A little snipit the I coupied from a post from SV.  Seems pretty sick to me........

"I just checked the new cleric affinity war..

The new stance adds 30% meele damg 10% acc and 15% block
the finishers till lvl 33 are: 1 400% weapon damg +300 damg and 300% weapon damg + 200 something and even better ones to come like meele haste buff more finishers etc...."

I just cancelled my account btw.  I still plan to hang out but this game is getting beyond sad.  I havent logged in in almost a week and I havent even had the desire to. 

WTFF. Yes, two F's.

yeah no kidding..how do they get such a good stance with no penalty?  why is the penalty on our stances still there?  seems like defensive fighters got it removed and now clerics?

I have both a 45 Monk (Dragon Style), and a 32 Cleric (War Affinity). Speaking purely from the point of view of the War path, they get one new finisher line over other clerics, and a counter attack. Also worth mentioning is the fact that affinities were something originally intended for Clerics much like Patrons are for Shamans but they never made it into the game before Beta ended. Some of the more recent changes to the Class which make it seem alot tougher, is the fact they removed Rout's 1 Minute reuse timer (Clerics old big finisher attack), and added one smaller DoT based attack line and one small stun based attack (which doesnt always work and was made to help them deal with healing mobs). I dont quite feel like I can out damage similier geared Monks yet, but it does feel like I do pretty competitve damage with other DPS based healers (Blood Mage, Phoenix Shaman, Death Affinity Cleric). What probably needs tuning with Clerics in general is the stance swaping- Stance Cool Down could use a longer duration, forcing you to choose wisely which stance you are in with the given moment. With a longer cool down you cant just swap and heal, then swap back. If you look at the stance itself it is balanced, its just the implementation that doesnt quite feel right.

And as stated by Soluss it does indeed have a very large heal penalty, Cleric large slow casting direct heal goes from 2,400 to 550 in war affinity stance, your quick patch heal goes from 1020 to around 250, so you wont be healing in that style... its purely for damage output as a secondary healer. The extra melee prowess of the War path is the whole point of taking that style, its much like the Phoenix Patron in it is based on damage output, and if your not a heavy dex based Cleric you wont be landing many criticals thusly gaining the finishers which allow you to maintain a steady flow of damage.

Aside from that the only thing that makes me go "Hmm" about the War Affinity is the fact that their big finisher has no reuse timer, and neither does Rout as of the last patch, Blood Hammer is clearly superior so why would you ever use the old finisher when you have a better one you can use as much as you want? A 30 second reuse timer on Blood Hammer finisher for War Clerics would make sense in that respect otherwise Rout is redundent and pointless. Thats my take on it, hope this sheds some light on the War Affinity a bit.

That is wonderful you feel that way, it really is.  But I don't pay a monthly fee if I don't think the game is getting the updates it deserves.  That is exactly what the monthly fee is, to support the update team.  The entire game has its problems, and that is why population is dipped to dangerous lows, especially in the monk crowd.  Our negative comments may come out of anger, but most of us are also providing feedback to make us a more rounded class and get us where we should be.  I don't have time to make alts.  I am level 49 and don't plan on getting another toon up that high.

I figured out the whole reason they added in the cleric overpoweredness.  If you think back several weeks, fellowships went live in a patch on the test server.  However, they did not go live with the recent test->live push.  I went back last night and looked at all of the test patch notes on vgspheres (official test server site), and any/all notes regarding fellowships are gone.  I bet they added in the cleric stuff to keep us busy and forget that they ninja-removed fellowships.  lol

I have to say that I would never have made it to 50 on Varking without a guilding helping me level.  Do I feel that our overall dps is lower then it should be at 50?  Sure.  But I feel that if I play my toon right I can do a lot more dps then people might realize.  It's gotten a little boring now but the guild is going to test server soon to try out new raid content.  Should be interesting at least.  I'm the only monk in my guild, if that tells you anything about how many monks are lvl 50 on pvp servers.

I flip back and forth on this one.  One the one hand I realize they are making passes throught the classes and think it is great so many classes are getting things that make them more fun.  That they are adding things that missed release.

On the other hand I just don't get why they won't boost up monks.  A couple of other things I would like to see added (in the spirit of what other classes get). Along with a dps boost.

I would like our heal to be shortened to a 2 min timer.  This wouldn't impact grouping much but would help us soloing and perhaps even in raiding.  Or give us a jin based heal. 

I would like some kind of snare, purely because it is annoying to have to chase fleeing mobs all over the place, and pretty much every other class gets one .

And I would like our dps to higher.  Maybe what we need is one more attack added,  something that does 300% ish.  This would fill us out nicely. 

Or make vulnerabilities work better and make us the kings at it.

To be honest playing my ranger is more efffective and more fun,  I can shoot at range, I do great melee damage, I can heal a little bit (mostly use).  Can root an add etc.  The ranger wins in every category pretty much other than FD.  The only reason I haven't completely switched to my ranger is I hate playing the class everyone plays.  Course now that looks like Clerics , hehe.

Quinn,  is it they don't see a problem with Monks?  Are we that hard to balance?   Perhaps if I knew the answer to these things it would help.  I mean they must get it at some point with the lack of higher lvl monks....

Kydan