Galen's wonky E/Mo "infuse healer"

So, this is the healing build I've been running over the last couple of months. It was absolutely, no questions asked, way too good before the Ether Renewal nerf (much more broken than any E/Mo smiter ever was); there are plenty of Free Faction stories about crazy stuff I did, not because I'm an excellent player (I'm not), but because Ether Renewal really was that good. (Embryo tells a story of me keeping the hero and five others up during the last 1:45 of Halls when the other two monks went down. I don't remember that -- I was probably too busy frantically mashing spells.) Now it's been nerfed to something sane, bringing the healer down from an ohmigodbroken one to just a solid (but different) one.

The old build involved Heal Party and Aegis, and I'd sit there in Vault casting Heal Parties back-to-back nearly constantly. The energy is tighter now, so Party is out until I get some modicum of energy discipline back into my thick skull that's used to unlimited energy. Even so, Heal Party is an excellent self-heal, restoring something on the order of 180 life (see below).

Ether Renewal was nerfed, meaning (for several reasons) that Heal Party had to go. Aegis went too. However, the build still works, in a varied form.

The basic principle behind the build is this: Ether Renewal gives you health too! Most people using ER just sit there, gaining 80+ health per spell from ER, wasting all those blue numbers.

So, why not use Infuse Health with Ether Renewal? It certainly casts quickly, something you want in ER spells, and lets you do something with all those shiny blue numbers that would otherwise go to waste.

Now that we've got Ether Renewal and Infuse, what other skills go well with those? Well, we need some enchantments for Ether Renewal to play with, and we may as well have other ways to self-heal if we're going to use Infuse. Aura of Restoration fits both bills, and we've already got lots of Energy Storage for Renewal, so it's a natural.

What else to use? Quick-casting spells are preferred, so you can spam stuff under ER. Since there will be times that your health goes down from Infuse until you can heal yourself back up, Protective Spirit is a nice spell to use, with a quick cast time and a long duration. The same logic will suggest Reversal of Fortune; it can also mitigate damage on other people who would otherwise need to be Infused.

Now we need some other things to use. Vigorous Spirit seems like a natural choice, for three reasons: 1) you cast spells constantly since you have so much energy and such fast-casting spells, 2) you can put it on other people for "trickle healing" so you don't have to keep using Infuse, and 3) it's a cheap, long-duration enchantment for yourself.

Although many deride it as not worth it, Healing Breeze works well in this build: you have the energy to spam it, helping immensely with degen teams, and boosting your own health after an Infuse. It also counts as an enchantment for ER, obviously.

The last slot goes to the one skill that makes the build tick: Life Attunement. Since every point of health you gain can be transferred to anyone else with Infuse, you may as well make the most of your impressive self-healing.

The build, then, is:

Reversal of Fortune
Healing Breeze (was Heal Party before nerf)
Infuse Health
Protective Spirit
Vigorous Spirit (was Aegis before nerf)
Ether Renewal {E}
Aura of Restoration
Life Attunement

10+4 Storage (the loss of max life doesn't hurt much, since you have Prot Spirit on you all the time, and since you lose less when Infusing)
11 Protection
10 Heals

20% Enchanting sword pommel
20/20 Energy Storage scroll

The healing from Ether Renewal is so much that you wind up able to cast Infuses literally back-to-back, with each cast healing you to full before it resolves. While such frequent use of this spell may seem dangerous, the layered protections (Prot Spirit and RoF) on yourself and the constant healing make it less dangerous than you might think, and this build winds up being much more durable than a traditional healer to many sorts of attack. With Ether Renewal up you can chain-cast Infuse through Backfire and with two warriors beating on you (really!); without you have to be more conservative. After casting Infuse, refresh Reversal of Fortune on yourself, then go on about healing other people. Each Breeze or Prot heals you for ~68; each Reversal or Vigorous heals you for ~41, so you'll be back at full in no time -- even without Renewal. It is vulnerable to a very on-the-ball Necromancer or Mesmer, but no more than a traditional monk in different ways.

The build works best when you are supplied an enchantment by other characters: Tainted Flesh, Aegis, Succor, Orders, or whatever. Without it you'll have to be a bit more cautious about energy management.

It's different, it works, and it's a blast to play.

Infuse health is by far the best healing spell, hands down. Just no one seems to be able to use it right. I think this could be a good build, I'll have to try it some time.

Umm how is infuse the best healing spell. Its not really cost/effective due to the 10 energy and losing hafl of your life. Great build but cmon infuse health works well due to ether renewals healing. its got a 1/4 second cast so its to stop spikes not actually heal really well.

With the right skills, it's awesome. I didn't literally mean the best :P It's still pretty good if you can use it right. There was a team a few months ago using infuse health stuff. The monk lost health for about a tenth of a second, so he could constantly pump out infuse. Worked well...

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My god...that's so evil it just might work. I'm gonna try that ASAP! That would be insane to use, and it'd be quick as. All you'd need is 5 Mo/N and a prot, warrior and nuker or something, and you could spike with Grenth's Balance. Crazy crazy stuff.

You can only do so much spike damage with grenths. The more health the target loses the less effective the skill becomes. As a pre-spike you may want one person on your team to infuse, infuse then grenths. This way, providing both the grenth user and the target have equal health, you can reduce the target's health to 50% and then immediately follow with your true spike.

So you use life attunement to make up for not having divine favor? You take away from the dmg of your ally so you can heal better? If your ally dealt damage faster, you wouldnt have to heal so long, because the enemy would be dead. Instead of life attunement why not use vital blessing, then infuse health. The extra 160+Hp you get from blessing will add a lot to your infuse health. I think the amount of health you give from my idea, and the amount you give from having life attunement on is just a little different, but you dont sacrifice offense. In addition to this, you keep an enchantment on yourself, which helps with Ether Renewal. Im a, the best defense is a great offense, type person. Of course I could be wrong about all this.

uhhh what offense is he exactly losing by putting life attunement in there? he isn't going to be wanding anything. his job is a fast react clutch heal. that doesnt work when he has to wait to stop wanding something before he heals. plus, there's the obvious fact that he has no offensive spells.

Why put life attunement on yourself? It increase the amount of HP gained from a heal. If he puts it on himself, and heals an ally, what good did that do? The text for attunements says on an ally, that ally would gain a % more from a heal spell, but lose 30% dmg from his attack. Whats the sense in putting life attunement on yourself?

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Played around in random with this. Used a insightful staff of enchanting (pvp only char type), and it worked. This build is a great protector/spike healer. Plus, its really easy to keep yourself alive. My only qualm is working with the long regen time on ether renewal (i know it could be cut down by estorage offhand item, but it is conditional). Without renewal, your energy drains pretty fast. Not that renewal should be any better (maybe slightly shorter recharge time?...say 20 seconds?), but it takes id say a modicum of skill to work this well.

Overall...amazing healer, with MUCH more survivability than normal monks in an arena. Most people target you when they see you healing (and they target Ele's anyways), and you can suck up damage like a sponge, thereby wasting their attacks.

lol....And if someone decides to rend enchant you, they'll probably take severe damage, and you could probably just pop up a RoF or PS in no time, not to mention your other buffs.

The fastest death I had was about 15 seconds, where I was hit by a meteor/fball ele, kd hammer war, and a life transfer necro. In the meantime, my team killed the 4th player and the necro, and then res'd me.

And I never even had another enchanter on my team. If i could get a tainted flesh necro, or another prot monk with shielding hands, guardian, and aegis.... O man... the possibilities! lol

Great build Entropius!

actually, if you keep hitting infuse health with all those helaing buffs on and stuff, you will lose health, but then pop back up as 'half your health' from infuse health becomes < than the amount you get healed from because of all the buffs on you, and then it goes down etc. be pretty cool if someone would calculate the equilibrium point, if yknow what i mean

not sure what it would mean but it would be kinda cool to hit infuse health and not actually lose any health

Just use Damocles numbers. If you're self-healing 160 to 187 per infuse cast (depending on how many enchants you have on you), then the break-even point is 320-374 (depending on the same).

I find that the break-even point for me is nearly full health, since you're forgetting the health boost from Vigorous Spirit and Life Attunement.

Assuming Healing Breeze (cast this on yourself before you pop Renewal), Vigorous Spirit, Aura of Restoration, Life Attunement, Ether Renewal, and Protective Spirit on you, you wind up getting healed for:

+10 from Vigorous Spirit
+35 from Aura of Restoration
+114 from Ether Renewal

= 159 * 140% = 222.6

So equilibrium is at 445 life, 10 below my max.

If you get hit while you're doing this, it self-corrects -- you'll lose less next Infuse but gain the same.

The build is weak against Rend Enchants, true. It seems like it should be weaker than it is, honestly. However, in Tombs I don't seem to have much trouble. Sure, I get Rended every once in a while, but I can usually recover unless I'm also being energy drained -- and it takes significantly more energy drain to shut this build down than a conventional monk. The flipside is: once I'm drained, it takes more time for me to get set up again. I can't "play the bottom" of my energy pool like a conventional monk can.

This is when a +15/-1 weapon switch really comes in handy, since you can recast a few enchantments (assuming drain + rend), then hit switch and fire up Renewal to recharge.

Already worked on the weapon switching. Pull out a 15/-1 wand and 27/-1 off hand when your ether renewal is recharged and you have less than 13 mana in your pool and you can bring yourself up to about 50 mana (not counting the item's mana bonus) even if you have only 2-3 enchants running at the time. Of course, if your energy drops to nil when you have your switches out, you're probably out of commission for a good while, though this has happened only once when two energy denial mes' alternated between E surge and burn once they realized I was spike healing my team >.<

And yes, even with arcane conundrum and migraine or conundrum and dazed, i still managed to stay alive (in random arena) with just RoF for awhile. One axe warrior? No Problem. IW mesmer? Piece of cake. Air spiking your team? Prot spirit ftw. We went up against a few lame tclap groups once we broke into team arena and even they couldnt knock us out. One tclapper said, "F*** this, all you're doing is healing", at which point my team broke out in laughter, not even bothering to retort. Though, we did have 1 monk on our team, so maybe this build works best as a background worker. Most teams didn't even notice me precasting vig spirit (not to mention spamming prot spirit and breeze for a minute or so). If they did, they usually lost coordination when some warrior or mesmer started attacking me instead of focusing on the monk or mesmer on our team. Heck, all i had to do to worry about the warrior was cast a breeze and a vig spirit on him at the beginning of battle and it usually lasted him the fight.

Thanks again on the awesome build (24 consecutive wins from random to arena with 22 flawlesses )

I had a feeling this build could work out well. I'll have to try it out myself once I'm done with my exams and assignments this week.

See?? See?? I told you Infuse Health was awesome :P

All I have to say is WOW. Nice build and thank you for sharing. I guess all those people who were saying EMo makes a better healer have an argument!

First thing I did, after I calculated some numbers, let's see how it works out for me. So here is my experience:

I casted Life Attunement, Aura of Restoration and Vig Spirit and Protective Spirit on me at the start of the battle. The fight was going on and I saw a teammate losing health. So I put up Healing Breeze and Ether Renewal and used Infuse Health. I saw the red number and the blue numbers pop up and I was still at half health of my health bar. This is not what happened to me one time but it all the time. Is there some kind of casting order or am I doing something wrong. Cause I experience that the blue numbers are applied before the red number so you don't gain any health but only lose health.

Like to hear your experience about it if you played/tested it lately

psst! use Grenth's Balance on a person as soon as you use Infuse Health - you steal half the difference of your two HP's

My Malise/Wither/Rend necro would have fun with this build *grins*

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