Smiting Prayers

Smiting Prayers is a Monk secondary attribute, meaning that any character with Monk as their primary or secondary class can put points into this attribute.

Guild Wars Description
"No inherent effect. Many Monk skills, especially those related to dealing holy damage, become more effective with higher Smiting Prayers. Holy damage is especially powerful against the undead."

General Description
Smiting Prayers are useful for monks who want to deal damage. This is a very powerful attribute for many reasons. One is the fact that holy damage, while dealing double damage to the undead, is also unaffected by armour. This makes it one of the best types of damage in the game. Another is typecasting. Other players, spotting a Monk as their primary Profession, will assume they are a healer monk, and therefore helpless. These players will be in for a nasty surprise as their seemingly helpless target fights back.

Aside from the simple surprise factor, Smiting Prayers deal a good amount of direct damage. Banish, Bane Signet, Holy Strike, Signet of Judgement, and Smite all deal direct, holy damage. Meanwhile, the skills Balthazar's Aura and Symbol of Wrath deal holy damage per second. The skills Holy Wrath and Retribution both return a percentage of damage taken back to the attacker.

In addition to this large number of damaging skills, Smiting Prayers is linked to many more interesting skills. Many of these are geared towards making allies more effective in melee, like Balthazar's Spirit, Judge's Insight, and Strength of Honor. Scourge Healing helps take down healers, while Scourge Sacrifice will take down pesky Blood Magic users quickly.

Not entirely surprisingly, Smiting Prayers skills work quite well in combination with Healing Prayers and Protection Prayers skills. The favourite skill Zealot's Fire deals damage whenever you cast a spell on an ally, while the useful skill Smite Hex provides a nice way of ridding teammates of hexes. Perhaps the best usage of Smiting Prayers for a healer is to simply dissuade your foes from fighting you by showing them you have teeth after all. Taking a large amount of damage they cannot prevent, while Scourge Healing works its magic, is a great persuasion method for those annoying Warriors who harass any healer.

Unfortunately, while many Healing and Protection skills use only 5 energy and gain a benefit from Divine Favor, Smiting Prayers skills tend to be much more expensive overall, and while Divine Favor allows the savvy Monk to reduce the number of times he or she has to use a healing or protection skill every battle, Smiting Prayers usually affect enemies more than allies, thus reducing Divine Favor's effectiveness. As a result, because a Monk's energy supply comes primarily through conservation and amplified effectiveness rather than through reduced costs (as a Ranger), a larger pool (as an Elementalist), or energy recovery (as a Mesmer or Necromancer), the careless Monk who is used to only Healing and Protection will find himself or herself utterly without energy shortly into a barrage of Smiting. As a result, it is often a good idea to use Smiting Prayers more often on a caster with a Monk secondary than on a primary Monk. Of course, Primary monks certainly are able to be very effective indeed with Smiting Prayers, but they are at a disadvantage for energy management unless they make use of other energy management skills, such as a Mo/Me investing in Inspiration Magic.