Build Review #4
Originally Published by Sausaletus Rex
As promised last time around, this week I’m swearing off any and all Warrior builds…for at least one week. This week, instead, we’ll turn to my other love, the Monk. When I say Monk I’m not talking about those weird Smiting builds where the hunted becomes the hunter. No, you want something bizarre like that you’ll need to look back at my Illusionary Weaponry review. No, I, of course, mean a healer – a character devoted to protecting, defending, and otherwise keeping their teammates alive so they can merrily go about their business.
Long realized as one of the most important and powerful characters on any battlefield, a properly made Monk is an asset to any team. However, the design for Monks has often been neglected and stagnant. Monk players are, of course, defensively minded and perhaps it’s their conservative tendencies that lead them to settle on what works and stick with it. Other professions tend to be much more flexible, much more innovative, in their stratagems. And I’ll be the first to admit that I, as a long standing user of Monks in all their various guises, was much more concerned with keeping my healer up-to-date - to incorporate the latest changes into my build rather than to step back and see if the larger picture changing hadn’t opened up some new opportunities – but, then, I’ve never been much of an innovator. My builds are boring, proven, tested, and honed to a knife’s edge, never flashy. Because boring’s what wins games. Still, someone has to be pushing the boundaries of what a strategy and a profession can do. It’s risky because you’ll often fall on your face but it’s also rewarding because sometimes you’ll manage to get well out ahead of the pack and reap a substantial advantage before everyone else catches up.
So, today we’ll be looking at a Monk/Mesmer build by cce that’s really on the cutting edge. Or at least trying to be. It’s an all signet build and a fascinating one. But hold onto your seats because we’re going meta before things are through.
We’ll get to the build a bit later but first let’s talk about the idea behind it. Every build, after all, starts from somewhere and that somewhere is the idea or concept behind the build. In this case when I say an “all signet” build I mean just that. There’s six signet, one enchantment, and one stance on cce’s planned skill bar. The concept is to use signets and to make the most of them. That sort of build leaves me with two impressions.
First, it’s a role-playing build. A build that’s made not necessarily to be effective or viable but to fulfill some sort of need or desire on the part of the maker. There’s nothing necessarily wrong with such a build. I’ll make no secret of the fact that I’ve been known to play a role or two in my time and I can certainly understand the urges behind such a scheme. It is, however, very difficult to criticize. The normal rules for what works and what doesn’t go out of the window because it’s an intensely personal build. Skills and equipment aren’t chosen for whether or not they’re good at what they do but for what they mean to the builder. And that’s tricky ground to walk on because you can never be just quite sure what’s in someone else’s head. RP builds start off with a strong central concept; they’re fitted to a scheme rather than to a specific need. They’re the builds people make when they start thinking things like “Pets are cool. I want my character to use a pet.” Or “You know, I really enjoy helping people, I’m going to make a healing Monk.” Note that there’s nothing saying that such builds can’t be extremely effective in what they set out to do. Just that what they set out to do is a little bit off the beaten path. But, if you’re someone who’ll play a Warrior and never ever consider giving up your axe no matter what because you like it when your character smacks people around with it, then you’re walking down the same path. Guild Wars is a game of fantasy and in some way or another we’re all playing our roles and suspending our disbelief to become attached to our characters. What separates those who chose their plan based on what they want rather than what they need is that they’re much more interested in the play part rather than the game part. This usually means that an RP build can be atrocious when considered in a competitive light.
However, since an RP build is a bit hard to review, we’ll not consider cce’s build as such and instead consider the other option: he’s trying to get clever on us. What he’s doing, then, is to take a look at the landscape of the game, seeing how things stand, and then trying to figure out the best way to take advantage of it all. That, in essence, is where a meta-game starts. The meta-game’s the game outside of the game. The place where not just cce but dozen, hundreds, thousands of players are all trying to see the whole of the game and then make their plans based on what’s going to give them an advantage. Because Guild Wars is a game where our options are limited that means, at any given time, we’re only exploiting some of our advantages and at the same time we’ve left some weaknesses. It’s all part of having a plan, of making a build, and it’s a question, really, of just how much and where rather than of if such strengths and disadvantages exist. What the meta-game entails, then, is not considering the individual players pluses and minuses but the pluses and minuses of everyone else in the game. It’s trying to turn everyone else’s minus into your plus, in so many words. The meta-game is watching for your opponent’s tell in poker. Or trying to see a pattern in what they throw in Rock-Paper-Scissors.
Consider, if you will, the case where every single character in the game is limited to a choice between two sets of armor. The first armor, heavy armor, we’ll say is 80AL. The next, light armor, 60AL. It’s no contest there, everyone’s going to pick the heavy armor and take less damage. However, if we were to introduce some other type of benefit to the lesser armor. What if, instead we made light armor 60AL+30AL vs. Elemental damage? Now, that armor’s weaker overall but in a specific circumstance, when there’s elemental damage, it’s going to be a solid 10AL stronger. And to further that difference, let’s say our heavy armor has a penalty and make it 80AL-20AL vs. Elemental damage. Now, our heavy armor is going to be actually weaker than light armor in that situation where elemental damage is occurring. Now, players have an actual choice.
And that’s where the meta-game comes into things. Let’s say that, for whatever reason, everyone in the game starts off with heavy armor. They have to hunt out of their way to get that light armor. So everyone starts off with a big disadvantage to anyone using elemental damage. That being the case, the sensible play for everyone in the game to make is to start relying on elemental damage. Everyone’s going to be flinging around the weapons and spells that deal more damage based on what everyone else is wearing. Until, that is, someone manages to get their hands on a set of light armor. They’ll be extra protected against all those elemental damage slingers and will have a marked advantage in protection. At least until all the players worried about protecting themselves get their light armor, too, and some bright player realizes that, “Hey, everyone’s wearing armor protected against elemental damage, I think it might be a good idea to…not do elemental damage!”. They switch to another damage type and suddenly instead of light armor being the answer, others follow, and it’s back to everyone wanting their heavy armor.
At this point the game’s going to ping pong between which set of armor is the best. Not everyone’s going to realize that things have shifted right away, some are going to lag behind, some are going to be making the wrong play because they don’t know any better only to find they’ve made the right play when the pendulum swings back, and players are going to try and outguess things by running contrary to “popular wisdom”. The result is a sort of equilibrium where no one strategy for armor is better because not everyone will agree on it. Against an opponent, every character has about a 50% chance of guessing right and wearing the right set of armor, all other things being equal. What the metagame is, then, is that attempt to guess better. A player who listens to chats and watches message boards and talks to other players can get a feel for which way things have swung. If more players are wearing heavy armor, it’s time to use elemental damage. If more players are wearing light armor, it’s time to use something else. Or, since other who play the meta-game are going to follow that same line of reasoning it’s time to start wearing the opposite of what others are wearing so that a player’s less vulnerable than others to the dominant source of damage.
In a game as complex and detailed as Guild Wars there are all sorts of these sorts of momentary advantages to be gained or exploited. There are hundreds of skills, weapons, armor, and more that can be used in combination by players alone or in groups. That makes it incredibly hard for a player to tell exactly what someone else is going to do. By design, of course. The more everyone tries to out-guess each other the more things are going to change and flow over time. Rather than every character being identical it fosters an ever-growing array of diverse options for players to explore and try. Which, of course, is more fun for everyone involved because when there’s only one strategy it’s a matter of who runs that strategy best more than anything else. With more strategies introduced, the game becomes dynamic and unpredictable. That, in theory, means that there will never be one dominant strategy, one perfect build, because other players, the meta-game, can always adjust and adapt. A particular way of doing things might look good, might become dominant, over a short period of time, but as long as the game is flexible, it’s possible to come up with a solution.
One of the main ways for a meta-game to uncover the solution to an apparently dominant strategy is through the use of counters. Counters are strategies set up specifically to nullify other strategies. If a strategy is a problem, then a counter is the solution. An example of this from Guild Wars would be something like Healing Hands. It’s a skill probably not many new players to the game have seen but those who’ve followed it for a while remember. Healing Hands is a Monk enchantment that heals the enchanted character every time they take damage. They’re healed for a set amount so Healing Hands offsets any damage they take, generally by a good amount. It came into vogue – probably because it was a starting Monk skill – around the time of the WPE as a way of combating a dominant strategy at the time. Back then Warriors were a force to be reckoned with especially because people had learned to group several Warriors and set them after a single target. Those Warriors wouldn’t deal much damage individually – the damaging adding techniques discussed last week weren’t as common - but they’d combine to do a large amount of damage. No one dealt blows work a hundred points of damage but when you have five people doing hits worth twenty it’s the same net effect. Large groups of Warriors would swarm a single target and chip them to death and teams were set up around the idea of letting the Warriors do so. Focused Warrior builds became a problem because they’d steamroll over the unwary. However, when an opposing team had Healing Hands they weren’t a problem whatsoever. Healing Hands generally healed for more than the damage those Warriors were dealing, effectively, when someone got targeted by a bunch of Warriors and buffed up with Healing Hands they weren’t just reducing the damage taken, they were getting healed. If Warrior’s were a threat Healing Hands was the response.
Of course, Healing Hands only covered a character if they were dealing with Warriors or other physical damage. It would only activate when the damage a character took was from a weapon. A group of Elementalists had nothing to fear from Healing Hands. But nuker-heavy groups weren’t the order of the day. Warrior-centered team builds were. Healing Hands was such an effective counter to what had be a dominant strategy that Hands itself became a dominant strategy. One, of course, not without its own flaws as since it was an enchantment it could have been easily removed, but the tale of Healing Hands and just why it’s no longer worth playing is a long and sad one and I’ll leave it for some other time. Suffice to say it’s elite now and pales in comparison to the other elites available to a Monk. But the important lesson here is that counters, by their very nature, are extremely powerful and extremely narrow.
Because they work only against a specific strategy they’re narrow. They only work in very specific conditions. Without those conditions – when a group of Air Elementalists targeted someone using Healing hands, say – the counter’s all but useless. They’re also extremely powerful. They don’t just match the strategy they counter, they overwhelm it. If they weren’t the clear and obvious solution to their opposed strategy they wouldn’t be worth playing. This is why healing is much more efficient than damage. The amount of healing that a dedicated healer can pump out per second per cost is a lot higher than the amount of damage a dedicated damage dealer can dish out over that same time frame and for that same cost. Hands down, healing will outrace damage. If healing were less powerful and efficient than damage then healing would only serve to delay a damage dealer. If I deal 20 damage a hit and you heal 10 damage a heal and you’ve got 200 hit points then all you’ve done by healing is to make me take 15 seconds rather than 20 seconds to drop you. Similarly, when healing and damage are equal matches healing only works to stymie damage. If I do 20 damage and you heal 20 health then I’ll be wailing away at you a long time. Then, it’s just a matter of whose connection drops or who’ll make a mistake. In either case, instead of healing the best thing to do is to figure out how to better my damage. If you can deal just 21 damage to my 20 you haven’t just checked me or slowed me down, you’ve won. No, because healing is a counter to damage it needs to be stronger and it needs to be a lot stronger just to be on the safe side. By being stronger than healing a team doesn’t need to bring a number of Monks equal to the number of damage dealers on the other side, if not more, in order to survive, they can bring far fewer and have more character slots with which to do something else. That’s the core of threat/answer game theory. All other things being equal, the counter to a strategy has to have a larger payoff – Healing has to be capable of outracing damage and keeping someone alive indefinitely so that while healing is vital it’s not so vital that everyone on your team needs to have it – in order for that counter strategy to be viable.
Now what does all that have to do with the meta-game and with cce’s build? What cce is doing by concentrating on signets is an attempt to make a jump ahead in the meta-game – everyone’s wearing heavy armor, he’s switching to light armor – by coming up with a counter to a popular, if not dominant strategy. If he’s successful his build will become the new standard, an advantage too good for anyone who’s looking to do something similar to pass up, and someone else is going to have to head to the drawing board in order to come up with a counter to that.
In this case, the strategy cce is attempting to outguess is a profoundly simple one : Monks are important, get the Monks anyway you can. As I said earlier, Monks are the most valuable character on any field of battle. Because they outweigh damage a lone Monk can keep their team alive in the face of an onslaught of the opposition’s damage. It’s certainly not easy – and believe me, I’ve tried – but it can be done even though most teams have one or two more Monks just to be on the safe side. Because Monks are so good at defending the rest of their team, they’re of critical importance. Remove a team’s Monks from the equation and that team is incredibly vulnerable to damage and should be quickly defeated. So, a priority is placed by most teams on eliminating the healing base – the Monks and other characters that are keeping the other team alive and in good healing – as quickly as possible. And one way they do so is to concentrate on disruption rather than damage. Killing a target with Monk back up, as most teams with more than one Monk will have, is no easy task because Monks are so good at getting rid of damage. However, Monks aren’t very good at dealing with disruption. Interrupting, blocking, and otherwise harassing a Monk prevents them from using their abilities and that’s effectively the same as killing them off. And generally a good deal easier.
Disruption happens a number of ways, of course, but the most common are techniques that any Mesmer will be familiar with. Deny a character their energy, prevent them from casting, and interrupt their spells. Most of a Monk’s heavy lifting is done through spells, spells which require energy to cast and which are specifically countered by a number of skills such as Power Spike. Spells have casting times, too, which can be increased by things like Migraine or Dazed. There are a lot of spells in the game so a lot of skills were developed specifically to neutralize them. Many techniques and tactics have energy to counter spells because they’re abundant and it’s a necessity. Much of that effort focuses on preventing Monks from delivering their healing.
So, cce’s plan – by my recognizing, anyway - is to sidestep all of this by avoiding those easily countered spells in the first place. Instead, he’ll use signets. Signets cost no energy to cast, so anyone trying to drain his energy off is wasting their efforts. And because they’re not classified as spells they aren’t stopped by many of the techniques that will counter spell casting. Elegant in its simplicity, cce plan recognizes that the meta-game focuses on stopping Monks largely by concentrating on preventing their spell casting. Then, it’s found the things that those out to counter spells will have a hard time countering.
There are a few problems with all that, of course. I wouldn’t be reviewing a build if I thought it was perfect nor could any build really be “perfect”. The goal is laudable but let’s try and see if in fashioning something to leapfrog in the meta-game cce’s actually created anything worth playing. But, first, let’s have a look at the build :
Vital Signet Blesser
As I said, six signets, one stance, and one maintained enchantment. That makes for a character very resilient to many common sources of disrupting a spell caster. Signets require no energy so energy denial isn’t going to be much of a factor here. It’s going to hurt, sure, as cce’s going to be wanting to run Mantra of Inscriptions – which will lower the recharge time of all his signets dramatically – constantly and that alone requires some energy. Because cce’s planning on putting Vital Blessing on a lot of targets he’s going to be running on little to no regeneration, perhaps he’ll even head into negative regeneration, so his only source of energy is going to be that Blessed Signet.
A word here about how maintain enchantments work. Basically, when you cast one it takes an amount of energy but these enchantments have no duration. Instead, for as long as your character maintains that enchantment, as long as they keep it up and running, they’ll lose one pip of energy regeneration. Or, in other words, one energy every three seconds. Since Monks start off with four pips that’s not a big problem, they’ll lose a big of regeneration and have an enchantment last infinitely long, when they’ve got regeneration to spare. The more maintained enchantments they add, however, the worse things get. For an average Monk once they cast that forth maintained enchantment they’ll have no pips of regeneration left. They’ll gain no more energy at all, meaning unless they have a skill or a teammate to give them energy they’re not going to be able to do much. Casting more maintained enchantments past then is indeed possible. When they cast that fifth maintained enchantment they’ll gain another pip of negative regeneration and will go into degeneration. Instead of gaining energy they’ll slowly be losing it. Again, it’s only one energy every three seconds per pip so with a skill to manage energy it’s certainly possible to keep more than five enchantments up. The problem here is what happens to maintained enchantments when the energy bar reaches zero. When the maintainer runs out of energy all maintained enchantments over and above their regeneration are canceled. If they have four pips and they have six maintained enchantments up, they’ll lose the two enchantments they cast most recently and have four maintained enchantments running and no pips. Since they’ll be stuck then at zero energy and zero regeneration until they self-cancel one or more of their enchantments that can be a very dangerous state to be in.
By casting that Blessed Signet, cce will gain energy for each and every enchantment he’s maintaining up to a maximum determined by his Divine Favor attribute. At the moment that’s three energy and at Divine Favor 10 cce will be able to reap about fourteen energy from it. Since Blessed Signet takes twenty seconds to recharge cce will need to spend less than fourteen energy in those twenty seconds (Actually a bit more because of casting time and aftercast and all.) in order to maintain more than four enchantments. And, at the same time, in order to get that fourteen energy cce will need to maintain about five enchantments. So, since Mantra of Inscriptions will be sucking up ten energy every time it’s recast itself that’s probably going to be a good number to shoot for. No more than five maintained enchantments should be easily maintained when Mantra of Inscriptions means that Blessed Signet will recharge every twelve or so seconds instead of every twenty. Using Blessed Signet that way, cce will have about three pips worth of regeneration with only the long recycle time of Mantra of Inscriptions to spend it on.
A character out to deny energy will still be able to take away that last maintained enchantment, then, but after casting Blessed Signet, cce will be able to get it right back up. The bigger danger, of course, is enchantment removal. A character out to strip enchantments away is going to be able to remove those maintained enchantments as well as cce’s critical Mantra of Inscriptions.
The energy picture is looking solid, then, but also remember that signets are not spells. That interrupt Mesmer looking to tag cce with Power Leak is out of luck. Not because cce doesn’t care about energy but because Power Leak won’t interrupt a signet – only spells will. Dazed, Arcane Conundrum, and other skills and conditions that increase the casting time of spells similarly don’t matter to a signet.
That’s a good thing because signets typically have considerable casting times and there’s not much you can do to increase them. Signet of Devotion is going to recharge faster with Mantra of Inscriptions but it still has a nearly two second casting time. There’s also the aftercast time to consider as well, which is a part of casting a signet as it is of casting nearly any skill. So, that’s eight odd points of healing for no energy and that’s very hard to interrupt but with a recycle time of around five seconds (better than the normal seven or eight without Mantra of Inscriptions, granted.) it’s still only about 17HPS. As a signet and not a spell you also won’t get the Divine Favor bonus applied to that healing, either. It’s hard to counter but it’s not that effective. And the same holds true for most signets, they make up for their ease of use by being extremely slow to use. Mantra of Inscriptions helps by nearly halving the recharge times but those signets will still take time to cast and that can be problematic when you want a heal or a knockdown now rather than in a few seconds.
So, oddly, some of cce’s protective power is going to come from his Vital Blessing. Since he’ll have a lot of extra energy – as long as no one’s sapping him - he can cast it and cancel it and cast it again to both increase a target’s maximum health and give them that slight Divine Favor boost alongside of his Signet of Devotion healing. In the meantime, he’ll use Signet of Humility to strip elite skills from a target and Bane Signet to cause a bit of damage and knock down an attacker in an effort to add a bit of active defense to his reactive healing. The elite skill here Signet of Midnight will blind, and therefore neuter, any Warrior that decides to attack cce and he can always blast them with Bane Signet and head for the hills, too. Not too far away, of course, because maintained enchantments have ranges, stray too far and cce will cancel his own enchantments. Purge Signet can be used to remove all hexes and conditions from a target. It’s problematic because it will drain energy when it does so and that might put this character at zero energy and cancel those extra maintained enchantments but the only real difficulty there is if cce will need to rebuff Mantra of Inscriptions soon. The purge happens regardless of the amount of energy a character has and it can’t drop you below zero energy so there’s no difference between using Purge Signet on a character with eight conditions when you have twenty energy and when you have eighty.
So, overall, while this character isn’t going to be able to perform the heavy lifting of healing its party – healing is too slow here to effectively deal with heavily focused fire – this character can be a secondary or supporting healer. Because it doesn’t rely on energy it doesn’t require the attention of its team’s BiPer – if its team has one – and they can focus on the energy guzzling Monk who’ll be doing the main healing. It’s a character that will serve to defend and protect its party and, therefore, buy the real healers a bit of time.
I’m not entirely sure it’s going to be the best at that job, of course, because in order to free this character from the bonds of energy what’s happened is that the vital roles of healing and defense have become weak, inefficient, and slow. That’s not a recipe for a good healer, even a secondary one, in my estimation. And while this character will avoid those measures designed to counter spellcasters, for the most part, there are, however, methods of countering signet use. Just as there are skills to trip up spells there are skills to trip up signets. The Ranger ritual Primal Echoes gives all signets a healthy energy cost, much more than this build could bear for long, for example. The Elementalist skill Rust increases signets’ already long casting times. And the Mesmer skill Ignorance simply stops a character from using signet skills at all, just to name a few. And while they’re not used now if, say, some clever build using signets became the standard for healing, then you can rest assured that the metagame would catch up and those skills would become much more popular and well-used. And this build becomes as vulnerable as a spell-centered build against a character with Power Leak, Power Block, and Arcane Conundrum. Also, while those Mesmer interrupts aren’t going to work on signets other interrupts will. Disrupting Chop and Distracting Shot don’ care what it is that you’re doing, they just interrupt you. With signets' appreciable casting times they’re vulnerable to such indiscriminant interruption and that’s something a lot of disruptive characters are already packing.
There are weaknesses to any plan, though, and that doesn’t necessarily make cce’s a poor plan just one that can be countered. No, what I really question is not the overall concept – which is intriguing and certainly has some merit – but the execution of it. For one, I wonder why since cce is dabbling in Mesmer and in Inspiration he selects Midnight Signet as his elite over the Keystone Signet. Yes, he’s got Mantra of Inscriptions to drop his recycle times but that just means he could use Keystone Signet to instantly recharge his signet skills more quickly. And since there are so few non-signet skills with the right timing locking them for a few seconds isn’t going to matter. Midnight Signet is nice if, of course, you’re being beat on by one and only one Warrior. Since that Blindness is only going to disrupt the one it’s not a skill you’ll want if you’re being attacked by groups of Warriors. Considering the power that Keystone Signet holds in a plan built around signets, Midnight Signet is a distant second as far as elite Mesmer signet skills go.
For that matter, I find the idea of having lots of maintained enchantments to be a valid one the enchantments cce settled on is Vital Blessings. That skill increases the maximum health of its target. And, yes, it does work to also increase their current health by the same amount when cast and will deliver that Divine Favor bonus. But it takes a few seconds to cast so it can’t be used as a really effective heal especially in a build that’s not going to have the energy to really support casting and canceling it extremely quickly, it’s going to be cast and left up. To be frank, a few hundred extra hit points on your teammates doesn’t mean a whole lot. A character that’s being focused is going to have a lot of damage and a lot of healing heading their way. So much so, in fact, that the amount of health they’ll cycle through as they’re damaged then healed damaged then healed is going to reach the thousands quickly (If, say, the gold standard for a damage dealing character is to reach at least 40DPS, then just three of those character will deal 120DPS and dish 1200 hit points worth of damage in ten seconds. The average healer or group of healers should be capable of defending against such an attack and heal at least that many hit points or otherwise reduce that damage over those seconds.). What they really need then are skills that will deal out more healing per second than those trying to attack can deal out damage in those seconds. Increasing their maximum hit points by a fraction of the total isn’t going to cut it. And when a character isn’t coming under focused fire that extra health is irrelevant. Health only keeps a character from dying, it doesn’t matter when they’re not taking damage – or using those skills that require health, like Necromancer sacrificial skills, in order to work – and adding to the health of someone not taking more damage than they can handle themselves is a waste. Vital Blessings makes a lot more sense at lower levels when that health gain is a much larger percentage of overall health. At level 10 or so - when you’ll finally have the AP to get to an attribute rank of 12 – when everyone has about 300 hit points then adding 100 hit points is a fine idea. Raw healing power is better, of course, but you’re giving a character a lot more protection then. As character levels advance the skill becomes more and more marginal as the percentage of gained health scales down.
There are much better maintained enchantments floating around there. Holy Veil will make the job of people trying to hex or debuff your teammate much more difficult. And hexes are extremely common and devastating when used correctly. It can always be taken off when that teammate needs to be buffed up with enchantments. If cce wants to make his tanks happy he can look in Smiting and pick up Balthazar's Spirit which will give them adrenaline and energy. And, probably the best of the bunch for someone acting as a support healer is in the same line as Vital Blessings. Life Bond not only reduces the amount of damage that a focused target will take but it reduces the overall damage that everyone involved will take. It splits the damage received by the target, directs half of it at the caster, then reduces that damage by a set amount and that can be extremely useful.
In addition, some of those signets cce’s selected seemed to be used only for the fact that they’re signets. Signet of Humility, for example, disables a target’s elite skill. That can be annoying, sure, but for the most part isn’t going to be all that damaging. And Bane Signet is a slow, low-damage skill. It ignores armor and can cause knockdown but it’s forgettable because it means cce’s spending time away from enchanting or Signet of Devotioning. They fit the concept but they’re not adding much to what this character can do.
Therefore, if I was going to alter cce’s build this is what I’d do. First, Keystone Signet is in, Midnight Signet is out. Second, some of those marginally useful signets are out as well. Third, I’m getting a better maintained enchantment. Then, since this build is actually going to be very well off as far as energy goes, I’m going to sprinkle in a spell or two to aid that core function of helping my team stay alive.
There are a few ways to go from there, so let’s take a look at them. First, we’ll try and make the best use of Life Bond with a Protection Prayers build.
Blessed Protector
The idea here, then, is to be support the other healers on your team by casting Life Bond on as many targets as possible. You really want it on the teammate being focused but you can spread it around a bit, too, so that the enchantment removers on the other team have one more enchantment to worry about and you don’t have to count on your reaction time. Reversal of Fortune gets used to further decrease the damage taken by whomever’s being focused. Along with the Divine Favor bonus it makes for a pretty decent healing spell with a great recycle time when a target’s taking damage. And Blessed Signet can be used for healing purposes, too. Purge Signet can further help to save that focused target, if need be. And should it require use, Leech Signet can help to recover the energy it drains. Keystone Signet and Mantra of Inscriptions along with Blessed Signet and Leech Signet ensure that this character can steal or gain a lot of energy in a hurry.
This sort of character won’t be able to take up the whole task of defending a target but working in concert with other healers it should be very effective while remaining a bit more immune to the efforts of a Monk-hunter than another Monk would.
But, let’s see if we can’t create a signet user that just might be able to heal a target by itself.
Blessed Healer
Here, we’ll trade Life Bond for Essence Bond. Casting it on the focused target will let this character reap considerable energy and allow them to keep healing. We’ll also drop Leech Signet in favor of another spell and double up our healing with Orison of Healing and Dwayna’s Kiss. Dwayna’s Kiss heals more the more enchantments are on a target so along with Divine Favor and the enchantments that should be on a target it can make for some nice healing. That and Orison along with Signet of Devotion make for a healer with pretty decent power. Infuse Health is the “panic button” that can be used to temporarily save a teammate when damage starts to outrace healing temporarily.
That, of course, is taking us a bit far away from the idea of a signet using build but it’s a necessity of being able to heal efficiently and effectively. I’d even suggest dropping Signet of Devotion in favor of Healing Breeze, which would only make Dwayna’s Kiss better and relying on Mantra of Inscriptions, Keystone Signet, and Blessed Signet only for energy management purposes. But, Purge Signet could also replace Dwayna’s or Infuse Health when this character’s team has more than one healer around to make this build a bit more spell-less.
Finally, let’s go whole-hog with the maintained enchantments and look at a build that concentrates on spreading around enchantments to help the rest of the party.
Holy Ghost
Here we’ll trade this character’s regeneration to increase the energy gain of our party members. Our Warriors will love the extra adrenaline and energy from Balthazar’s Spirit and anyone can benefit from the extra regeneration from Succor. The Essence Bond and Leech Signet and Keystone Signet combination with our Blessed Signet and Mantra of Inscriptions combination will ensure we’ll still have some energy to keep a lot of those enchantments up or to keep recasting them. We can use all those enchantments for is to throw up a lot of chaff for the enchantment removers to deal with. We’ll have the energy to keep recasting them and by focusing on two or three of our teammates we’ll also shield our enchantments from being easily removed. And, in the meantime, or if all our enchantments get stripped and we’ve run out of energy we can offer some weak healing with Signet of Devotion.
So, while these builds might not be the next step forward in the quest to build a better healer it certainly has some interesting lessons. Relying solely on signets makes a character too inefficient and too limited in their options. However, by adding signets in a build we can decrease our reliance on energy as well as our vulnerability to various spell based counter-measures.
Thanks for reading and be sure to comment on this essay as well as cce's build here in our forums.
Long realized as one of the most important and powerful characters on any battlefield, a properly made Monk is an asset to any team. However, the design for Monks has often been neglected and stagnant. Monk players are, of course, defensively minded and perhaps it’s their conservative tendencies that lead them to settle on what works and stick with it. Other professions tend to be much more flexible, much more innovative, in their stratagems. And I’ll be the first to admit that I, as a long standing user of Monks in all their various guises, was much more concerned with keeping my healer up-to-date - to incorporate the latest changes into my build rather than to step back and see if the larger picture changing hadn’t opened up some new opportunities – but, then, I’ve never been much of an innovator. My builds are boring, proven, tested, and honed to a knife’s edge, never flashy. Because boring’s what wins games. Still, someone has to be pushing the boundaries of what a strategy and a profession can do. It’s risky because you’ll often fall on your face but it’s also rewarding because sometimes you’ll manage to get well out ahead of the pack and reap a substantial advantage before everyone else catches up.
So, today we’ll be looking at a Monk/Mesmer build by cce that’s really on the cutting edge. Or at least trying to be. It’s an all signet build and a fascinating one. But hold onto your seats because we’re going meta before things are through.
We’ll get to the build a bit later but first let’s talk about the idea behind it. Every build, after all, starts from somewhere and that somewhere is the idea or concept behind the build. In this case when I say an “all signet” build I mean just that. There’s six signet, one enchantment, and one stance on cce’s planned skill bar. The concept is to use signets and to make the most of them. That sort of build leaves me with two impressions.
First, it’s a role-playing build. A build that’s made not necessarily to be effective or viable but to fulfill some sort of need or desire on the part of the maker. There’s nothing necessarily wrong with such a build. I’ll make no secret of the fact that I’ve been known to play a role or two in my time and I can certainly understand the urges behind such a scheme. It is, however, very difficult to criticize. The normal rules for what works and what doesn’t go out of the window because it’s an intensely personal build. Skills and equipment aren’t chosen for whether or not they’re good at what they do but for what they mean to the builder. And that’s tricky ground to walk on because you can never be just quite sure what’s in someone else’s head. RP builds start off with a strong central concept; they’re fitted to a scheme rather than to a specific need. They’re the builds people make when they start thinking things like “Pets are cool. I want my character to use a pet.” Or “You know, I really enjoy helping people, I’m going to make a healing Monk.” Note that there’s nothing saying that such builds can’t be extremely effective in what they set out to do. Just that what they set out to do is a little bit off the beaten path. But, if you’re someone who’ll play a Warrior and never ever consider giving up your axe no matter what because you like it when your character smacks people around with it, then you’re walking down the same path. Guild Wars is a game of fantasy and in some way or another we’re all playing our roles and suspending our disbelief to become attached to our characters. What separates those who chose their plan based on what they want rather than what they need is that they’re much more interested in the play part rather than the game part. This usually means that an RP build can be atrocious when considered in a competitive light.
However, since an RP build is a bit hard to review, we’ll not consider cce’s build as such and instead consider the other option: he’s trying to get clever on us. What he’s doing, then, is to take a look at the landscape of the game, seeing how things stand, and then trying to figure out the best way to take advantage of it all. That, in essence, is where a meta-game starts. The meta-game’s the game outside of the game. The place where not just cce but dozen, hundreds, thousands of players are all trying to see the whole of the game and then make their plans based on what’s going to give them an advantage. Because Guild Wars is a game where our options are limited that means, at any given time, we’re only exploiting some of our advantages and at the same time we’ve left some weaknesses. It’s all part of having a plan, of making a build, and it’s a question, really, of just how much and where rather than of if such strengths and disadvantages exist. What the meta-game entails, then, is not considering the individual players pluses and minuses but the pluses and minuses of everyone else in the game. It’s trying to turn everyone else’s minus into your plus, in so many words. The meta-game is watching for your opponent’s tell in poker. Or trying to see a pattern in what they throw in Rock-Paper-Scissors.
Consider, if you will, the case where every single character in the game is limited to a choice between two sets of armor. The first armor, heavy armor, we’ll say is 80AL. The next, light armor, 60AL. It’s no contest there, everyone’s going to pick the heavy armor and take less damage. However, if we were to introduce some other type of benefit to the lesser armor. What if, instead we made light armor 60AL+30AL vs. Elemental damage? Now, that armor’s weaker overall but in a specific circumstance, when there’s elemental damage, it’s going to be a solid 10AL stronger. And to further that difference, let’s say our heavy armor has a penalty and make it 80AL-20AL vs. Elemental damage. Now, our heavy armor is going to be actually weaker than light armor in that situation where elemental damage is occurring. Now, players have an actual choice.
And that’s where the meta-game comes into things. Let’s say that, for whatever reason, everyone in the game starts off with heavy armor. They have to hunt out of their way to get that light armor. So everyone starts off with a big disadvantage to anyone using elemental damage. That being the case, the sensible play for everyone in the game to make is to start relying on elemental damage. Everyone’s going to be flinging around the weapons and spells that deal more damage based on what everyone else is wearing. Until, that is, someone manages to get their hands on a set of light armor. They’ll be extra protected against all those elemental damage slingers and will have a marked advantage in protection. At least until all the players worried about protecting themselves get their light armor, too, and some bright player realizes that, “Hey, everyone’s wearing armor protected against elemental damage, I think it might be a good idea to…not do elemental damage!”. They switch to another damage type and suddenly instead of light armor being the answer, others follow, and it’s back to everyone wanting their heavy armor.
At this point the game’s going to ping pong between which set of armor is the best. Not everyone’s going to realize that things have shifted right away, some are going to lag behind, some are going to be making the wrong play because they don’t know any better only to find they’ve made the right play when the pendulum swings back, and players are going to try and outguess things by running contrary to “popular wisdom”. The result is a sort of equilibrium where no one strategy for armor is better because not everyone will agree on it. Against an opponent, every character has about a 50% chance of guessing right and wearing the right set of armor, all other things being equal. What the metagame is, then, is that attempt to guess better. A player who listens to chats and watches message boards and talks to other players can get a feel for which way things have swung. If more players are wearing heavy armor, it’s time to use elemental damage. If more players are wearing light armor, it’s time to use something else. Or, since other who play the meta-game are going to follow that same line of reasoning it’s time to start wearing the opposite of what others are wearing so that a player’s less vulnerable than others to the dominant source of damage.
In a game as complex and detailed as Guild Wars there are all sorts of these sorts of momentary advantages to be gained or exploited. There are hundreds of skills, weapons, armor, and more that can be used in combination by players alone or in groups. That makes it incredibly hard for a player to tell exactly what someone else is going to do. By design, of course. The more everyone tries to out-guess each other the more things are going to change and flow over time. Rather than every character being identical it fosters an ever-growing array of diverse options for players to explore and try. Which, of course, is more fun for everyone involved because when there’s only one strategy it’s a matter of who runs that strategy best more than anything else. With more strategies introduced, the game becomes dynamic and unpredictable. That, in theory, means that there will never be one dominant strategy, one perfect build, because other players, the meta-game, can always adjust and adapt. A particular way of doing things might look good, might become dominant, over a short period of time, but as long as the game is flexible, it’s possible to come up with a solution.
One of the main ways for a meta-game to uncover the solution to an apparently dominant strategy is through the use of counters. Counters are strategies set up specifically to nullify other strategies. If a strategy is a problem, then a counter is the solution. An example of this from Guild Wars would be something like Healing Hands. It’s a skill probably not many new players to the game have seen but those who’ve followed it for a while remember. Healing Hands is a Monk enchantment that heals the enchanted character every time they take damage. They’re healed for a set amount so Healing Hands offsets any damage they take, generally by a good amount. It came into vogue – probably because it was a starting Monk skill – around the time of the WPE as a way of combating a dominant strategy at the time. Back then Warriors were a force to be reckoned with especially because people had learned to group several Warriors and set them after a single target. Those Warriors wouldn’t deal much damage individually – the damaging adding techniques discussed last week weren’t as common - but they’d combine to do a large amount of damage. No one dealt blows work a hundred points of damage but when you have five people doing hits worth twenty it’s the same net effect. Large groups of Warriors would swarm a single target and chip them to death and teams were set up around the idea of letting the Warriors do so. Focused Warrior builds became a problem because they’d steamroll over the unwary. However, when an opposing team had Healing Hands they weren’t a problem whatsoever. Healing Hands generally healed for more than the damage those Warriors were dealing, effectively, when someone got targeted by a bunch of Warriors and buffed up with Healing Hands they weren’t just reducing the damage taken, they were getting healed. If Warrior’s were a threat Healing Hands was the response.
Of course, Healing Hands only covered a character if they were dealing with Warriors or other physical damage. It would only activate when the damage a character took was from a weapon. A group of Elementalists had nothing to fear from Healing Hands. But nuker-heavy groups weren’t the order of the day. Warrior-centered team builds were. Healing Hands was such an effective counter to what had be a dominant strategy that Hands itself became a dominant strategy. One, of course, not without its own flaws as since it was an enchantment it could have been easily removed, but the tale of Healing Hands and just why it’s no longer worth playing is a long and sad one and I’ll leave it for some other time. Suffice to say it’s elite now and pales in comparison to the other elites available to a Monk. But the important lesson here is that counters, by their very nature, are extremely powerful and extremely narrow.
Because they work only against a specific strategy they’re narrow. They only work in very specific conditions. Without those conditions – when a group of Air Elementalists targeted someone using Healing hands, say – the counter’s all but useless. They’re also extremely powerful. They don’t just match the strategy they counter, they overwhelm it. If they weren’t the clear and obvious solution to their opposed strategy they wouldn’t be worth playing. This is why healing is much more efficient than damage. The amount of healing that a dedicated healer can pump out per second per cost is a lot higher than the amount of damage a dedicated damage dealer can dish out over that same time frame and for that same cost. Hands down, healing will outrace damage. If healing were less powerful and efficient than damage then healing would only serve to delay a damage dealer. If I deal 20 damage a hit and you heal 10 damage a heal and you’ve got 200 hit points then all you’ve done by healing is to make me take 15 seconds rather than 20 seconds to drop you. Similarly, when healing and damage are equal matches healing only works to stymie damage. If I do 20 damage and you heal 20 health then I’ll be wailing away at you a long time. Then, it’s just a matter of whose connection drops or who’ll make a mistake. In either case, instead of healing the best thing to do is to figure out how to better my damage. If you can deal just 21 damage to my 20 you haven’t just checked me or slowed me down, you’ve won. No, because healing is a counter to damage it needs to be stronger and it needs to be a lot stronger just to be on the safe side. By being stronger than healing a team doesn’t need to bring a number of Monks equal to the number of damage dealers on the other side, if not more, in order to survive, they can bring far fewer and have more character slots with which to do something else. That’s the core of threat/answer game theory. All other things being equal, the counter to a strategy has to have a larger payoff – Healing has to be capable of outracing damage and keeping someone alive indefinitely so that while healing is vital it’s not so vital that everyone on your team needs to have it – in order for that counter strategy to be viable.
Now what does all that have to do with the meta-game and with cce’s build? What cce is doing by concentrating on signets is an attempt to make a jump ahead in the meta-game – everyone’s wearing heavy armor, he’s switching to light armor – by coming up with a counter to a popular, if not dominant strategy. If he’s successful his build will become the new standard, an advantage too good for anyone who’s looking to do something similar to pass up, and someone else is going to have to head to the drawing board in order to come up with a counter to that.
In this case, the strategy cce is attempting to outguess is a profoundly simple one : Monks are important, get the Monks anyway you can. As I said earlier, Monks are the most valuable character on any field of battle. Because they outweigh damage a lone Monk can keep their team alive in the face of an onslaught of the opposition’s damage. It’s certainly not easy – and believe me, I’ve tried – but it can be done even though most teams have one or two more Monks just to be on the safe side. Because Monks are so good at defending the rest of their team, they’re of critical importance. Remove a team’s Monks from the equation and that team is incredibly vulnerable to damage and should be quickly defeated. So, a priority is placed by most teams on eliminating the healing base – the Monks and other characters that are keeping the other team alive and in good healing – as quickly as possible. And one way they do so is to concentrate on disruption rather than damage. Killing a target with Monk back up, as most teams with more than one Monk will have, is no easy task because Monks are so good at getting rid of damage. However, Monks aren’t very good at dealing with disruption. Interrupting, blocking, and otherwise harassing a Monk prevents them from using their abilities and that’s effectively the same as killing them off. And generally a good deal easier.
Disruption happens a number of ways, of course, but the most common are techniques that any Mesmer will be familiar with. Deny a character their energy, prevent them from casting, and interrupt their spells. Most of a Monk’s heavy lifting is done through spells, spells which require energy to cast and which are specifically countered by a number of skills such as Power Spike. Spells have casting times, too, which can be increased by things like Migraine or Dazed. There are a lot of spells in the game so a lot of skills were developed specifically to neutralize them. Many techniques and tactics have energy to counter spells because they’re abundant and it’s a necessity. Much of that effort focuses on preventing Monks from delivering their healing.
So, cce’s plan – by my recognizing, anyway - is to sidestep all of this by avoiding those easily countered spells in the first place. Instead, he’ll use signets. Signets cost no energy to cast, so anyone trying to drain his energy off is wasting their efforts. And because they’re not classified as spells they aren’t stopped by many of the techniques that will counter spell casting. Elegant in its simplicity, cce plan recognizes that the meta-game focuses on stopping Monks largely by concentrating on preventing their spell casting. Then, it’s found the things that those out to counter spells will have a hard time countering.
There are a few problems with all that, of course. I wouldn’t be reviewing a build if I thought it was perfect nor could any build really be “perfect”. The goal is laudable but let’s try and see if in fashioning something to leapfrog in the meta-game cce’s actually created anything worth playing. But, first, let’s have a look at the build :
Vital Signet Blesser
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As I said, six signets, one stance, and one maintained enchantment. That makes for a character very resilient to many common sources of disrupting a spell caster. Signets require no energy so energy denial isn’t going to be much of a factor here. It’s going to hurt, sure, as cce’s going to be wanting to run Mantra of Inscriptions – which will lower the recharge time of all his signets dramatically – constantly and that alone requires some energy. Because cce’s planning on putting Vital Blessing on a lot of targets he’s going to be running on little to no regeneration, perhaps he’ll even head into negative regeneration, so his only source of energy is going to be that Blessed Signet.
A word here about how maintain enchantments work. Basically, when you cast one it takes an amount of energy but these enchantments have no duration. Instead, for as long as your character maintains that enchantment, as long as they keep it up and running, they’ll lose one pip of energy regeneration. Or, in other words, one energy every three seconds. Since Monks start off with four pips that’s not a big problem, they’ll lose a big of regeneration and have an enchantment last infinitely long, when they’ve got regeneration to spare. The more maintained enchantments they add, however, the worse things get. For an average Monk once they cast that forth maintained enchantment they’ll have no pips of regeneration left. They’ll gain no more energy at all, meaning unless they have a skill or a teammate to give them energy they’re not going to be able to do much. Casting more maintained enchantments past then is indeed possible. When they cast that fifth maintained enchantment they’ll gain another pip of negative regeneration and will go into degeneration. Instead of gaining energy they’ll slowly be losing it. Again, it’s only one energy every three seconds per pip so with a skill to manage energy it’s certainly possible to keep more than five enchantments up. The problem here is what happens to maintained enchantments when the energy bar reaches zero. When the maintainer runs out of energy all maintained enchantments over and above their regeneration are canceled. If they have four pips and they have six maintained enchantments up, they’ll lose the two enchantments they cast most recently and have four maintained enchantments running and no pips. Since they’ll be stuck then at zero energy and zero regeneration until they self-cancel one or more of their enchantments that can be a very dangerous state to be in.
By casting that Blessed Signet, cce will gain energy for each and every enchantment he’s maintaining up to a maximum determined by his Divine Favor attribute. At the moment that’s three energy and at Divine Favor 10 cce will be able to reap about fourteen energy from it. Since Blessed Signet takes twenty seconds to recharge cce will need to spend less than fourteen energy in those twenty seconds (Actually a bit more because of casting time and aftercast and all.) in order to maintain more than four enchantments. And, at the same time, in order to get that fourteen energy cce will need to maintain about five enchantments. So, since Mantra of Inscriptions will be sucking up ten energy every time it’s recast itself that’s probably going to be a good number to shoot for. No more than five maintained enchantments should be easily maintained when Mantra of Inscriptions means that Blessed Signet will recharge every twelve or so seconds instead of every twenty. Using Blessed Signet that way, cce will have about three pips worth of regeneration with only the long recycle time of Mantra of Inscriptions to spend it on.
A character out to deny energy will still be able to take away that last maintained enchantment, then, but after casting Blessed Signet, cce will be able to get it right back up. The bigger danger, of course, is enchantment removal. A character out to strip enchantments away is going to be able to remove those maintained enchantments as well as cce’s critical Mantra of Inscriptions.
The energy picture is looking solid, then, but also remember that signets are not spells. That interrupt Mesmer looking to tag cce with Power Leak is out of luck. Not because cce doesn’t care about energy but because Power Leak won’t interrupt a signet – only spells will. Dazed, Arcane Conundrum, and other skills and conditions that increase the casting time of spells similarly don’t matter to a signet.
That’s a good thing because signets typically have considerable casting times and there’s not much you can do to increase them. Signet of Devotion is going to recharge faster with Mantra of Inscriptions but it still has a nearly two second casting time. There’s also the aftercast time to consider as well, which is a part of casting a signet as it is of casting nearly any skill. So, that’s eight odd points of healing for no energy and that’s very hard to interrupt but with a recycle time of around five seconds (better than the normal seven or eight without Mantra of Inscriptions, granted.) it’s still only about 17HPS. As a signet and not a spell you also won’t get the Divine Favor bonus applied to that healing, either. It’s hard to counter but it’s not that effective. And the same holds true for most signets, they make up for their ease of use by being extremely slow to use. Mantra of Inscriptions helps by nearly halving the recharge times but those signets will still take time to cast and that can be problematic when you want a heal or a knockdown now rather than in a few seconds.
So, oddly, some of cce’s protective power is going to come from his Vital Blessing. Since he’ll have a lot of extra energy – as long as no one’s sapping him - he can cast it and cancel it and cast it again to both increase a target’s maximum health and give them that slight Divine Favor boost alongside of his Signet of Devotion healing. In the meantime, he’ll use Signet of Humility to strip elite skills from a target and Bane Signet to cause a bit of damage and knock down an attacker in an effort to add a bit of active defense to his reactive healing. The elite skill here Signet of Midnight will blind, and therefore neuter, any Warrior that decides to attack cce and he can always blast them with Bane Signet and head for the hills, too. Not too far away, of course, because maintained enchantments have ranges, stray too far and cce will cancel his own enchantments. Purge Signet can be used to remove all hexes and conditions from a target. It’s problematic because it will drain energy when it does so and that might put this character at zero energy and cancel those extra maintained enchantments but the only real difficulty there is if cce will need to rebuff Mantra of Inscriptions soon. The purge happens regardless of the amount of energy a character has and it can’t drop you below zero energy so there’s no difference between using Purge Signet on a character with eight conditions when you have twenty energy and when you have eighty.
So, overall, while this character isn’t going to be able to perform the heavy lifting of healing its party – healing is too slow here to effectively deal with heavily focused fire – this character can be a secondary or supporting healer. Because it doesn’t rely on energy it doesn’t require the attention of its team’s BiPer – if its team has one – and they can focus on the energy guzzling Monk who’ll be doing the main healing. It’s a character that will serve to defend and protect its party and, therefore, buy the real healers a bit of time.
I’m not entirely sure it’s going to be the best at that job, of course, because in order to free this character from the bonds of energy what’s happened is that the vital roles of healing and defense have become weak, inefficient, and slow. That’s not a recipe for a good healer, even a secondary one, in my estimation. And while this character will avoid those measures designed to counter spellcasters, for the most part, there are, however, methods of countering signet use. Just as there are skills to trip up spells there are skills to trip up signets. The Ranger ritual Primal Echoes gives all signets a healthy energy cost, much more than this build could bear for long, for example. The Elementalist skill Rust increases signets’ already long casting times. And the Mesmer skill Ignorance simply stops a character from using signet skills at all, just to name a few. And while they’re not used now if, say, some clever build using signets became the standard for healing, then you can rest assured that the metagame would catch up and those skills would become much more popular and well-used. And this build becomes as vulnerable as a spell-centered build against a character with Power Leak, Power Block, and Arcane Conundrum. Also, while those Mesmer interrupts aren’t going to work on signets other interrupts will. Disrupting Chop and Distracting Shot don’ care what it is that you’re doing, they just interrupt you. With signets' appreciable casting times they’re vulnerable to such indiscriminant interruption and that’s something a lot of disruptive characters are already packing.
There are weaknesses to any plan, though, and that doesn’t necessarily make cce’s a poor plan just one that can be countered. No, what I really question is not the overall concept – which is intriguing and certainly has some merit – but the execution of it. For one, I wonder why since cce is dabbling in Mesmer and in Inspiration he selects Midnight Signet as his elite over the Keystone Signet. Yes, he’s got Mantra of Inscriptions to drop his recycle times but that just means he could use Keystone Signet to instantly recharge his signet skills more quickly. And since there are so few non-signet skills with the right timing locking them for a few seconds isn’t going to matter. Midnight Signet is nice if, of course, you’re being beat on by one and only one Warrior. Since that Blindness is only going to disrupt the one it’s not a skill you’ll want if you’re being attacked by groups of Warriors. Considering the power that Keystone Signet holds in a plan built around signets, Midnight Signet is a distant second as far as elite Mesmer signet skills go.
For that matter, I find the idea of having lots of maintained enchantments to be a valid one the enchantments cce settled on is Vital Blessings. That skill increases the maximum health of its target. And, yes, it does work to also increase their current health by the same amount when cast and will deliver that Divine Favor bonus. But it takes a few seconds to cast so it can’t be used as a really effective heal especially in a build that’s not going to have the energy to really support casting and canceling it extremely quickly, it’s going to be cast and left up. To be frank, a few hundred extra hit points on your teammates doesn’t mean a whole lot. A character that’s being focused is going to have a lot of damage and a lot of healing heading their way. So much so, in fact, that the amount of health they’ll cycle through as they’re damaged then healed damaged then healed is going to reach the thousands quickly (If, say, the gold standard for a damage dealing character is to reach at least 40DPS, then just three of those character will deal 120DPS and dish 1200 hit points worth of damage in ten seconds. The average healer or group of healers should be capable of defending against such an attack and heal at least that many hit points or otherwise reduce that damage over those seconds.). What they really need then are skills that will deal out more healing per second than those trying to attack can deal out damage in those seconds. Increasing their maximum hit points by a fraction of the total isn’t going to cut it. And when a character isn’t coming under focused fire that extra health is irrelevant. Health only keeps a character from dying, it doesn’t matter when they’re not taking damage – or using those skills that require health, like Necromancer sacrificial skills, in order to work – and adding to the health of someone not taking more damage than they can handle themselves is a waste. Vital Blessings makes a lot more sense at lower levels when that health gain is a much larger percentage of overall health. At level 10 or so - when you’ll finally have the AP to get to an attribute rank of 12 – when everyone has about 300 hit points then adding 100 hit points is a fine idea. Raw healing power is better, of course, but you’re giving a character a lot more protection then. As character levels advance the skill becomes more and more marginal as the percentage of gained health scales down.
There are much better maintained enchantments floating around there. Holy Veil will make the job of people trying to hex or debuff your teammate much more difficult. And hexes are extremely common and devastating when used correctly. It can always be taken off when that teammate needs to be buffed up with enchantments. If cce wants to make his tanks happy he can look in Smiting and pick up Balthazar's Spirit which will give them adrenaline and energy. And, probably the best of the bunch for someone acting as a support healer is in the same line as Vital Blessings. Life Bond not only reduces the amount of damage that a focused target will take but it reduces the overall damage that everyone involved will take. It splits the damage received by the target, directs half of it at the caster, then reduces that damage by a set amount and that can be extremely useful.
In addition, some of those signets cce’s selected seemed to be used only for the fact that they’re signets. Signet of Humility, for example, disables a target’s elite skill. That can be annoying, sure, but for the most part isn’t going to be all that damaging. And Bane Signet is a slow, low-damage skill. It ignores armor and can cause knockdown but it’s forgettable because it means cce’s spending time away from enchanting or Signet of Devotioning. They fit the concept but they’re not adding much to what this character can do.
Therefore, if I was going to alter cce’s build this is what I’d do. First, Keystone Signet is in, Midnight Signet is out. Second, some of those marginally useful signets are out as well. Third, I’m getting a better maintained enchantment. Then, since this build is actually going to be very well off as far as energy goes, I’m going to sprinkle in a spell or two to aid that core function of helping my team stay alive.
There are a few ways to go from there, so let’s take a look at them. First, we’ll try and make the best use of Life Bond with a Protection Prayers build.
Blessed Protector
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The idea here, then, is to be support the other healers on your team by casting Life Bond on as many targets as possible. You really want it on the teammate being focused but you can spread it around a bit, too, so that the enchantment removers on the other team have one more enchantment to worry about and you don’t have to count on your reaction time. Reversal of Fortune gets used to further decrease the damage taken by whomever’s being focused. Along with the Divine Favor bonus it makes for a pretty decent healing spell with a great recycle time when a target’s taking damage. And Blessed Signet can be used for healing purposes, too. Purge Signet can further help to save that focused target, if need be. And should it require use, Leech Signet can help to recover the energy it drains. Keystone Signet and Mantra of Inscriptions along with Blessed Signet and Leech Signet ensure that this character can steal or gain a lot of energy in a hurry.
This sort of character won’t be able to take up the whole task of defending a target but working in concert with other healers it should be very effective while remaining a bit more immune to the efforts of a Monk-hunter than another Monk would.
But, let’s see if we can’t create a signet user that just might be able to heal a target by itself.
Blessed Healer
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That, of course, is taking us a bit far away from the idea of a signet using build but it’s a necessity of being able to heal efficiently and effectively. I’d even suggest dropping Signet of Devotion in favor of Healing Breeze, which would only make Dwayna’s Kiss better and relying on Mantra of Inscriptions, Keystone Signet, and Blessed Signet only for energy management purposes. But, Purge Signet could also replace Dwayna’s or Infuse Health when this character’s team has more than one healer around to make this build a bit more spell-less.
Finally, let’s go whole-hog with the maintained enchantments and look at a build that concentrates on spreading around enchantments to help the rest of the party.
Holy Ghost
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Here we’ll trade this character’s regeneration to increase the energy gain of our party members. Our Warriors will love the extra adrenaline and energy from Balthazar’s Spirit and anyone can benefit from the extra regeneration from Succor. The Essence Bond and Leech Signet and Keystone Signet combination with our Blessed Signet and Mantra of Inscriptions combination will ensure we’ll still have some energy to keep a lot of those enchantments up or to keep recasting them. We can use all those enchantments for is to throw up a lot of chaff for the enchantment removers to deal with. We’ll have the energy to keep recasting them and by focusing on two or three of our teammates we’ll also shield our enchantments from being easily removed. And, in the meantime, or if all our enchantments get stripped and we’ve run out of energy we can offer some weak healing with Signet of Devotion.
So, while these builds might not be the next step forward in the quest to build a better healer it certainly has some interesting lessons. Relying solely on signets makes a character too inefficient and too limited in their options. However, by adding signets in a build we can decrease our reliance on energy as well as our vulnerability to various spell based counter-measures.
Thanks for reading and be sure to comment on this essay as well as cce's build here in our forums.
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