Skill Focus: Glyph of Sacrifice
Table of Contents
Skill Location
Skill Description
How it Works
More on Glyphs
Using the Skill
Specific Combos
Potential Conflicts
Summary
Skill Location
Glyph of Sacrifice is only available from a skill trainer. You can obtain it from Steig in Camp Rankor or from Dakk in Ember Light Camp.
Skill Description
Skill Name: Glyph of Sacrifice
Description: Your next spell may be cast instantly, but takes an additional 90 seconds to recharge.
Energy Cost: 5
Activation: 1 second
Recharge Time: 15 seconds
Linked Attribute: None
Skill Type: Glyph
How it Works
Similar to other glyphs, activating this skill will modify how the next spell you cast behaves. First, you activate the GoS, then cast your spell. Once activated, the effect of the Glyph of Sacrifice changes the casting time of the next spell to be 0, thus it will be cast instantly. However, 90 extra seconds will then be added onto that spell's recharge timer.
More on Glyphs
Once activated, a glyph remains in effect until your next spell is cast, or a maximum of 15 seconds whichever comes first. In addition, glyphs do not stack. If you attempt to use a 2nd glyph after activating GoS, it will be replaced by the newer glyph. Since a glyph only effects the next spell you cast, it will not affect any non-spell skills you attempt to use. Also, glyphs are not linked to any attributes, thus they behave identically for all primary or secondary elementalists regardless of their ranks or character level.
Using the Skill
By itself, this skill does nothing useful. It must interact with another spell to exhibit any benefits. At first glance, the effect of Glyph of Sacrifice may not seem worth the drawback. Waiting for 90 extra seconds to be able to re-use a skill is a painfully long time in a fast-paced game like Guild Wars. For many spells, using the GoS ability to instantly cast them is not worth waiting the extra time to use them again. However, there are a few skills that don't get cast as often where waiting 90 extra seconds is not as much of a problem, and there are also some tricks we can use to overcome the extra 90-second recharge drawback. Figuring out which skills those are, or which methods best overcome the drawback are the keys to maximizing the usefulness of Glyph of Sacrifice.
Being able to instantly cast the next spell means that next spell will be very difficult to interrupt. When facing foes using interrupts, GoS can allow you to avoid those interrupts and get your spell off. Depending on the spell and the situation, that could turn the entire battle.
By shortening the casting time it also allows you to fire off multiple spells even faster than usual. For example, you could cast Deep Freeze, slowing a group of foes, follow that by activating GoS and then instantly casting Maelstrom before those enemies have much time to change their positions. Several of the elementalist's harder hitting Area of Effect (AoE) spells have long casting times. Being able to reduce them to only a 1 second glyph activation plus instant spell casting is very tempting. If there's a cool, but slow-to-cast spell you like to use roughly once per battle, it might make a good candidate for use with Glyph of Sacrifice.
There are some skills that can remove or lessen the recharge penalty, but one easily overlooked option to recharge spells is boss killing. Not everyone may realize it, but when you kill a boss, all your skills instantly recharge. Thus, when you are encountering numerous bosses (various missions, skill capping, green item hunting, etc), the drawback of GoS can often be quickly and easily removed during the course of play.
Specific Combos
Resurrection is one spell that has an extremely long casting time, but shouldn't need to be cast all that often. For an elementalist/monk or monk/elementalist, combining Glyph of Sacrifice w/ Resurrection turns the skill into one that only takes 1 second total to activate and is very difficult to interrupt. The downside of having to wait an extra 90 seconds to cast it again is generally tolerable for a rez spell. If necessary, you can spend extra time after a battle in PvE to rez other comrades. Meanwhile in PvP, the one-shot Resurrection Signet has proven to be a near must-have skill. The GoS + Resurrection combo is faster, harder to interrupt and re-useable, though it does tie up 2 skill slots.
Echo and Arcane Echo have some very special interaction with GoS. No matter what spell they copy or what glyphs you apply to those spells, the copied skills will revert back to their original echo version after 20 seconds. Thus, you cast echo, then a spell, then cast GoS and use the copied version and suffer no major drawback. Rather than being unavailable for 90+ seconds, that copy of the spell is simply unavailable until the echo recharges, which is a significantly shorter amount of time.
One of the more obvious elementalist skills to use in conjunction with GoS is Meteor Shower. This allows the caster to bypass the lengthy 5 second casting time and immediately unleash devastation on the enemy. Some "nuker" builds will run Glyph of Sacrifice and Meteor Shower. Tossing in Echo and/or Arcane Echo turns this into an "echo-nuker" variant. By using GoS in conjunction with Meteor shower and an echo, it cuts the casting time for two Meteor Showers down from 10 seconds to only 6.
Oath Shot can be used to instantly recharge all other skills in your skill bar. As a result, you can use GoS, then another spell, and follow it up with a successful Oath Shot to instantly recharge those skills. This trick is mostly limited to Ranger/Elementalists since Oath Shot requires 7 ranks in Expertise (ranger-only attribute) or it suffers a 50% chance of missing and failing. The penalty for failure is rather severe so any Elementalist/Rangers will find this combo much less useful.
Other skills that speed up skill recharge such as Mantra of Recovery, Quickening Zephyr or Serpent's Quickness can be used to more quickly overcome the penalty associated with Glyph of Sacrifice.
Potential Conflicts
As mentioned above, glyphs do not work with other glyphs. If you're using a GoS, you may want to avoid using multiple glyphs in your skillbar.
Any skill with a casting time of 1 second or less should generally not be used as a target for GoS. Although GoS can potentially make those skills harder to interrupt, it's usually not worth spending 1 second to activate the GoS and suffering the extra 90 second recharge time just to make the skill slightly harder to interrupt.
If you've activated Glyph of Sacrifice, but are then immediately hexed with Diversion before you can cast your spell, you may want to wait for Diversion to wear off before casting. Otherwise, the recharge delay from Diversion will add with the delay of GoS causing an even longer spell recharge. On the other hand, activating GoS after being hexed by Diversion may not be a problem. Typically, you won't be recasting GoS all that often, so having it recharge slowly is generally acceptable.
Summary
Glyph of Sacrifice can be a very useful skill in the right situations or in combination with the right skills. Being able to rapidly cast powerful spells quickly can allow you to catch enemies off-guard. By making skills cast instantly, GoS can allow spells to get past enemy interrupts. Meanwhile, the recharge drawback from using Glyph of Sacrifice can be lessened by using certain skills or by killing a boss. Give it a try, and you might be pleasantly surprised by how useful it can be.
