Monk Guardian

Hi, appreciate your efforts on these boards.

My bro will play primary healer. I will try play an character which

A) stays close to the healer and tries to take care of incoming melee who obviously targets the primary healer.
B) Secondary objective is to spam damage across the board.
C) heal the poor chap if needed with Breeze or Orison

What is the best suited class to take care of incoming melee targetting said healer?

There are so many answers to this; I have been thinking Earthmage/mo for damage output and defendability. I see that Me is an option also due to debuff abilities, I read, although not knowing Ne too well, that they are very good at taking care of Melee.

You may comment on that general question if you like.

I have landed on an Earth/Mo, due to high damage output (i hope), good defense, good range (I can cast on other targets, if no enemy is pestering the healer), good mana regen Elite, and ability to heal the primary healer if it goes really bad.

(You may note I was considering Mo/El, to use Orison with 8x4 DF bonus! That would give me good healing ability across the board, as I would do Orison with 100+ a pop. Not too shabby. This could be an option if I do not use the 2 Energy Storage Elites for mana)

I am also struggelig with the choice of Elite. I landed on El/mo due to the good Elites under Energy Storage, I think. However, I am still struggeling with deciding on
- Elemental Attunement (decent, but not high figures of mana saving)
- Ethereal Renewal
- Ether Prodigy

You may comment on that seeing the picked skills as of below;

Class: Elementalist / Monk

Attributes: (cost)
Energy Storage: 10 (61)
Earth Magic: 11 (77)
Healing Prayers: 10 (61)

Total attribute points used: 199/200


Skills:
1) Stone Daggers (availability) - (5,1,0) You send out two stone daggers. If it hits, each stone dagger strikes for 19 earth damage.
2) Stoning (availability) - (15,1,5) You send a flurry of stones at target foe. The stones strike for 71 earth damage if they hit.
3) Aftershock (availability) - (10,1,10) Nearby enemies are struck for 80 damage. Knocked down characters are struck for 52 additional damage.
4) Armor of Earth (availability) - (10,1,15) For 30 seconds, you gain 51 armor, but move 23% slower than normal.
5) Ward Against Melee (availability) - (10,3,30) You create a ward against melee at your current location. For 17 seconds, allies in this area have a 50% chance to evade melee attacks.
6) Healing Breeze (availability) - (10,1,2) For 10 seconds, target ally gains health regeneration of 7.
7) Earth Attunement (availability) - (10,2,60) For 53 seconds, you are attuned to Earth. You gain 30% of the energy cost of the spell each time you use Earth Magic.
8) Ether Prodigy (availability) (elite) - (5,2,5) Lose all enchantments. For 15 seconds, you gain energy regeneration of 4. When Ether Prodigy ends, you take 2 damage for each point of energy you have. This spell causes exhaustion. This is an elite skill.


- AoEarth for myself.
- Ward for primary healer and myself (Seed instead??)
- Ether Prod. for myself; Am considering Renewal obviously.

(Have lost faith in Elemental Attunement I think..it costs me 10 mana/80 total regen/minute and saves me what ? 30% of used 60? = 18. Low net gain)

So. Any comments? Have my 2(+1) objectives in mind.


A final comment. I did play Berserker R/W during last weekend. It was great fun. I am aware of the damage output of melee in this game, many say it is low, but I do not agree. Would I be better off in that direction for my 2 objectives?

I like the idea of a character based around supporting your healers- however, I don't know if the direct earth-damage route is the best idea- without support from other teammates, you're unlikely to be able to kill the warriors coming after your healer. Wards are nice, though- that might make the earth line worth taking a serious look at.

Other professions that I can see being able to provide nice support are rangers, and possibly necromancers or even warriors.

Rangers can use traps to cripple and blind attackers, as well as use healing spring for a nice heal. Necromancers can slow down the opponents attack speeds, make wells out of corpses for healing, and can use Blood is Power to super-charge your Monk's healing abilities. Warriors can help somewhat using tactics shouts- Watch Yourself will help reduce the damage that your healer takes.

Rather than casting direct heals on the monk(though that's a possiblity too), I would suggest using some of the very nice enchantments. For example, Life Barrier will reduce the damage they take by half. Combining that with some other healing and support skills to reduce the damage that they take such as wards or debuffing the enemy attackers with hexes and conditions, and you'll be able to do a lot to prevent the enemy from killing your healer.

You may want to consider this build.

Mo/Wa
Divine(11)
Smiting(10)
Hammer(10)
None need to be put in Healing.

=== Divine Favor ===
Signet of Devotion [0/2/5] (Signet) Heal target ally for 14..83 Health.
Peace and Harmony [5/1/60] ELITE (Enchantment Spell) For 30..78 seconds, target ally gains +1 Energy regeneration. Peace and Harmony ends if that ally attacks or casts a spell that does not target an ally.
Divine Healing [10/2/60] (Spell) Heal yourself and nearby party members for 10..210 Health.

=== Smiting Prayers ===
Zealot's Fire [10/1/30] (Enchantment Spell) For 60 seconds, whenever target ally uses a skill on an ally, all nearby foes (within 25 feet) are struck for 5..28 fire damage.
Scourge Healing [10/2/0] (Hex Spell) For 30 seconds, every time target foe is healed, the healer takes 15..67 Holy damage.
=== Healing Prayers ===
Restore Life [10/8/0] (Spell) Touch the body of a fallen party member. Target party member is returned to life with 26% Health and 42% Energy.
=== Hammer Mastery ===
Counter Blow [0/0/4] (Hammer Attack) If this attack hits an attacking foe, that foe is knocked down.
Staggering Blow [5/0/30] (Hammer Attack) If this hammer blow hits, target will suffer from weakness for 5..17 seconds.

The task of this monk is to keep the "Healer" alive.
It does this by casting Peace and Harmony and Zealot's Fire on them. Since the "Healer" will be casting "spells that target an ally", they will get +1 energy to do it and radiate fire damage around them. A Monk has good energy regen so, Divine Healing can help with nearby healing too. This will allow you to be a decoy as well. Stay within the range of Zealot's Fire.

If you need to save energy, spot heals can be done with Signet of Devotion.
If an attacker closes on the "Healer", use your trusty hammer to change their mind.
Once they take some damage and want to be healed, Scourge Healing kicks in.
( Their Healing Signet should hurt a little. )

As far as elite skills go, if you want to protect someone ... Here are two monk options you may want to consider....

SMITING (11 Skill)
Shield of Judgment (elite) - (15,1,45) For 17 seconds, anyone striking target ally with an attack is knocked down and suffers 24 damage. This is an elite skill.


For 17 seconds they are not going to take much melee damage. The recharge is not great at 45 seconds however. I think this is an excellent skill, 17 seconds is quite a time in PVP and they should be able to support the team quite well in this time. Often when someone finds out that they are on the ground pretty much continually and doing no damage, they run off to find an easier target. This may also stack well with Zealot's fire which will continue to do additional damage while they are knocked down.

PROTECTION (11 skill)
Shield of Regeneration (elite) - (15,1,20) For 10 seconds, target ally gains 9 health regeneration and 40 armor. This is an elite skill.

The amount of regen is really astounding 9 regen = 18 hp/sec for 10 secs. 180 hps in 10 secounds and you are taking 1/2 damage due to the +40AL. Very nice skill that should see you laughing off attacks for the next 10 seconds. It is re-usable every 20 seconds which is also quite nice.


Another protection skill, you may want to consider is Life Bond which would work well if you are a class that is not overly targetted.

Life Bond - (10+,2,0) Whenever target other ally takes physical damage, half the damage is redirected to you. The damage you receive this way is reduced by 23 points.

If you are a monk secondary with some small amount of healing and are not targetted alot until the end. This spell will reduce PHYSICAL damage by 50% and damage you receive will be negligable under most circumstances. But it will certainly add to their survivability. It works even better when you consider the multitude of warrior builds improving their hit rate with skills like frenzy and 100 blades etc... Of particular note however is that it does not stop casting damage.

Life barrier (elite) does the same but it also effects spell damage at the cost of being elite and requiring you to maintain the enchantment. The 50% health effect making the skill would not be too much of a problem if you are a class that is not overly high on the enemies targetting priority list. Note that none of the dmaage is redirected to you with this skill.

Life Barrier (elite) - (15+,2,5) While you maintain this enchantment, damage dealt to target other ally is halved. If your health is below 50% when that ally takes damage, Life Barrier ends. This is an elite skill.

Anyway ... these are some additional options to consider.

If you're looking at primary healer support, definately consider a Mes/Mo (or some variation, perhaps a Mes/Nec). If you're dedicating a character to the role, you really need something that is going to keep the monk running at 100% efficiency all the time. Load him up with hex removal, a splash of condition removal, and either some form of damage protection. Life Barrier is a good option, only if you're protecting a single monk. More than one and you'll need to look at more spammable options like guardian + RoF, or some anti-warrior hexes.

1 monk running at 100% efficiency can carry a team of 8, with only occasional support from secondary healers. It's hard to do, and you need to be able to put the increased offensive power you have available to good use, but it is surprisingly effective.

Thanks for the replies.
But I have to say I think you missed my points a bit; You sideskirted both my main objectives really;

A) stays close to the healer and tries to take care of incoming melee who obviously targets the primary healer.
B) Secondary objective is to spam damage across the board.
C) heal the poor chap if needed with Breeze or Orison

And proceeding to comment on C), which is the least of my priorities

OKAY, if you feel that A, B, are less important than adding to the monks maan regen, or healing him, I can understand that.

Saying that earth is not much on the offensive side. I dont really understand that? The way I made my build now, I will do a nice amount of damage with my Stone daggers and Stoning. And have the mana to do it for a while. Aftershock is as good as a dd in fact in terms of damage/mana. So I got 3 spells to burn with.

With a mana efficiency of say 8 dam/mana, I can do around 70 x 8 = 560 damage on my mana pool ex regen. That is if I do not use defensive spells. With AoEarth I can probably do ok as it is, even if I am pummeled..

Ahum. I am considering to play W/E though, as the damage output of such a guy with Conjure would be rather good. But then again, I loose the ability to do damage across the board (ranged), and I loose out on mana regen elites. (Not entirely true I guess, I could bring Glyph (E) and gain 60 mana/minute, and build around heavy DD. Hmm.

OR I could play E/W, and get the best of both worlds. I could do my blast sequence, proceed with melee, but then I would need Conjure* lines and that deviates from Earth. So many choices..

Ahhh...the choices, the choices.

Can any of the Alfas say how the damage output in 30-60 seconds is for a W/X compared to an El/X??

Again, this relates to my primary objective, to take care of incoming melee attacking the healer..

I have to agree that BIP may be a goodie if I stay close to Healer. That could mean El/Ne for me then. Hm.

Your strategy is excellent: protecting your main healer. I have the following suggestions:

1. An El/Mo will probably do the trick, but I suggest switching to Fire.

2. Consider a R/Mo, with the Ranger having traps, as suggested above, for local killing, and ignite arrow, for ranged damage.

3. Consider a Mo/R. The monk skills would be smiting and protection. Smiting for local damage, and protection for the healer as well as your group's fighters. Protection would have a terrific synergy with your main healer and if you play together often, you'd become a powerful pair. For your ranger skill, I suggest charm animal. First, your pet will add another fighter to your group, and will attack whoever you do so that you have another weapon against melee attackers. Second, as a monk, you can heal your pet with healing spells, no need to add animal healing spells to your skills.

Another possibility is to build some defensive capabilities on the healer itself. I have a Mo/E character that was specced in Divine Favor, Healing, and Earth. I usually carry 5-6 healing spells and 2 earth spells (GLE, Ward against melee, sometimes armor of earth). Sure I don't have any protection spells but that is what the other monk is for

An Elmo really isn't all that good at taking care of a Monk. Any healing you're going to try and do is pathetic compared to what a good Monk can do - the damage you're going to be doing with an Earth Elementalist is ignorable outside of focus fire situations, and certainly isn't going to scare off anyone.

The most important skills for taking care of a Monk:

Life Bond. I can't stress the importance of this skill enough - get it on a key Monk and their chances of survival go through the roof. If it gets Rended, get it back up ASAP.

Blood is Power, level 3. Your Monks are better healers than you, so give them twice the energy to work with so that they can take care of themselves. Monks get bombarded by Debilitating Shots, Power Leaks, and other energy destruction, and BiP lets them ignore much of that.

Shadow of Fear / Enfeebling Blood. Quickly reduce all the Warriors getting up in your face to a bunch of retards with nerf bats.

Condition / Hex removal. See above, you need to keep your guys clean. Purge Signet is the one shot solution even if it's unwieldly (take off focus, cast, put focus back on), but it solves all your problems now. Mend and Remove Hex are also solid.


Regarding damage, you just aren't going to be doing much of anything if you aren't focused upon dealing damage - it's a time intensive, energy intensive job that you can't half-ass. So I'd do damage support - Rend Enchantments on key targets to keep them vulnerable, or something like Judge's Insight on your own Warriors to let them punch through. Toss Scourge Healing on a target if you go with the latter, as well.

Balance with another good Protection or two so that you can help out in key spots, and you've got a decent, non-Monk support caster that does what you want it to.

Peace,
-CxE

BIP Level 3, do you then mean 3 arrows of mana regen? i.e 0 skill in Blood Magic?

If you are considering Warrior, then you should probably look at utilizing knockdown and blind as ways to protection for your healer friend. Maybe using a Wa/Mo you can use some of the healing skills that I mentioned earlier + the knockdown and blind effects to really seal the protection deal.

I am not really convinced however that a warrior should be hanging back in protection duty of an attack that may or may not come. I can see that this role would work offensively with the use of the healing skills from a distance and used whilst you are attacking. I think it would be more sound to have the protection skills for when someone like the monk is taking damage. But be more offensively based rather than hanging back.

What you are describing is someone with a support role, then the deliverance of damage is secondary and not as important. I think you need to decide whether you are about offense (in which case you should be attacking) or support in which case doing massive damage is not altogether important (providing tools to keep people alive and allow others to do more damage or shut down people).

There are alot of options... I think you should try and few and see what you think works best.

If you want to shut down any type of Warrior then your best route is without any doubt Mes/Necro. What you want is to disable/make them so useless even if they do attack your monk it'll be like a mosquito bite. Talking from experience, a warrior's worst ennemy is the Enfeeble, Shadow of Fear, Faintheartedness combo. What this will do is the warrior will attack at such a slow rate it'll be laughable, Enfeeble also causes weakness. If you want, Enfeebling Blood is also good. The pros of the skill are that you're doing AoE put the con is your sacrificing health for it.

As Ensign suggested, if you want to support a healer and don't have your entire team to focus fire with you, avoid the damage route altogether. Besides a warrior/monk will be too time consuming to kill. And you don't want the other team to take advantage of that. Basically here's what I'm suggesting for your monk supporter character:

Mesmer/Necromancer

Skill 1: Enfeeble
Skill 2: Faintheartedness
Skill 3: Shadow of Fear
Skill 4: Diversion
Skill 5: Power Spike
Skill 6: Power Drain
Skill 7: Shatter Hex
Skill 8: Blood is Power

Domination Magic 11 + 2
Inspiration Magic 7 + 1
Fast Casting 8 + 1
Blood Magic 4
Curses 9

Your curses will make warriors useless and the Domination line will be quite usefull when your monk will get backfired. Power Spike and Power Drain are there so you can contribute to the team effort. I never used Diversion but it seems like it's the skill to shut down monks and spam casters. Once those warriors will be down, you want to do be doing something usefull. BiP is at the sweet spot, you're just high enough to give your monk a nice +4 pips of energy regen. You could also put 0 in Blood Magic and it would be +3 with a puny sacrifice, choice is yours I suppose.

i often thought that i would just protect the monks by killing everything as fast as possible (me and my friends have been running the obsidian flame build for a while)

But it didn't work?

But it didn't work?