Mouse Skills:Crippling Wave (Concussion)
Cyclone Strike (Soothing Wind OR Implosion)
Hotbar Skills:Breath of Heaven (Circle of Life)
Serenity (Tranquility)
Inner Sanctuary (Safe Haven)
Mantra of Healing (Heavenly Body)
Passive Skills:Resolve
Transcendence OR Chant of Resonance
Beacon of Ytar
Crippling Wave and Cyclone Strike go together like toast and butter- simply, but amazingly. Which form of Cyclone Strike you use depends heavily on how your party functions- a more scattered party necessitates Implosion, which will grab virtually everything on the screen and dump it into your lap. If your party tends to stay close together- and I mean less than half a screen apart close together- then Soothing Breeze should be used to provide an additional heal. Either way Cyclone Strike drops things into your melee range- at which point you unleash a triple-strike from Crippling Wave and cut their movement speed, attack speed, and damage per hit. This makes them less threatening, and will often give you back a good portion of the Spirit you need to trigger Cyclone Strike again after only a couple of cycles, ensuring that the enemies stay in your debilitating grasp.
All of the hotbar skills here are defensive skills that benefit your party immensely. Circle of Life keeps Breath of Heaven at a useful level of healing up into the higher echelons of play, and Serenity (Tranquility) lets you react to an incoming threat in the event you can’t immediately divert it into your swirl of debuff. Inner Sanctuary can be used to not only protect your ranged party members but also provide melee fighters somewhere to go for refuge now and again. Combining it with the Safe Haven rune accelerates the healing garnered from a break in combat even further, and all of this is compounded by Mantra of Healing restoring Life at a steady rate, and Heavenly Body allowing the entire party to soak extra damage. Overall, this means a constant, though not too consistent, stream of healing for your allies, who you’ve just dragged all the melee attackers off of and made sure that even if those same melee attackers somehow get away from you, they won’t be able to hurt your friends too much.
Resolve is an obvious pick here, compounding the effects of Crippling Wave (Concussion) to further disable enemy offense. The attacks you receive from melee enemies should be laughably weak with both skills, cutting their damage nearly in half- to say nothing of the reduction in attack rate. Transcendence ensures that you heal yourself on a regular bases to an even more extreme degree- if you find that you don’t need this extra healing, switch it out for Chant of Resonance so that you can use Cyclone Strike slightly more often- or possibly even if you do need the extra healing, just to keep things away from your other party members so they can bombard the enemy around you and kill them faster. Finally, Beacon of Ytar reduces the cooldowns of all your Action Bar skills except for the Mantra, giving you access to them much more quickly, just to make sure you’re prepared for incoming damage.
This is a very team-friendly build- in fact, it only really works as part of a team. Despite the pleasing level of damage Crippling Wave can put out, without teammates this build becomes slow and a lot of the rune choices (and even the choice of Inner Sanctuary as a skill) cease to make sense. If you solo, you really should be using something less geared towards enabling a party.
