Or - ask not what your monk can do for you, but what you can do for your monk! ![[Image: hammer.gif]](http://realmsbeyond.net/forums/images/smilies/hammer.gif)
Of late we've fallen into the typical and boring "careful aggro - one tank - nuke" methodology given the insane amounts of damage non-tanks are taking, plus having only one monk for a while. This slows progress down because you need to give time for the careful pulls, as well as recovering from the inevitable mistakes when aggro breaks. But now we have much more power at our fingertips with skills from every campaign, and our team should consider ways to break out of this mold so we can simply roll over our enemies with relative speed and safety.
Zero armor necessarily implies a lot of damage if unprotected, and while me and Zed are cooking up energy-efficient healers with elites like Healer's Covenant, Zealot's Defense, Offering of Spirit etc, we still need to somehow mitigate the huge incoming damage to make keeping people alive more reasonable. This job needs to be distributed throughout the entire team, so this thread is meant to brainstorm ways that can be done, which can then be incoporated into our own builds as the situation demands.
One simple thing we should consider is everyone just bringing at least one good self-defense skill, especially if you're a frontliner but even midliners as well. I don't mean a slow heal like Troll Unguent, the backline should have that part taken care of with energy-efficient builds. I'm talking mitigation such as block stances like natural stride, lightning reflexes, disciplined stance, soldiers defense, critical defenses, and so on. There are assassin "escape" tools like return, death's retreat, and feigned neutrality in this vein as well. Eles can get a decent armor boost (at a mobility cost) with a modest earth investment (or perhaps even water now). Modest armor boosts are also avaliable from rit pots like Mighty was Vorizon or Protective was Kaoli. There are also some protection enchantments like Shield of Absorption which are especially efficient on a dervish. Blocking or increasing armor are important since unprotected, one can take 100s of damage at this point; not something you want to rely on healing to clean up every time.
We can also consider team-wide protection roles. Stand Your Ground is probably the best bet for consistent team-wide armor, although two copies are required for constant uptime, and it's hard to keep up the energy without characters like paragons, necros, or eles. It also needs to be kept in mind that armor isn't going to stack anymore. They're On Fire is very effective if we have fire eles, but it requires a paragon primary. Shields Up! is extremely useful against archer hordes, but requires two or three people to keep it up in a chain. (Though even +60 armor half the time isn't bad!) Rits or Rangers can try defensive spirit spam, which gets somewhat trickier with the energy limitations. Aegis chain is another possibility, which is most manageable on eles with their large pools and glyph; the paragon sister skill Defensive Anthem is also avaliable. A traditional bonder may also work if we can push the energy pool up enough to make a large number of enchants more manageable. Eles also have the various ward spells to keep a midline and backline happy.
In PvE we also have the venerable "distractor" roles of ally creatures. A single pet isn't much protection, but it is a little. A team full of pets does the job better. With the increased kill speed nudists should now have at their fingertips, the venerable Minon Master becomes more viable. Efficient spells like bone minions can be paired with either of the corpse-less elite summons, Jagged Bones and Flesh Golem, for added resiliance. Bone Minions are actually an energy gain skill with reasonable soul reaping, so the MM can use that energy to fuel other roles like curse shutdown, or even spamming protective spirit. Or, you can get a ritualist on this job with consume essence for e-management, and they can put out even harder to kill minions than a (rune-less) necro could.
Finally there is the shutdown route. The latest necro changes have rendered weakness riduclously cheap to spam everywhere, and cuts the armor-respecting portion of damage down to a mere third. It's hard to imagine a time when we *shouldn't* be running this with a necro around. There's also AoE hexes such as meekness, shadow of fear, and reckless haste. Mass blind is also possible through either eruption, or various other skills combined with epidemic. Daze + epidemic is the potent counterpart for controlling spellcasters, as long as you have enough physical damagers to trigger the daze. Mesmers have some AoE tools now (clumsiness, arcane conundrum) for slowing down the incoming offense, and interrupts are versitle and good for nabbing those devestating earthquakes and the like. There are also other "fire and forget" interrupt styles like Maelstrom or choking gas spam. Frequent knockdowns are another potent way to protect ourselves, such as constantly chained earthshakers and counter blow.
Whatever route we take in defense and offense, energy is at an obvious premium with only two pips and 20 pool. Candy cane items are legit now, and that inclues the gingerbread focus and it's whopping +5 energy. Any caster can raise their pool by 30 with only 6 points in communing by taking Mighty was Vorizon; this is especially useful for healers who need more energy at the start of a fight and less as the enemies drop, as well as necros who benefit from a higher ceiling to store all that soul reaping energy. We may similarly have empowerment on us at times, which makes any rit item grant +10 energy and +50ish health. There are a number of good energy elites between mind blast, elemental attunement, offering of spirit/blood, defender's zeal etc. that are sometimes overlooked on normal characters, which are far more useful for us. Auspicious Incantation is a great skill for casting those longer-reacharge and expensive 25e spells like eruption or maelstrom. We can also employ not only Blood ritual but Blood is Power on the team for a constant energy supply.
If we can ever manage to get some physical attackers on the team![[Image: tongue.gif]](http://realmsbeyond.net/forums/images/smilies/tongue.gif)
they will probably need to spam attack skills to be effective, and look to tools such as Zealous Vow, Soldier's Endurance, energy-gain dagger attacks + critical strikes, or Expertise to keep themselves going.
So as we go forward from here, let us please take team survivability into consideration. Make life on your monks easier, and we can eliminate the need for a "pure tank", have all our characters contributing both to offense and defense, and hopefully find ourselves taking fewer dirt naps.![[Image: smoke.gif]](http://realmsbeyond.net/forums/images/smilies/smoke.gif)
And please append any more ideas you have for protecting our team!
Of late we've fallen into the typical and boring "careful aggro - one tank - nuke" methodology given the insane amounts of damage non-tanks are taking, plus having only one monk for a while. This slows progress down because you need to give time for the careful pulls, as well as recovering from the inevitable mistakes when aggro breaks. But now we have much more power at our fingertips with skills from every campaign, and our team should consider ways to break out of this mold so we can simply roll over our enemies with relative speed and safety.
Zero armor necessarily implies a lot of damage if unprotected, and while me and Zed are cooking up energy-efficient healers with elites like Healer's Covenant, Zealot's Defense, Offering of Spirit etc, we still need to somehow mitigate the huge incoming damage to make keeping people alive more reasonable. This job needs to be distributed throughout the entire team, so this thread is meant to brainstorm ways that can be done, which can then be incoporated into our own builds as the situation demands.
One simple thing we should consider is everyone just bringing at least one good self-defense skill, especially if you're a frontliner but even midliners as well. I don't mean a slow heal like Troll Unguent, the backline should have that part taken care of with energy-efficient builds. I'm talking mitigation such as block stances like natural stride, lightning reflexes, disciplined stance, soldiers defense, critical defenses, and so on. There are assassin "escape" tools like return, death's retreat, and feigned neutrality in this vein as well. Eles can get a decent armor boost (at a mobility cost) with a modest earth investment (or perhaps even water now). Modest armor boosts are also avaliable from rit pots like Mighty was Vorizon or Protective was Kaoli. There are also some protection enchantments like Shield of Absorption which are especially efficient on a dervish. Blocking or increasing armor are important since unprotected, one can take 100s of damage at this point; not something you want to rely on healing to clean up every time.
We can also consider team-wide protection roles. Stand Your Ground is probably the best bet for consistent team-wide armor, although two copies are required for constant uptime, and it's hard to keep up the energy without characters like paragons, necros, or eles. It also needs to be kept in mind that armor isn't going to stack anymore. They're On Fire is very effective if we have fire eles, but it requires a paragon primary. Shields Up! is extremely useful against archer hordes, but requires two or three people to keep it up in a chain. (Though even +60 armor half the time isn't bad!) Rits or Rangers can try defensive spirit spam, which gets somewhat trickier with the energy limitations. Aegis chain is another possibility, which is most manageable on eles with their large pools and glyph; the paragon sister skill Defensive Anthem is also avaliable. A traditional bonder may also work if we can push the energy pool up enough to make a large number of enchants more manageable. Eles also have the various ward spells to keep a midline and backline happy.
In PvE we also have the venerable "distractor" roles of ally creatures. A single pet isn't much protection, but it is a little. A team full of pets does the job better. With the increased kill speed nudists should now have at their fingertips, the venerable Minon Master becomes more viable. Efficient spells like bone minions can be paired with either of the corpse-less elite summons, Jagged Bones and Flesh Golem, for added resiliance. Bone Minions are actually an energy gain skill with reasonable soul reaping, so the MM can use that energy to fuel other roles like curse shutdown, or even spamming protective spirit. Or, you can get a ritualist on this job with consume essence for e-management, and they can put out even harder to kill minions than a (rune-less) necro could.
Finally there is the shutdown route. The latest necro changes have rendered weakness riduclously cheap to spam everywhere, and cuts the armor-respecting portion of damage down to a mere third. It's hard to imagine a time when we *shouldn't* be running this with a necro around. There's also AoE hexes such as meekness, shadow of fear, and reckless haste. Mass blind is also possible through either eruption, or various other skills combined with epidemic. Daze + epidemic is the potent counterpart for controlling spellcasters, as long as you have enough physical damagers to trigger the daze. Mesmers have some AoE tools now (clumsiness, arcane conundrum) for slowing down the incoming offense, and interrupts are versitle and good for nabbing those devestating earthquakes and the like. There are also other "fire and forget" interrupt styles like Maelstrom or choking gas spam. Frequent knockdowns are another potent way to protect ourselves, such as constantly chained earthshakers and counter blow.
Whatever route we take in defense and offense, energy is at an obvious premium with only two pips and 20 pool. Candy cane items are legit now, and that inclues the gingerbread focus and it's whopping +5 energy. Any caster can raise their pool by 30 with only 6 points in communing by taking Mighty was Vorizon; this is especially useful for healers who need more energy at the start of a fight and less as the enemies drop, as well as necros who benefit from a higher ceiling to store all that soul reaping energy. We may similarly have empowerment on us at times, which makes any rit item grant +10 energy and +50ish health. There are a number of good energy elites between mind blast, elemental attunement, offering of spirit/blood, defender's zeal etc. that are sometimes overlooked on normal characters, which are far more useful for us. Auspicious Incantation is a great skill for casting those longer-reacharge and expensive 25e spells like eruption or maelstrom. We can also employ not only Blood ritual but Blood is Power on the team for a constant energy supply.
If we can ever manage to get some physical attackers on the team
they will probably need to spam attack skills to be effective, and look to tools such as Zealous Vow, Soldier's Endurance, energy-gain dagger attacks + critical strikes, or Expertise to keep themselves going.So as we go forward from here, let us please take team survivability into consideration. Make life on your monks easier, and we can eliminate the need for a "pure tank", have all our characters contributing both to offense and defense, and hopefully find ourselves taking fewer dirt naps.
And please append any more ideas you have for protecting our team!
