A Paladin is my second main after a monk, and I can say that while they were never in as poor shape as the Monk, all the changes they've gotten have been justified.

Sigil's changes of the paladin have shown a very strong understanding of the class and what it could use the most in terms of tweaks. The fact that Talisker himself plays a Paladin would explain that now.

I'm hoping that things are just quiet because they've stepped back and are considering a more complete package of changes, but given the lack of communication that seems unlikely.

I've decided to play my paladin until the monk is brought up to where it should be. The great thing about the paladin is that they were pretty good at release, and since then have gotten nothing but beneficial tweaks and additions.

You won't notice just how much safe fall helps until you get on one of your other characters and die trying to jump down off something.

You can train it up on anything that makes you lose health when falling. You can probably train it up on jumps that don't even take away life.
You do train it faster going off larger falls, but that usually comes with much longer travel times back and forth so it evens out.

Everything I've seen so far has had people saying it gave +25% to each.

And I don't know where you're getting your information about how evasion is actually calculated, but we know that in-game evasion stacks up additively in the tool-tip window for a total "evasion" percentage.

Not a Drunken monk. Their evasive stance was never as overpowering as the +75% of the Harmonious Crane.

Restoring Drunken to the 30% it was before would not make a Monk equal to a real tank, but it would make offtanking something that is consistently effective and viable.

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.


1. Monks are about base DPS. They are suppose to do more than a Rogue who is not stealthed/behind/stalking a target, and more than a Ranger who has not spent time studying his target in prolonged battles. So while DPS is important, it's not the only thing the monk cares about or the only thing he's suppose to bring to the table.

2. Each form has a different focus. Drunken is suppose to be the best off tank outside of a real tank, combining light tanking with good DPS.
Now if you don't want that capability then don't go with that form. Simple. If all your care about is DPS then you've got a form for that too - Dragon. And if you want to be all around good there's Harmonious.

3. For those who like the concept of the Drunken monk and want to play it; A class that combines high DPS with good offtanking, as Drunken use to, is not "second rate". Taking any component by itself would be second rate, but like any class in this game that brings many things together the final class is greater than the sum of it's parts. A Drunken monk, once fixed, would be the only class that combines high DPS with unmatched light tanking and aggro management tools, making him a valuable addition to any team.

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.

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.

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.

Dragon is no less broken or gimped than the others.
In truth, Harmonious is regarded by most as being the most complete and least gimped right now.

Dragon:
Storm stance damage is low and doesn't stack with secrets.
Dragon stance does nothing.
Stone stance only adds about +5% mitigation.

Harmonious is capable of doing as much damage as Dragon, possibly more, through use of Tiger stance and it's debuffs.
The only advantage Dragon seems to have is that it requires less effort to do it's damage (You don't have to jump between stances, and you don't have to debuff first), so it may be more consistent.
But Dragon losses out on the powerful evasive stance of Harmonious and the fairly useful jin gaining stance.
Dragon also loses out on the added team utility of debuffs.

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.

The Qualian Racial, Swiftness of Sands, is a 10 second buff that basically grants you 100% evasion. The only time I've had it fail on me was when I had my back to a target, and failed to evade.

I ran into basically the same problem at that level on Kojan because there's not much to solo around level 16-20.

Your best is to get a group for the Ra-Jin forest.

The Dragon Monk should do significantly more damage than the Harmonious monk, because they get no additional evasion or utility.
AoE damage alone is unlikely to ever be powerful enough to single handedly make up for no evasion, no utility, and single target damage that is only equivalent to what a Harmonious monk can achieve.

Things are really out of whack right now because not only do Harmonious monks do damage equivalent to a Dragon monk, but they have better evasion than a Drunken monk. Added on top of that their utility.
It's no wonder why most people play harmonious and are generally happy with it.

That's not to say Harmonious monks should be nerfed, but it just illustrates how badly out of shape both the Dragon and Drunken monk are.
The Harmonious monk is about where he should be, and if all they did was prop up the Dragon's damage and Drunken's evasion relative to where the Harmonious monk is, it would set everything right.

In case you didn't know; You can change the look of your character at any time after you've made it. Hit the customize button on the character screen and you can fully customize your look all over again.