Does anyone still use prot bond?

Howdy,

Was simply curious if anyone still used the spell--and for what?

Yes, I use it sometimes for farming with a guildie. Also, I have used it on missions before, like if I see someone really getting hit hard I'll throw it on them.

hell yes, bonding, i don't bother with life barrier any more, this combined with balth's spirit is far superior

I believe you're thinking of Life Bond, Skuld, not Protective Bond. Personally, I don't because the energy drain becomes too much if someone is really being hammered on. Once my energy hits 0, the enchantment ends and I have no other way to heal them. While the 'not more than 5% health loss' thing is nice, I'd just rather keep Prot Spirit and use a boon protect build.

and the fact theres a chance it can end with every hit can be annoying too.. meaning you have to keep recasting it adding to the already out of control energy drain

I'm working on builds involving this skill; it seems useful in some places, but it is a tricky one to run. The problem with it is that the decision point lies in the spectrum of damage normally taken, a mere 24 damage (*)will trigger the protection, and far too many hits are that size. In order to use this skill you have to determine what the damage ranges are coming in, and tweak its use to compensate. For example - if you are facing a combination of melee/direct spike damage, you don't really want it triggering on aevery swing of a sword, but you do want it intercepting the 100+damage obsidian flame. So what do you do? Use methods to shift the decision point to a level more likely to indicate a spike - either increasing the armour vs some forms of damage or increase the natural health to the point that you are only catching the true spikes.

So, what works? Well, combined with a Life Bond for example, you can artifically shift the decision point - if the target suffers only half damage from attacks that will result in the decision point being 48 damage vs attacks, a more reasonable level - after all, any attack for over 48 is worth stopping a portion of - it indicates a larger than normal attack. Physical resistence is an interesting one; since most damage being dealt is physical in many areas, shifting the armour value for physical damage up by 40 halves the incoming as well - you can use this effect to screen the damage, making it less likely to trigger vs swung attacks, but more likely to trigger vs elemental, and not altering it vs armour ignoring damage.

Who to bond? Well, a warrior is a pretty safe bet. Anytime a warrior is taking damage for over 24 in a shot he's probably being hit with something big-ish; after all, a warrior with a 16 AL shield, knights boots, superior absorption and a -2 damage mod on his shield would need to be hit with a base damage swing of ~81 damage to trigger it if it were physical, so it's not going ot go off from ordinary stuff. Even elemental damage would need to be 58 or more damage to set it off, so you won't be wasting energy defending him from a stone dagger, but it'll catch the obsidian flame or meteor shower just fine, and it'll blunt an energy surge or the like as well. By having it only trigger on certain types of hits it's actually not a bad investment, though one questions the value of it for the energy spent m,aintaining it if you are facing the worng build. I can see it as a useful skill for a few situations; you can start with it on certain team members, and if it is not triggering or triggering too often it's the wrong skill.

(*) For the purpose of the above I'm using a 480 health as the base - if you tweak that value it also tweaks the break point. I think that the priciple though remains to have it catch things that would be very harmful, like armour ignoring spikes, but not react to normal damage ranges.

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