Id personally rather not be a raid tank, just being able to function in groups is enough for me, which mainly requires
1) defensive stance to have + hate (not middle)
2) jeering kick to be more useful


I like hate transfer, something like eq1 where we can feed x amount of hate from each attack to the tank would be nice.  Require us to be in MT group or something so its balanced.  Or a group only hate reduction buff that effects casters AND melee, requiring us to be in the group. 


I like high melee dps, just dont want to see dragon become elemental reliant unless they get all 6 elements that way they can do the job right.  If they only get 3/6 elements, it seems like they would only be good 50% of the time. They do seem more melee oriented then dragons, so it wouldnt be horrible. 

Appreciate the input

Agreed, i personally am already leveling a shaman and psi to 50 incase monks become obsolete.  I enjoy raiding but if I will be benched then ill find a way into the raid with a more usefull class

First off you are wrong in how Errant strike/fist of celerity works.

It adds an extra swing, not doubles your current damage.  JOLT doubles your current damage.

TF - 8k
FoC- 8k +8k
ES+Foc - 8k+8k+8k
ES+Foc+jolt - 16k+16k+16k

So under the current system it would be more accurate to say.

              CURRENT              NEW
TF                5289                  3920
FoC             10578                7158
ES               15156                13630
QJ               30312                26577

Sano is an incredibly frustrating/buggy fight.  It took me 10 tries to beat him because he would still hit me even if i reflected the spell. 

However when i beat sano, i got the update and instantly ported out, never saw a chest or got to loot anything

2) it would seem to me that how it is sposed to work with quickblade would be:
=(900+100+500)+(900+100+500)
 since, if you hit the shank button twice you would get:
[button hit 1]
=900+100+500
[button hit 2]
=900+100+500

*NOT* as talisker is suggesting =(900+100+900+100)+500

can you explain why he is going with the later explanation?


I asked the same thing, and their answer was a un appeasing "because thats how we want it to be now"  Basiclly your 100% right on how it should be (its actually pretty close to how it is atm), it just comes down to difference of oppinion.  Developers feel melee are too over powered so they find ways to nerf existing systems. 

The issue comes down to flat damage being added to melee damage.  For skills like boundless fist, its Melee + bonus damage, so if boundless fist hits twice, you get 2x melee + bonus.... and the melee CONTAINS the + damage.  For weapon dmg attacks (shank) its just adding the +flat to the end of the attack.  It should work the same for MELEE and WPN DMG based attacks. 

My best guess is its harmonious monk+bear shaman stacking -15% mitigation (minus 30 total), with max ac debuffs and rogue force crits.

That nets you 8 seconds of a mob with 30% less mit, and garunted crits on thousand fists/thunder fist.
Max + damage % buffs (belt of ages, paladin aura, bard song, cleric buff)  AND jolt/errant/quickening. 

Cant really test it till we get a harmonious monk and bear shaman, or an active paladin, but its worth a shot.  Although to hit a 200k crit, you would have to hit for 133k base damage on thousand fist.  Which is still 60k more then i hit for (only need +75% more dmg...) 

At this point proof is irrelevant.  They will nerf everyone to do the same dps no matter what.  I still cant reproduce the thits myself and i still parse in the 5k+ range so I just accept that their are buffs/debuffs they arent mentioning, and said buffs/debuffs are the key factor.

I personally dont beleive a drop of the reason behind the nerf, or the whole "skills are having + damage added for each effect (stun, dmg, jin) etc."  To me I see exactly how the damage is added, straight to the melee damage, and modified from there.  But at the same time it doesnt matter, because they will change the system to how they see fit, nerfing everything and claiming its a bug, not matter what we post.  About now the only thing that would stop it is if silius, taliksar, tiraslee, and Phanthom all got fired and replaced.

theres ways around that fusoya, we dont even fight the pet.

Then post the joust and ill add them to my list, my guild asked me not to post their strats so i gave as much info as possible

Funny a psi going monk... only because i just got a second account and im leveling a psi up and i was going to say they are a breath of fresh air too!

Im also leveling up a bear shaman.  Figured between those 2 on a second account ill always have guild buffs ready.

updated up till chath, no strats for akande/naranda though, some things are better for you guys to figure out.

Chath i probably wont ever post a strat on, same for the quest after, which is striff mc cloud, the final boss for the group griffon

OKay i just checked and here how it works.

In Song/vanguard/assets/sounds

There are files like Orc_male.isb  and Orc_male.icb

The isb contains ALL sounds that an orc male player would make, this includes, death, fighting, getting hit, emotes.  The icb contains the information of when to play each sound.

To change the sounds you hear you need an unrealed.exe (lol very expensive and its basically the unreal editor for the game)  or a sound program capable of editing the isb (possible but doubt you will find afree one), while maintaining their same location so that you dont have to change the icb. 

It is possible to edit the extension from isb to something else (mp3) and have SOME of them play, but only about 1 in 10 files actually would play.  I had more luck with the in game music

Yup, you can edit the in game sounds by renaming files you find as the same.

(example)
Death.midi   is the default, and you find Awesomekungfudeath.midi.  Just rename the Awesome one into death.midi, and replace the old file.


1) I dont know what the actual names are
2) I dont know what the actual sound file types are (midi, wave, mp3)  i know the in game music is a weird format that plays on mp3 players though (it was like .cal3)
3) I dont know if changing the sounds is permanent, it used to be you would have to patch the game, then add the sound files after you patched, but before the character select.  And every time you patched it would replace the sound files with the default.


Eq2 and eq1 had a neat workaround where you could have a Custom music/sound folder and it would load those instead of default and you didnt have to reset it each time, im not sure if VG has that or not.

So some of these are kind of obvious, some not so much.  As a whole theres a lot of lthings that should be done before our overall dps is evaluated, and not afterwards.  (Why balance our dps if they are going to fix bugs/issues latter that will change the pecking order)

Skills
Stance push:  This skill is great, don’t get me wrong, the only problem is I have class envy.  On mobs like siliusaurus/vercel/zaygius, I cannot be the only stance pusher because it takes 5-8 pushes (at 40end a push) to get them out of their stance.  On mobs like Zaygius that just isn’t an option.  Rangers/disciples are able to push the same mob out of stance in 1-2 pushes.  I think the “power” of our push needs to be adjusted. 

Dragon breath:  This skill was supposed to get a damage increase in gu3.  It apparently got left off, from what quinn the mighty said, it was supposed to be well more then 2k ae damage every 5 minutes.

Sun dragons corona:  This was supposed to be changed to a dps buff for dragon monks to give them a slightly large edge vs drunken and harmonious, however it never got changed.  Originally QTM planed to have it put as an ae proc buff, but that idea quickly died.  Many ideas have come and gone, the general consensus was that the skill needs to be something that increases dps solo/raid regardless of what the mobs elemental affinity is.

8 Ae on dragon: So its nice that dragons have so many ae, however, most of them are largely useless.  Dragon breath is incredibly low damage on a long recast, dragon rakes its claw is frontal only, and the defensive reactive is a 300 damage 2 second ae stun on a 1 minute timer.   The finishers are okay, but the bigger problem is out side of old targ and siliusaurus , ae have little to no role in this game as they are all too weak, which makes the fact dragon monks specialize in ae, largely a dps drain since most of their extra skill will never be used.

Jeering kick This used to be one of the primary taunts for drunken monk, gu3 changed it to a useless skill that force taunts for 2 attacks every 30 seconds.  We can use jeering kick non stop but as long as force taunt immunity is up we cant use it to get agro back.   This skill needs to be adjusted to be similar to other tanks taunts (ie force taunt for 7-10 hits instead of 2).  Its largely unusable now. 

Errant/fist of celerity (stacking)/jolt : So I feel a large deal of the inflated damage people see with monks is 100% due to skills like these stacking.  Rogues/dragon/harmonious monks get 1 double dmg skill and jolt, and drunken get 2 double damage skills.  In the long term the stacking of these types of buffs is leading to a huge inflation of dps.  Before any kind of balance is done, these skills need to be defined as intended to stack or not.  The only issue I have with them not stacking is that our armor procs fist of celerity and drunken can cast errant strike, naturally you don’t want a 10second proc to cancel a 30 second buff, but I’m sure the can be accounted for.  Other then that I don’t feel that these skills should stack, and it should be one on at a time. 



Weapons:
Quantity (3 raid weapons, no legendary griffon weapons):  At the raid level there is 3 options for monk dps.  This is inline with the fact that monks/disciples are the minority, and we shouldn’t expect to get 8 hand to hand weapons in any dungeon (unless there are 40 swords, and 20+ daggers ).  However with the limited availability of weapons, we as monks (and disciples) have to wait much longer then rogues, bards, and rangers to get 2 legendary raid weapons.  On a side note, the only monk useable weapon to drop in OT is heroic and worse damage (base) then t5 crafted, where as there are legendary parry daggers, swords, axes, hammers, and saws (? ).  It would have been nice to make shoruls claw a legendary weapon.  Even if it wasn’t apw quality legendary, anything better then t5 heroic would be a welcome asset. 

Quality (2/3 geared to disciples, heroic are lame):  Most of the weapons we get share disciple stats.  That’s fine, because I wouldn’t expect there to be 2 monk weapons and 2 disciple weapons, 4 total hand to hand weapons would be a bit monk for 2/16 classes.  However, weapons are first and foremost dps items.  Monks truly get the shaft in this department because our dps items have points on them allocated to stats we cant use.  This is slightly different then stats we don’t want (aka con would be lame but at least we would get hp/resists), because monks literally cant do anything with vitality, wisdom, energy, energy regeneration, healing focus, etc… they flat out do 0 for us.  While I don’t want to take away from disciples, as they really need those stats, it would be nice to have an npc we can trade in the disciple stat weapons to and get the dps equivalent.  Aka hand in a weapon with +vit/energy/heal focus, and get +str/dmg rating/proc.  Again on a side note, I know the griffon rewards aren’t ment to be the best, but at the same time they are currently restricted to the slot (primary/off hand) and as such the better of the 2 for melee dps is main hand, which makes it useless for us because we would naturally want our legendary fist to be main hand and the griffon one off hand.    Not gonna touch on how much the weapons stink or how they are 99% geared for disciples.

Unique (dagges/focus/earrings) This kind of falls under the quantity of weapons available to us, but not entirely.  As far as available options for dps, (weapon x main hand weapon y off hand) We have a total of 6 options (3 weapons).  Many apw earrings/focus items and daggers are no longer unique, which greatly increases the options for gear placement in apw.  I have no clue if it’s a bug or intended, but I would like to add that as a monk and only having 3 weapon options available, I would really like if the non fabled ones were no longer unique so at least we could increase the options of possible weapon combos. (aka 2x legions or 2x senators).  Every other melee dps has 9+ weapons and over 40 weapon combos to choose from, so it would be nice to at least let us use our limited supply of weapons in a more diverse manner. 

Stances
Mitigation penalty The penalty stands no grounds.  If sorcs are intended to be the top dps, then there is no reason for a dragon monk to get hit harder then a sorc and this should be removed entirely. 
Drunken/Harmonious defensive The defensive stance of these two are ridiculously close, and for the most part harmonious wins out simply because 1% loss of parry/dodge is totally worth it for the endurance cost reduction. 
Harmonious offensive The endurance penalty is ridiculously unbalanced.  It makes it so the offensive stance actually causes a loss in dps in comparison to the middle/defensive stance.
Stances  Overall all 9 stances need to be looked at, I know its asking a lot, but they really need to be balanced monk to monk similar to the way tanks got their stances reevaluated.

Feign Death
Fail rates (z axis/re agro) Theres a few long standing bugs with feign death, notably in areas like old targ and NN where there is horrible line of sight issues and problems with the z axis.  While not directly related to melee balance, it is rather annoying.  The same goes for reagro bugs that harmonious/dragons are sometimes experiencing.
Returning home  As far as monk utility and viability, FD pulling was promised to be addressed back in gu3.  The overall goal was to add a delay in mobs returning home to allow monks to actually fd split mobs. 

Animations
Secret of flame/ice block anything but jabs  So along standing issue that peeves a lot of monks, is that all these classes are getting new fighting animations and spell graphics, and for 2 months now monks have been stuck with a bug that makes us only use a jab animation.  Every secret (except the lvl 50 secret of ice) removes our combat animations.  This should be a simple bug to fix and the fact its lasted 2 months is slightly ridiculous. 

it seemed like an hour to me not 100% sure on that though

Sadlly none of those are even possible in the sense that they really wont spend coding time on stuff like that until EVERY thing else is done. :-(