely meaningless job.

Quote: Originally Posted by LightningHell

I would say that it has possibly the highest heal per energy ratio....but generally people don't like heal over time skills. Personally, I like it simply for the awesome heal per energy ratio.

Energy efficiency doesn't make it the best skill for reasons Ensign stated. If you need to heal someone 100-200 hp now, VS isn't going to cut it and you now have a teammate to res and DP to deal with.