I'll have to check that out...basically the macro is just a list of /cast commands, and the first one it finds available it performs:

/cast "Flying Kick II"
/cast "Kick of the Heavens I"
/cast "Thousand Fists I"
/cast "Quivering Palm I"
/cast "Stinging Backfist III"

Kick of the Heavens is only active when a successful Flying Kick has been performed.  So what's happening is, I get a chain event and I hit my macro (keyboard F) and it does a /cast FK.  Then if it lands, it opens up KotH.  I won't work until the cooldown shadow goes away, but in the meantime I get a dodge which enables Stinging backfist.  Both KotH and SB are available options at this point.  I hit F again, and the macro executes KotH, and it's at that point the icon for SB is replaced by the static KotH icon.

I'll try and see if doing it with actual mouse clicks does it as well.

well if I edit my past post this thread just keeps on sinking so whee, fresh text space for this fox!

The previously mentioned bug with the Kick of the Heavens icon is still around as of 5/17/07.  I had thought it was gone, seemed the conditions that triggered it previously had happened a few times without triggering the bug, but then it happened again this morning.  Dang!  Now it may be intermittant and hard to reproduce, maybe a crit for extra damage has to be involved now or something?  Can't pin it down.

I so, so wanted to believe that Sigil could actually build a house in the dragon's mouth and not get swallowed.

This blows.  SOE meddled with EQ after gobbling up Verant and now (as I see Sigil as largely a reborn Verant) they get to do it all over again.

SOE doesn't play nice and if this doesn't come to total blowage, I'll be amazed.

I used to try to keep it capped per level for the first few but that started to get harder and take longer, now I basically just run up and jump up whatever happens to be on my path.  If there's a rock, I run up it and jump off.  If there's a hill, run up and jump off.  I get a skillup occasionally and it doesn't take much time out from other things.  I'm up to about Safe Fall 189 that way.

I can fall ridiculous distances and take at most 100-300 damage if any.  I get the impression it is possible to "critical miss" though, I rode the Leth Nurae water slide to the pool at the top of the goddess statue, arced out into space from the top of that and died on the rocks far side of the lake at the base of the statue.  But that was back around skill 120 or so.

But yeah, if you just get in the habit of running up any incline and jumping off anything that you happen upon, you will raise it over time without a lot of trouble.  It doesn't really seem to matter how high either as long as you get airborne, it's just skillups are less frequent.  (can't confirm this.)

Hmm let me be detailed in case it matters.  I'm 23 Raki Drunken Monk on Frengrot.  I'm weilding Standard Issue Sentinel's Knuckles in primary and Dread Claws in secondary. (edit: I use the standard AI except for a map texture replacement and custom PoI points on the map so that shouldn't affect this.)(edit: I've been working on crafting for a week or so so I can't swear this is absolutely due to the patch.  Today was about the first whack whack for me in some days.)

I was in Drunken Mastery stance throughout with the reduced cooldown timers.

My bug is with the Counter bar, which for me contains Quivering Palm I and Stinging Backfist III.

In combat, when the conditions allow for Flying Kick II to go off, if successful it enables Kick of the Heavens I.  Now while the cooldown is moving down the icon so you can activate Kick of the Heavens I, say I dodge something, and get the "boing" sound effect that tells me that a counter is enabled.  If I then do the Kick of the Heavens I, then that icon (for KotH) replaces the Stinging Backfist icon in my counters bar.  I stays lit, it doesn't cool down or anything, and it knocks that ability off the bar.

At that point, I can only perform Stinging Backfist III if I drag the icon down onto a regular button bar.  Of course being there, it doesn't show the cooldown animation or the activiation timer (green bar moving across the top) or anything.

The only fix seems to be to restart the Vanguard Client.  Reloading the UI with uiload doesn't help.

I was able to replicate this 3 times today with restarts to get the icons back the way they are supposed to be in between.  In each case, it was: Flying Kick, dodge counter becomes available, KotH performed, Stinging Backfist icon replaced in the counter tray with nonfunctioning KotH icon.

It's not just graphically displaying the wrong icon either.  I have a macro that has all my specials prioritized in a list, and after the bug replaces the SB icon on the counter bar, an isolated dodge that should enable the counters and using the macro that should activate it doesn't trigger any more Stinging Backfists until I drag the icon from my abilities book down onto a normal button bar.

UPDATE 5/13/07 OK tonight it seems to have been fiddled with but now if Flying Kick is available, and I get a dodge, and I perform a Flying Kick, then Stinging Backfist is replaced by a nonfunctioning KotH icon.

I think the solution to this is that KotH needs to have an actual spot on the Chains bar or something, along with all the other finishers.  I know it is an "advanced finisher" but fine, as it has been it really has no home, I have never been able to figure out how the icon is supposed to work, replacing Flying Kick while it's available would make most sense/least harm in my mind since you need to successfully do a Flying Kick to trigger it.  But only if the Flying Kick icon came back afterwards

I say, skip the icon replacement strategy altogether because it is causing problems with the UI.  Just make the Chains bar one icon longer, put the KotH icon on it and leave it dark until a successful Flying Kick (the prerequisite.)  Problem solved.  You already have a successful coding for icons staying darked out until prerequisite conditions are met (dodge, crit, whatever) so why mess with success.

As it is, it's popping up on the bar but at the wrong place, wrong time and broken, and not resetting what it replaced when it is no longer applicable.  Tonight is different but no better than yesterday.

I actually sucessfully defended myself against an equal-level druid, which considering I stink at pvp and have no interest in it, means the druid must have really not known what he was doing

I saw someone post that people snaring you who take damage can lose snare and I pelted him with shurikens and was able to close and beat on said druid.  Might have been luck.  We were both 23.  I have as much resist jewelry as I can afford, maybe that helped.

Oh and Hitokiri, if you want hypnotic google leekspin.

~that food actually works now and can reduce downtime when soloing
~that food is so cheap that it's not unreasonable to use
~facing a group of 4 tough mobs standing next to each other and killing them, by killing one and FD, killing another and FD, then killing the last 2.
~finally learning how to make life so much easier with a couple of simple macros.

thanks for spelling it out, much clearer now!   

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.

Tooltip on Intelligence states it helps determine how well you recognize battle tactics.

1.  Anyone know if this stat just governs how fast Combat Awareness or Tactics Awareness rises upon gaining a level, or is the raw stat itself used in these functions?

2. Anyone know if raising INT results in more chains/reactions/etc due to the inference of the tooltip, or is that solely a product of your Combat Awareness and such?

I seem to recall the Ten Ton Hammer stat guide listing DEX, STR and INT as most important to Monks...not sure the source of their conclusion there, but makes me interested in the above 2 questions.

Some stats seem to have Direct or Indirect effects, STR for instance is supposed to directly affect how much damage you deal....but does INT have a direct effect on chains and the like, or only indirectly through the skills it has influence over?

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 

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.

thanks!

no idea but I've settled to a simple regimen of trying it every time I gain a level, which isn't too often.  I don't think there are any mid-level skills but it wouldn't be a huge burden to Aum every time you get adventuring points.   Takes like 30 seconds or something.  Think of it as a time to still your thoughts and contemplate nirvana.

The concept, not the dead guy in the bad sweater.

Just a casual skim of this board will show a Class Lead and a Dev who have a lively dialog seeking feedback from members of the class, which is pretty impressive if as you say Sigil hates Monks and want us to wither and die from lack of attention.

I'm willing to give it considerably more than the short time it's been Live to adjust things for normal non-beta play.  When I left EQ after about 6 years the classes were still being tweaked and presumably still are.  That Monks specifically or class balance in general are still works in progress doesn't really surprise or dismay me.

What's this newfangled Dink-a-Dope you speak of?  Back in the old days we had Rope-a-Dope and that was all we needed.  Kids nowadays, always coming up with stuff... shakes cane

OK tacked this onto existing issue threads on 2 sites and got no luck, so I'm setting it up as its own topic in the hope someone knows and will post.

Does Drunken Fist Stance currently work?

The other two Drunken stances (Mastery and Sway) you click the stance button and you get text feedback ("You have entered ___ Stance") and the circular icon for the stance appears in your maintained effects window.

Switching between Master and Sway results in similar text feedback and the new Stance icon replaces the old Stance icon.

However, for switching to Drunken Fist stance...no text, no icon, the icon for the previous Stance goes away and is not replaced by the Fist icon.  So to all appearances, in text and icons, switching to Drunken Fist appears to all the world like "no stance."

This sure looks buggy to me, and I'm not proficient enough with a parser to use one to confirm that the stated effects of Drunken Fist (10% damage 25% aggro? if I recall) are present in the absence of text or icon evidence of the Stance being in effect.

PS:  The thought came to me that perhaps Fist is the default state of a Drunken monk, and only the other two are modifiers to that base state?  Do the other two paths (Dragon, Harmonious) similarly have an "invisible" stance? (no maintained effect icon, no entered stance text?)

Thanks for any info!