Vanguard Monks

Lets see how everyones second tier stances compare with each other. Also feel free to add in issues with each stance. I kind of want to see how all the stances compare with each other.

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-Magnificent Storm Dragon stance adds lightning damage per attack. Supposed to drain 1 Jin per 6 seconds.

-Dragon stance is supposed to add to your HP regen.

-Magnificent Stone Dragon stance raises AC by ~800 as well as 30% fire/cold rune, -20% attack speed...or 40% fire/cold rune, -15% attack speed depending on if you mouse over the buff icon or the stance shift icon.

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-Storm Dragon proc is 50-80 damage per attack vs even level 2 dots. The proc is resistable, can MISS, and only hits the offensive target when you AE. Secrets do not stack with this stance. This stance needs to be changed to something other than a random lightning proc. Make it %crit boost, %damage boost. That way the more agressive stance of the damage style of monks actually noticably improves our DPS.

-Dragon stance does nothing. Fix this please, and make it a noticeable HP regen.

-Stone Dragon does not apply the rune effect. Also, why do the buff icon and the tooltip when hovering over the stance shift icon differ?  Make the stance actually work. The only thing you get by switching to this stance is the 800 AC and slower attack speed. 40% fire rune would be nice when fighting in Rahz Inkur and Sands of Sorrow.

While it's always a possibility of replacing storm stance, I think Storm stance would be good if it were just fixed and tweaked in the right ways.

But I would like to see Dragon stance replaced with something different, because I don't think we'll ever see the HP regen increased to any significant level. I don't know if it's suppose to be in combat or out of combat, because I measured no difference in either with this stance activated.

I'd like to see something like this:
+10% runspeed. +endurance regen (minor), +HP regen out of combat.
Nothing major, but it's unique enough that one would actually consider using this stance once in a while, instead of Stone or Storm.
Maybe you use it for the utility of running around.
Maybe you use it to regen health out of combat.
Maybe you use it because you don't want to burn jin on storm stance, but don't care about the AC of stone stance, so you'd like to take advantage of a minor endurance regen buff.

Neither of those by themselves would make for a useful stance, but together they offer up something flexible and unique enough to be useful.

Harmonious T2

Harmonious Body: Regenerate 1 jin every 20 seconds.
Eternal Crane: 25% endurance regeneration (does not appear to stack with other forms of endurance reductions), 20% less damage, +8% dodge and parry.
Magnificent Tiger: 50% endurance cost, +25% critchance.

Harmonious Body works, but really, it's a downtime saver. On the shortrun it'll keep a status quo on your Jin between fights; and if you have a long downtime (travel, food break etc) it will ensure you'll be full Jin. For fighting I don't find it useful at all.

Eternal Crane fills no real purpose. With Aum Ti, I might aswell shift to Harmonious Body to slap my expensive shortduration debuffs when soloing and then shift back. The dodge/parry bonuses might seem nice, but in reality, they are not due to the potency of Tiger stance.

The Magnificient Tiger on the other hand is a beast. It allows a perfect freedom in weaponry while maintaining a high critrate - and two-handers are currently quite powerful for monks. I would be so bold and say it's the best stance availible for monks. The endurance penalty is noticable solo, but with Aum Ti it's manageable, and if you're grouping a cleric or bear shaman, the stance is pretty much without a disadvantage.

It could be assumed that T3 eternal crane looses the damage penalty (which still dosen't do that much, the sheer power of Tiger will still outperform it) and Tiger gains an additional 5% critrate.

I posted the Harmonious ones in the monk ability sticky but here they are again for discussion purposes:

Level 30
- Magnificent Tiger:  Increases critical chance by 25% while increasing endurance costs by 50%.
- Eternal Crane:  Increases chance to block, parry and dodge by 25% and decreases endurance costs by 25%. Lowers damage by 20%.
- Harmonious Body:  Slowly regenerates Jin over time.

My thoughts on each are:
- Tiger is great for the high crit rates but is still a little too costly in terms of endurance. Perhaps the issue isn't the stance but moreso of the endurance cost of specific abilities themselves. Perfect example of this is Deadly Adder Hand, which causes weakness for 16 seconds and ends with a DD for approximately 250 damage (version 3). For the "bang", 57 endurance is way too costly to even use, so I don't.

- Crane is ok for those times when you need to off-tank but the tradeoff is a tough pill to swallow. There should be a tradeoff for the increase to evasion but the loss in damage is crippling in its current state.

- Harm body is interesting. For the first 28 levels or so, I thought it to be nothing more than a nice way to recoup Jin in downtime before jumping into a fight. However, I've recently started testing its usefulness in combat and I'm actually a little suprised at the results. The regen isn't so fast that I can stay near max Jin at all times in a fight but provides enough to give me the freedom to use almost any ability when I want (provided any individual refresh isn't preclusing it).

Since I mostly use Tiger as my other stance, the real comparison between the two is 1) impact of crit rates, and 2) impact to the endurance bar. Personally, I expected to miss the high crit rates that Tiger provides quite a bit when in Harm stance, but I'm actually still critting a fairly high amount. The real difference that I've noticed though is with regards to the endurance bar. In Tiger, an Eagle Claw and 3-4 immediate attacks and I'm OOE, and that's not even attempting to use Deadly Adder Hand either. If either Eagle Claw or DAH misses, I'm really behind the 8 ball in the fight. And if both miss, I immediately try to FD as it's way too hard to recover from. I've found the best way to manage this stance is not to fire abilities all at once right away but to pace myself using them throughout the fight so as to allow for my endurance to remain at an even keel, if possible.

In Harm stance though, the over-penalyzing endurance costs don't have as big of an impact, particularly on missed attacks and debuffs that need to be re-used. Meaning, I can choose to fire off more crits up front if I want to and potentially make the fight really short, especially if I get lucky with a few reactions or big crits. And obviously, Jin management is a little less of a problem in this stance as well.

I'm going to continue playing around with Harm Body some more but as of now, I'm actually beginning to like it over Tiger. Crane, on the other hand, is only ever useful to me in a group where I occassionally need to off-tank.

Since I am a Harmi monk, aside from Stacne / Aum stacking issues I dont have a whole lot to gripe about. The Harmonious Monk is IMO the closest to "Complete" . Although mebee I'd like to see a Jin discount on specials while in HB form.

Drunken IMO needs the most love.. stuff I'd like to see with them

• Some form of mitigation buff that grows in level
• More evasion
• Better aggro management

Dragon

• Stacking issuses with secrets eliminated
•  ATK Buff to increase over all damage
• Damage Shield

Tell you what, I'll summarise this post and send it off to Sigil in a couple days for them to use as a community whish list for the stances.

Edit: I got on tangent about abilites... the focus should be on the stances themselves.

~QTM

I would agree. However our debuffs badly lack duration (should increase with rank) and the reuse on our finisher (2 minutes for a 20 second effect) is a bit of a joke.

Dragon style here.

Storm Dragon adding a proc just feels wrong as a stance.
Really would want to have straight +dps% stance with -ac or -parry/dodge which would feel natural compared to other stances. Could still give dragon style a lightning proc secret learnable with Aum to keep it but would be nice to get rid of that proc on our offensive stance. Changing this stance to +dps would also fix the stacking issues with secrets.

Dragon stance, I actually would want this to work and give us good hp regen that would be max hp% based.

Stone dragon stance, well I really don't see why the dps/ae style gets something like this and would rather see something that would enhance our ae damage as it would fit the style. If it's staying like this, at least that fire/cold rune needs to be fixed but it could also be given to Dragon stance instead and then replace this stance with a new idea.

Would like to get some attention to Dragon style ae's/skills also at some point but this topic is about stances and those flaws will get fixed someday.

I couldn't agree with this more Quinn...

Drunken Style monks should excel at evasion and agro management.

I'd like to see not only powerful rescues, but the reverse as well.  The ability to either gain, shed, or redirect agro would serve very well as a defining role for the style, especially given their evasive nature.

-My thought is that if evasion is put to where it should be then they shouldn't need a mitigation buff. Drunken monks are all about avoiding damage, not absorbing it.

-Evasion is the cornerstone of the Drunken Monk. Everything he is revolves around it his ability to off-tank and counter attack using evasion. If it's not high enough then he is just not going to function.
The evasive stance needs to at least be doubled to 20% evasion, putting it above harmonious's evasive stance  (currently 16%) and putting it high enough to justify the -10% accuracy penalty. I'd go as high as 25% easily, so that the evasion advantage over Harmonious is not marginal but significant. The Drunken Monk's original evasive stance set at 30% was never overpowered like the Harmonious one was, which was a ridiculous 75%.

-I'm not sure about aggro. The Drunken Monk already has a pretty nice set of aggro tools for a light fighter. I don't believe his aggro management should equal the capability of a real tank.



-Storm stance is in need of many tweaks... Stacking. Damage increase. Scaling.

-We do need a general DPS buff, so that we do enough damage to make the loss of evasion and utility worth it...but AoE attacks in particular need to be looked at and retooled. Right now AoEing is not a viable Dragon monk strategy unless you're facing mobs well below your level. They cost too much endurance, do too little damage, and worst of all they only give you one jin (which when combined with the high endurance cost ensures that you will be further hindered in the fight by a drastic lack of jin).
AoE attacks also appear to be bugged so that jin surge and storm stance does not apply the extra damage to every target hit.
Dragon monks are also in search of some kind of niche, and being the best melee AoE user would do the trick.
AoE attacks could give one jin for each target hit. They need a big endurance reduction, and a moderate damage buff.
In order for AoEing to be a viable method of fighting, the AoEs have to be close in efficiency to a single target attack but not quite as good. This keeps single targets attacks as being best for single targets, but makes AoEs the clear best choice when facing multiple mobs (Because right now you'll actually kill them faster by focusing on a single target strategy to kill each one fast).

-A damage shield is something that would be fitting to the Dragon Monk, considering it combines the two things they have: Damage and AC buffs.
I would like to see Stone stance spiced up by adding a damage shield on top of the minor AC buff it gives.
Right now Stone stance is, well, bland and of little tactical value. Sure you might throw it on if you're in a situation that you need to offtank for a while, but it doesn't add much to your overall survivability.
The power of the damage shield could rise as you level.
This would actually be a very dragon monk like type of active defense - As enemies hit you more they are contributing to you killing them off faster so that the threat is removed.

Quinn - Speaking for only Dragons as that is what my toon is we are really more in dire straits then a "wish list".
We have had several patchs go in with very little monk tuning especially after we got hit with the nerf bat.
Dragon stances have been broke since release if not even prior to that in beta.
This recent patch with the increase to secrets which is nice and we are all enjoying actually invalidated one of our stances.
Storm Dragon was weaker then Secrects pre-patch now its a no brainer.
Dragon Stance has never worked so that leaves us with
Stone Dragon!  Woot for us!  Stone Dragon is a situational stance used for those times we need to off-tank or if we need to mitigate a little extra damage.

So in true game play that leaves Dragons with one viable stance, Whats Up with That!  We are not asking for what we would like to see as enhancements, we are asking to fix that which is broken.  Enhancements = wish list, Broken = priority fix!

For the last patchs we have seen all the other classes receive large strides in their tuning - It really is our turn.  One of the key elements is our stances especially the ones that are broken.  Seems strange that we get buffs to abilities that are working rather then fixing those items that are flat broken.  It would seem more logical to fix that which is broken first and then buff and tune from there.

You seem to have a pulse on the issues with the stances across all 3 flavors of monk, you play a harmonious and have stated that you believe harmonious are currently the most complete, I'm hoping that your influence with getting harmonious current could maybe also grace us Dragons and Drunks.

Imo i do not think there that complet. Still need a bit of tweaking, at lvl 26 i have well 3 debuffs, witch one is only used if i parry, so in party it is useless since we do not off tank, cause againts 4 dots we get way to much damage. 2 others are not bad, but one of the them cost 57 end, so in tiger form well thats 2 skills and you got to wait befor doing any thing els. and over that the debuff doesnt do any damage except after 16sec if i remember right. but if you keep it up it = 0 damage and each time you do it you do 0 damage. Above that im not even sure if the tank can even notice the decrease with the incoming damage, cause when i solo i sure dont notice it. Eagle claw is not bad gives a small boost in dps.

as for harm stances, well i would of love having tiger form go from 50% end cost to a 25 or 30% end cost at lvl 50. Crane form hurts alot the dps at the start seems only usefull in the higher lvl even when soloing. and for the harm stance well it is kinda useless as the dragon regen thing maybe not as much but for 1 jin every min... not many times will i use it.

I play a harmi monk on live. On test I play all 3 monk styles.

So your contribution would be

• More Damage from Storm Dragon Proc
• Stacking issues eliminated from Storm Dragon
• In combat health regen for Dragon Stance
• Slightly more mitigation from Stone Dragon

~QTM

-Storm Dragon
*If the lightning proc is something that is there to stay, then make it proc on every target when we AE.
*Make it stack with Secrets
*Rather see it changed to +xx% damage and -xx% avoidance. That way there is no room for variable dps bonus from a stance due to resists or misses, and will alleviate stacking with Secrets.

-Stone Dragon
*Make the Fire/Cold rune work, and have it show in combat log as "your rune absorbs xx damage from soandso's Fireball."
*Add a little more AC bonus.

-Dragon
*Make the health regen actually work, stack with other regen effects, and make it be noticeable.

There should be some actual decisions when deciding what stance to use. Not, "well these two stances blow ass, so I guess I am stuck using this stance."

I am really hoping for a slight overhaul in the stances.  The proc on Storm Dragon is just not good compared to other classes.  Other classes are getting damage and crit stances, I am really hoping for that.  We have enough Secrets to add additional damage to each hit, I am really hoping for a straight damage stance to help out our overall DPS, which is extremely lacking.  Yes, I hope Dragon Stance is fixed, but I don't think this is the stance the majority of people will be in.  I view Dragon Stance as a priority because it is the primary stance, and it needs to be brought up to par with other classes.  I'd like to see like 20-30% more damage and maybe 5% crit or something.  Stone Dragon gets a large bonus in mitigation and resist, why can't there be a similar increase for our damage?

As I see it, we Dragon Monks are supposed to be all-out DPS with very little utility.  However, our DPS sucks compared to every other class, including healers.  To compensate for our low utility, we need DPS comparable or greater to those of Rangers, who can shoot things from 50 meters away and do insane damage while they do it, and THEN outdamage us with huge attacks and nice buffs up close.  I think Monks with such low utility need to be able to do more damage than a Ranger, but hey, that's just me.

We need an actually useful stance that actually makes a difference.  Hopefully if the lightning from the stance and a secret stack on top of eachother we'll get a bit more DPS, but I'm still really pulling for a straight damage/crit stance that would help put us on par with the other offensive classes who all have much much more utility. 

Quinn,
I play a Dragon monk on live and my thoughts are like this according to your conslidated list...

• More Damage from Storm Dragon Proc

   * As stated above this should be moved to a more basic %dmg/crit increase buff instead of a lighting proc. I also feel that while in this stance a Dragon monk should be on par with rogues in stealth and rangers in long fights. By choosing Dragon stance we are openly accepting the fact we will have less evasion and no real utility for the sake of pure dps. To me thats what going Dragon is about.

• Stacking issues eliminated from Storm Dragon

   * Agreed - maybe even give Dragons a few specific Secrets available only to that stance

• In combat health regen for Dragon Stance

   * I think if this stance worked it would be a nice option possibly when soloing - could use a second effect like a dmg shield

• Slightly more mitigation from Stone Dragon

   * I agree with one of the people above that this stance should be replaced with something more dps specific - I'm thinking something along the lines of AoE specific. Perhaps an increase of all AoE dmg by 20% while reducing end costs by 20%

Definately some good ideas getting thrown around... I'd really like some drunken monks to weigh in on this too. Perhaps I'll cross post this on the SV site *ugh*

~QTM

Im a 27 Drunken monk.

Stances are worthless imho. The drunken mastery abilities i have recieved so far only get me flak from groups cause it draws aggro on me. Tanks, nor healers like it when I get aggro due to my paper armor and no evasion. I stay in +haste +dodge stance 90% of the time when grouped. Solo +dmg +aggro, but its such a minimal increase it doesn't matter what stance im really in. The only stance that hurts me is the +evasion - accuracy, solo or in group the stance has no benfit whatsoever I'd rather spend more time questing for evasion/dodge gear then click on that stance button to get the evasion boost.

The best stance would be the haste/dodge just because it doesn't draw more aggro, but being a drunken monk, I shouldn't have to be affraid of aggro.


(Im on the fence as to changing my path, the quest is done, just needs to be turned in, but im trying my best to stay drunk)

I'm a drunken monk. Level 38 (39 probably today). Here is a recap of the drunken stances:

Drunken Mastery Stance

Attack Speed + 10%
Dodge + 5%

Drunken Fist

Damage + 15%
Aggression + 25%

Drunken Sway

Dodge + 12%
Accuracy - 5%

To be perfectly honest here, the Drunken Sway stance does pretty much nothing. If that stance was meant for us to be a good offtanker... it doesn't work. I take about the same amount of damage in that stance as I would in any of the other stances. I mean, seriously, 12% to only dodge?

With Drunken, there is no medium ground it seems. In Drunken Mastery Stance, we get attack speed increase, which should help DPS... but it really doesn't. I'm wondering if the attack speed is only on the auto-attack skill and nothing else. In the Drunken Fist stance, I seem to do a little more damage, but with the dmg and automatically generating 25% more agro, I pull agro from the MT all the time. So there needs to be a fix with the two stances there. Like:

Drunken Mastery Stance

Damage + 20%
Dodge + 5%
Aggression - 10%

Drunken Fist

Damage + 15%
Aggression + 25%

Drunken Sway

Dodge, parry, block (and whatever other skill we have for evasion) + 30%
Accuracy - 10%

Drunken Sway would be similar to Aum Ti... but would also stack with it.

I chose Drunken because my wife and I play together (she's a cleric). I was to be a semi-tank (medium tank if you will)... but I get owned faster than a Psi with no gear. The description of what a drunken monk was to be is not what it has become... especially after the one nerf to our mitigation.

I'm not saying my ideas for change are perfect.. but it's something to look at. Seriously, 12% to just dodge is pathetic. Attack speed does nothing. I know we are not to be the best DPS monk... but we are not an off tank either. I gave up the DPS side of things for evasion and such... but it really seems, I gave up DPS for pretty much nothing.

What level does drunken sway go from  10% dodge to 30% dodge?

Thanks.

You are right, I mistyped that. I edited my post to reflect the correct numbers we currently have.

Here I was hoping that the drunken sway would be somewhat useful later on.  curses foiled again.

As for my own views on the drunken monk stance. I agree with the above two drunk monkeys.

Drunken Sway is worthless, and I am in drunken mastery stance just about the entire time.  With all our specials that we use, 10% haste auto attack haste is almost worthless.  At least the dodge works..the tool tip anyway.

If we want to have 3 working stances there needs to be a way to reliable change stances on the fly.  Or 3 remarkably different stances.

Drunken Mastery: DPS stance while grouping.
Drunken Fist:  Tanking stance
Drunken Sway = ??  Its a bad tanking stance as you need aggro, and with the accuracy penalty you gain even less aggression. 

Maybe something along the lines of adding a debuff or increasing threat as a result of dodging.  This was in fact the lesson you get taught when learning drunken style.  Dodge to piss them off and make your enemy do something to expose a weakness.

While I agree that they need to definitely help you guys out with evasion, etc if you were to get:

u]Drunken Mastery Stance[/u]
Damage + 20%
Dodge + 5%
Aggression - 10%

why would you ever use anything else? That would make you a better dps machine than a Dragon monk...

Then reduce the dmg a little to be under that of Dragon. Why would we use anything else? Because this offers nothing in the way of evasion (like Drunken Sway would give us) nor anything in the way of getting and keep agro (like Drunken Fist would give us).

I said they probably were not perfect, but it's something to consider.. and if it's higher than dragon monks, reduce it to below.. that's fine with me.. I'll take the DPS hit to be able to off tank.

Quinn,

I love the idea of stances as they help give each monk style a particular subset of flavor.
As monks of the 3 schools we will all be called apon to off-tank, DPS and save our skins.
We will approach these 3 aspects differently based on our style and some will excel in each of the 3 subcomponents then the others.

Currently my understanding is:
Dragon = Dps
Harmonious = Dps/off-tank/debuff - a jack of all trades but a master of none.
Drunken = Off-tank

As a Dragon I have a stance to off-tank but limited abilities to help augement that stance - so I can off tank but will not do it as well as my Harmonious nor Drunken brethren.  Carry that thought process forward for the other aspects of our roles and that should help develop the stances.

My wish list after our stances have been fixed/tuned is that the developers add more ability to the individual stances as we get upgrades to those stances.  Currently it seems that the abilities remain the same from the lower tier stance but just get buffed going into the next tier, thats beneficial but I would like to see new elements added into the next tier stance.  This would allow the developers to add more flavor to each of the 3 styles without overloading us with more hotbar buttons.  I would also like to see upgrades to our stances occur in shorter level spans, currently I think t2 stance is gained at lvl 30, thats 15 levels before we see an upgrade.  A mob i faced at lvl 15 is vastly different then what I am going to face at lvl 29. 

A Possible stance achivement curve could be t1=lvl 15, t2=lvl 25, t3=lvl 35, t4=lvl 45 and t5 which would be mastery tier at lvl 50.  This would allow appropriate additions to our power base but in closer intervals and more tuned to what we are going to encounter at those level ranges.

Just some thoughts for the future.

KageKiri

I went Dragon for the sole reason of the regeneration ability, I figured it would be a pretty easy fix by the time I started playing a monk. I like to solo so figured it would help keep downtime, well, down heh.
Personally I think it should be equal to eating food when out of combat, least an apple. The stacking issue of course, and make the other stance an option since i cant tell a difference using it. I still get my rear end beat down way faster then my equal geared and level bard.

I play much of the classes in the game, SOE all access so i got 4 extra slots, and monks really do feel like the most "broke".
Is there a way to say, even for one patch, a monk total review of stances and just get em fixed. Tired of all the dps talk really until the stances are fixed to really judge where our dps is at.
Plus the stances is what defines the class much like shamans and should really set us each apart who go dragon/drunken/harm instead of "Im going Harm cause it isnt broke really". Decisions made on brokeness isnt really a decision.

Thanks for posting QTM, thought you were hiding from all the negativity lately on here   :D

I lurk... never hide.   ::)

I am truely passionate about the class. Prolly to the level of Soluss ( I just cant get involved in some threads to his level under the Handle QTM). So all the negativity really doesnt faze me. The monk has SO much potential I just get giddy over it.  :idiot2:
I appreciate all the Drunks coming out of the closet so to speak. :2funny: and chime in.

~QTM

Much due respect to you QTM, I truly understand how hard you're working for us and I appreciate it as much as the next Monk.

But I'm sick of hearing the word "potential" and having it related to our class. I think it's high time for this "potential" to become something a little more tangible.

Thats because they found out that their bottle of White Lightning was being replaced with a 2c bottle of Ripple!  >:(

I was just recently browsing the other class forums and I came across a particular Ranger thread that caught my eye. Something to the effect of "Anyone else capable of regular 6k+ crits?"

6k+ crits? That's like 2x the damage of my highest legendary so far.  :embarassed:

And I'm using Zank  :buck2:

They need to like give Ranger's a penalty on their bow shots so that maybe 10% of the time an arrow backfires and shoots them in the face dealing like 2000 damage or something.  :smitten:

Back to being on topic, Dragon needs a lot of reworking as many have you already had  pointed out.

My closest Monk friend in game is the same level as I and had just recently switched over to Harmonious and was LOLing at his decision to choose Dragon back in the day.

This is not acceptable, the three stances are so far from balanced right now I daresay fixing them is more important than anything else.

I have conceptual hang ups with choosing anything other than a Dragon monk which is what I've wanted to play since hearing about the stances pre-release and no matter how great the disparity between the two are, I will never switch and it's not acceptable that I'm somewhat gimped for doing that.

The +% crit stance on Harmonious gives any Monk with a two hander like Zank the ability to feel like Tony Montana with a Tommy Gun and a hangover DPS wise and leaves us Dragon Monks feeling like 3rd grade martial arts students just prior to receiving their yellow belt.

Storm Dragon Stance is certainly cool; hell I love seeing lightning arc through my target on every hit, but the fact that it blocks out Secrets coupled with the fact that it does nothing to increase either my critical or actual DPS is unacceptable from the standpoint of a Dragon Monk. If anything, move the "proc" from this stance over to a Secret like ability only accessible to Dragon Monks and give us a stance similar to Harmonious crit stance but that allows us to actually surpass it in DPS (we are after all, the DPS mastery correct?).

I do not see the point in giving the DPS mastery form a regeneration stance. This IMHO needs to be completely replaced with something that perhaps as many others have said provides a boost to our AOEing ability.

Stone Dragon is fine conceptually, I think it's very fitting to have a stance that bolsters our AC for the time's we have to off-tank, but I think the AC needs to be increased and I also think it should give us some kind of damage shield. Recycled idea yes, but it's a good one that I agree with. It also fits the concept of a Dragon Monk.

Ryoku,
Why should we care if Rangers can consistently do 6k crits?
If thats their damage we should be glad for them as we are not fighting against them we are fighting with them.
It does show that our DPS is not were it should be given all the discussions on the boards till current, but trying to bring down our Ranger brothers does us no good either.
If I'm in a party with a Ranger against a heavy boss mob I want him to be pulling 6k crits, that helps the group achieve its goal which is dead boss.

I think our concern is that compared to another light fighter, lets say a "Ranger", we are nothing more then an annoying DOT taking up a party slot, with the occasional convienance of providing wipe prevention if our FD doesn't get resisted or we don't get 2 shotted.

I would rather use other classes as a litmus scale of where we are at but not target the nerf bat at them.
I don't want anybody to be nerfed and if we monks are to be considered the base for everyones dps we can all just kiss those heroic and legendary boss lewts "Goodby!".

Lol, bud, I was making more of a joke out of it than anything.

Nerfing any class is not the solution and I'm well aware of that.

The thing I like about you most is that you can keep a level head and post very well. You can also take all our issues that sound whiney and rantish and turn them into a well thought out statement. To be the person that actually talks to Sigil.. this kind of quality is imperative

That post was semi my fault when me and another ranger got into an arguement over what I said to be can hit that number he took it as always hit that number.  Therefore he posted on the ranger forums to get everyone to laugh at me.

Heh, all is good Brother Soluss. BTW I was serious about adding a backfire to Ranger bows.   :2funny:       

As a Dragon monk currently, to put my thoughts into bullet point form:


In general where the Dragon monk should be conceptually:
-We should be doing a lot more damage than a Harmonious in order to make up for our total loss of extra evasion and utility.
-Our AoEs need to not just be viable, but the best among melee fighters.


The current state of the stances:
Storm stance - Bugged in many ways, with low damage. It's only our default stance by virtue of the other two having no real use.
Dragon stance - Does nothing.
Stone stance - Nobody ever says, "This looks like a job for Stone stance"; because it has no role. The only reason people would switch to it is if they want to inch out every bit of added defense/mitigation they can get, even though stone stance's added mitigation won't make a noticeable impact on their survivability.


Changes needed to specific stances:

Storm Stance
-It should scale better with level.
-It should stack with secrets.
-It should do a lot more damage.
-It should proc the damage on every target you hit with an AoE.
-It shouldn't miss or fail to proc.
-It should provide an additional damage buff that only applies to AoE attacks, which would help increase our superiority as an AoE user compared with the other forms.

Stone stance.
-The AC buff is too low to make a noticeable impact in your ability to survive during most encounters. The impact of this stance is such that nobody says "Hmm, maybe stone stance would be best for this encounter".
-A damage shield should be added on top of the AC buff. The damage shield would absorb a percentage of the mob's attacks and return it back onto them.
It fits conceptually with the monk's main defensive stance being about AC and helping to kill multiple targets faster.
-Thus, the added mitigation provided with the damage shield on top of it helping to kill faster would make storm stance a more interesting and viable stance.
-The combined mitigation of the AC and damage shield should be significantly less than the total evasion gained by the Harmonious evasive stance, and the Harmonious evasive stance should be less than that gained from the Drunken evasive stance (currently Harmonious can gain more evasion than a Drunken for some reason).
With the Harmonious having 16% total evasion from their evasive stance, the Dragon damage shield could absorb 5% of incoming damage (returning it back to the attacker) and still only put the Dragon's total increased mitigation at 10%. That would put it on par with the current Drunken evasive stance of +10%, but we can all agree that is way too low for Drunken form and will have to be increased to at least 20% to be better than what the Harmonious evasive stance has to offer.
-The damage shield could start at 2.5% at level 15, and scale up every 5 levels to eventually be 5% at level 50.

Dragon stance.
-This is our neutral stance, the one that is suppose to offer little benefit but no downsides. As such, I don't think we'll ever see it replaced with something like an AoE enhancing stance (And storm stance could be fixed to serve this role anyway).
-The first possible improvement would be to fix it so it does as it describes; Give us a significant increase in health regeneration, both in combat and out of combat. But that in itself is not something I think will be very useful because we all know the in-combat health regeneration would be so miniscule as to be non-existent.
-But I favor two alternatives for making this stance useful.
1. Make it an enhancement of vitality based in-combat health regeneration and run speed. This would allow for Dragon monks, who max vitality and even get gear that buffs it, to make in-combat health regeneration fast enough that it becomes a viable means of increasing survivability when compared to if they had just dumped those points into constitution for added HP and resistances.
Originally this is what I thought the stance was meant to do, because I envisioned in-combat health regeneration and increased run speed from vitality being more monk-like than simply increasing his HP and resistances.
2. A more simple change would be to have the Dragon stance increase out of combat health and endurance regeneration, in addition to giving a slight run speed increase like 10%. This makes the stance useful as something to be in out of combat, not just for reducing downtime but also for getting to your next target faster.
This would be fitting for the Dragon monk as an offensive force that moves and strikes faster than other monks, because there is less downtime and travel time between fights.

Monk Path of the Drunken Style

"The way of the drunken monk is one of deception and unseen power.  Practitioners of the drunken style are taught to keep themselves off balanced, striking from impossible angles and tempting opponents to strike at openings that do not really exist.  Students learn to stagger about to dodge and infuriate their opponents.  They also learn to use powerful counterattacks which benefit them greatly due to their evasive nature."

Given the Grandmaster's assesment of drunken monks (and who am I to argue with a Grandmaster), drunken style monks excel at evasion while exploiting deceptive manuevers that infuriate their opponents.  As such, our stances should be evasive by nature and reflect this path of "deception and unseen power".

I'm sure these could be tweaked, but this would be my general vision of what drunken monks should bring to the table.

Proposed Drunken Style Stances


- Drunken Fist Stance - 15%(20,25) damage increase, 5%(10,15) accuracy increase

The most offensive of the drunken style stances, Drunken Fist Stance represents the unseen power of the drunken style monks.  In this stance, drunken monks sacrifice their more deceptive and complex evasive manuevers in favor of powerful focussed attacks.  Because of this, drunken monks fighting in this style forego any evasive benefit beyond their base ability to dodge or parry incoming attacks.  Damage and accuracy bonus scale with level.


- Drunken Sway Stance - 20%(25,30) dodge and parry increase, 20%(30,40) increased agro generation

The most defensive of the drunken style stances, Drunken Sway Stance embodies the uniquely evasive nature of the drunken style monk.  The off balanced and staggering steps of the Drunken Sway Stance infuriate opponents, tempting them to strike relentlessly at openings that do not exist.  Dodge, parry, and agro generation increase with the monks level.


- Drunken Master Stance - 10%(15,20) dodge and parry increase, 50% damage reduction, Agro generated from this stance is redirected towards the monks defensive target

The Drunken Master Stance is the epitome of the drunken monk's deceptive nature. Instead of infuriating his opponent, the swaying steps and mishappen attacks of the Drunken Master Stance work to confound and placate the monk's opponent.  In a subtle and uncanny dance of drunken style subterfuge, monks in this stance are able to redirect aggression in the midsts of the chaos of battle.  Dodge and parry increase with the monks level.

I'm way too apathetic about my monk and Vanguard in general lately to chime in with anything that hasn't been said already. I just saw

"This looks like a job for Stone Stance."

and couldn't help laughing for 30 seconds straight. The thought of someone saying such a thing so eagerly is just hilarious...I can just see them switching to Dragon Stance afterward for downtime with a gleam in their eyes...

The sad thing is, stone stance used to be rather useful on EQ1...sad times...:(

I may be misinterpreting your post, but I think you took that phrase WAY out of context.

This is the type of  three completely separate and useful style of stances I would want to see.    It fills each role we'd want to fill and does it in the nature of the drunken monk.  I think the hard numbers maybe a bit off after the avoidance nerf and what Sigil wants to see from static avoidance gains, but all and all they are very good ideas.

It's funny ... a month ago Tiger stance was widely considered by Harmi monks as the gimp stance that only a few people use 8\    Now it's * the * stance to use.  On the other hand nobody ever use Crane again.

Most players envision revamping the stances to where each stance is equally useful, but it's worth noting that the devs clearly follow this pattern when it comes to the three stances of each form:
Offensive stance.
Neutral Stance (Very little benefit, but no downside).
Defensive stance.
And with the exception of Drunken Fist stance, all the Offensive/Defensive stances have a positive and negative associated with them.
So we may be more likely to see changes that stick to this framework.


My thoughts on Zend's ideas:
1. I don't see how a strait up large damage and accuracy increasing stance fits the Drunken concept. It is also something pretty powerful considering the other two form offensive stances have major drawbacks (Storm stance has one built in, but it currently doesn't function).
The current +damage and +hate stance is more fitting conceptually, even if it's not as useful having your aggro generation and defensive stances seperate. But then maybe you were intended to switch between them, and you weren't intended to have it as easy as tanks do (Only tanks have defensive stances with +aggro generation built into it).

2. I like your third stance concept of something that increases defensive target hate, but from a practical standpoint your line up does not include a neutral stance so getting this may not be likely.
An alternative to this stance would be to merge it with Drunken Fist, giving you a stance that gives +15% damage and +25% aggro to your defensive target. This would allow you to use it on either yourself or someone else.

3.  25-30% total evasion gain is the minimum Drunken defensive stance would need to be competitive, but getting any more than that seems very unlikely in light of the global evasion changes.
I also don't believe it's feasible to get such a large bonus without also getting a penalty somewhere. Even tanks don't get to use their defensive stance without some kind of significant penalty. The -10% accuracy should stay in place of aggro generation, the later of which would just be benefit stacked on benefit with no downside at all.

I use Crane quite a bit when soloing or when I have to emergency off-tank.

~QTM

   You have to give this stance a + to aggro some how or it will be remain worthless other then sort of soloing stance.  Whats the point of avoiding 20% attacks or whatever, if the mob ends up on your healer because you miss with your attacks.

   I understand the way the devs are making the stances.  Two with larger bonuses but draw backs, and one neutral, but that does not mean that all three should be viable and have their own purpose.
   
   Drunken Mastery is our neutral stance.  It gives a marginal dps increase with auto attack haste, and a minor avoidance increase.  All this for no side effect.   If you leave this as the base you can tweak the other two as you see fit.

Example:

Drunken Fist:
+Damage (just like now)
-Avoidance or AC

Drunken Sway:
+Dodge / Parry
+Aggro
-Damage / accuracy and or -movement speed
It goes against the style of a drunken monk to lose damage or accuracy based on how the game / lore tells us we are suppose to fight, but sometimes you just don't have any other mechanics to balance with.

I also avoided putting in hard numbers to avoid nit picking percents and what not, that would really be up to the devs on how they want to balance.  These suggestions would make the stances viable for different roles the Drunken Monk would perform.

I tried using Crane again w/ Tranquility... but I found using Zank w/ Tiger actually solos better because i can kill the mob faster and thus lose less HP, even when Tranquility has more DPS than Zank. Oh well.

Edit: Oh Crane is useful for travelling~ 25% less end cost for soaring leap   ::)

I guess its a gear related decsion then as I have a nice martial sword so I can effectively keep QP and DA on the mobs and when I can I use the North Wind serires too. It may take me longer but I am rarely in danger of dying.

So in essence we can  both be "Right"  :crazy2:

~QTM

I use nice hand 2 hand weapons (2 Claws of Bloodletting, level 40 rare) at level 33 and I waste about 50-60% of my HP fighting equal level 2 dots.  =/ 

To be honest though, even with fixed stances and damage output something radical has to be done with the general playstyle.

We have the worst of two worlds: Our buffs have so tiny durations that we need to keep a constant eye on them if we want to keep them up at all times.
On the other hand, our attacks - beyond the normal spam abilities - have insane reuse timers.
5 minutes (and Jin) to get a guaranteed critical (with global cooldown to boot) or a guaranteed finisher? 10 minutes to get a 1 minute proc boost (which is probably a bug - according to tooltip it's suppose to last 20 sec)? 30 minutes (and a global cooldown - which is probably again a bug) for 20 seconds damage spike? 2 minutes to deal an aoe finisher which isn't much stronger than flying kick (and nothing compared to the AoE finishers on a 1 minute cooldown rangers for example have). 2 minutes for our style specific finishers, which in the case of harmonious gives a 20 second debuff - and an actually lower damage than Flying Kick (even though the tooltips would indicate a fairly equal amount, North Winds deals significally less)?
Oh, and lest I forget, debuffs that lasts 16 seconds on level 15 and lasts 16 seconds on level 50. It's not all that fun to refresh debuffs because they can't scale with ranks (since damage scaling is off).

This leads to a rather quick boredom, you need to spam the buffs to maintain decent output, but your combat will be so static because the specials are either underpowered or have such immense reuse that they aren't really considered alternatives. In the end, on most grinds (ie where things aren't really challenging, you easily just skip the buffs and skip the long reuse abilities and just spam away.)

Buffs are generally a free resource - you wont notice any downtime when the whole party is being buffed. I don't see why our buffs couldn't have some decency of duration.
I also don't see why our combat abilities need such ridicilously long cooldowns - they would easily lend to a varied strategy if they were actually accountable...

Agreed.  Many, if not most, of the higher level monk abilities are on at least 5 minute timers, making these abilities not useful at all.  Most of these supposedly uber monk skills arent even that good either.

And the Harmi debuffs need to have duration extended w/ upgrades, or its effectiveness increased drastically.  As of now I can safely say 90% of Harmi monks only use Eagle Claw.

Slight derail here, but I summed up the comments from this thread and from the PMs I have recieved over the past several days. I feel this list is a good start and getting the stances where they need to be. I appreciate any feedback you can provide.

Dragon Style Stances

Storm Dragon
* Procs need to have the thier damage upped. Also the Proc can be missed ( I can understand resisted but missed)
* There are stacking issues with this stance and the Secrets line that need to be resolved
* Proc needs to hit on all targets when performing AE attacks
* Perhaps add a crit chance boost or add % Based Damage boost will make it more effective
* Add a damage shield component

Dragon Stance
* Health Regen is not working. Also this component needs to be an in combat item. This could be solved easily by turning the stance into a heal over time with infinite duration (similar to a pally's auras). This would need to scale with level.
* Perhaps improved versions of the stance can remove poison / diseases or other effects

Stone Dragon Stance
* The Fire / Cold rune needs to actually apply itself
* Mitigation needs to scale with level
* The slow component should decrease as improved versions are used.


Drunken Monk Stances

Drunken Mastery Stance
* The Haste Component doesn't help at all as it only effects auto attack. It needs to be changd. Change it to a % weapon based attack buff.
* Remove the +5 Dodge and add in a small aggro reduction component

Drunken Fist Stance
* Change the attack buff to a damage reduction (small)
* Add a Dodge Modifier to compensate for the dmg reduction
* increase the hate generating component.

Drunken Sway Stance
* Change the dodge from +12 to Dodge +10 and Parry +5 evasion needs to be beefed up some
* Possibly make use of the "glancing blow" functionality from beta 2 to simulate rolling with a punch / strike.
* Keep Accuracy at -5%

Harmonious Body Style Stances

Crane Stance
* There are several stacking issues with Aums and Shaman spells that need to be addressed. Over all it works well.

Harmonious BOdy Stance
* The Jin increase needs a tweak upwards.
* Possibly add a Jin reduction component with the stance although if you tweak up the jin regen enough it essentially does the same thing.

Tiger Stance
* Again, there appear to be stacking issues with crit enhancing abilities / items that suggest a hard cap or stacking issues these need to be looked at.
* Many feel the end cost penalties may be too harsh. Perhaps a slight reduction in end costs may be in order.

QTM,

As a Dragon your summarized list for the dragon stances is good money.  If the devs were able to deliver this I would be a happy Dragon.

I would see this as making us fixed with latter patchs bringing in enhancements to enrichen the stances even further.

Thanks QTM and I hope we can see this live soon.
psst - A little prophetic vision of an approximate rough guess to see live would go along way.

Yeah the Dragon Style stances are a nod in the right direction, but I still don't think our damage or DPS problems will be solved by only changing stances.  We need a buff or two that will help out with damage, a 1 hour buff or something that doesn't eat up jin so fast as Iron Hand (which I think should be an hour buff, but hey that's just me). 

If a stance can cure poison/disease, some serious thought needs to put into the harmonious self-cleanse buff (30 minute (...) reuse, 6 jin, 2 minute duration, clear poison/disease/curses each second (but it's actually hard to find things it does cure, appears the tags aren't in properly yet)) that I fail to recall the name off (Diamond Something?). Well, some serious thought needs to be put into any ability with 30+ min reuse, but still.


With Aum Ti, I for one don't feel like the endurance cost is to harsh (it's 30% more with it). While the amout of abilities I use is limited (quite actually because of the ridicilious reuses or durations, not because of costs) I don't generally have an endurance problem unless RNG starts hating me and I don't crit for a while. Even without Aum Ti, I didn't really have endurance issues.
With a cleric/bear-shaman, I simply can't run out of endurance. With the exception of possible stacking issues that should be resolved, Tiger stance is by far the most potent offensive stance currently, even with the endurance penalty. That might actually change if we got an Aum that could actually compete with Ti, naturally.

Drunk Monk level 20...

As pointed out elsewhere, Drunken Fist stance doesn't have text or maintained effect icon feedback to show you it is truly in effect.  (This is reportedly cosmetic but is stance related and does need fixed.)

I tend to keep in Drunken Mastery stance as I don't seem to notice the increased damage of Drunken Fist as much as the haste of the Mastery.  Now it has been posted here that the haste of Mastery only is affecting the autoattacks?  But, my purely subjective impression was that I was getting more frequent chains/reactions with Mastery than Fist, and had attributed that to the haste effect.  Therefore, since we do the greatest damage with chains and reactions and the like, this led me to note that I kill things faster with Mastery than Fist.

I don't know if this is a false impression on my part, or if in fact the haste is only on autoattacks, if they can trigger chains/reactions to account for my impression.  I reserve the right for my impression to be illusory  :laugh:

As posted many times already, Sway has no usefulness to me personally for widely stated reasons, so in essence I have 2 real stances to choose from.  And since I kill monsters faster in Mastery (mainly soloing) I really have ended up remaining in the same stance all the time.

You use your recues and aggro tools. And if need be you switch to your offensive stance when you want to pull something, but switch to defensive once you've got the aggro.

I'm going to have to respectfully disagree with some notions that have been put forth, of where Drunken Style stances should be.  I think Lorr Evander understood what I was attempting to suggest by saying these stances were completely seperate and useful by filling each roll we'd be expected to play as a Drunken Style Monk.  Perhaps I should explain the reasoning behind my suggestions.

While all monks share some abilities of each style, each style of monk also has their own set of Mastery Abilities representative of their respective styles.  I believe that in turn, each style's stances should also reflect those unique abilities and enable monks to perform the roles that their style is expected to contribute.  I'm thinking largely in terms of gameplay mechanics, where each style of monk contributes some defined role for the party.

I think that most everyone agrees that the Drunken Style Monk is, or should be, geared towards off-tanking.  I see the Drunken Monk as the party member that does several specific things in that capacity for the group.  For example:

- Taking that "add" and keeping it busy until the until the tank is ready and the situation is under better control,  and then redirecting that mob to the tank.
- Pulling mobs off of casters and healers when the tank's ability to keep agro is stretched thin.
- Assisting tanks in holding agro during intense battles.
- Doing baseline dps when off-tanking isn't needed.

These are the types of roles I see reflected in the Drunken Style abilities, and these are the types of roles people could reasonably expect Drunken Style Monks to play.  I see different, but equally effective and important roles for the other styles of monks as well.

Keep in mind, the numbers I've attached to these stances were pulled out of the air and are, for all intensive purposes, meaningless.  That is something the developers would need to determine and tune.  It's the concept of the stances and their contribution to gameplay for the expected roles of Drunken Monks that I'm suggesting.


There will most certainly be circumstances where Drunken Monks will want/need to fill the role of dps.  This offensive stance would fill that role, allowing the Drunken Monk accuracy and increased damage at the expense of any extra evasion.  This stance would generate far more agro than usual, hitting more often and for more damage.  In fact, a monk gaining agro in this stance better be prepared for it. It won't be pretty when that 4/5 dot mob cracks you upside the head whle not in a defensive stance.  We all know how soft monks are.

The numbers I've attached to this stance are perhaps high, but a flat damage increase is consistent across abilities and easy to tune.  I also believe that the other two styles should have a more agressive, accurate, and damaging offensive stance.  While dps is not the strong suit of this style, a Drunken Monk should be able to perform that role to some base extent. 

I actually see this as the most "neutral" of the Drunken Monk's stances, and not used as often considering the primary role that the other stances would allow him to excel at.  Heck, take the damge increase off, slap on very small evasion boost and call it neutral. 



It makes particularly good sense to have agro generation on the drunken monk's defensive stance.  The very in-game description of the Drunken Monk contributes their evasive style to infuriating opponents. 

Protective fighters generate agro from their defensive stances, so too should the "off-tank" of monks.  Remember that this is evasion and strikes will get through.  Given a reasonable level of evasion, there is no way in hell that any monk will ever be able to "tank" even remotely as well as a protective fighter.  We simply do not have the hit points or mitigation to sustain heavy blows for any length of time.

Coupled with our rescues and agro tools, this stance would allow the Drunken Monk to naturally excel in the role he is expected to play.



I'll admit, I'm in love with this idea.  It seems a natural fit for the role Drunken Monks are expected play in groups.  The idea of agro redirection is naturally fitting for the Drunken Monk, as well an immensily useful purpose for groups.  In addition, this would really help to define the roles each style would be expected to play.

The bottom line is, I don't feel that the current stances of the drunken monk are anywhere near what would allow them to make the most use of their Mastery Abilities; nor do I believe the current stances conducive to allowing the Drunken Monk to perform their expected role as the off-tank of light fighters.

The main hangup with your proposed offensive and defensive stances is that they have increased bonuses and no inbuilt penalties. The Monk stances don't work that way. In fact, most stances in general don't work that way. You've usually got to sacrifice something to get something else.

 

The Drunken monk already has the capability to fill the DPS role with his basic Monk abilities.
What the Drunken monk doesn't get is many extra ways of increasing his raw DPS over the base monk levels, because he has chosen to sacrifice that in exchange for tools geared towards offtanking and aggro management.

The Drunken monk already has a +damage and +aggro stance. And it's the only offensive or defensive stance among the monk forms that doesn't have a penalty associated with it.

So given what is already there and what the place of the Drunken Monk is, it can't be justified giving them a powerful pure damage and accuracy boosting stance, especially one with no downside.
As is part of the vision already, any drunken offensive stance should be flavored to aid offtanking or aggro management - Either by increasing their aggro, or by increasing/decreasing the aggro of their defensive target.


That's exactly what the neutral stance already does. It's a small evasion boost and really nothing else.

You can't get a  +evasion and +aggro stance with no downside. Even tanks don't get that.
What you'd end up with is a +evasive stance with the +aggro component only being there to allow you to grab aggro in spite of your damage penalty for that stance.

One possibility is to incorporate aggro into both the defensive and offensive stances. The difference being that the offensive one allows you to redirect the aggro to your defensive target, while the defensive one just helps you hold aggro on your own target.

This would give the offensive stance a much greater tactical use. In exchange the offensive stance should get some kind of penalty. I don't know why it doesn't already have some kind of penalty, because all the other offensive and defensive monk stances do.

It's the neutral stance. Like the Jin regeneration of Harmonious or Health (if working) of Dragon. It dosen't upgrade either (faik!), much like it's the other styles.
Extra agro from an offensive stance is a penalty, because it limits the use of it. Now, monks have little issues with shedding agro, but it still requires a bit more eye work and diminishes DPS due to the global cooldown of FD. But if you're soloing, duoing or otherwise grouped where you are the one desnigated to take the beating, this might not come of as a penalty - but in reality, it is.


Accuracy loss is generally worse than damage loss agreed - if you want a stance which produces agro you would want one that does it at a steady pace (ie, accurate) rather than a spiky. You don't really want the form not used simply because the unreliablity to land rescues, taunts and whatever. Accuracy penalty is harsh.
As for tanking, mitigation beats avoidance any day of the week; and heavy tanks are quite capable of generating rather decent amout of avoidance to boot.


Drunken offensive = +damage, +agro. Drunken neutral = +haste, +dodge. Drunken defensive = +dodge, -accuracy. ~ Or whatever the specifics are.
The reason why the stance you call offensive don't have penalties is because it's the neutral stance.

This is what is now you're right. We are offering ideas as to what we want to see adjusted to to do their jobs effectively.  A defensive stance with a huge accuracy penalty but not increase in aggro is worthless.  Its akin to making the warriors defensive stance but with out the +40% hate increase.  All they get is some avoidance and a lot lower damage.

Truth to be told, I'm against light melee as tanking specalist (it'll all just boil down to being a 2nd class tank and a 2nd class DPS - where most solutions would be better (such as normal CC)).
That said, if that's the aim of the style is to offtank, I agree with you that the stances of the Drunken Styles are funny (in the bad meaning) right now. They lack the more obvious focus that for example Harmonious has (although, the neutral stane of Drunken is perhaps the better of all neutrals) and both the offensive and defensive stance seems to be meshed up in a headacheish form.
If instead a defensive stance would be +dodge, +agro, -damage, it would be very similar to Crane Stance (although, I wouldn't mind Crane being redone, perhaps with spell avoidance/mitigation as focus instead of melee damage) which I think the developers are trying to avoid.

All i got to say is DITCH THE OFFTANKING. It is highly useless and uneffiecient.  We should focus more on DPS and second our mastery utility.

Why is offtanking for us useless and unefficien? Well when we group we uselly encounter 4 dots that are higher n level then use and some times equale or lower lvl then us. Lower lvl and equal hurt alot, but higher lvl hurt even more. Even with ur combined parry dodge of 20-30%, well with even con mobs and lower we do not even dodge parry at that percentage. And with our med armor, and doesnt absorbe much damage. Miuch better for us to FD and to nerve hit, 30 seconds the mob does nothing, so no mana waisted on healing us cause if we offtank we suck all the mana out of the healers. Over that casters, rogues... can sleep, stun charm....

Our tankig ability should be some what good vs 3 dots and lower.

Like other have said they need to revise our skills, cuse some have such long timers that there utility out weight there usefullness, like long timer, excessive jin use, low power...

Some thing that could help all monks is with defensive target, if he dodges, parrys or blocks it actives our related skills.

I can only speak for Harm since i am one. as of lvl 27 we have 2 debuffs in our mastery. The str debuff should be converted in to dot instead of the damage don at the end. This wold make it more usefull to keep this up. Since our utility is our debuff, buffs i think they should add a few. Wave in the clouds should have it timer reduced to like 5-10min and make it a castable buff on self or defensive target.

As for others i can only speculate since i have no experience with them. Dragon well we can all agree that there utility is there DPS. As for drunken monks, there defensive targets they can increase its defense, and maybe as some one els said they can manage agro. So they can trick mobs in doing what they want. Since drunken monks are know to trick there enemie and beeing plaufull while fighting they could fit them right.

i might hvae forgottent some stuff since i had to write it a second time cause when i posted it, i got logged out.

added. wow it did it a 3rd time but this time i copied and pasted befor posted.

I believe the damage shield idea was for the Stone Dragon stance and not the Storm Dragon.  It would be kinda useless in Storm Dragon since we'd likely use that stance when grouped and if we were to offtank, we'd switch into Stone Dragon.

Also, does the proc in Storm only work when using AOE's?  If so, is there a reason why it shouldn't apply to single target attacks as well?  I think this would help boost overall damage, especially after the bug with the inability to stack with secrets is removed, and I think that it should only have a chance to be resisted (not missed) and should proc on all targets hit by an AOE.  As for boosting overall damage, perhaps leaving the crit rate increase to Harmonious would be a good way to differentiate the monks, however, I think it may be cool to have the crit range on Dragon's increased so that when we crit, we crit big.  It would kind of give Dragon's something to look forward to, to see a random large number pop up on the screen every now and then (and really make pushing the envelope on managing aggro in groups interesting).

Harmonious would be critting more often, but at a normal crit range, so that their damage would be more evenly sustained and 'zen-like' with their judicious balancing of damage, endurance and jin.  Dragon's would be more like a rampaging bull in a china shop, with noticable damage from the getgo, but having to manage the damage at the onset of a fight until it was time to go all out.

Drunken should do less damage in offsensive, but have a significant aggro boost from damage so that they can take aggro quickly if needed, and then switch to a high counter attack defensive posture to stay alive and do damage through costless counter attacks to help conserve endurance.  Giving Drunken's a health regen proc or a finisher lifetap when in that stance would potentially make things interesting so that healers would be more willing to have them offtank.

I am pretty sure he meant for the proc to work on AE as well as single target.

I'd really like to see a bonus on Storm Dragon stance (or hell, whatever stance in Dragon Style, make a new one!  :P) give an additional 15-20% damage on crits.  I don't think this would be too extreme.....

A 1000 damage crit normally would only be boosted to about 1200 damage.  That would help DPS over the course of a battle and not be significantly overpowering or anything.  Hell even 30% I don't think would be too overpowering, as Dragon monks need DPS, because that's what we're specced to do.

What do other people think? 

Lots of talk about off-tanking here. While this is certainly a valuable aspect of utility us Monks are apparently supposed to have, lets not let it dilude our sole responsibility for DPS. According to the archetype branch, we are a light fighter designed to inflict massive damage. I'd rather that than be a second rate damage dealer as well as a second rate tank. That to me screams of the SK/Pally back in EQ1 before the Windblade and subsequent changes made to their damage capabilities.

That would be cool to have a +dmg % to crits on the storm dragon stance as well as the proc.  They could scale it as we get new levels of the stances to make the +% more in line with what we will see at various levels.  This would allow them to give us appropriate level damage without having to play the Buff Bat then Nerf Bat scenario.

Personally I think the stance upgrades are too spread apart and is a missed opportunity for the Devs to take advantage of an in game mechanic that they could use to buff/nerf monks at various level ranges were necessary.

Another suggestion specific to Storm Stance is to allow both the Proc and the Secrets a damage increase if we pop Jin Surge, actually you could apply that to all monk styles concerning the secrets aspect.

A little off-topic but still concerning stances is our animations when we are in our various stances.
I see other classes have little swirling things and other animations - not sure on the specifics but i do see them.

Suggestions:
Storm Dragon: we could have little flashs of lightening crackling around our hands and like swirls of electrical charges around our toon, doesn’t have to be anything over the top but noticeable to party members.

Dragon Stance: a slight golden glow, kinda like the DragonBall Z power up, doesn’t have to be obnoxious but again noticeable.

Stone Dragon: we take on an overall grey appearance kinda like the effigy guys at Lord Tsangs.

Harmonious – I don’t play so will let the harmony monks chime in.

Drunken – I don’t play but would be cool if all drunk monks got a wine gourd on their gaining of the stance.  A lot could be done with the gourd mechanic, ie. a regening health pot, a power up for their high evasion stance, etc..  Also they need to move like drunks, those are just my suggestion I will leave it to the players of those style to elaborate.

This is something hopefully we'll see implemented AFTER our core changes are made. It's doubtful we'll see any aesthetic changes to our class until finally our class is mechanically fixed. Just a matter of priority I suppose.

I'd like to see Drunken Monks boost Evasion (at cost of accuracy or something) by actually consuming alchohol!!  Like, for 10cp you can gain 10% extra dodge and 10% extra hate at cost of 5% accuracy, for 10 minutes.

But you need a Wine Gourd to put that alchohol in!  ;)

I'm going dragon, but if the Drunken animation ever goes in, I'd be all in even if I didn't plan on ever offtanking.  Stumbling around while fighting, hell even stubling while walking would just be too good to pass up.  Imagine hitting numlock to run from point A to point B and having to 'steer' your character every now and then to adjust his course.  How hilarious would that be?  ;D

edit - Those are great animation suggestions btw.

Follow the gourd!  Give me your shoes!!

...I love the wine jug idea.  AZN Channel on cable ran a show called Drunken Master, and they have run other martial arts dramas with "drunken monks" as prominent characters...they are seldom without the jug.  I confess this is the reason I chose Drunken with no consideration to other values or comparisons between the paths.  It was purely an aesthetic choice.

You can't ditch a whole form.
And evasion didn't use to be useless or inefficient. The issue here is not the concept but the execution. Drunken's evasion capabilities needs to be returned to where it was.


It was. The idea was to make stone stance give more protection on top of aiding your damage dealing, which is fitting for the Dragon Monk.


I got to thinking later that another big reason not to include +aggro in the defensive stance is because you won't always WANT to keep aggro. You're not a tank, you don't want to hold aggro permanently. So you use offensive stance to peel aggro, but then use defensive stance to survive while you temporarily hold it.

The Drunken monk isn't just about holding aggro, but managing aggro. Meaning he can shift it around to other players, drop it from himself, or gain it if need be.
So having aggro generation in both offensive and defensive stances could be a burden and interferes with your capability to manage aggro.for the benefit of the whole team.


I think most here are trying to make storm stance more complex than it really needs to be.
The concept is fine as is, it just needs a huge boost in proc damage and several bugs fixed.