Lv75 Merit Ability: Devotion

[Icemage]

Did a bit of meriting last night and bought level 1 Devotion.

Effects:

20 minute recast.

Transfers 1/4 of your current HP (rounded down) to a target party member other than yourself as MP. You cannot use it on yourself to recover MP (so it can't be used like the RDM ability Convert).

As WHM75/BLM37 with 970HP I transferred 242MP to my friend, losing 242HP in the process.

Seems very very powerful at 75. Not sure extra levels (-2.5 mins recast per extr level) are worth it, but it's very useful if you know how to protect yourself from further damage).


Icemage

[Omni]

Re: Lv75 Merit Ability: Devotion

This shows some love to the elvaan and galka whm out there. Having lots of hp might be a good thing now to macro out before you use Devotion.

[Balodoth]

Re: Lv75 Merit Ability: Devotion

Icemage said "current" HP. So I imagine raising the max won't do much for you.

I think this is a nice companion to a WHM's panic button. If you Benediction, and you WILL die, then might as well siphon off some MP before you bite the dust.

[Hamlet]

Re: Lv75 Merit Ability: Devotion

I think this is the best thing whm's got, by far. It's like 1/4 convert, but for another pt member. I can see it having many uses, such as running low on mp, you could give either the blm or rdm some mp to cure with in an emergency. What's the recast, 10 minutes? And you can merit it down to 5?

Refresh gives 1 mp/second. If you fully merit it, you can do this once every 300 seconds. Some races could get 300 mp pretty easy. It's not refresh because you can only keep one other person going with this ability, but damn it's pretty close.

You could also have 2 whms in a party (over lvl 12, gasp!), and they could basically refresh eachother. Some might consider it overkill, but one of them could pull and the other could main heal in a melee pt. It would be useful if you had a 4 melees and 1 whm and was looking for a refresher.

That's just off the top of my head. There's lots of cool stuff this ability could do.

[Omni]

Re: Lv75 Merit Ability: Devotion

Icemage said "current" HP. So I imagine raising the max won't do much for you.

I think this is a nice companion to a WHM's panic button. If you Benediction, and you WILL die, then might as well siphon off some MP before you bite the dust.

your point?
raising your max mp and healing/regening yourself till full would make it a benefit for being elvaan or galka.

it doesnt have to be a dire situation when you are using this ability.

it could be very well to help your pt minimize downtime. for instance your pld is low on mp and you are trying to keep the chain alive. unmacro any mp items, heal till full and use devotion on your pld and poof, a fresh and ready to go pld.

or if you only deal with dire situations, you can have another mage cure you, then use devotion to give your pld or another mage a giant mp boost.

[tdh]

Re: Lv75 Merit Ability: Devotion

I think there are some sweet new abilities added, but the problem is most of them are 20 minute /recasts!!! It took me forever to it down to using all my MP in 10 minutes so I could Convert every 10 minutes. I'd forget I even had a 20 minute ability! You can shave off 5 minutes from the /recast with merits, but even then 15 minutes is a long time.

WHM I partied with last night is a Merit Hog. He fully Merited his stuff, and then got 10 Merits in the bank. He bought Protectra V and Shellra V and kind of wished he had gotten something else. (He said it only gave you an extra 5 DEF. I didn't pay that close attention to it, I just liked the pretty light as he cast it! haha)

Personally I think they should have made them 15 minutes /recasts, and then allow you to Merit them down to 10 minutes. But that's me. They're new, I don't know how over powered, or abused they may become if they were a 10 minute /recast. I'm sure we have plenty of time to test them before they even think about adjusting this update.

[Hamlet]

Re: Lv75 Merit Ability: Devotion

Oh, so it's 20 minute recast. That means that it'll never be as good as refresh, but you can still funnel a very decent amount of mp into one player if you merit it and use it every chance you get. Blms would love you.

It would be cool to try out a traditional party with all this new stuff. RDM could be giving the pld phalanx2, whm could be boosting the blm's mp by 300 every 15 minutes... Could be really interesting.

[sevenpointflaw]

Re: Lv75 Merit Ability: Devotion

Well, my observations on it all is that most WHM don't even use Divine Seal/Veil very often. As far as I'm concerned, you should be using it every ten minutes. Sure its not much in and of itself, but as I'm fond of pointing out, it all adds up very quickly. If you go the extra mile on -everything- it will put you step above and beyond.

I think cycling divine seal, devotion, and martyr (if you cycle them regularly) is one of those things that - while it won't make or break a party - will certainly go a long way to make the difference between 5-10 chain party and a party that chains endlessly.

Now couple that with the new mace that is Cure Potenecy +10% and WHM/NIN (as much as I hate to add to the /nin dependency) has an entirely new appeal to it for Merit Parties post-Hexa (until you're fighting Imps, at least...)

Double Post Edited:
I'd also add that the other night I was in a party with a PLD, chainging imps, and it was about every 30min or so that he would be comepletely out of MP. His MP pool was about 300mp total. He also didn't have any hate issues, so I would think that the timer, while seemingly long, is fairly well timed. I've only recently gotten into sky/hnm applications so I can't say how usefull it is there.

[Tirrock]

Re: Lv75 Merit Ability: Devotion

One thing is for certain, it's a lot better than protectra V. >_>

[sevenpointflaw]

Re: Lv75 Merit Ability: Devotion

I'm honestly less interested in Pro/Shell V than I am in devotion + martyr. Though the former may have more applications solo since d/m can't be used on <me>. I wonder though, can Pro/Shell be merited multiple times to increase the effectiveness of it?

[Tirrock]

Re: Lv75 Merit Ability: Devotion

Yes, it can be.

Protectra V gives 5 more DEF than protect IV at one upgrade. You get 2 more DEF per upgrade.

I don't know how good shellra V is though, that's sort of hard to test. (I guess it'd be easier if I walked up to faf/nid and got winged.)

[Nazo]

Re: Lv75 Merit Ability: Devotion

I picked up devotion last night too, didn't get a chance to use it though sadly. Any word on if it's a 75 only ability or can it be used in cap battles once you have it?
I'm aiming to pick up Prot / Shell too, even though they don't sound all that good I just don't like the idea of there being white mage spells I don't have :/

[Olorin401]

Re: WHMs and Divine Veil - I've worked REALLY hard to work this ability into my gameplay, epsecially since starting more speed and strategy-intensive gameplay (ie Dynamis and TP Burn parties). It's almost become second nature to me to use it. It helps A LOT when you're trying to conserve MP to not cast Erase or Silena 4-6 times. It helps even more, since I'm Elvaan and my MP is a joke..

I picked up devotion last night too, didn't get a chance to use it though sadly. Any word on if it's a 75 only ability or can it be used in cap battles once you have it?

That's an interesting thought.. Imagine if you were /WHM and you were able to use Devotion with one of your other level 75 jobs? That's would be really nice... don't think it works that way though.

[Illuminatus]

Re: Lv75 Merit Ability: Devotion

WHM-specific merits are just that: WHM-specific. They go away if you delevel to 74 or change to another job.

[Karinya]

Re: Lv75 Merit Ability: Devotion

Well, it's not all bad news about Protectra V. It's 5 more def than pro4 normally, but that can be increased by a def food. I've seen as high as 7.

Yeah, that doesn't seem like much, but when you consider that the duration is half an hour... it could save quite a bit of damage over that much time. And it costs you an extra...20 mp per half hour? So pretty much free (aside from the 3 merit points, of course).