Life Bond / Life Barrier in PvE - Is the combo worth the elite?

Question for ya alls:

I often run Final Assault with a group of 5, playing as the Protection / Heal Monk. I usually use the following skills:

Blessed Signit
Life Bond
Mend (+4)
Essence Bond
Healing Breeze (+8 or 9, can't remember)
Dwayna's Kiss (about 250 heal for warrior)
Word of Healing (200 ish healing)
Rebirth

I'm set for a single purpose: Keep the aggro warrior alive. I cast Bond / Mend / Essence on the warrior, and Mend myself, so my regen is zero. Bond others as needed in emergency. Dwayna's for the warrior, Word for emergency aggro. I've tried other builds, but this always seems to work best for me.

Now the question: am I being stupid by not using the Bond / Barrier combo? In most cases Bond / Mend will mean that I only have to occasionally heal the warrior (Mend is to counter conditions, not really for healing). Or is there another combo that is more effective?

Word of Healing has saved my team countless times when the other Monk gets overwhelmed, so I really hate to part with it.

Any ideas how I could improve this build? I've tried using Mark of Prot (recharge too long), Shield of Regen (yawn, not much better than breeze in Furnace), Restore condition (they just put them back on...) et. al.

Looking for help improving my Monking, specifically in Sorrow's Furnace (but also in FOW for 1 warrior groups). I'm pretty experinced with over 100 runs. Thanks.

Try this it was fun for me

Life Bond
Life Barrier
Blessed Signet
Balthazars Spirit
Protective Spirit
Mend Ailment
Rebirth
Reversal of Fortune
16 Prot
13 Divine Favor
Rest into Smiting

that would reduce the agro tanks dmg to Boom..

Moved to the campfire (builds) forum for a more precise discussion

Na, you need to have mesmer secondary to have fun with it...
Mantra of Inscriptions rulez

Oh Yea that one too

and also to heal Reversal should be enuff

My PvE Mo/Me -

14 Protection
11 Divine Favor
10 Smiting Prayers
7 Inspiration

1. Mantra of Inscriptions
2. Blessed Signet
3. Mend Ailment/Mend Condition
4. Guardian/Aegis
5. Shielding Hands/Aegis
6. Smite Hex
7. Life Barrier {E}
8. Rebirth

Dedicated protector. No direct healing to speak of, so it might not be what you're looking for w00t!. Life Barrier is a wonderful, wonderful enchantment. I usually put it on 4-5 members of the party, and use Mantra+Blessed Sig for my energy management. Unless I run into mass enchantment stripping at a horrible time (Well of Suffering can do it, especially if my teammates refuse to move out of the well), Life Barrier makes things very easy on the healer monk. When under heavy fire, Guardian and Shielding Hands are nice ways to soften the damage some more. Sometimes I swap in Aegis, like when I'm sharing monking duties with one of the other monks in my guild who is prot, so that we don't accidently Shielding Hands the same person. We share the Aegis - one puts it up, then the other puts it up. With our enchant-lengthening staves, our party is without Aegis for only a short period.

Smiting could be dropped some, since I only use it for Smite Hex, but I love Smite Hex. It does about 60 dmg in an AoE and removes a hex, which is essential if I get hit with Rust. I hate Rust. Makes activating my Blessed Sig a pain in the arse. Only thing I don't like about Smite Hex is the recharge, but I can deal.

Anyway, that's how I use Life Barrier. No Life Bond, no Balth's Spirit, no Essence Bond... just straight-up Barrier. When it's on, it's that effective. I'm beginning to see why its an elite.

EDIT: Oh, one more thing. I don't have Reversal of Fortune in there, and I know many monks will bash me for being a protector without RoF. Let me explain. Life Barrier reduces the damage my teammates take, which makes the life-gain associated with RoF minimal. I prefer to prevent the damage all-together in the form of Guardian or Shielding Hands. Sure, Guardian only works against physical attacks, and Shielding Hands has a recharge, but I find it works. RoF was a drain on my energy and I didn't see it doing much more than preventing one attack every two seconds and not healing much. Guardian has the protential to prevent much more than that over the course of 5 seconds, and Shielding Hands has the potential to reduce the damage taken to zero with the help of Life Barrier, which I think is a great use of 5 energy.

Yea, drop smiting to min. and get protection to lvl 16.

What to do about hex removal though, Dmitri3? Remove Hex? Holy Veil?

I always use smite hex, even though it's always around lvl 3... when I play supportive role.
Don't think you have to care about the damage, you removed the hex in one sec - that's all /clap .

ADD: Using that many attributes for one single skill, not even elite is kinda sick!

Thing is that in Sorrow's Furnace you can't keep up with hexes and conditions, so I don't even try. I just counter their effects with the combo of Mend / Breeze (+13 counters a max of -15 pretty well).

In my experience there are only a couple of places where damage spikes; where the Bond / Barrier is merited. In those cases I just spam Kiss and Word.

The crux of my problem is that I just can't seem to get rid of Word. One healer in Sorrow's Furnace isn't enough, even with a keg holder. I need the bigi bang of Word with the small energy cost. I just can't shake the feeling that I could be doing this more efficiently tho.

Good idea on switching secondary to Mez. I've only kept Warrior for Sprint, as I don't solo. Doesn't do me much good in FoW or Furnace, so I might as well drop it.

Hm, hm, what about these warriors running all around the place? lol

Yea, you're probably right. I used to use more smiting spells and I just never went and reduced my smiting attribute

/duh

I'll fix that poste-haste.

For FA farming in SF, I either go protection or healing, depending on which my guildie goes. We're a monk pair XD

As a protection monk, I use:
Protection Prayers: 16
Divine Favor: 13

Life Barrier
Life Bond
Vital Blessing <- sometimes as a spike heal, or even kept on self.
Blessed Signet
Mend Condition
Reversal of Fortune
Rebirth/Res Sig <- if something goes wrong, can't afford to lose all energy with Rebirth
XX <- spell of choice: Life Attunement, Aegis, Guardian

In my opinion, if you're trying to keep tanks alive (for example, SF farming), then yeah. With a good group, you can take tough areas, though you'd have problems with enchantment shattering, so you better have some overups.

I don't really think that way... Tanks can survive by themselves lol... It's the casters, nukers and all other sorts that need this protection. Plus, the mob changes targets very often :P.

In other words, you're wasting yourself on just one ally, instead of all group... and notice that YOU CAN protect all the party, it's not like you're limited to one person.

this seems like an appropriate place to put this:

as a bonder in sorrows (assuming the tank is holding a keg/gear), do you find yourself having to replace enchantments alot, or are a few cover enchantments enough to stop the removal on the important ones?

I've been curious about this because I ran a bond/barrier monk for the Defend Droknar's Forge quest, and it was just insane how often I was having to reapply enchantments, even when I was attempting to cover them as best I could. (which obviously wasn't good enough :P)

y just not insp hex.

Inspired Hex is nice, but I can only use it every 20 seconds because it becomes the hex that was removed for 20 seconds. I all ready dislike the recharge of Smite Hex, and that's less than 20 seconds.

I've been doing a lot of PvE protection recently with a build that uses the Barrier/Bond combo. I've been using it in FoW mostly and don't know how well it would work in Sorrow's with all the heavy degens and enchant removal, but here it goes:

Mo/Me
Protection Prayers: 10+1
Divine Favour: 11+4
Inspiration: 8

Skills:
Life Barrier {E}
Life Bond
Balthazars Spirit
Blessed Signet
Mantra of Inscriptions
Divine Boon
Reversal of Fortune
Rebirth

At the start I barrier + bond the tank(s) and cast boon and balth's spirit on myself. Bond triggers balth's spirit, so that's a decent amount of extra energy. I usually allso cast barrier on my fellow monk, just to be on the safe side (I play with PUG's mostly and aggro can be very bad sometimes)
During battle I allways keep my eye out on 4 things:
1. How's energy? (Keep hitting that blessed sig and mantra!)
2. Are the enchants still on the tanks (replace ASAP if gone)
3. Which of the non-tanks are taking heat? (Use bond for that extra energy )
4. Who needs some extra healing? (boon + RoF helps out a decent amount)

This build has worked wonders for me, but as stated: in FoW. Haven't tested it yet on the sorrow's quests yet, so could be very bad over there.
One thing noteworthy is that in some areas (restore temple quest for example), I use balthazars spirit on the warriors as a cover-up enchantment.

Hope this has been helpfull!

How many maintained enchantments are you usually maintaining at once, nakama? I imagine this build gets kinda tricky when you approach the Wailing Lord with all the Nature's Renewal spirits laying around.

I maintain about 6-7 enchantments at a time (8-9 at most). So you're right about that wailing lord quest, NR makes me very sad. I usually ask not to do that one, because it kind of renders my build useless.
If the PUG does insist to do that quest, I'd probably just run boon and help out with the healing (pretty hard with only 2 regen). Often times there is a battery necro in the group and he could help out with energy.
But many people seem to hate wailing lord anyway, so most of the times I won't encounter NR. If I'm told in advance we will be doing that quest, I'll either just switch to my healing build or make a build that is not so dependant on maintained enchantments.
Thanks for pointing that out though Schwitz, never did wailing lord with this build and never crossed my mind that NR is used over there. Now I'll be better prepared!