Effective dervish guide

Effective dervish guide
''Note: this article is intended to provide guidance for experienced characters playing a new dervish or the experienced dervish looking for additional options. If this is your first time playing Guild Wars, please see Getting started (Nightfall).''

The Dervish profession is only available in the Guild Wars: Nightfall campaign. Users of other Guild Wars campaigns will not be able to use this profession unless they add a Nightfall key to their account.

What is a Dervish?
The Dervish is a hybrid melee/spell caster class. The dervish wields a scythe that can strike multiple foes at once, while relying heavily on Enchantments and other spells to deal damage and increase survivability.

A Dervish's Place
The dervish is a melee character that stands next to the tank. However, the dervish is not a tank and should let the warrior rush in and get the mobs' attention before going in to deal damage.

At the same time, there are many skills the Dervish has that can make it a tank, and so it may take the tank's place. It is not as extremely dangerous to tank with a dervish as it is with an assassin.


 * Some Dervish skills that aid in tanking: Avatar of Balthazar for the armor and speed bonus, Mystic Vigor for the extra health bonus, Faithful Intervention for extra protection in serious situations, and Conviction for the armor/regen bonus, just to name a few.

Being a Dervish
In PvE, the Dervish's job is to support the party by dealing damage by means of Scythe Attacks and Enchantments. The dervish also forms a secondary body-blocker between the mob, the tank, and the casters.

Attribute Distribution
Most Dervishes will split their attributes between Scythe Mastery, Mysticism and either Wind Prayers or Earth Prayers.


 * Earth Prayers: The Earth Prayers line includes skills that deal with earth damage and defense. Many skills in this line heal you, increase your maximum HP, give Health regeneration, or avoid attacks.


 * Scythe Mastery: This line increases your effectiveness with a scythe. Each rank in it will increase damage dealt by attack skills, increase your chance to make a critical hit, as well as increase damage done by the scythe's normal attack. Most scythe attacks will remove an Enchantment and the dervish will receive health benefits, extra damage, or the attack will become unblockable. Just to name a few side effects of the scythe attacks.


 * Mysticism: For every rank in Mysticism you gain 1 Health when an enchantment ends, for every 3 ranks you gain 1 energy when an enchantment ends. The skills in this line deal with holy damage, as well as energy and health gain. If you plan to use a lot of enchantments a good recommendation is to raise your Mysticism rank to at least 15, at that rank you will be able to cast most 5 energy enchantments and have no worries about energy loss.


 * Wind Prayers: This line deals with cold damage and also includes some movement related skills. Skills in this line will usually deal cold damage, increase your speed, or reduce the cost of other skills. Also in this attribute are skills such as Natural Healing which, with increasing points added into Wind Prayers can become your best healing skill.

Some Basic Skill Synergies
As with many professions, the dervish skill line has many skills that provide good synergy. For instance, a dervish using Avatar of Melandru might use Wearying Strike in order to take advantage of the attack bonus and deep wound, without suffering the drawback of Weakness. Another example would be Attacker's Insight and Lyssa's Assault in order to regain your energy by making the attack free, while still gaining the energy gain from it.

What is Enchantment Management?
As a dervish you will be dealing heavily with enchantments, and it would be in your best interest to manage your enchantments effectively. In this case, managing means knowing when to drop/recast maintained enchantments, what order normal enchantments will be stripped in, energy cost and effectiveness in any given situation. For example, if you use enchantments that cause earth damage, ensure that your opponents are not less vulnerable to that damage type.

What is an enchantment, and why should I use them?
Enchantments are long-lasting spells with varying effects, for instance Faithful Intervention heals you if your health falls below a certain amount. As a Dervish they are your life-blood, they keep you alive, increase your abilities or give other bonuses.

Releasing enchantments is fun too, because unlike other classes, most Dervish enchantments not only trigger while active, but have secondary triggers when the enchantment ends. With spells like Mystic Sandstorm, you can charge in loaded with enchantments, release loads of conditions and damage, and run out until you have all the skills recharged.

Enchantment Stack and When To Recast
If you have many enchantments active at one time, it is referred to as a stack. It is important to cover critical or desirable enchantments with ones that aren't so important and can be recast easily. Some notes about enchantment stacks:
 * The order in which you have cast them will be displayed from left to right in the Effects Monitor area.
 * Enchantment stripping happens from the rightmost enchantment (also referred to as 'outer'), and goes left - this does only apply if you have not moved your effects bar to another position on the screen, eg the bottom right, where enchantments will be stripped from top left to bottom right.
 * Cast the important enchantments first, then your covers. This way your less important ones will be stripped first.
 * When an enchantment icon in the Effects Monitor begins flashing, it has about 2 seconds of duration left. At this point consider recasting it, unless you want it to end for a bonus.
 * Due to the low maximum energy of the Dervish, energy can be tight when using expensive enchantment spells and/or scythe attacks. Because Dervish builds generally have a heavy investment in the Mysticism line, consider letting your enchantments actually end before recasting them. It will only leave you unprotected for about a second and will grant you bonus health and more importantly, energy.

Enchantment Juggling
As a dervish you can greatly increase your effectiveness by 'juggling' enchantments. For instance, you might have Pious Assault as your attack skill, as well as some enchantments with low recasts such as Vital Boon. It would be best to end Vital Boon with Pious Assault before it expires on its own so that Pious Assault will recharge instantly, you gain the health benefit, and can then recast Vital Boon. You could do this every 8 seconds in the case of Vital Boon.