User:Quizzical/Build Adjustments

Let's start with a simple question: is Protective Spirit a useful skill?

The correct answer to that is, it depends. If you're facing an elementalist boss that can dish out 400 HP damage per hit, reducing that to 53 or so is incredibly useful. Taking only two hits to die is not good for your survival chances, and dying in one hit is even worse. Protective spirit nearly always ensures that you'll take at least ten hits to die, and this usually allows a good bit of time for healing.

That is, of course, an extreme case. But reducing 200 HP damage to 55 is useful, too. Reducing 100 HP damage to 50 is also helpful. Doing so only once may not be that vital, but several such reductions over the course of the duration of the enchantment can make a huge difference.

But what if mobs only deal 40 HP damage per hit? Then protective spirit "reduces" each hit from 40 HP damage to 40, unless you have a lot of death penalty or are using a gimmick build. The only benefit of the enchantment in this case is the divine favor bonus--and 10 energy for only 42 HP or so is awfully inefficient.

So should you bring protective spirit when doing some particular mission or vanquish or whatever? The correct answer to that is, once again, it depends. If you're going to fight mobs that do tremendous amounts of damage in a single packet and don't remove enchantments, and you can largely get them to attack the character you want, then the answer is an unequivocal yes. And if instead, mobs try to kill you with a heavy barrage of 40 HP hits that won't trigger protective spirit at all, then the skill is at best a waste of a slot on your skill bar.

So the answer is, sometimes you should bring it and sometimes not. In other words, change your build (or a hero's build, or a choice of henchmen, or whatever) depending on whether the skill will be useful or not.

This is by no means unique to protective spirit. Relying on enchantments to keep you alive may work quite well in places that mobs don't remove them. It doesn't work so well in places where many mobs have Gaze of Contempt or Well of the Profane. Heavy duty hex removal such as expel hexes can be immensely useful against mobs that use certain nasty hexes, but is a waste of an elite against mobs that use no hexes whatsoever. Blindness and weakness can work great to hamper martial weapon classes, but don't do much to elementalists.

The solution, then, is to bring skills that will be useful in whatever content you're doing, and not skills that won't help. It is well-known which mobs are in which explorable areas and missions, and what builds the various mobs have. If you're reading this, you've found the (unofficial) wiki, and can readily look up such information. Bring the skills that counter whatever it is that mobs will try to do.

So why is it that so many people insist on picking out one build that they like, and using that one build everywhere? People want to be a fire nuker in Hell's Precipice, a minion master where mobs leave no exploitable corpses, or whatever. Or worse, people want to bring such a hero for those missions, rather than changing their hero to a build that might actually be helpful or pulling out a different hero--or another henchman, for that matter.

Similarly, people often ask whether some particular build is "good", without giving any context. A build that is incredibly useful in one area may be worthless in another. Just because someone put a build on some wiki as being great for whatever the poster uses it for doesn't mean it will help in the mission you're about to do. Indeed, if the build were good under all possible circumstances, that would be quite strong evidence that something in it needs a nerf.

Thus, if people ask if a build is "good" in general, the correct answer is no. Besides, you forgot to do the attribute quests, or else are leaving a lot of attribute points unallocated.