Forget damage rating, i much much much prefer Melee crit rating.

Also what you forget to mention is that a bard doting use all of his mana and can only keep it up for about 20-30 seconds before they need a break to get mana up.  Where as we can keep it up till the cows come home.  Aum kor + end regen gear means we can use all of our attacks whenever we please.

As far as rangers, i dont know.  I know with good gear they are decent, but in many places ranged isnt always an option.  Some its a must though, so its more like 80% of the time they are good, IF they can snare a mob and if they can range it.  Areas with fast respawn or lots of wanders limits a ranger to melee only, and then their dps is about 80% of ours.

Dont get me wrong, i think monks need a hellva dmg upgrade.  Skills like crescent kick and kick to the heavens need a modifier on them other then just flat dmg.   Same with PeH, if im going to wait 5 min for it i want it to be nice.  Dragon monk should also be the clear cut top dps of the 3 styles which atm its not.  In fact i think drunken monk is the highest dps with the 2 extra attacks AFTER thousand fist and thunder fist.  Not to mention dragon breath (worthless ae ) is replaced with a large dmg direct attack. 

Ill go more into the 3 styles comparison today after i finish with harmonious.  So far my conclusion is that dragon monks dps is patheticly close to the other 2 styles and aside from the crit % and proc on the stance, there is no benifit to dragon style

Having played a Dragon monk since Beta, I recently switched styles over to Harmony. I can confirm Dragons prolly make a little more DPS that Harmony Monk. Just a well placed Dot after jin surge will see both Dragon dots adding up to around 5k per tick. Harmony Monk will bring a little More to the party in the way of some very sweet debuffs.

Monks are Very gear Dependant!  And as Fujitsu said Our Most important items are 2 Good hand wraps and Items which add % Crit and % Damage. A well Kitted out Harmony Monk will Crit for around 60-70% which is very cool indeed =)

A lot of Monks DPS is considerably enhanced by your group; -  Bards, Clerics and Necros will add considerable DPS,  in a good group @50 you should see STR hit your 900 soft cap with a decent balanced DPS group.

Rambling  on a lil, anyways I can also confirm that recently I cleared a Crypt with group comprised of 3 rangers a Warrior, Cleric and myself (dragon Monk at the time) consistently was pulling agro of the MT way before the Rangers (all kitted with striking weapons /heroic gear) So yes a well Equipped Dragon Monk can out DPS Rangers all day long and you wont be puffing for breath either 

I have found Agro stealing its prolly about the same post gu2 although a well played tank of any class should be able to hold and keep the agro (excluding a string of crtitted finishers)

if they didn't have assassin long swords they weren't well equipped...  long swords of the assassin are much preferred for rangers since so many of their finishers actually are considered *ranged* attacks.   

what generally causes the monks to draw aggro is our rate of attacks, being pretty much the only class that never gets a chance to use auto-attacks.  That said, from a DPS perspective a ranger will out damage us.  And a well kitted ranger will out aggro us.

Prob is that noone is real parsing, or even there are working pars progs that counts everything. Most people that are crying about monk DPS are just seeing a some huge crit number from other classes and start thinking it is "all day long" damage.

Play some classes high, not 50 - but maybe about 30. Suit them with good gear from quests/crafters and feel the diference.

I have tested Ranger, Bard and Monk - and Monk is killing fastest by far -  same mobs, same lvl.

Even in groups is Monk more prefered - on Halgar server -  than Ranger or Rogue (maybe only a bard is bigger deal). Well played Monk can perfect pull and scout out rooms without wipe a group and can allways mezz one and at the end dish out huge damage.

Its not all in standing there and punching one mob.

Monks kick ass, maybe we are not Mr.Universum but we kick ass! 

Stop crunching numbers, start beeing a Monk 

P.S.
    cause of exploiting weekness, got one nice link with all weekneses - on comp at Work, got to post it than next week when im again there 

Aggro?  that discussion ended in 2 letters, FD!  So follow the thread.

Just gonna make a few last comments.

1) Assassin's swords are primary hand only (longsword) So you can only have one not two.
2) Their delay is 2.75, and currently weapons average the delay between main hand and off hand meaning that a ranger with longsword in their primary hand would need 1.15 delay off hander just to get the average delay to 1.95s.
3) It adds 113 ranged crit.  Which is 5% ish at 50.  Only a very few items besides bow can add ranged crit.

So no, rangers dont swing more then monks
No, its impossible to dual wield 2 long swords
A monk who agros to much is a monk who doesnt know how to fd and stand up

The reason rangers agro less is they have more active agro management then monks.  Most monks dont have an evade hotkey.

/cast "Feign Death III"
/stand
/autoattack

Use it well, use it often, costs you the time to cast 1 attack spell

longswords are 1 handed and yes you can equip and use 2.


weapon attack speed is VASTLY overrated for most classes.