Archive:Mo/E Divine Spirit Spammer

A build designed to allow spamming of cheap monk spells by combining the skill Divine Spirit with Glyph of Renewal.

Protection Spammer
This variation focuses on Protection Prayers.

Attributes and Skills
[build prof=monk/eleme protec=12+1 divine=12+3+1][glyph of renewal][divine spirit][guardian][reversal of fortune][mend condition][protective spirit][contemplation of purity][holy veil][/build]

Healing Spammer
This variation focuses on Healing Prayers.

Attributes and Skills
[build prof=monk/eleme healin=12+1 divine=12+3+1 earthm=3][glyph of renewal][divine spirit][vigorous spirit][healing touch][orison of healing][dwaynas kiss][kinetic armor][holy veil][/build]

General usage for both variations
This build is designed to spam the many 5-energy Monk spells as often as needed or desired, without running out of energy. Glyph of Renewal is what makes this build possible. Divine Spirit is extremely powerful, but its recharge time is 60 seconds. Glyph of Renewal can effectively cut that down to 15 seconds. With 16 points in Divine Favor and the Enchanting mod on your weapon, Divine Spirit will last for 18 seconds. This means that you can keep it up perpetually if you use it in conjunction with Glyph of Renewal. Your staff should have the Hale and Enchanting mods. Your armor can be whatever you prefer. For runes, you should at least have a Superior Rune of Divine Favor. Other runes are a bonus. This build is powerful in the random arenas and PvE.

Once the enemy is engaged, use Glyph of Renewal and then Divine Spirit. Now, for the next 18 seconds, all of your 5-energy spells will only cost you 1 energy. Since you gain about 1.33 energy every second (1 with Holy Veil up), you will practically gain energy regardless of how often you spam your spells. When Glyph of Renewal is recharged, use it and Divine Spirit again. If you recast Divine Spirit before it has run out, then it will only cost you 5 energy instead of 10, which can make a big difference.

If energy denial Mesmers drain your energy, switch your weapon to one that will give you a temporary bonus to energy, so you can keep Divine Spirit and Kinetic Armor up. Use Holy Veil to remove hexes from allies, or keep it up to hinder hex casters. Use Contemplation of Purity if you are hit with lots of damaging hexes and conditions.

Discussion

 * Many people like Divine Boon for Protection builds. However, it will effectively triple the cost of your spells, making you less able to spam them consistently.
 * Draw Conditions or Mend Ailment can be substituted in for Mend Condition, but the latter suffers from a longer recharge.
 * Heal Party might be nice for the Healing build in an emergency, but if you're not going to cast it that often, you might as well take Divine Healing instead.
 * Likewise, Divine Intervention might be a nice safety net for either build, and it's also really cheap.
 * Blessed Aura might be useful to keep Divine Spirit, and the other enchantments, up and running longer. With 16 Divine Favor and the Enchanting weapon mod, Monk enchantments will last 57% longer, meaning Divine Spirit will last 23 seconds. It's unclear whether the skill-slot required is worth it, however.
 * Some people prefer Armor of Earth to Kinetic Armor because you don't have to worry about keeping it refreshed, but since this build is specifically designed to spam spells, you should never run into a situation where Kinetic Armor is about to run out.
 * Since this is a spamming build, Zealot's Fire could potentially be quite powerful if you also include a Superior Smiting Rune
 * If you're going to put points into Smiting Prayers, then you might as well take Smite Hex instead of Holy Veil for that bit of extra damage.
 * Kinetic Armor can be substituted in for Contemplation of Purity to allow you tank damage to some extent.
 * A problem with this build is that if you use Contemplation of Purity when Divine Spirit is up, you will remove Divine Spirit which can be harmful.

Strengths

 * Energy denial will have a hard time dealing with you, as it's quite hard to shut someone down if they only need 1 energy.
 * Although it doesn't seem like it, this build provides you with massive healing. Because you can chain-cast almost indefinitely, you heal for the Divine Favor bonus about once every 1.5 seconds, i.e. 51hp every 1.5 seconds, not counting the added healing or misc. effects of your spells.

Counters
Some obvious counters include:
 * Enchantment removal. Having Divine Spirit removed from you before it's refreshed can put a serious hamper on your healing abilities.
 * Desecrate Enchantments will spike you for an extremely large amount of damage since, if you're being focus-fired, you'll probably have between 4 and 8 enchantments on you at any time, depending on whether you use Zealot's Fire, Holy Veil, etc. Three or four Necro's who use this attack on you, well-timed, will instantly kill you if you don't have Protective Spirit.
 * Signet of Humility. This build has the same weakness as any build that relies heavily on an elite skill: if timed right, Mesmers can disable your elite, thus disabling your energy management.
 * Spikes. If you can catch a spike early enough, you can counter with spamming your spells and throwing on Protective Spirit.  However, you don't have the anti-spike abilities that a Monk with Infuse Health has.  This level of coordination is very rare in RA and TA, though.

Energy Efficiency: Blessed Aura
Assuming you have 16 Divine Favor and +20% Enchantment Duration mod on your weapon, we will discuss energy efficiency of Blessed Aura. We will also be assuming that the initial energy cost of Blessed Aura has been regenerated before the battle begins. Further, we'll assume that you recast the Glyph of Renewal + Divine Spirit combination 2 seconds before Divine Spirit runs out, to be sure you get the energy bonus.

With Blessed Aura, Divine Spirit will last 23 seconds (rounding down), i.e. 10/(23-2) = .476 energy spent per second (energy cost divided by how often we recast it). With only 3 energy regeneration pips, i.e. 1 energy per second gained, we have an actual net energy regeneration of .524 energy per second.

Without Blessed Aura, we get 18 seconds (rounding down), or 10/(18-2) = 0.625 energy spent per second. With 4 energy regen pips (i.e. 4/3, or 1.33, energy per second), we have an actual energy regeneration of 0.7083 energy per second.

Clearly, Blessed Aura isn't worth it in terms of energy. However, using Blessed Aura has other advantages: It increases the length of your Guardian by a small amount (which isn't too important, seeing as you spam it all the time anyway), it gives you some leeway with Divine Spirit since you have an extra 7 seconds for spamming spells before having to take 2 seconds out of your healing to reapply, and all in all is a great spell for any enchantment heavy build. If you favor using Protective Spirit (a very high cost spell for this build, since it costs 5 times as much energy as your main spells) then this could be very helpful, making it so you need to cast Protective Spirit far less often. Protective Spirit normally lasts 24 seconds, 28 (rounding down) with an Enchantment mod, 32 (rounding down) with both an Enchantment mod and Blessed Aura. This is .178 and .156 energy spent per second. Thus, you are still more energy efficient without Blessed Aura than with, though the convenience factor alone may make it worthwhile. This is entirely dependent upon your playing style.

Note that Blessed Aura will not increase the duration of Kinetic Armor, since that is not a monk enchantment.

Also note that using this in combination with healing breeze will make it last 15.7 seconds. If you sacrifice 35 health and take a major healing rune as well, you'll be able to get 9 health regeneration from breeze. Rounding down, this heals for an insane amount of 270 over time for only 5 energy. Perhaps Blessed Aura isn't so bad after all.