Holy Damage on Monk is Ignore Target Defence?

Im sorry i haven't had time to use forums too often. I still question if this is the right place to have left this kind of thread at.

Anyway, I know that Mesmer's Damage over time ignores target defence, but those the holy damage on The monk smiting spell ignore target defence also?
and if so, what other spells/attacks ignore target defence?
thanks in advance

edit:
is it wise to have any smiting skills from the monk to use in offensive combat at all?

i do not believe that holy dmg ignores armor because of the fact that some of them say they have specific armor penetration percentages.

also, if youre playing a monk and you want to focus on healing during pvp. you dont have much time to be going on offense it is a quite busy job keeping your team alive. but youre welcome to try, depending on your team it may be very successful who knows. its just not the most common thing done as a monk primary.

other spells that ignore target armor:
any spell that does health degredation (i.e. -4 arrows (pips) of health)
Illusionary weapon
crystal wave (says it on the skill)

those are the only ones i got off the top of my head.

Monks are for healing and dont you forget it now ya hear dont go all rightous and say hey i think i will go and smite me some evil today. no it dont work taht way you susposed to heal dont give into the temptaion of smithing o no u better not.

thanks lot for those helpsful replies. one more question though
if i use mark of rodgort and fire dmg, the burning dmg on mark of rodgort, would that ignore target defence?

yes (10 characters)

The Monk's Smiting spells do infact Ignore the targets defence, they always do the listed damage(except against undead and that necro armor set).

If the spell says "deal x Holy damage" then it will ignore the targets armor. The only skill that doesn't follow this is Judge's Insight, which changes your damage to Holy, this will not make your attacks ignore armor, but you will get the added bonus against Undead.

I happen to like the Smiting line as a form of attacking. And Monks are not just ment to heal, they have just as much right to Attack and slay the enemey as a Warrior.

How other say should not limit one's decision... How do we get new build ideas? Not this way for sure.

thanks fezz, the only smiting skill i use is judges insight thats why i believed it didnt penetrate.

Doing a Monk primary Smiter is just plain dumb. Divine Favor will in no way help your damage output. Wrong primary for damage.

Not dumb at all.. Im making a charecter that specialises in Divine Favor Healing prayers and Smiting prayers.. I found a spell combination that does 355 damage for 20 energy, 4 second total spell cast time, and 30 second recharge time.

Ill be able to heal and kick your ass at the same time
Hardly dumb..

Please check the FAQ. It has information on the different damage types, armor ignoring attacks, and armor penetrating attacks.

Sometimes your other class's primary attribute won't help your damage any either, in which case, using the other class as primary does nothing for you but prevent you from using runes that boost smiting, hurting your ability to do damage.

I've used the smiting line... and quite frankly, it's a ton of fun!

The only problem I ever run into is when my teammates suddenly expect me to heal them... dang it, does the bald head make me look like I want to babysit them all day long?

In other words, if you take a primary monk and don't heal (at least initally after release) people will not respect you... partially due to the fact that they don't realize just how powerful some of the smiting line buffs are.

People will eventually get smarter and then it will be socially acceptable to be a smiting monk.

EDIT: Divine Favor is still quite a useful skill line, so being a primary monk actually means that you need to put fewer points into healing. Theoretically, (this isn't completely sound) you can put 4 levels into divine and 4 levels into healing spells which averages your healing power to a fairly decent amount (the exception being DOT heals.) This is substantially cheaper than getting 8 levels of healing on another character for a similiar effect. Will it be uber 100% kind of heals? Probably not, but even then that can be compensated for if you take a pure monk build!

This is not the first time this opinion has been expressed on the forum. Nonetheless, Smiters are out there and they are fun to play. But, from what I have observed, you don't need to be a smiting monk to deal damage. In my PvE guild, the only one of us that reached 20 was a healing monk, with only Divine Favor and Healing. He was by no means a wuss and often dealt out more damage than others. So if you want to smite, heck, go ahead! This is Guild Wars! There are no rules! If you can imagine it, you can do it.

It doesn't tell whether smiting is ignoring or not though. Or am I looking at the wrong one? I'm reading Game Mechanics.

yea the smiting skills ignore defense

I never knew that.

Sure, you lose runes. Good point. But, if your other class' primary doesn't help you either, you should pick another.

"Fun" doesn't translate to effective. Which is the issue at hand.

lol, I shudder to think how much damage your elementalist guild mates did.

Anyway, smiting monks can be useful, for PvE. All in all though, you're better off if you go damage primary/smiting secondary, or just support. It can add nicely to real damage, not cause the real damage.

No, he meant the FAQ. The stickied thread at the top of this forum. Specifically, this:

Hehe, I was gonna say... how do they ignore armor if they get a bonus against necro armor set :P

Strange, because the skills themselves such as banish never say "ignores armour", that is why I was confused. Thanks for clearing it up.

Yeah, none of the skills that ignore armor - with a few exceptions like earth spells like Obs. Flame - say they bypass armor. As a general rule, most Mesmer and Monk skills do, any life stealing Necro skill does while direct damage Necro skill don't and, of course, Warrior, Ranger, and Elementalist skills generally don't as well.

It's just one of those things where it would be nice if the descriptions were more detailed. But if you read a lot of them - like me - you can generally tell. Armoring ignoring skills will say something along the lines of "target takes x damage" or target takes damage, target suffers damage target loses health, wording along those lines means you don't care about armor. While armor affected skills say something along the lines of "target foe is struck for x damage" or the skill strikes for damage, damage is inflicted, damage is dealt, wording along those lines means armor is a factor. Not 100% accurate but, then, neither are the skill descriptions.

Ah I see, so their secretly forcing us to read! The school board must be in on this!

well then Guild Wars Guru contradicts itself here...

I'm 100% sure that there is an article that I read on this very site in the Guides section that says that only Elemental damage is subject to some sort of armor damage reduction while Chaos, Shadow, and Holy do ignore armor.

I can find the quote if I dug around a bit, but I'm sure someone here knows what I'm talking about.

Edit: here it is from the Armor Selection Guide in the Guides section:

"One important note however. No armour type effects Mesmer damage, Holy Damage, Dark or Chaos Damage. So damage from Mesmers, Smiters and Necros can be largely taken from the equation (with the exception of Death Magic's Deathly Chill and Deathly Swarm which uses cold (water) elemental damage). So when armour says +Elemental … it means exactly that … protection versus Elementalist damage only."

I guess the answer is that "normal" armor does not ignore damage from these other types, but Elemental damage pluses, as is stated, effect only Elemental damage: makes sense.