With the changes to secret of flame/ice tracendence is worthless.

If they made it so it was a perm buff like flame/ice then it would be nice for the extra 5% dmg but currently the 5% dmg buff really is only worth it if your drunken monk with um kor on and have psi buffs... basicly if you get over 60% refresh haste its decent to have 1 min of dmg and 2 min 30 sec reuse. 

I would personally like to see it be like flame and ice and id probably use it all the time.

Or make it not a secret, but that proly would be OP at its state atm, 1m/5m buff for only 8 jin is godly.

I like the idea of mitigation and health as part of transcendence.  I kinda have mixed feelings about the hate mod though.  If I were to tank, I would want a hate mod, of course, but my thinking is that we ought to make trans a defensive secret rather than a tanking secret.  In other words, I think trans ought to be a "make you harder to kill" secret rather than a "make you a meat shield" secret.  I picture a scenario on raids and such where the mob we're fighting does AE damage and monks switch to trans to both make it more likely they live and keep doing dps and taking the burden of healing them off the healer(s).

I definately think we ought to have a health recovery component to transcendence, it kinda sounds like something that would help your health  , but I think it would be a better idea to have something like 1-2% of melee damage dealt returned as health.  Due to the nature of our dps, this would result in a fairly smooth heal over time rather than some sketchy, unpredictable heal procs.  If we use this for tanking, we want our health to be as predictable as possible, ie we don't want our health to go down at variable rates. 

I propose we make trans something like this:

+ % dmg
+ some magic damage
+ to all forms of damage resists (enough to be significant)
1-2% of melee damage returned as health

It may be overpowered, but I think there is enough flexibility in the numbers involved to be worthwhile but not at the same time not break balance.  I think we can get away with having no hate modifier due to the nature of our dps in relation to other dps classes.  Our dps is smooth and consistent and its the highest at the start of the fight.

Just a quick note:

If we shoot for all damage resists instead of a mitigation boost we'd get some protection from magical foes (which I think is our main weakness right now) plus some mitigation from the physical resist.

Another thought I had for secrets in general:

What do you all think of having the secrets turn all of our melee damage into a certain elemental type.  For example, while we have secret of fire activated, all melee attacks would deal fire damage instead of physical damage, secret of ice, ice damage, secret of transcendence, magical damage.  I think that would add a bit of strategy and versatility to our repertoire.  For melee resistant foes we could circumvent their defenses with the appropriate secret and for element/magic resistant foes we would have to use no secret.

I personally think that the "melee damage changed to elemental melee damage" should be reserved for the Dragon monk, as it makes the most sence.

Think of it like this:

One of their basic attacks, Six Dragons Strike. That implies that their is a "type" of dragon for every element, we know their is a Sun Dragon, a Storm Dragon, a Cloud Dragon, a Stone Dragon, and a Spirit Dragon.

The developers could expand the lore by adding "Claws of the ----- Dragon" that would simply change the melee damage of the monk to that dragon's particular element.

Claws of the Sun Dragon = Fire

"                  Cloud Dragon = Mental (astral dragon)

"                 Storm Dragon = Arcane

"                 Stone Dragon = Physical

"                   Spirit Dragon = Spiritual

"                   Frost Dragon = Cold (this is the only one that currently does not have a named mentioned in any ofour abilities, so what ever "cold" related name would suffice)


It would allow Dragon monk's to gain a slight offensive edge over the other two styles by adapting their damage type to match their foe's weakness.

Before this gets lost in the background, it's still an issue that SoT is overall a forgotten ability at the moment.  I applaude the changes to SoI/SoF, but fail to see where Transcendance has a role at this point.  I'm seeing an alarming list of abilities on my hotkeys that are gathering dustbunnies.  We owe it to ourselves to come up with viable, useful, and balanced ways to re-implement them into gameplay.