Vanguard Monks

Hi all great site :)

Does anyone know if the hand wraps/ Knuckle damage is the way it supposed to be now?  or is it still better to fight bare hand?

Welcome to the forums!

To my knowledge, at this current time monks are still better off fighting weaponless until the 20's or so.  :-\

Keep in mind we would only get better with weapons post level 20 if you could find a GOOD weapon. I wish I could find it now but a week or so back, in one of the beta patches, there was Dev. notes about how Monk Hand to Hand was now classified like weapon quality. As we raise levels our fists and feet upgrade like if you were to upgrade weapons. Unfortunately I do not have the specifics but I can look for them a bit.

Edit: I found the info on this site thanks to the MonkBOT. (awesome idea)  I cut and pasted directly from the patch notes of Build 01677 on 1-15-07.

Disciple and MONK - Unarmed damage is no longer treated like rare weapons at all level ranges. From level 1-9 they are now common strength. From 10-19 they are now uncommon strength. From 20-39 they are rare strength. From 40-49 they are in between rare and ultra rare strength. At level 50 they are the equivalent of an ultra rare weapon in damage modifier. MONK and Disciple unarmed attacks still retain their improved speed and critical hit chance.

The way I read that is that monk barehands will always be better.  They get stronger and stronger as you level.  I doubt many people will come across an ultra rare weapon

I dont think they will always be better. IF our fists are always better then anything that isnt ultra-rare, that will change very fast because all the work put into the monk / discliple only weapons would have been a complete waste of time and they arnt going to go through and take all those out of the game so the easiest solution is to reduce the damage we do with our bare fists.

well not necesarily true IMO.  Ther could be some rare weapons that are better then fists but would be really hard and rare to get.  Also they are still there for people to chose statistic changes over better dmg.  For example say you are a warrior and you have a choice between 2 swords of uberness.  1 sword gives you say 50 more dmg over the other which would really increase your dps, in essense increasing your hate to help hold you target as well.  The other sword gives you a 20% bonus to dodge or parry or something or possibly can proc a ward which will absorb dmg, effectively increasing your survivabilty.  Same senario, items are all about choices.  If they itemize well then you should have a decent selection of what you need depending on your circumstances.  Weapon choice is not all about dmg alone.  So really i dont think that having monk itemization would be wasted if done right and I also dont see a need to lower our barehanded dmg any.

Butt I will say that I think things like fist wraps should not lower our base barehand dmg because your are still hand to hand and that is what it should depend on.  Fist wraps buy definition are wrapping your fists with something.  That should add to your already existing damage and not change it to whatever the wraps are

Nice example Soluss. And I totally agree that we should have the option to use weapons or fists and that both options should be equally as enticing. Tyring to make one of them be the better choice will only result in cookie-cutter style monks with the same gears and weapons.

Thanks Zhao, i just hope that it is implemented like that to give us good tough choices and more versatality

I could'nt agree more Soluss

It is unfortunate that you have to equip fist wraps or knuckles in order to level your hand-to-hand skill up, as of the last night of Beta. Unless that was a bug that they will fix during the conversion to live.


[fixed for clarity]

I really hope so. That would be horrible.

Just for Clarification

You do not have to equip anything now to improve your "hand to hand" skill


Lukster O'Charms

Hmmm.. i know eventually, skilling up the weapons will be worthwhile... can we get weapon skillups from no-xp mobs ie, do I go around slaughtering noobie areas for my weapon skillups later on, or am I gonna need to start whipping out the lower dps weapons every so often, in order to get the skills up for the better weapons, when they drop?

i suggest you build all your skills now while you are leveling.  in my experience in other games, they never allow skill ups on grey mobs.  and to raise your skills from bottom to end game would take a long time of you doing crap for damage in groups until you skill up.

still unsure what you guys are talking about my weapons are much nicer then hand to hand!

QFE

The last thing you want is get an awesome weapon and then spend your next gaming day training said weapon on greys / greens to get skill ups

~QTM

What is your level and what are the weapons? Because any weapon I equip results in lower DPS than I get barehanded. (Though I have knuckles with healing focus that I generally use off-hand keeping my main hand empty.

Most cases I have see is that rare weapons will be better DPS than bare fists up to the level of the item . e.g. Dread Wind's Claws would be better dps up untill it's item level of 15 then you would see its DPS as a negative vs. bare handed.

I can't say with certainty as I have only had a couple of rare in my toons lifetime since release

~QTM

OK, Quinn the Mighty's reply to this post is pre-Update1 pre-patch to Update1....and my read of the combined patch notes included some reference to monk attacks going weapon damage based?

See I used to use weapons and then people said don't use weapons so I sold them all, then the patch made it sound like we should use weapons again so I bought some...can we have some sort of read as to whether a decent weapon is of benefit to a fighting monk now, since the displayed DPS on the info window ingame goes up when we equip them???

Yes it's a noob question, I'm only level 16.

You can check your DPS on your character sheet (when you hover your mouse over "main hand" or "off hand" you see the DPS in the tooltip window). Light weapons like handwraps and knuckles have 5% critical, just like unarmed. So if the DPS is higher with weapons then without weapons, it is worth it. Especially because weapons have mods on them most of the time.
Just fool around a bit with different weapons, and check your DPS. Then you can chose what you like, and what fits your style. For a lvl 16, handwraps/knuckles/ulak/claws with 12+dps will probably make a difference over unarmed.