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. :-(

I think what Fusoya is talking about is that during the melee rebalance, if monks are way under where they should be, then the developers will up the damage of skills until we are back where we should be.

And what simmon is refering to is broken skills, and interform blanace (aka dragon has lots of useelss skills, drunken isnt as defensive as it should be ala taunts and stance)

You are both right, monks will get our skills rebalanced, but we wont get the overhaul we need on stances, ae attacks, and taunts.

some numbers i remember from qtm:
base fd is 95% (nothing engaged) or vs an even con mob.... check you got about 97% so thats spot on

You lose 5% per level over you: Check.  That means vs a 53 you lose 15% and go from 95% to 80%.... and thats exactly what you got.


I think you will be hard pressed to observe a difference with the ring on unless you have 2 of them. 

Overall, glad you did it, doubt it will do much for the complainers about generic fd fails but at least we know its working as intended as long as your not in an area with bad z axis (old targ and NN come to mind)

I never said vicus was exploiting i said him and the wringwraiths are the only two mobs i hit for over 100k.  Dont be a pencil dick, k thx.

I still do average over 6k on all parses and never have hits for 100k+ unless its one of the 2 mobs i mentioned. 

Its quite simple how i do my dps.

I have staggering fist/crescent kick macroed into every button i press.  I stay in aum kor and have max refresh haste, and I stagger errant strike/fist of celerity so i use one each time i thousand fist.  I never used both at the same time until recently.   I dont know what i did to piss in your cheerios but down right attacking me for no reason is classy act. 

whats your int at? mines close to 700 raid buffed and my secret of flame htis for about 2-3k a pop
Whats your total +%damage with out buffs? mines 53%, with raid buffs its closer to 90% (17% bard, 10%pal, 10%cleric).
I have no secrets and ill post a log next week of my dps and you all can see theres not 100k+ hits.  I dont use jin surge, and i dont stack fist/errant.

Thats what i ment, the macro doesnt work as a 1 button macro unless you press it more then once and only after waiting 2 seconds.

I think you get more damage from jin surge before 1k fist because its more damage to begin with, but due to timers and limited duration of skills like jolt its better for me in raids to use it on thunder fist

heres the link to the complete skill list.

http://www.vanguardmonks.com/option,com_smf/Itemid,27/topic,923.0/

The first post is generic monk skills
the second explain all my numbers/code

the third-fifth are skills learned by aums for dragon/drunken/harmonious

Not sure if that macro works at all.

because thousand fist is a 2second global cool down you would have to mash the hotkey over and over to get it to use jin surge then thunder fist.


As a drunken, ive tried the following
belt of the ages
errant strike
fist of celerity
thousand fist
jin surge
jolt

Then i manually click thundering fist.  Solo my high crits are about 10-15k  raids its about 50k hit, 62k crit.

Even with pally aura, i only got up to about 75k with crits.  Its refreshing to know this nerf only hurts poeple currently exploiting buffs, doubt its gonna do to much to the average monk who can only get 30-50k hits max.

Any skill listed as dragon only/drunken only/harmonious only are learned from aums from those specific classes, check the skills and tactics threads theres 2 threads and both list em all

So i found out today all rogue daggers are no longer unique.  Not sure if this is a bug or intended, but if its intended i would like for atleast the legions choking grasp to be made non - unique so that us monks have more options for dual wielding in apw.  Since 2 is kinda limiting, and senators claws are retardedly rare.

Ill ask silius tomorrow but he tends to not respond anymore.

Naw they could just cap it at +lvl *10 for the cap on flat damage.