Spectral Agony

Analysis
Spectral Agony can very quickly kill an unprotected character. To make things worse, Mursaat and Jade enemies will use this skill frequently. The only way to protect against it is infusion. Infusing your armor will reduce all of the effects of Spectral Agony to very manageable levels.

Spectral Agony was changed in a previous patch, but the in-game description does not reflect this. Our own analysis on damage follows:

1 The total damage done is the total health lost due to direct damage and health degeneration over Spectral Agony's 5 second span. 2 Health degeneration is subtracted from regeneration to find the actual health "balance." A character cannot actually suffer from more than 10 net health degeneration (or benefit from more than 10 net health regeneration). 3 Assumes an effective net penalty of 10 health degeneration.

The exact slowing effect of Spectral Agony is unknown. When wearing a fully infused set, little or no slowing is experienced. With each piece less, a character suffers from progressively worse slowing. Spectral Agony's direct damage ignores armor like Obsidian Flame and Crystal Wave. This means infusion is the only protection and any infused piece of armor is effective as another.

Shields which feature damage reduction cannot reduce the damage done by Spectral Agony, as shields and armors featuring such damage reduction affect only physical damage as of the 7/13/06 update.

Spells that reduce damage taken like Healing Hands and Life Sheath are triggered by the direct damage of Spectral Agony and therefore can counter that damage, but not the health degeneration.

It's quite difficult to prevent Spectral Agony through most of the usual skill prevention methods. It's not a spell, so most interrupts would not work against it, and it's cast very fast (about 1/2 a second activation) which means even skill interrupts have a high chance of failure.

The final word on Spectral Agony is that when fighting Mursaat or Jade, make sure you're wearing a fully infused set of armor.