Retribution, a worthy skill in Mr Ensign's Skill Effectiveness top 5?

Nobody loves Smiting. That's just the way it is.

I have seen numerous posts saying that a warrior, on a good day, can churn out let us say 30+ DPS. Just to pick a figure. I believe I have seen 40-50 DPS also, but that sounds a bit wild to me. I dont know.

We can stipulate
20 DPS melee
9 DPS from 3 Adrenaline attacks (very roughly)
Add Conjure for 8 DPS flavour.

Okay, let us say 30 DPS to be somewhere comfortable.

Let us now also add Charles' comment that "you need a mob to kill a monk"

Then we introduce

Retribution (availability) (Enchantment)
While you maintain this enchantment, whenever target ally takes melee damage, this spell deals 27% of the damage back to the source.
Casting cost: 10 energy plus an arrow of regeneration
Casting time: 2 sec
Recharge time: 0 sec
Relevant attribute: Smiting Magic


For melee defense, this skill will then does
27% x 30 = 8 DPS

back on the source warrior.

If the said "mob" is present, you can scale this figure.

So, this seems like a good skill to use together with Life Bond, if you are looking over your primary Monk?

How is the mana management? Well, it cost 10 mana/30 seconds upkeep.
(1 arrow of mana regeneration).

Compared to Conjure, that is double cost, but as far as I can see, it only looses out to Conjure?

Sadly, I myself gave up Smiting after a few tries. But for those who use Smiting, it could be a good situational damage dealer?

If you combine this skill with Life Bond, won't the monk reflect back only 13.5% of physical attacks? And that's what? 10 damage on a Final Thrust?

I'm really not a big fan of Retribution...

*edit* As well, correct me if I'm wrong, but is the damage reflected back, affected by armor?

Your question goes way beyond my understanding of the games mechanics.

This game is layers upon layer of types of skills. Awesome.

For example. What is an attack?

I was sitting here looking at

Blurred Vision (availability) (Hex)
For 8 seconds, target foe and nearby foes are hexed with Blurred Vision. While hexed, those foes have a 50% chance to miss with attacks.

Will this skill make a spell caster miss with 50% of his damage spells? It should do. If you look at Conjure it has the same wording

Conjure Frost (availability) (Enchantment)
Lose all enchantments. For 60 seconds, your attacks strike for an additional 1 cold damage.

As Conjure triggers on each attack, I would assume BVision triggers on each spell cast attack also?? Did anybody consider this?

First of all, I'm not sure what you mean by "skill effectiveness top 5." Does that mean it's in the top 5 most useful skills in-game, in every situation? Or that it has the potential to churn out more damage than any other skill?

Regardless of criteria, retribution still wont make the list, for a few simple reasons.

First, as you've pointed out, is that it's in Smiting. To deal back 27% damage you'd need a 12 in Smiting, and Smiting really only has 4 good skills that don't have any synergy with the others in its own list.

Next, you're considering this on a monk who's getting attacked by a group from the other team. Any team making a serious attack on the monk is going to bring Rend Enchantments to punch through the monk's various defenses. Say goodbye to your retribution, and good luck coming up with the 10 energy to put up a mediocre defense.

Finally, it's only useful against melee damage. It will not deal damage back anyone using a bow, staff, or wand. Warriors also suffer from space constraints- have you ever managed to get more than 3 warriors attacking the same target? It's difficult to do. More likley than not, you had 3 warriors with a fourth and fifth behind them, trying to push their way in to get an attack or two in.

So while Retribution has the potential to deal a lot of damage back, it's simply not going to in very many situations. It's in a bad attribute, it will get removed with your other enchantments, and is only useful against a limited number of attackers. It wont do enough damage to scare the warriors away either- if they're trying to kill you, they should be swinging through things like Empathy anyways. Retribution is not any scarier.

If you really want to reduce the DPS of multiple attackers against you, bring along Shielding Hands or Shield of Deflection- Shielding Hands will drop the damage from every attack against you by 10 or more even with a mediocre level in Protection- and it only costs 10 energy. The cooldown on Shielding Hands is one of the few things that keeps it from being my favorite skill, but even now it never leaves my skillbar. Shield of Deflection is elite, but will cause 75% of enemy attacks to miss, and that's not just melee. On top of that, any attacks that get through will do reduced damage because it improves your armor as well.

I'm not Ensign, but Retribution is not a top 5 skill by any stretch of the imagination in any scenario.
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RE: Blurred Vision

Blurred vision only affects attacks, not spells or signets (or even touch spells.)

These are not attacks. Conjure will not add any damage when you cast Lightning Orb. Blured Vision will not make you more likely to miss with Fireball.

Some spells are projectiles, and have a chance to miss on their own, but even those projectile spells are not attacks, and are not subject to blurred vision, conjure flame, Order of Pain, etc..or any enchantment or hex that triggers when you attack.

All conjure Frost does is add damage to each attack. Attacks, as I understand it, are merely strikes with a weapon. So blindness would effect a spellcaster's use of their wand, but would not affect their spells, such as Flare, Fireball, Orison of Healing, etc.

The problem I see with your build with Retribution is that, as Narc points out, combining Life Bond will reduce damage back. And any warriors pounding on your Monk will probably not take much damage, as I suspect this is damage after armor's reducing effects.

No one attacks Warriors.

It take a lot of dedicated focus fire to drop someone, and a bit of reflected damage isn't going to scare anyone. It'd be a nice jolt to someone with Frenzy up, but generally 8-10 DPS on targets that you're otherwise ignoring isn't going to do anything.

I guess it can spread around enough damage on a Warrior heavy team to start annoying their Monks, but that just isn't going to pull its weight. I'd rather use Life Bond to actually protect the Monk, not just annoy the Warriors.

Peace,
-CxE

That'd be an interesting taboo to break. Imagine a 4v4 with 3 elementalists and one necromancer. The elementalists target the warrior first, kill him quickly, and the necromancer turns the corpse into a bone fiend. Then, the elemtalists target someone else, create a new corpse, and the necromancer creates another bone fiend. Of course, the monk is now busy raising one (or two corpses), while the elementalists rest up for a bit.

With two 14 level bone fiends on the field, you're now back at square one again; with 4v4.

Good luck killing a Warrior with full Monk support. Attacking a Warrior first isn't a taboo, it's a quick trip to the loser's bracket.

Peace,
-CxE

Correct me if I'm wrong, but aren't additional damage dealt by conjures calculated separately from you base attack? Thus Retribution will deal back 27% of base damage, plus 27% of conjure, meaning you will actually deal back less than you predicted. Hell, conjure might now even count at all making the returns of Retribution even lower.

Ahh, so Conjure only adds to the attack of the Wands. Makes a lot of sense Not the spells. Thanks. I was just wondering. All this will be obvious when the game launches I guess.

Im not using Retribution, I was just wondering if it could be useful in a defensive position.

Hehe, a warrior supported by even a half decent monk isn't going to drop very fast at all. This will give the other six players of your team time to go after the ennemy, giving your team the edge. The very few times I ever was focused upon were quite funny. Essentially what happened was I'd be the first to charge in because of Sprint. Being a warrior/monk and having 2 monks from our guild behind me made any attemps futile. They'd usually stop after realising I'd never go past 1 fourth of my total health. Maybe that's a decent strategy, get a gimp warrior to go prod the team to make them waste some energy in the beginning.

If you want to take warriors out of the battle in the earlier stages, don't bother attacking them, just make sure to bring a Necro or Necro secondary with Shadow of Fear and Enfeeble or Enfeebling Blood. These benefit from an added bonus should you get more than one warrior on your monk's back. The Necro character could also bring Rend Enchantments as pointed earlier to help you in killing the opposing Monks as well as the classic BiP (which will make you the most popular kid on the block).

Is there anything valueable in the "Smiting" line? Something like 'Banish' could be an ok spell if the recharge was something a bit more spectable, 10 seconds is along time; perhaps 3 or 5 would make it usable.

Sure.

Balthazar's Spirit
Judge's Insight
Scourge Healing
Zealot's Fire

You can make an argument for the following:
Signet of Judgement {E}
Shield of Judgement {E}
Strength of Honor

The real problem with smiting is that the line has almost no synergy with other monk skills or with Divine Favor. The good spells within Smiting have no synergy with each other either, which makes it even harder to justify getting Smiting to a decent level.

Banish and Smite have 2 things going for them: low energy and ignore armor. Cooldowns kill them- you just won't be able to kill things reliably using them.

Personally I wouldn't bring either of the elites or Strength of Honor along. There are better elites out there and Conjure Element or Judge's Insight is almost always going to be as good as or better than Strength of Honor, but you can make a case for it if you like. I just wouldn't.

I think that Banish is a fine skill in its own right - it's cheap, ignores armor, casts quickly, and does a decent amount of damage. It doesn't quite stack up to, say, Lightning Strike but does it have to? I think that Banish is perfect as is - it isn't an all star but I'd be happy to grab it if it fit my character concept.

Of course, that's the problem. Let's say that you want to play a Smiting Monk who hits the enemy with direct, ranged damage. You have the following skills to support Banish in such a build:




See the problem? There's nothing wrong with Banish, it's just out of place.

It's pretty much what Scaphism said - the line has several good skills but zero synergy. You'd be grabbing Smiting for a single skill usually, and that's a questionable use of attribute points. I like Wa/Mos with Judge's Insight, Balthazar's Spirit is great on anyone who's reliably taking damage, and Zealot's Fire is a Monk staple for soloing in PvE - but you don't have anything even approaching the trio of Word/Orison/Breeze as a Healing base, or SoD/RoF/Hands from the Protection line. The line isn't weak, it's schizophrenic.

Peace,
-CxE

Retribution isn't too great- the best I've seen it used for is with conjunction with Holy Wrath.... have a W/Mo specced with smiting to cast both of those on a monk and then just use adrenal skills. Unfortunately, there are dozens of enchantments I'd prefer to stick on in the place of Retribution- Life Bond/Barrier, Balthazar's Spirit, etc.... Holy Wrath does pretty good damage reflection, at the cost of keeping you at 0 energy, permanently. Though, as Ensign pointed out, in PvP it's not too worthwhile, since all that dealing damage to the enemy warriors will do is put a small amount of strain on the enemy healers- something that can help, but isn't always worth too much.... if the enemy is using Elementalists or Rangers for damage, the damage reflection skills are pretty worthless, as they won't do anything at all. In PvE, they can be alright since you're just looking to clear out the enemy mob, and you can deal some decent damage passively, especially with the large number of warriors you run into in PvE.

Smiting overall is a so-so line. It's got some decent skills- Banish and Smite are both quite nice, Signet of Judgement can be powerful at times, Shield of Judgement is an excellent counter to focus-fire, with the drawback of a long recharge time. Scourge Healing is excellent, and Scourge Sacrifice can be a great skill if you know you're going to be fighting teams that have a BiPper. Holy Strike can be great as well if you have a way to knockdown your enemy, though not nearly as nice as some other skills like Aftershock. Overall, Smiting skills have their uses, but the line as a whole isn't as useful as many of the other skill lines. If you're running a character with a monk secondary for resurrect, there's some nice smiting skills you can use, but I wouldn't generally take a monk primary or secondary just for smiting skills.