User talk:Gelbrekt/Useless Skill

Mostly agree, but...

• Smiting Prayers are still very interesting. Balthazar's Spirit, Holy Wrath and Retribution are keystone of 600+smite farming. Reversal of Damage, Smite Condition, Smite Hex, Judge's Intervention are still good ally protection. Ray of Judgement is still a lot of damage in PvE/JQ. Not talking about Strength of Honor in PvE... Castigation Signet is also one of the rare usable non-elite energy managemenet skill in the whole monk's skills panel.
• Deadly Arts has Dancing Daggers, Assassin's Promise !!! Dark Prison, Entangling Asp, Iron Palm, Impale, Signet of Toxic Shock, Signet of Shadows, Signet of Deadly Corruption and Mark of Insecurity which are good, if not very good skills. In that regard I suggest you my monk build :

	Elite

• Cautery Signet is a great cure. It has seen use in MTSC to clean cripple, bleeding, blind from frontlines regularly and with no energy cost (unlike Martyr).

The following skills are bad, but they have some use :

• Swap, Conflagration, Shadow of Haste, Spell Breaker, Vocal was Sogolon, Strike as One, Primal Echoes and Roaring Winds are niche skills. Try to do Duncan without swap... Conflagration allows increased damage against ice or plant foes (best example is UW farming with ranger). Shadow Haste is great for chest farming. Spell Breaker and Vocal was Sogolon are still used in farming builds especially on support hero. Strike as One is a keystone of SaO chains. Primal Echoes, Roaring Winds are situational skills which can destroy a build.
• Needling Shot is funny to use to finish foes, especially with damage-boosting preparations/enchantments. I like to use it in JQ to kill turtles/juggernauts
• Disrupting Accuracy is a neat skill for Assassin/Rangers.
• Remedy Signet can be used when you can't afford Antidote Signet as a cure (for example, W/P spear build)
• Enfeebling Touch isn't so bad. Health loss can't be prevented and weakness is great. The real bad point is the touch range. Touch ranger anyone ?
• Barbed Arrows is one of the few reason why Poison Arrow may still be used.
• Signet of Infection isn't so bad, although I can't remember why. Something to do with Fragility+Fevered Dreams I think.
• I sometimes see Mantra of Concentration on RoJ monks in JQ. Not that it is a good skill though.
• Same with necromancers running Vile Miasma.

Some of my JQ bars, if this can give you ideas :

• Lacerate (JQ disease -> bleeding in spirit range) :

	Elite

• Draw Spirit (JQ bomber) :

	Elite

--Ruine Eternelle 14:20, 7 March 2016 (UTC)

Thank you for your imput. I obviously do not mean in this page that all skills listed gives absolutley zero benefit to the user. What I really mean by "useless" in this page is that each skill listed on the page meet either or both of these 2 statements:

• 1: I, personally after my 6000 hours or so in this game, have never seen this skill being used by a serious player in a serious situation.
• 2: Another skill can, usually almost flawlessly, benefit the user more than this skill in more or less all scenarios.

If you have read my build pages you can see that i usually list the strenghts and weaknesses of each build, in order to highlight what the build actually does. This is because it is in my belief completely irrelevant how GOOD a skill or build is; the only thing that truly matters if it is BEST for the current situation you are in. So sure, your smiting build is pretty good; it can do alot of damage in addition to stuns. However it is vulnerable to interruptions and you lack self heal and self defense (60 armor), so I'd say you would be more probable to win a match/mission if you used another build. About your JQ build: I see that the build is good, but i also think that there are better ways to win a JQ match. If I had made that build, or any other for that matter, I would ask the 3 questions:

• What does the build do? Imagine the best possible scenario where this build shrines the brightest. What would the build accomplish then? How likely is it that this scenario will occur?
• What are the weaknesses of the build? Imagine the worst possible scenario where everything goes to hell. What would the build accomplish then? How likely is it that this scenario will occur?
• Now that the questions above are answered, could I make a different build that is more powerful in the ideal scenarios and simultaniously less hardcountered in the worst imaginable scenarios?

Usually, the answer to the last question is yes. In your case, the strength of the build is that it potentially does good damage over time and can potentially cause damage everywhere in spirit range. However, this relies on the spirit being alive (which is easy to kill), it relies on having the conditions active on your targets (which can be removed, and healed before they become fatal), it relies on your skills with long activation times are not interrupted, and you have very little self-defense. I could go on longer on this, but in short you could say that there are better ways to deal damage by using builds that both deal more damage and are harder to counter. The only reason why i made this page, really, was to highlight the skills that I have never used, in order to see if I can make some decent builds using some of them. It is entierly possible that some of them might actually be ideal in many situations. I don´t have time to write more at the moment, I might come back to this later though. Have fun until then! :) --Gelbrekt (talk) 13:15, 8 March 2016 (UTC)

Churnning earth ? Healing seed ? Rebirth ? Recall ? Sorry, I really don't follow you here. Churnning earth can be used on a ward hero in HM to benefit from the increased movement speeed of foes to knock them down. Healing seed is great on hero too if you plan to go tanking. Recall is a keystone of SaO chains, among other things, because it is the only shadow step that has compass range that doesn't teleport you back to a previous position! And rebirth is great to res outside of aggro range --Ruine Eternelle 17:51, 15 March 2016 (UTC)

Just curious about "Recall is a keystone of SaO chains". I have never heard of a build like that before and it sounds incredibly silly (sorry). Could you link a build to it and/or tell me what it is used for? Also, as I said, the main purpose of this page is to highlight the skills that you (in other wordds I) see very infrequently - it is entierly possible that many skills on this page can be viable depending on the situation. --Gelbrekt (talk) 07:48, 8 July 2016 (UTC)

The selling point of Recall is the fact that you don't need to be in spell range to reach the target. This can help you get a few seconds when doing a SC (for speed records), and in the case of Portal jumps such as SaO chains, to reach an ally that is beyond the aggro bubble. For most purposes however, it has too many drawbacks to be a good skill.

Churnning earth can be of use on earth ele in PvE HM : the increased speed of foes and the fact that it is AoE (and foes moves in AoE) makes it a guaranteed AoE KD (in addition to damage). You don't see it frequently because earth ele isn't meta for PvE HM. Similarly "Fear Me !" could be a thing to consider in Famine/Mind Wrack/energy denial teams (I can see one, two or three assassins using this to get more crits), but energy denial teams are not meta too (and will probably never be). If we consider that a skill's uselfulness is based of its meta status, then I fully agree with you.--Ruine Eternelle 11:27, 4 November 2016 (UTC)

Edit : also I made this builds based on one of your own :

	Elite

--Ruine Eternelle 11:57, 4 November 2016 (UTC)

I'd agree with Ruine on the idea that the whole picture is not made of just black and white, there are certain skills which don't belong to the category of brought in for daily play, and yet, can't be reckoned as entirely-useless. That's true for "Watch Yourself!" (PvP), Enervating Charge, Fertile Season, Glyph of Concentration, Healing Seed, Healing Touch, Lacerate, Magnetic Surge, Mantra of Concentration, Predatory Season, Shatter Storm, Strike as One, Succor and Watchful Spirit. In spite of being rarely-utilized, they're better to be attributed to the list of situationally-applicable skills, where in conjunction with the other skillbars of the entire team build, their utilization renders into quite useful. Here are a few out of many possible examples:

• Build:Team - HA R-Spike in which we can see Shatter Storm on the Paragon.
• A few of HA builds on one of my guild's associated pages, where we can spot "Watch Yourself!" (PvP) usage on one of the Paragons or Glyph of Concentration appearing on the skillbar of R-spike Orders Necro.
• And in this one we're able to see Fertile Season, Healing Seed, Lacerate, Mantra of Concentration and Predatory Season all at the same time.
• Strike as One can be observed on a serious PvP setup here. :)
• Apart from that, a few of the other skillbars can be drawn to confirm the application of Enervating Charge and Healing Touch, not mentioning I've included another couple of "useless skills", which in reality can't be treated just so (Distortion, Ether Signet):
  

Try the last one in RA to see if it's worthless or not, its template is OwUUEsh1YoSNg5VWaTf2ExNLA3EA. Without a shadow of doubt it can be done in a more traditional way with OwET0YIXHqBMvySb6zmQlhv4mAA, but I wanted to demonstrate that things which sometimes seem to be out of meta can still represent a strong, reliable choice. :) As for the rest of mentioned skills, these can also be found under certain unique conditions in various 8 vs 8 builds, where to advocate the use of Succor, we can take Build:Team - HA Contagion Spike as an example.

There are many others, at the same time, I don't think it's necessary to list them all here so that you could see my point regarding the usage of these skills: of being applicable, but to a much lesser extent. :) Dmitri Fatkin (talk) 15:41, 29 April 2017 (UTC)

Great list!

User:Armond/Guide to optimization may be of interest to you. ^_^ --Falconeye (talk) 22:59, 16 May 2016 (UTC)

Thank you! That's a nice list too! ;)--Gelbrekt (talk) 07:50, 8 July 2016 (UTC)