Build Review #4

About the last two, i'm not sure it's really worth it using up 2 skills (one of them your elite!) just to reduce signet casting time. If there were only one or two signets, sure. But everything those builds does is centered around the quick and efficient use of signets.

Reducing casting times can be huge. As huge, if not moreso than energy management. What are the three important details when considering a skill? Energy, effect, and time. Energy is what you need to cast it, the resource - A skill's meaningless if you can't afford to cast it, after all. Effect is what a skill actually does - it could be low cost and low recharge but you still wouldn't want it if it did something crummy. Witness Wastrel's Worry. And time is just how often you can do whatever it is that skill does and how rapidly - A spell that does a little damage with a low cooldown can be better than a spell with medium damage and a long recharge timer. You won't see any heals with a long casting time, after all, because no one would use them. Improve any one of those factors and you'll improve your skill.

With signets energy isn't an issue so you're left either boosting their effect or managing the time it takes to use or recharge them.

That 45% reduction to the recharge time of Leech Signet from Mantra of Inscriptions alone means that it turns from soemthing nearly unuseable to a zero energy, interrupting version of Energy Tap. Blessed Signet can really crank out the energy . And so on. The best part is that MoI and Keystone Signet synergize because MoI shortens the amount of time needed to cast Keystone and Keystone lets you use Blessed Signet more to have the energy to keep MoI running constantly. Now, with the change to Blessed Signet it's probably overkill because you'll spend all your time casting Keystone and Blessed and owon't be able to do much of anything else.

It's a good point about the elite, though. I had another version of a Smiting build on my drawing board, one that actually made use of Bane Signet. It was a bit different and not much of a healer so I was hesitant. But I'm really kicking myself now because I basically had the big abuse over the last BWE and I didn't realize it. Because, of course, I would have dropped Midnight Signet for Signet of Judgment. There, of course, time management becomes even more important as the more you can fire off that AoE knockdown the better, which, of course, led me to try and figure out a way to drop as much off that recharge time on SoJ and Banesig as I could. Zrave just had the brilliant idea of putting htat Quickening Zephyr on another character.

In fact, here's what I had in my notes :

Originally Posted by Tuon