Protection Monk Equivalencies in other Fantasy RPGs

I haven't played GW in a while, but it seems like whenever I migrate to a new game I always want to roll that game's equivalent to a Protection Monk - seeing as they were one of my favorite builds to play in GW.

So far:

WoW - Priests were a ...disappointment... to say the least. Heal Heal and Heal some more. (It's funny reading forums where someone brings up this suggestion every so often: "Hey it'd be cool if priests could throw out a variety of short-term defensive buffs to make the class more interesting")

D&D - A healer in plate always kind of bugged me, and the defensive spells there seem to be too situational and not very powerful. Not something you could really build a character around.

I'm pretty much burnt out on GW and don't think I'll be coming back soon, but I really do miss playing a protection monk. I'm curious if anyone else has successfully ported a protection monk type character into another RPG?

I think some of the elder scrolls games that let you customize your spells give you that option.

...so now all we have to do is to wait for Bethseda to finish their Elder Scrolls MMO...by that time, GW2 will be out.

Dungeon Siege 2 - you can develop a nature mage specialising in Embrace-type spells. A lot of incredibly powerful protective buffs ranging from handy to stupidly overpowered - the challenge in using them is that you can only have two of these buffs stacked at any one time and they last for a very long time, so you need to be able to plan ahead on the fly and stack the right buffs at the right times on the way across the map. Embrace specialists also gain access to the ultimate in protective magic; the Invulnerability power (which turns your whole party invulnerable for up to 12 seconds at power level 3).

On top of that, in mercenary (easy) mode you'll also find yourself with enough points to specialise into a second field; the nature mage also offers ice magic, summoning magic, wrath magic (offensive buffs, which also count towards the 2 buff limit) and healing magic. Healing/embrace hybrids are very common setups in mercenary mode, with most players starting to push into wrath and ice when veteran and elite mode come along (haven't met a nature mage who specced into summoning yet despite it having the most damaging power in the game).

I've played a fair few RPGs, and... well... of all of them - Guild Wars is the game where Protection is the most prevalent - indeed, up to the point where pure healing = utter fail in GW.

By comparison, most other games have smaller protection abilities that are an addition to a healer's ability, rather than the main focus (as with good GW monks)

I'd probably use it as an excuse to pick up FFVII again. Master Barrier on Cloud makes him a prot monk... right?

But Elder scrolls games are single player so that stuff would be mostly selfheals - not really something that would make person enjoying healing others happy.

I think that OP is out of luck, pretty much every healer class does straight red bars go up thing with some condition removal. Best you can do are minor but longterm defensive buffs.

Btw: DnD Monks work morelike Paragons - party wide buffs (which you can stack a lot) while dealing (meele) damage.

Huh?
I thought Monks in DnD were essentially invincible godmode characters that tore things to pieces barehanded?

... you meant Cleric, right?

I was gonna say something similar; Final Fantasy spells like Barrier/Veil, Shell... ... and some more I'm totally forgetting right now.

I need to play FF5 now, haha.

Ups, yeah i did. :-/ Too ... Much .... GW

[skill]Protective Spirit[/skill]
Just that skill alone makes Protection Prayers worth it.

This has to be the most veiled anti-other game I have ever seen.

You can't compare GW to other MMOs, since they were not the basis for GW's skill system.

You can, however, compare GW's skill system to Magic: the Gathering, which ArenaNet admitted was the inspiration. When you do, the 10% damage cap of Protective Spirit seems kinda lame, as MtG in recent years is a far superior balanced game.

(Also, I despise Protective Spirit because it doesn't encourage intelligent play in an active game. It's 100% passive.

You just keep pressing buttons. Not much different from a healer in any game...)

Reflect/Wall were always big defensive spells. In the original, white mages also had spells that improved your defense agaisnt one element.

To be fair, I don't think A.net realized the potency of Protective Spirit/Bond when the game was first released. The skill combos that people have created today (hybrid monks, 55s, etc) were probablly unthinkable to A.net back in the beta days. 3 million people can come up with a lot of wierd, unforseen stuff.

How the heck do you not see a spell which can reduce a 100-200+ damage attack to only 40-50 damage without any serious investment?

Farming potential, maybe, but the fact that Prot Spirit is a requirement for Hard Mode is bad game design.

And with a little DP the remaining damage can be reduced to zero with just one more skill.

Yeah Final Fantasy has had Barrier/Protect and Shell/MBarrier. Blink to raise evasion (like Guardian). Ensuna to cure conditions.

You don't need an excuse to pick up FFVII again.

It's always as good as when you first played it.

Disregarding dumb stat-pumping bosses in hard mode, prot spirit is one of the more active big prots a monk has. It's too expensive to keep up on everyone all the time, so you have to be smart-like with it.

Also, I liked FF6 more than 7. Morph + double ultima is pro.

MtG is fairly skewed in terms of balance right now.

Starting with Mirrodin and the Ravager debacle. It hasn't gotten any better.

Vanish the other one I was looking for (raises evasion).

Heck even Pokemon *puts up flame shield* has prot-like skills... can't remember much of the names, but Double Team is one of them (raises evasion).

Clerics aren't for healing, they're for buffing themselves to insane levels and then beating the tar out of everything before the rest of the party can blink.

EDIT: DnD > Guild Wars, just so we have that clear and settled.

Gorebyss is the ultimate prot Monk.

Iron Defense / Amnesia / Baton Pass / Ice Beam

ID & Am a whole bunch, then Baton Pass it off to a Blissey or Heracross to do the real killing \m/ ^_^
Pokemon ftw

I'd definitely choose Elder Scrolls over GW2.

Izzy's thoughts on Prot Spirit:

http://wiki.guildwars.com/wiki/User_...tective_Spirit

Well, atleast he admits it.

Oh trust me. I could bash GW if I felt like it. But that wasn't the focus of the thread and didn't want to distract.

Mainly what I dig so much about protection monks is two fold.

1. They're a healer class that is anticipatory instead of reactionary. You have a lot more choices than "Big, slow heal" and "small, fast heal".

2. It totally changes the dynamic of the game. Unlike straight up heals, protection becomes more and more efficient the more guys that wailing on the same target. Requiring a lot of fast and smart target switching on offense. Playing a warrior, I liked that had to be on the ball and try to find the weak point in an enemy's defenses (read where the protection magic wasn't). In that respect it seems like GW is the only RPG I've played that significantly punishes "OMG MOB THE HEALER!!11!" mentality.

This ,btw, is also why "Tanking" totally breaks GW PvE. I personally hope that in GW2 they throw the concept of tanking out completely. We might actually see people actually bringing OMG SHUTDOWN to PvE. Seriously this game needs better AI and more unpredictable fights.

If we didn't have prot spirit, we'd either need a lot of other defensive enchantments and/or healing prayers would have to be omega buffed.

Prot Spirit isn't so neccessary for PvE, because there you can use broken PvE skills to keep your party alive (TNTF/SY! para) while in PvP it certanly is good, but again not only solution... *cough, SB, cough *

Uber Fireball = I don't need a healer.

Ever since i started playing GW, i wished they had FFVIII's Reflect as a spell ^^

Ragnarok Online: there are some "Protection Prayers" spells in the sense of removing status ailments, but most of their stuff is passive. Cast and forget. Speaks volumes about the balance of that game.

I'm sorry, but the reason Mirrodin broke things wasn't the Ravager. It was Affinity (the game mechanic) and Cranial Plating (the card). When all of your lands are artifacts, and you can drop a huge creature for half the cost - or less, assuming you've played other artifacts, - and then give it +1 for each artifact you've got (which is often enough to kill something in 2 hits with a normally weak creature), you're talking broken. Not Saga broken (I <3 Black Summer), but broken nonetheless.

On topic: Magic does have some "protection" effects, chiefly among the white cards. Most center around the prevention of damage - which, I suppose, would be a close equivalent of "healing" damage in GW, - but some can replace or redirect it. Equal Treatment, for example, reduces all damage dealt in a turn to 2, regardless of how much damage would normally be dealt. Shaman en-Kor has the ability to redirect all damage from another creature to itself, and then distribute it to other creatures you control, one point at a time, which would sort of make it the Magic equivalent of a GW bonder.

But I shouldn't talk, really. I quit Magic when they changed the card layout for Mirrodin and 8th edition

As for D&D, it doesn't really do "protection" in GW sense. There is an "Invulnerability" spell that is effectively a clone of GW's Divine Intervention, but most divine magic in D&D doesn't do what it does in GW. Specifically, if we equate the GW "blocking" mechanic to the "miss chance" mechanic in D&D, it will suddenly become apparent that in D&D giving something a 50/50 chance of being missed on attacks is the provision of the mage (Displacement, Invisibility, even Darkness or Blur) rather than the cleric. What the D&D cleric has is the ability to increase the Armor Class of the party, but since GW doesn't use a similar "to hit" formula for attacks, these buffs do not equate to +AL buffs. They are "protection" only in the sense that they prevent damage by making enemy attacks more likely to miss.

This is not the case with energy attacks, however. D&D has spells that provide energy resistance and immunity, which actually function as "protection" spells might on damage. For example, there are spells that give a flat resistance of (10/20/30) damage per attack of an energy type, much as Shielding Hands does. The energy immunity spells are closer in their functionality to GW's Sight Beyond Sight and the way it interacts with the Blinded condition - they prevent energy damage while they are active, but once they're down, you're wide open.

Seriously, though, we're comparing apples and oranges here. If there were so many glaring similarities between GW and another game that you could play a virtually identical character in both, somebody would be heading to court veeeery quickly

This thread's beard-fu is strong.

Wow, if prot spirit is overpowered, then I'd hate to think what some skills in other MMO's would be classified as. Besides, mass degeneration can own prot spirit hard.

Oh, and quote a man : "More DOTS, give me more DOTS!!!! Lots of DOTS!!"

You might not be aware of this, but a while back, Bethesda gave their fan community a big 'GOREDENGINE you' and told us that they felt like ruining the Elder Scrolls series and reducing to consolised junk.

This message to us came in the form of TESIV: Oblivion.

No no, you're doing it wrong. It's Vanish/Doom :P

GW needs more Life3...

I vote for FF7 Phoenix as the ultimate prot rez

Doesn´t compare to PS at all. Cutting the damage in half? Orosen, Tranquil Acolyte deals with Channeled Strike 198 damage in NM and 352 damage in HM. Half damage: 99 and 176. With PS he deals 48! TNTF lasts 12 sec at leadership 16, PS 24 sec.


Had to laugh at this one:
Overpowered Sunspear Skills

← moved to Archive 1
[edit]
"There's Nothing to Fear!"

← moved to Underpowered Skills/PvE and Monster

It does have it doesn't it? [skill]Divine Intervention[/skill].

Aeris is always as awesome as when you first played it too.