Divine Herald: Defensive Stance or Holy Fury?

[Pharaoh]

I'm tier 3 level 30 and after collecting exploration badges have just enough CP's to buy either DS or HF. Other than one career badge coming up, it will be a while before I get anymore CP's. Can't decide between the two.

A lot of my time is spent helping to defend the stronghold against raids.

If I bought Holy Fury now and Stamina later, that would give me a total of 101 hit points when activated.

Defensive Stance: This skill allows the character to gain the Defensive Stance Status Effect for a duration of 15 minutes by spending 1 Action Point and 10 Magic Points. This status effect can be stacked, increasing its duration. While the Defensive Stance Status Effect is active, any attack that might normally hit the character has a 33% chance of outright missing. In other words, once an attack has successfully hit the character with Defensive Stance, there is then a flat 33% chance that that hit becomes a miss.

Holy Fury: This skill costs 1 Action Point and 10 Magic Points to activate. When activated, the character gains 20 additional Hit Points and the Holy Fury Status Effect for 20 minutes. The character can go over their normal maximum Hit Point total by use of this skill. This skill cannot be used if the character is already under the influence of the Holy Fury Status Effect.

[Saint_Jimmy]

Defensive Stance doesn't work when you've got Harbinger active, just as a heads up. As a result, Holy Fury would probably be my pick.

[Wozzy]

Defensive stance is a pretty good skill for defense, even though you can't activate the harbinger skills. Assuming after soak, the enemy does about 20 damage, this is the exact same bonus as HF. Since they are more likely to do less than that, due to forts and pots, it actually ends up being better than HF. I say usually, because it isn't an efficient use of resources if you already have high dodge, and it costs mana for every time you attack.

Holy Fury on the other hand has an additonal offensive bonus: buffer against auras. Harbinger gives you negative soak, which makes aura's hurt, even with GIs. The additional buffer, on top of healing 3HP on hit, means you can almost negate the damage, which can be valuable for raiding as well as defending.

[Pharaoh]

I don't suppose the 3 HP gained under the influence of Holy Fury heals minor poison does it?

[Wozzy]

[Pharaoh]

I decided to go with Holy Fury which I now regret. It may have a bug, I don't know. I activated it during the last raid and even though it was on for only 5 minutes, I quickly lost 20 hit points somehow. I was never attacked once either.

It was like it got deactivated. But it still showed I was under the holy fury influence when I got back to my SH. And I continued to lose 1 point every minute, so it was working.

[Saint_Jimmy]

Testing shows that that's due to the healing on melee attack portion of the skill resetting you to max HP if for some reason you're above it.

[Pharaoh]

[Rincewind]

I will look into fixing that

[Pharaoh]

[catvom]

[Pharaoh]

Sometimes in all the excitement I forget to monitor my health and have died as a result. I figure the 3 HP gain with every melee attack would come in handy.