I easily out dps my shaman friend and my dreadknight with my monk.  I am level 12 i use a sylvan bladestaff.  trying to find something with the parry though.  I crit and hit my finishers and no one is able to pull hate off me unless they have many skills that add hate.  Not to be an ass or anything but if you guys are having this many problems maybe your doing something wrong.  I do however agree that we need more damage as an offensive simply for survivability.  Also it would help when killing healers in pvp

i can easily out dps a ranger the only thing i have a problem with is our pvp dps.  taking out a healer is really really hard for us even if our finishers proc a lot.  we need to be able to do enough burst dps so that they can't just heal through it over and over again.  I would like to see us not have to drain their energy completely before we can kill them.

Our animations look cooler? 

I'm definately not unhappy playing my monk, I have alot of fun and they are still good to play, even as dragon. Dont get me wrong though, they do need a decent amount of loving.

-Crit nerf definately hurt our DPS a ton. Mainly because most of our skills are triggered from crits.
-Our skills cost perhaps too much endurance; there is no gear available thus far with +endurance or anything of that sort. Alot of the medium armor we can get has +energy, but that means diddly to us.
-Our off-hand dps is terrible compared to primary. Are monks (martial artists) really that uncoordinated?

With that said, there's plenty of avenues for improvement, such as decreases on endurance use, more crits, higher base dps, haste, etc. I'm fairly certain that a large portion of the monk dps is collected later on in the game but also I'm pretty sure we will get a bone tossed our way at some point.

Definately if you are unhappy with the class and want to be able to solo well or put out mass dps, there are other classes available, however, I'm sure classes like shaman are going to get the nerf boot up their hind end. In the end I'd just recommend playing whatever class you have the most fun in.

I dont' think that's as much of an issue because the lack of dps is causing us to stink in solo, group and raid situations.

I honestly don't care. I'll solo or group.  I do what gets me from level 1 to level 50 the fastest.  Now this may change but for now at least until level 30, soloing is more efficient.  Groups are bugged, people are spread out, more solo quests and for some reason group experience is not all that great compared to soloing mobs. That's the just the way it is.  It's a viable option (probably more than they intended).

 For me and even most people in my guild.. we don't care.. we just want to get to raid level as that is what we enjoy most.  Although.. I will say you miss out if you don't group  some of the time to enjoy some good dungeon crawls. But it's not like EQ where you really needed to group 100% of the time if you wanted to advance.  At least not right now.. maybe that changes at higher levels... I don't know.

Either way, I don't want to be the best soloer.. I expect a healer to be able to kill tougher mobs easier than me but it should take em longer as they shouldn't be able to damage them as fast.   But at the same time it takes them to kill the 4 dot, I wanna be able to kill 2 mobs that are 2 dots which essentially gets me similar xp.  As of right now, not only can most classes kill group mobs efficiently, many of these classes can kill 2 dots faster than monks.  Not only can they do that, but they end the fight with mostly full hp, energy and endurance.  Monks just aren't competitive... I'll go one over that.. dragon monks are really hurting.

This effects soloing efficiency to the tune of taking twice as long as others to level solo.
This effects grouping by being much less valuable then almost every other class.

I dont' have to be the best soloer or be highest dps in groups, but don't make me the smelly kid playing with the cat turds in the sandbox. 

Sorry to burst your bubble mr deluded fanboi, but any one of the offensive fighters fill our roll in a group much better than our class. Each possess not only more dps, but much more utility than our class, granted rogues are not much better than us if at all (maybe they are worse) but bard and ranger bring more dps AND more utility. When people start to learn more about classes than just reading the manual that Sigil made (very misleading imho) you can beat monks will be invited into less and less groups.

But you know what youre right, I shouldnt complain, because its all my fault, that I paid 50 bucks + to play a game only to discover the class I wanted to be is far far far substandard, which I might add isnt my opinion but just how it is.

I'd like to add my 2 copper to this thread.
In EQ the monks knew a few ups and downs.
Pre Luclin, and thus pre nerf, you could see tons of monk twinks running everywhere. We monks where the kings as we could outtank and outdps allmost any other character. Post nerf, twinks where put aside, and monks became a rare sight.
All mmo will always play the up and down game to keep people playing their game : you up a class : everyone rerolls to this class. You nerf it, everyone plays another class. Well of course not everyone, but i guess you'll get my point.

When i heard about Vanguard, i had high hopes that this game could be the new EQ (in terms of pleasure i had playing that game).
Reading that the monk would be a high DPS class and still possessing the FD ability made me buy this game.

Whatever the issues we have as monks, i'll keep playing my char as i'll know that i'll be doing what i love the most in an MMO : high end raid pulling !
We have the tool, we'll have this awesome role in the future.

But as for now, i must say i'm quite disapointed.
First, i saw that Warriors had a mana bar. Sorry, energy bar. At that point i thought we would have one as monks, after all, a  monk is supposed to be trained since childhood, both mentaly and physicaly.
To my surprise, we had no mana bar, sorry energy bar.
This was the first disapointment, as i really thought every class could use all reserves (hp, end, energy). In fact i think we're the only ones not to have an energy bar (maybe the rogues dont have one too ?).
To me this is probably the first explanation of our "underpowerness". It could really be a design flaw.
It's really unfair, and illogical to have just a couple of classes that wont benefit from +energy gear or buffs.
In EQ monks had the same issue, but rogues and warriors where with us. I "loved" the way they fixed it (5 or 6 years after release) : they made all + energy items give also 50% of the energy score in endurance. While it helped us, it boosted even more hybrids.

Now we have a second issue : a lot of our special attacks are fixed damage, not base on our "white" damage value. These attacks are "ok" compared to what we currently have, but still undepowered to other melee special attacks.
But the worse is that once we'll reach higher levels, equipment will play a much higher role, and since thse sub par attacks wont scale up, they'll be even more underpowered.

The third issue, is regarding bugs. It seems most our stances are bugged (or have been nerfed), but there is also the weapon change bug (for some reason if i equip a weapon to see its effect, i keep doing damage with it even after unequiping it or even selling it, raising the skills etc ... while there are some exploits to do with this, when i try a weapon and realise it sucks, i'm even more desapointed when i HAVE to fight with it).

The fourth issue is utility, as some have pointed at we dont have a lot of usefull tools.
As i said before, we'll be the raid pullers because of our "culture" of pulling, and because FD will be needed (well i hope so). But as in EQ, we wont be used a lot for group pulling, as some classes will be chosed because they'll be able to get allmost as good results (or even better) but with 5 times less fight.
It took 5 years in EQ to get pulling tools with the addition of "lull" like effects.
I hope it'll take us less time with Vanguard.

Finaly, the Jin idea, while interesting, it has at the moment really limited usefullness. In fact, i feel like its more of some kind of limitation. Why dont we have Jin dumps like an attack that spends all your remaining Jin and does damage accordingly ? Or powers that do damage according to your current Jin etc ...
At the momement it realy feels like an unfinished feature.

I hope we'll get some kind of attention, and give a faire share of usefullness to our favourite class