Think of any martial artist you've seen in a movie - What is their main asset? It's their seemingly superhuman ability to dodge or deflect any incoming attack, and then dispatch the enemies in due time with measured and calculated attacks. They are usually at a disadvantage in terms of arms and armor, and lack raw offensive power or brawn, but they make up for it by tactically flexible and virtually unhittable; so they can take time to target the enemy's weak areas, deblitate them, or turn their own strengths against them.

A monk that just has strait up DPS with poor evasion is little more than a bar room brawler.


Such martial artists are also capable of taking on multiple opponents with ease relative to other types of fighters. This could be best represented in the monk by giving him the best collectiobn of melee AoE attacks available. Currently the monk's AoEs are a waste of time, and seem inferior to the Ranger's selection. The Ranger by his nature should be more single target focused, given that his special is based around studying a single target.

Maybe like the bard +damage modifier, it would simply reduce our Jin max by 2 (or other arbitary number) when active?

Even with the best armor I can afford with all dex on it an equal level ranger friend with just piecemeal armor takes a lot less damage then me. I guess I agree with id rather be avoiding damage then dishing out more.
I see monks as the emergency off tank in a party, not really needing healing while the whole other group takes out the main mob fast while we beat ours down a bit but not like a rogue in stealth or ranger at range.

Even if our damage is put where it's suppose to be (more damage in the short term than Rangers), it still doesn't give the monk a niche among offensive fighters. Our damage was always intended to be mid-range amongst the offensive fighters.

Fixing evasion is the key to giving the monk his niche. And when that's done your harmonious monk will be able to use his reaction based debuffs in the off tanking role.

FD pulling should not define us either. I hate the idea of FD pulling. Coinceptually what about a monk makes him a puller? Why does it make sense that faking one's death should be the premier means of pulling? None of it makes sense. It's a farce holdover from EQ1, where people took advantage of the game mechanics to use FD as a pulling mechanism.
There are better ways to give the monk his niche.


The three forms, if we continue having three, must be broken down like this in order to give each one a useful niche:
DRAGON - You do more damage than a Ranger who has studied his target, but not as much damage as a Rogue who's stealthed/behind a target, and not as much sustained single target damage as a Berserker. You have the most powerful selection of melee AoE capability available, which gives you a tactical capability the Rogue and Berserker do not have. Dragon should lack the capability to offtank like either Harmonious or Drunken, but it should still have better survivability than a Rogue or Berserker, in addition to having a bit more utility. But they would have less utility than a Ranger.
HARMONIOUS - You are the best debuffer of the light fighters, and still have the capability to offtank.
DRUNKEN - The concept is fine as is, they just need to ramp evasion back up so that the Drunken monk is the supreme off tanker of the light fighters.

"Even if our damage is put where it's suppose to be (more damage in the short term than Rangers), it still doesn't give the monk a niche among offensive fighters. Our damage was always intended to be mid-range amongst the offensive fighters."

Lomash - can I ask why you believe we were meant to be only mid-range dps??? I keep seeing you post on how we need more evasion and to merge the stances, etc. I think you were even trying to justify that we shouldnt be the highest dps offensive fighter...even though thats how monks were presented throughout beta by saying that Berserkers, who arent even in game yet and who knows when they will be, will fill that role....

I personally think that yes better evasion is something that needs to be provided particularly to the druken stance. But as a Dragon monk I expect my class to be nothing but a dps machine with little utility. Both bards and rangers have plenty of utility and therefore should be well below both monks and rogues as far as dps is concerned. And monks should be better consistent dps with the rogue being better situational and burst dps.

I think our niche was that we could be one of three types of class....pure dps, utility or off tank. Now obviously the fact that most of our stances are broke and with all the nerfs none of those options look good cause we pretty much suck in all of them. But if we were to be put up where we belong I think a lot of that goes away...

Just my thoughts....

well in the defense (no pun intended) of evasion... it is not only good for offtanking but rather good for pulling if they ever fix our damn fd =) but yeah i want more dps too

I was fighting with a ranger 1 lvl above me last night and i basically interviewed him about his damage and he was kind enough to compare notes with me.  (im lvl 34, now 35 and he's lvl 35)

His finishers hit for around 2k + 1k   and he had a triple combo finisher, the third one being an 8k dot.

my finishers were around 1k + 600  and 800 + 400ish.  my 2hander i could get up to around 2k with thousand fists.  However it was very clear his average finisher which i compared to our kick finisher did twice the damage.  (COMPLETE BS)

He also had a triple combo finisher, the final combo being an 8k.  So wtf where is our 8k damage finisher?

His averge damage on special attacks was in the 1500 damage range while mine would only break 1k if i payed attention to weaknesses.  (There was also a rogue who was easily breaking 4k with his finishers, but im not worried about him)

The ranger did have weapon advantage over me, being that his weapon was around 36 DPS and my fists were 27.  My 2hander was 31 DPS.  However i had better armor and consequently better str + dex when we were buffed up.

The numbers are getting closer, and i wouldn't expect them to be exactly the same.  Both myself and the ranger agreed that overtime for longer duration battles the ranger should out damage me.  However in the shorter battles that last less than a minute i should out DPS him.   

When i would use my ice secret when we were fighting mobs in vol tuniel, i would pull aggro over both the ranger, the rogue and the warrior.  I don' have a parser so i couldn't parse it, but i do know that when my secret was on i was the one with aggro.  when it was off the ranger had aggro.  VERY intersting stuff to me.  Honestly i'm happy with where my monk is right now.  I think my finishers should do a little less than double what they do now, and the stances should be reworked to be more useful, and a slight boost in special attack damage.  (and of course fix FD)  other than that i have no complaints whatsoever  and i am still enjoying my monk greatly.

Numbers sound about right as they are now and its clear a ranger is far ahead of us... just in crit finishers alone but also in normal skills.  Think about this logically though... I do not buy the "monks should be better dps in the first 20 secs and rangers there after) logically that is impossible.  How can you have a class (the ranger) with twice the damage ability(of the monk) not do higher dps in the first 20 seconds of the fight?

IE say ranger monk duoing... monk pulls with shuruken doing maby a 100 to 300 dmg.  Ranger then shoots his bow shot while incomming doing anywhere from 2k to 8k damage.  Monk then uses his awesome 600 dmg attack ranger then uses his awesome 2k attack. You cant argue finishing abilities because the ranger will get them just as often. The monk has no chance in that scenario to even catch up to the ranger , when from what the devs say the ranger should be trying to catch the monk....

Now another example Ranger pulls with is bow which will most likely crit for 6k... sorry no way in hell are we even going to catch that period.  

Either way the monk is always way behind and trying to play catch up.. rangers range damage is too good... rangers melee damage is still almost twice that of our own.  I mean what are you going to do? tell a ranger not to use his bow to make us on par with dps?

The only way to make the monk do more dps then a ranger in the first 20 seconds is to either drastically nerf the ranger, which wont happen nor should it.  Or severely raise the monk dps, which is not going to happen either.  You can tell that wont happen by the little tweaks here and there on meaningless skills.

actually, i think i will post this in its own topic