How to waste 10 energy - by Divine Spirit

This skill was one of the top 5 best skills....even over-powered when it debuted. Ensign sang its praises every chance he got. Now look at it:

Description: For 1-13 seconds, Monk spells cost you 5 less energy to cast. (Minimum cost: 3 Energy.)
Energy Cost 10
Casting Time 1/4 seconds
Recharge Time 60 seconds

Can anyone find a practical use for this? 1-13 seconds, 60 recharge, 10 energy!!! Laughable! You can barely recoup your 10 point energy loss, much less actually save energy. Even to recoup your energy loss, you'd have to have to have a reasonably high Divine Favor attribute. Anything less than level 7 is an exercise in "how to waste 10 energy".

While I'm at it......ANet still needs to address Healing Hands. The intent in modifying it, as I understood, was to keep it out of warrior/monk hands that seemed to be the flavor of the month at one time. As anyone knows, the smart move would have been to move the skill into, what still is, a very weak skill line...Divine Favor.

In a move that shocked the healing community, ANet saw fit not to balance the skill, not to address its skill line but to just slap an Elite tag on it and call it a day.

One of you Alphas should call them up and offer to help catch the escapee from the local insane asylum that's wreaking havoc in the monk department.

Divine Spirit is quite a nice skill as it is now, actually. In a profession that is sorely lacking on energy management skills, it actually provides one of the best ways to help manage energy. It won't do quite as much over a duration as Peace and Harmony, but it's more immediate, so you have your energy when you need it in the heat of battle, and it's not elite and doesn't end if you do anything offensive. Look at divine spirit coupled with some standard healing:

Orison->3 energy (2 savings)
Breeze->5 energy(5 savings)
Healing Seed->10 energy(5 savings)

If you cast simply these three spells during the duration of Divine Spirit, you've already saved energy by using the skill. Add in 2 more Orisons, some healing touches/dwayna's kisses/words of healing, and you'll have saved a lot of energy by using this skill. It does pain me to take a skill that doesn't recharge for 60 seconds, but it is a good skill to help keep you casting in the middle of battle. Look at it this way- Peace and Harmony is elite, and gives you 20 energy over 60 seconds(ignoring the cast cost too, though it lasts more than 60 secs with high divine favor). If you cast 6 10+ energy cost skills(which cost 5 less to cast) during the duration, you've gained just as much energy through this non-elite skill as you would have with Peace and Harmony, without the downsides of Peace and Harmony. It is unlikely you'll be casting that many 10+ energy skills, especially with a monk, but when I have divine spirit up, I'll generally use breeze 2-3 times, cast my healing seed if I have it, and use a couple of orisons/words/whatever. Looking at this:

2x Healing Breeze= 10 energy saved- this payed for Divine Spirit right here
1x Healing Seed= 5 energy saved
2x Orison = 4 energy saved
1x Word of Healing = 2 energy saved

Energy spent: 10+10+6+3= 29+10 for divine spirit = 39

That one Divine Spirit there payed for itself and gained 11 energy- almost as good of an effect as several of the elite energy gain skills of other classes. Energy Drain will get you 13 with 12 inspiration, Offering of Blood gains 13 with high blood magic- both are elite, Energy Drain depends on your opponent having 18 energy, and Offering of Blood requires a life sacrifice. Of course, these skills have faster recharges, but they're also elite. A non-elite version(energy tap) will gain you 8 energy maximum every 23 seconds, with an agonizing 3 second cast time. If you're interested in emptying your pool, you can cast a few more skills(since you're regenning energy during the duration- you'll get 12 more energy to use during the duration of Divine Spirit), which will let you save another 10 energy or so with Divine Spirit.

Monks are generally reactive in their casting, making it more difficult to exactly quantify how much energy you'll be able to save through Divine Spirit. However, you can throw it on once a battle gets going, and be able to cast your spells without worrying so much about conserving energy for later- by itself, it won't keep you free from energy problems, as most healers are energy hogs, but when combined with some additional energy management, it can be quite useful.

Healing Hands is no longer that bad as an elite skill- many of the other nice elite monk enchantments have been toned down so that HH is fairly similar. Healing Hands being elite doesn't take it out of W/Mo hands- it just proved to be an extremely powerful skill. When I started in the alpha, Healing Hands was not elite and Healing Seed could be cast on yourself- so as a healer, I could make myself be pretty much invincible to anything besides a mesmer- regardless of the number of enemies coming at me, and without using my elite slot. This situation was fixed by making Healing Hands elite, and restricting Healing Seed to be castable only on other allies.

I play monks a lot during the alpha, and neither of these skills are in dire need of fixing. In fact, there's lots of other monk skills that I think are far less useful than either of these skills. Some examples:

Divine Healing- nice heal, but 2 second cast time, 10 energy, and only useable every 60 seconds?

Protective Bond- prevent damage from almost every attack- but spend 25 energy to cast it, 1 regen to maintain it, lose 3(or more) energy whenever damage is prevented, and it ends when you run out of energy... in practice, it's nearly impossible to maintain for any duration of time, and you will be at 0 energy when it ends, leaving you helpless to do anything. I could see it be worthwhile if it didn't have the end condition, but it's not something I could ever see myself using as it is.

Retribution- lose 1 energy every 3 seconds to maintain it, to do a small amount of reflected damage to low-priority targets.

Balthazar's Aura- 25 energy cost, to put up a small AoE storm effect around an ally- dealing 15 damage per second at 12 smiting... it is mobile, as the ally can chase around the enemies, but definately not worth the energy.

That's some right, pretty analysis. I think you ignored the fatal flaw though: 1-13 seconds! Let's assume optimum conditions with a 12 attribute in Divine Favor, how many spells could you get off in 13 seconds? Being generous, I'd say 4. We'll also assume those 4 spells cost 10+ energy to cast so AT BEST, you're saving yourself 10 energy.

Now if we depart from the theoretical world to a more practical one, the vast majority will not have a 12 Divine Favor until they're near ascension. With after-cast, targeting time and cast time for 10+ energy cost skills a more reasonable estimate is about 9 or 10 seconds, and 2 or 3 spells. Realistically, the most that the majority of the monk population will ever save with this skill is 5 energy and I would argue that most would be lucky to break even.

The healing hands debate is one left up to those far more knowledgeable than I however I still believe it punished monks more than its intended "punishable" audience. From what I read on the forums, this seemed to be the majority opinion. Slapping an Elite tag on a skill without changing it in any other way translates to laziness in my opinion.

Over 13 seconds you can cast approximately 7 skills with a casting time of 1 second (1.75 with aftercast) or approximately 8 skills with a casting time of 3/4. Those *are* the skills a Monk's going to be casting and casting just two or three they'll recharge quickly enough with, say, a Healing Breeze or two thrown in for good measure, and completely fill up those 13 seconds with casting. If those skills cost the bare minimum of 5 energy, you've saved, over the duration of the skill about 3 pips worth of energy. 14~16 energy over the length of the recharge, though, isn't all that impressive as it's about .26 energy per second, or around one energy every four seconds or less than a pip of regen. Still, that's a near pip of regen you wouldn't have otherwise. The Monk list is very poor on energy regeneration skills and very energy hungry - it's not top-heavy like the Elementalist list, but it's full of cheap, quickly recharging spammable skills that suck up a lot of energy. Just casting Orison every 3.75 seconds is spending 1.33 energy or the equivalent of wiping out your regen. Every little bit helps over the long haul. But what Divine Spirit is really good at is making sure you have the energy to cast during that brief flurry when someone's being heavily focused. Seven 5 energy spells is 35 energy and over 13 seconds you'll only regenerate about 17. If you don't start with a lot of energy to begin with that can spell doom as your energy runs out and you miss that all-important life-saving heal on a teammate. But with DS, which at 1/4 second casting time is quick enough to put up, (Although that aftercast hurts, really hurts there as you miss out on .75 seconds when you could be casting) those seven spells cost 21 energy or nearly enough that you can count on regeneration providing you the energy. It could spell the difference between saving a teammate and not being able to do anything because you've hit bottom. And that's just using things like Healing Touch, Orison, Reversal of Fortune, and Word of Healing, it's even better with skills like Heal Other, Healing Breeze, and Shield of Regeneration. What you don't want to do is, say, cast Heal Party or Heal Area with Divine Spirit but you probably don't want to cast those anyway.

Obviously, it's not something you want to pop when you get Dazed or when your casting time is otherwise hampered and the real trick is knowing when and where to use it to have that brief flurry of healing. It could be better, could last a bit longer, sure, but it's now actually useful to a healer where before it was mostly forgettable.

Hmm, it dosen't seem that bad, one skill that really need to be checked is Holyr wrath... that skill is a good way to waste 10 energy.

Holy Wrath
While you maintain this "Enchantment", whenever target ally takes melee damage, this spell deals 25-59% of the damage back to the source and you lose 10 energy.

Heh- I actually like Holy Wrath on some character builds. Have a W/Mo maintain Holy Wrath on the healers- they can use adrenal skills, so the energy loss is no real issue, and 50+% damage returned will deal a lot of damage to the warriors trying to focus your healers... generally damage dealt to warriors is forgettable, but it does put a drain on their enemy healers- not only do they have to deal with the damage that your team is doing, they have to try to keep up with 1/2 the damage that their warriors are dealing to your monks as well. Considering monks tend to go through thousands of points of damage and healing in an encounter, that's a considerable amount of extra healing that you're forcing the enemy healers to do.

That's a pretty nice idea, but really, if you don't care about your energy, why not put 2 maintened enchantment on your monk instead? wouldn't it turn out to be better for your monk? Like ife attunement and life bond, or even blathazar spirit and retribution.

So at attribute 12, under optimal conditions, Divine Spirit is Glyph of Lesser Energy with twice the cooldown? Glyph of Lesser Energy is playable?


Tell me you're joking. You saw the 60 second cooldown, right?


You of course neglect to mention that not only is it cast three times as often, netting you close to 40 energy per minute as opposed to 10 from Divine Spirit, but that Energy Drain also devastates your target's energy to the tune of 54 energy per minute. The net result? Energy Drain results in a net energy swing of 93 points per minute, while Divine Spirit, gives you 11 energy per minute under optimal conditions.

Don't use Divine Spirit, the skill has been trashed. Lower the cooldown, and we'll talk.

Peace,
-CxE

But Glyph of Lesser energy is for ele's, the idea of the monk one being longer cool down time, is that no one wants monks to be able to heal loads and loads and save enough energy on it to carry on in just 30 seconds, it would make monks heal more than they currently do making monks too powerful as far as healing themselves and partys goes.

No, Glyph of energy is, at best, 10 energy every 30 seconds or the equivalent of adding a pip's worth of regeneration. But it also adds 1.75 casting time and works only on one skill. You need to use it with a skill that costs 15~25 energy to even get that one, single pip. Glyph of Energy is a lot better, in terms of energy management, as it's up to 15 energy every 15 seconds or the equivalent of 3 pips. Although, again, it adds 1.75 casting time and you need to use it with a 25 energy skill. It's also elite and therefore, not at all good. Playable but you can do better.

That's for an Elementalist, though. Where else can you get on demand energy management from the Monk list? Blessed Signet? That's only good if you're using maintained enchantments. Essence Bond? Balthazar's? Both involve getting hit and both are maintained enchantments so you need to earn back more than 1 energy every 3 seconds in order to make them even break even.

Divine Spirit isn't much good, no, but you can use it to relieve yourself as you spam heals. To be a nice skill it needs a much lower cooldown, probably in the order of 20~30 seconds. And probably a drop in cost from 10 to 5. But it does have its uses as an energy management skill for a profession that's starved for it.

Holy Wrath, though. I don't know about that one. Not when there's Retribution to do pretty much the same thing without the hit to energy...

This may be another one of those confusing skill description from ANet, will Holy Wrath stop if you lose all your energy like Thunderclap will ? Will it stop like Life Bond when you can't keep the upkeep ?

Holy Wrath doesn't end if you have 0 energy like Thunderclap, Spinal Shivers, or Protective Bond- it will stay around. All maintained enchantments will end if you can't maintain the upkeep, but that only happens if you try to run more enchantments than you have regeneration, or you get hit with energy degeneration hexes such as Malaise or Panic.

I tend to like Holy Wrath far more than Retribution, due to the fact that I'll never really run either if I'm doing anything with my energy. If I'm going to be casting spells anyways, I've got far better uses for my energy than maintaining either enchantment. If I'm not using energy, I might as well use Holy Wrath- it has about double the effect of Retribution. One thing I've noticed is that it can be advantageous to make sure to be at 0 energy anyhow- it helps you not take damage from pesky things like Mind Wrack, Energy Burn, etc.

As for Divine Spirit versus skills like Glyph of Lesser Energy, they serve different focuses. Glyph is useless for 95% of Monk skills- which is why the old version of DS was horrid- being capped at 8 energy made it so there were very few skills you could use to get any benefit from it. DS is useful because it provides some energy management for a class that doesn't have many options in that respect, and for most any other energy management skills, you have to spend a lot of attribute points in a secondary attribute to get anything worthwhile. I'm not claiming it's anywhere near Energy Drain in usefullness, but how many healers want to spend their attribute points boosting a line that they are only using for energy management, and waste their elite skill for something like Energy Drain, as opposed to some of the nice Monk elites such as Word of Healing or Aura of Faith?

My healers tend to get around 7 inspiration and use power drain, and occasionally a second inspiration skill(channelling or leech signet) to help with energy management. However, I do this out of necessity rather than desire- I could care less if I actually interrupt something with my power drain- so long as I get the energy from it(via interrupting during the aftercast). As Saus pointed out, the other options for energy management in monk skills are sorely lacking in effectiveness. I generally will only ever bother bringing one skill that Glyph of Lesser Energy will effect(either healing seed or shield of deflection), which kinda cuts that out as an effective option. Any other method of energy management requires at least considerable expenditure into an attribute, which can be difficult if you're wanting to run a 12 healing/12 divine setup.

Just bringing one skill along that would work with Glyph of Energy is all you need given the cooldown. Just casting Glyph/Seed once per minute will give you the same benefit that Divine Spirit can give you.

Yes, I agree with you that Glyph of Lesser Energy is horrid on a Monk. I wouldn't touch it. But Divine Spirit is even worse.

Peace,
-CxE

can someone do the math on mantra of inscriptions + blessed signet + keystone signet? How many pips is that?

Depends on how many enchantments you're running. Blessed Signet adds energy based on how many maintained enchantments you have up. There's a cap on energy, too.

But, okay, with Inspiration of 12 you've got MoI reducing Signet's recharge timers by 45%. That means Keystonesig is 16~17 seconds, depending on rounding and Blessed is 5~6, depending on rounding again (I'd guess that it's the higher value but I'm not sure). There's aftercast on signets, too, in my experience, so the 2 second casting time is actually 2.75. So, you can cast Blessed Signet once, then Keystone, then Blessed within 8.25 seconds. Then you'll need to wait just over 14 seconds before using Keystone again. You could then do it all over again, as Blessed would recharge at 6 seconds and then would need 2.75 seconds to cast, leaving Keystone with 5 seconds to recharge. Now, Keystone will recharge in those 5 seconds but by the time you finish casting it Blessed will already have recharged so you want to waint until you get that forth Blessed off before using Keystone for the fifth. You could then repeat that patten of Blessed -> Blessed -> Blessed -> Keystone -> Blessed ->Blessed -> Blessed -> Keystone -> Blessed -> Blessed -> Blessed indefinitely. So, let's just say Keystone will add 1/4 to the effects of Blessed Signet. It depends on when you get that energy and it's frontloaded a bit, the longer you go the less impact you get from Keystone, but that's the simplest way to parse it down.

It's not quite that simple as Keystone takes time. So while normally starting from the moment you cast Blessed it would take you - with MoI - 35 seconds before you could cast it four times. With Keystone, starting from a zero point of that first Keystone after that first Blessed (Which is the infinite point), it takes you something like 26 seconds.

So, now you get 3 energy per maintained enchantment per Blessed. With one enchantment up you get 12 energy with Blessed alone over those four casts or 12 energy in 35 seconds or about .34 energy a second or the equivalent of just over a pip. Keystone turns that into 12 energy in roughly 26 seconds or about .45 energy every second. So it's somewhere around 30% more efficient. Add one or more enchantments and you get that same ratio, although you get a lot more energy. Each maintainted enchantment with Blessed is about a pip. Each with Keystone+Blessed is about .45 energy a second. That's with MoI, of course (Without it it's less, .24 energy a second with just Blessed. With Keystone....well, you do the math on that...). And the proviso that you spend a *lot* of time casting even just Blessed to get that energy.

So if you can keep five or six enchantments running with MoI and Blessed Signet you're talking about an insane boost to your energy regeneration (Six is the most you'd want to run with DF of 12 because after that you start hitting the energy cap on Blessed Signet. But keep in mind that you're putting yourself into degeneration yourself to do that.).

Divine Spirit sucks. You need to have near-full energy to get an advantage from this skill. Even with a lower recharge, what's the chances that a healer will sit with full mana after a battle was already started?
Also, to get an advantage from Divine Spirit you need to chain-cast spells. If you want to chain-cast spells, then probably you need to do it NOW, not after you'll finish casting of Divine Spirit. Moreover, after you casted it, you're effectively forced to chain-cast spells to get the most out of this enchantment. So, most likely that you'll lose some net efficiency and your real energy advantage will be less than, say, 11 energy in the second post by Freyas in this thread.
Now, add to that one mana-draining interrupt and you're toast... This spell magnifies effectiveness of mana drains because you lose mana at the start and need mana to use an advantage it gives.

Other energy management skills give mana when you need it, this one just improves mana efficiency of chain-casting.

You don't need full energy to get a benefit from Divine Spirit- you can chain-cast spells like healing breeze, orison, and word of healing without any problems with fairly low energy- you can chain cast orison as soon as it recharges with DS on and still gain energy via regeneration. So long as you've got 10-15 energy left after casting DS, you're not going to be running yourself empty on energy when your casting. As for chain casting, have you ever played a healer in the middle of a heated battle? Healers spend 3/4 their time in battle chain-casting low energy, quick recharge skills- the more, the better. Sure, you might be able to use something like energy tap in order to gain more energy in the long run, but during the 3 seconds you're casting it, you're likely to lose someone on your team- likely you or another healer. That energy gain won't do you any good when you're taking a nap in the dirt. Divine Spirit casts in .25 seconds, so with the aftercast, it takes you 1 second in total to activate... less time than it would have taken you to cast an orison.

So long as you get at least 10 energy back from using the skill, it hasn't hurt you. Even if you get power leaked on your first spell after using divine spirit. 4 seconds later, you'll be able to cast a 10 energy spell, at the cost of 5 energy- whereas without divine spirit, you'd be waiting for 4 seconds to cast orison and 8 seconds to cast something like breeze... rather than increasing the effectiveness of energy denial, it helps get around energy denial. Not to mention, if someone is spamming things like energy drain, energy tap, energy burn, etc to keep your energy too low to cast spells, with divine spirit, you'll still be able to get some off, whereas you would never get the energy to cast anything without it(assuming you cast it before they drain you below 10). Divine Spirit does not increase the effectiveness of energy denial, it decreases it.

As I said, the casting time of Divine Spirit is hardly a factor, so the delay in chain-casting makes little difference- the only thing that is effected is how long you can continue to chain-cast. If you're afraid of losing someone before you can get DS off, throw them a word of healing before you cast it- you shouldn't be waiting until it's that much of an emergency before using DS in any case.

Yes, Divine Spirit could use some improvement(I would be ecstatic if it was boosted), but in all actuality, it's better than most any other option open. Ensign seems to like Glyph better- that's fine, you can use them both. Divine Spirit is an option for energy management that is actually useable and gives a benefit, that is actually tailored fairly well to typical monk casting. You can't always spare several seconds to cast something like energy tap, you can't always watch enemy casters for a chance to interrupt with power drain, and you can't always afford nearly 4 seconds before your healing seed takes effect with glyph of lesser energy. And do you really want to sacrifice your elite skill slot for an energy mangement skill instead of a nice healing skill? Divine Spirit is quick to cast, and can help you cast a few extra spells, which may spell life or death for yourself or your teammates. Is it as efficient as some other skills? No. Is it more practical to use on a healer than most other energy management skills? Yes.