Smiter's Boon

i was just thinking about this yesterday...

Smiters Boon: 5e, 1/4s, 30r. For 30sec you receive double divine favour bonus for your smiting skills. For 30sec your smiting attribute is set to 0.

see what i did there? How easy is that?

maybe make it -1 or -2 energy each time a smite spell is casted like zealots fire or divine boon
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Vapor buddy

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I like your sense of humor.

You forgot to add X hours that it took to create this skill to that 15 seconds, because that was rendered as waste of time too by that nerf.

Although I think this post was made as a joke, it is actually a good idea. The double Divine Favor bonus is to allow a Monk to provide good heal support with smiting skills. Smiting skills are designed for damage though. The problem with the skill was that it allowed for serious damage and serious healing all at the same time. So removing the damage (O Smiting Prayers attribute) but keeping the heal support works. You can still provide condition removal, hex removal, and damage negation without providing significant damage. Since some of the skills NEED decent attribute points for thier use, not their damage, maybe just a clause of 'no damage from smiting prayers skills'.

This would allow someone to use Judge's Insight effectively, but not Reversal of Damage.

The energy cost could be used too. The idea of costing extra energy is familiar ground if you consider Divine Boon and Zealot's Fire. If you think the energy cost would easily be covered with the use of Castigation Signet and/or Blessed Signet, then simply have all signets disabled while using it. If it was 10 energy on a 10 second recharge, with a 2 energy cost per spell used, this would deplete a Monks energy reserves pretty fast. But knowing how Izzy likes to 'balance' things, they could make it a 15 energy spell with a 5 second recharge+duration and a 2 energy cost per spell.

[echo]x[mending]>[glyph of renewa]x[smiter's boon] Imo !

i quite consider nuking the skill instead of reworking it to be lazy, mistake or not. two wrongs don't make a right.

More than likely they are cutting expenses like everyone else. Which can result in looking for the quick fix, with the intent of revisiting it later. Face it, GW has no monthly income other than sales of the game, and account addons.

I agree, it's down to simple economics. It's a lot simpler (ie cheaper) to effectively remove a skill by over-nerf than it is to balance it. You could call it lazy or incompetent, but more likely it's just the application of a cheap fix.

Pretty sure it did, considering it's not being abused in PvP anymore.

Good Idea

OP Bad Idea

The creation of the skill is irrelevant to what I was replying to.

Killing a skill instead of reworking it because they didn't have enough time to come up with a good balance isn't lazy. Not trying to make this skill usable because they have other skills to deal with is not lazy.

Two wrongs don't make a right, but killing an overpowered skill stops it from being abused.

Isn't where it is now simply putting it deliberately into the 'not worth bringing' basket?

I don't PvP at all so I don't claim to be an expert, but to reference another poster, I don't really think this is necessarily a 'light switch' skill. You could reduce the bonus, make it unstackable with other skills that provide bonuses to healing, apply an energy cost to casting affected spells like Divine Boon, or any combination of the above. As Arkantos has said, there are more important things on their plate than reintroducing this skill into PvE, but impossible to balance and not as important as other concerns are two very different things.

(To be honest, I agree with the observation that setting Smiting Prayers to zero when used isn't as silly as it initially appears. It could then be used as a kind of 'switch' between heal-mode and damage-mode for tactical bar management and compression. You could even just have it reduce the damage of Smiting Prayers by a large proportion instead of reducing the attribute.)

The fact is that the bonus shouldn't exist at all. That is why it is a "light switch" skill. Reducing the bonus does nothing because the bonus is STILL there. Making it unstackable with other skills that provide healing bonuses wasn't the issue. Applying an energy cost would make it unusable for the same reason Divine Boon is currently unusable (well, most people wouldn't bring it, although there is a boonprot build thats still viable).

Setting it to zero would only make sense if the only skills used were smite condi and hex. The fact that RoD and judges (mostly RoD) is on the bar would make it having that effect pointless, and therefore it would be pointless to bring Smiter's Boon. At least as suggested, there would be no way to turn it on and off (30s duration, 30s cd). The only way would be if it was maintainable and had a short recharge, but the hassle and energy expenditure necessary for that would also make it rather useless. Put simply, the best way to balance Smiter's Boon is to destroy it.

Did people kick up this much shit when Ether Renewal got nerfed?