Monk
Originally Published by Freyas
Overview
The Monk fulfills a different role in a party than the other professions, generally being based around healing and enhancing your party abilities in combat, as well as removing detrimental conditions and hexes. Monks have some direct-damage capabilities in the Smiting Prayers attribute, but the majority of monk skills are focused on keeping your team alive and healthy so that they can continue fighting. While other classes have some defensive capabilities, it usually falls to a Monk to keep everyone alive and well.
Playing a Monk can seem boring for people who would prefer to jump in the fray and start disemboweling or nuking their opponents, but often the gameplay is more complex and fast-paced for Monk players. Healing your party requires close attention to everybody's life in order to determine where your heals will be put to best effect, as well as attention to what's going on in the battle to keep yourself alive. Often, monks will be the first targets to be attacked, due to their low armor level and their ability to aid their teammates.
One thing that most Monk players have to deal with is conserving energy. While many of the Monk spells have great benefits, oftentimes, these spells come with a high energy cost. If you are trying to keep your team alive, you have to be able to continue casting, and cast more spells than most other caster professions. Thus, managing your energy wisely is a skill that is highly beneficial to monk players.
Monks are the only class that has the ability to repeatedly return dead party members to life, and they have many skills which they can use to do so. This makes at least one monk a great asset to any team, so that the party has a chance to recover from difficult situations where several characters may be killed.
Armor
Monks start with armor that provides 5 AL, and eventually can use armor sets that provide around 60 AL. Some armors can offer other bonuses such as higher defense or extra energy, but these are balanced out with drawbacks of weaknesses to certain types of damage. Like all casters, Monks cannot take hits nearly as well as Warriors or Rangers, so if possible, you should try to avoid getting hit.
In addition to armor level, the Monk scalp designs can add a bonus to one of your attributes. New armor can be acquired frequently throughout the game to provide extra defense. As your survivability as a Monk affects the survivability of the entire party, it is recommended to try to upgrade your armor as often as possible.
Attributes
Currently, Monks have 4 attributes: Divine Favor(primary attribute), Healing Prayers, Protection Prayers, and Smiting Prayers. Of these attributes, Divine Favor, Healing Prayers, and Protection Prayers are primarily defensive attributes based on increasing the survivability of yourself and party members, while Smiting Prayers can be used to deal damage yourself, or increase the damage dealt by teammates.
Divine Favor
Divine Favor is the primary attribute for Monks, meaning that only characters who have Monk as their primary class can place points into the attribute. Along with having many skills tied to this attribute, Divine Favor adds a passive healing bonus when you cast a Monk spell on an ally. Currently, each point in Divine Favor will heal your allies for 3.2 life. This amount is rounded to the nearest whole number, so with 1 point in the attribute, your spells will gain 3 healing from divine favor. With 12 points in Divine Favor, each Monk spell that you cast on an ally will heal them for 38 health. This can be greatly beneficial for any monk using spells to heal or buff an ally.
The skills that are linked to the Divine Favor attribute are generally passive skills that provide a bonus to your healing capabilities. They have myriad benefits, such as increasing your energy regeneration, increasing the amount that your healing spells do, and make your enchantments last longer. Other Divine Favor skills can be used to heal yourself or your teammates, or even bring someone back from the brink of death. Overall, Divine Favor provides a great bonus for any healing or protection monk, and is always worth investing points in if you want to use skills from either of those attributes.
Healing Prayers
A large number of Monk players focus on the Healing Prayers attribute, as healing can be one of the most important thing for keeping your party alive. While every class has a way of healing themselves, Monks can heal both themselves and their party members much more efficiently than any other class. The Healing Prayers attribute offers a large number of skills based around keeping your allies alive, both in just direct health gained, as well as some very useful enchantments to regenerate health over time or heal whenever that ally gets hit.
If you want to make a character to be the savior of your team, keeping them all alive during a particularly tough mission, Healing Prayers is the attribute to focus on. When somebody is near death, a large heal can be the best bet of saving them, and can be the only way to counter life degeneration from poison and disease, as well as many Mesmer and Necromancer hexes that will drain life.
Protection Prayers
Protection Prayers complements the Healing Prayers attribute quite nicely. Whereas Healing Prayers focuses on restoring health to you and your allies, skills in the Protection Prayers line focus on preventing the damage from being dealt in the first place. When your party is taking less damage, there is less that needs to be healed. In addition to preventing attacks from hitting your allies, Protection Prayers can help your allies recover from conditions and hexes, which can be very destructive to your team.
Protection Prayers has more skills in it than the other Monk attributes, as well as many elite skills. These skills help in different ways: increasing health, reducing the damage taken from attacks and spells, restoring conditions, preventing attacks from hitting, and preventing the enemy from even attacking. One of the best ways to keep your party alive is to prevent anybody from damaging them, and that is exactly what the Protection Prayers line of skills allows you to do.
Smiting Prayers
If you wish to deal damage as a monk, Smiting Prayers gives you just that opportunity. Smiting Prayers skills range from enchantments that help you or your enemies deal extra damage in combat to direct-damage skills that ignore your targets armor class altogether. Several skills in the Smiting Prayers attribute also can knock down your opponents, interrupting their current action, and taking them out of combat for a few seconds, which can be very helpful.
While the damage dealt by skills in the Smiting Prayers attribute is not as high as the skills of some of the other classes, these skills do have their advantages. Most Smiting skills deal holy damage, which is unaffected by armor class, and deals double damage to undead enemies. Even if your target is a warrior with an extremely high armor level, Smiting skills will still deal full damage to them. In PvP combat, a smiting monk can be a very useful addition to your team as well, as many opponents will assume that you are a healer, and will rush in unprepared for the damage output that you can deal, while putting less pressure on the real healers on your team.
Building a Monk
The first thing to do when building a monk is deciding which attributes that you want to specialize in. Spreading out your attribute points too far will mean that none of your skills will be very effective. With all the excellent skills available to you, you need to pick what role you wish to play in a party, and focus on certain areas.
A healing Monk can be a difficult role to fill, as you'll need to balance keeping yourself alive with keeping your teammates alive. As you'll often be targeted by enemy attacks, you'll need to bring some skills to help protect yourself. However, you'll still want to provide support for your team, and many of the powerful healing skills can only be cast on other allies, meaning you won't be able to use those skills on yourself. In general, it can be good to either take some protection spells as well, or choose a secondary profession that will give you some useful skills for self-defense, and try to maximize your healing output. Also, pay attention to the energy cost and recharge times of the skills you choose for a healer. If you choose expensive healing spells, you won't be able to cast many spells before you run out of energy, and your allies may be killed while you're waiting for your energy to regenerate enough to cast your next spell.
Playing a healer can take a while to get accustomed to as well. Choosing who to heal, and when to cast your spells is a very important part of becoming a skilled healer. Healing an ally for 100 health when they are only injured for 50 life can waste some of your energy, which you may need later. However, waiting too long to cast your heals can lead to the person getting hit by some high-damage attacks that kill them before you are able to heal. Also, if you bring along enchantments that trigger when someone takes damage, you'll want to wait until it's clear who the enemy team is targeting so as to get the most benefit from that enchantment.
Protection Monks generally have different problems to overcome than healing Monks do. As many of the useful protection spells either have high energy costs, recharge timers, or require energy to maintain, you generally won't be casting your spells nearly as often. However, a protection Monk needs to pay close attention to the battle to see where their spells will provide the greatest benefit. Pay close attention to both which allies are taking the most damage, as well as if they have debilitating conditions. If a spellcaster is dazed, preventing them from casting any spells, removing their condition is extremely beneficial. Likewise, your attackers will not deal much damage if they are blinded, and removing that condition will help the team immensely. It's also important for a protection Monk to pay attention to what types of damage their allies are taking before using their skills. An enchantment to make 75% of attacks miss your ally won't help them much if they're being hit by a firestorm or losing life to health degeneration. Likewise, if you bring spells that remove multiple conditions or hexes, it's much better to use them on allies that are affected by more than one condition or hex.
Smiting Monks tend to be more similar to other character classes in setup, as you'll be focusing on damaging your enemies. Many of the smiting skills combine well to provide extra damage given the right circumstances. For example, you can use Bane Signet to knock down a warrior attacking you, followed by Holy Strike to gain an additional 20 damage. As with the other monk spells, many of the smiting skills can be cast on allies, so often you may want to cast some of your spells on other allies in order to gain the most benefit. If one of the other characters on your team has several people attacking them, it can be very beneficial to use some of the smiting enchantments on them rather than yourself. If you decide to bring damage-dealing skills from your secondary class, you can use several of the smiting skills to help deal more damage with those skills as well.
Combinations
Monk/Elementalist
Oftentimes as a Monk, you'll have several enemies attacking you. The Elementalist class gives you several options to help you out. The Earth Magic attribute has many powerful defensive skills that can allow you to survive much longer, while the Fire Magic attribute has many strong close-range area of effect skills that you can use to punish them for getting so close to you. Likewise, you can use Water Magic skills to slow your enemies down or Air Magic skills to increase your speed in order to run away.
Monk/Mesmer
If you're having difficulties keeping enough energy around to continue healing in difficult battles, having Mesmer as your secondary class can be very helpful. The Inspiration Magic attribute has many skills that will aid you in keeping your energy from running out. You have the option of taking skills to steal energy from your opponents for your own use, or even interrupt their spells in order to refill your energy. Some of the other Mesmer skills can be quite useful for staying alive as well. You can use hexes to blind your enemies and deal damage, prevent them from gaining adrenaline so that warriors can't use their high-damage attacks on you, or even just use a hex to deal damage to them for every attack that they take.
Monk/Necromancer
The Necromancer class offers a variety of hexes that can help you survive much longer as a monk, as well as provide some damage or disruption to the enemy team. Some Necromancer skills can inflict weakness on your foes, causing them to deal far less damage to your team, while others will slow down their attacks. You can also use some necromancer skills to help heal yourself either by exploiting corpses or by stealing the life from your opponents with hexes.
Monk/Ranger
A Ranger secondary offers both defense and offense for a Monk. Many of the Wilderness Survival skills can be used to prevent attacks from hitting you, while traps offer a means of dealing damage to enemies who think you'll be an easy target. Another popular option is to bring along a pet to help deal and absorb damage while you heal the party from behind.
Monk/Warrior
The Warrior class can be used to complement a monk build in several ways. The Tactics attribute allows you to bring along stances to reduce the damage that you take, allowing you to ignore the enemies beating on you, at least for a while. Having a Warrior secondary can also help you gain offensive capabilities, working quite well with the Smiting Prayers attribute to boost your damage output. Using warrior adrenal skills can also allow you to deal damage with low energy, allowing you to use some of the otherwise prohibitive skills such as Holy Wrath.
Tips
General
- Define your role and create your build to fit that role
- Pick Complimentary skills and Secondary Professions
- Keep energy management in mind when selecting skills
- Know your enemies; learn their skills and which skills can counter them
- Conversely, know what your enemies can do to counter you and how to adjust
- Don’t overextend yourself during battle, remember to stay with your team and in healing range
- When in PvE missions, always bring a healing skill
- Try to avoid melee combat. Monk skills often work better when cast on others.
- Try to determine the best target when using enchantments. They are powerful, but generally can't be cast often.
- When focused by enemies, do not run away from the battle- running in circles works as well in most situations.
- Pay close attention to your energy total- once you run out of energy, you will be unable to do much.
- Know what skills you have with you, and use the one that works best in any given situation.
- Remember that there are times when you won't be able to keep everyone alive. Don't pay attention to people complaining about your job, so long as you're doing the best that you can.
MMO Guru Network
