Regarding comparsion of monk3 with Plague doctor, I need to add that Incinerate will only deal flat damage, not affected by your physical attack, while extra seconds of Energy blast and One-Inch Punch dot will scale with your physical attack. Let’s say, you will have around 1500 physical attack and 500 magic attack. If you apple Incinerate after bleeed and one-inch punch debuff + deprotected zone, it’d result in 11 seconds duration. So 17k additional damage.
In comparsion, One-Inch Punch will deal around 2.5k damage per tick(not sure about scaling, but it deals like 1400 with my 600 patk), so 12.5k damage from 5 extra seconds. I need to test if dot damage scales with level, it might be higher or lower. We can see that incinerate deals more damage. But we also have Energy blast with double duration. Extra 2.5 seconds is extra 5 hits. Level 5 energy blast is 10*(1500+1145)-5*(1500+720)=15350 damage. So it’s also lower than Incineration damage, but don’t forget that it has knockback, so it will also provide 5 seconds of CC.
Final part, is the reasons why PD is worth getting. In my opinion Incineration is nearly the weakest skill you can get.
1)Healing Factor. At level 5 it has nearly 100% uptime, and with Divine Might it’s 100%. It makes your tank basically immortal. If you have a linker2, it makes your team nearly immortal.
2)Bloodletting. At level 5 it as wel has nearly 100% uptime, and again, with Divine might it’s 100%. Sure it was nerfed in kToS, but only for arena. In GvG it still has full duration, so it’s permanent immunity to CC.
3)Pandemic. For me it’s probably the main reason to get monk. Because according to the description you can share any status effects to other enemies. So at level 4 it will share One-Inch punch dot and Palm strike bleed up to 11 enemies. It will effectively bring much more damage than Incinerate. The only question is range, if sharing range is quite low, then it might be more effective to just cast Incinerate, but if it’s wide enough, then it can cripple the entire pack of enemies.
Now imagine how terrifying it can be in GvG if enemy has lost a protection from status effects for a few moments. During 5 seconds of silence it will eat most of the enemy parties exp. At level 4 it will destroy 11 players making them unable to fight for a quite long period of time. It’s the main reason why I’m ready to drop Energy blast level 10 in PvP.
Finally, there is no good weapon for monk at 220+(like sunkus maul), that’s why focusing on monk too much is not a really good idea. So getting PD will help a lot. I need to carry out a research to measure if One-Inch punch dot depends on skill level, how patk affects HP and SP drain, and if there is INT scaling for Energy blast. If Energy blast scales with INT it might be much better to make a INT based monk build, if it doesn’t, then SPR based build might work the best. In this case monk will mainly be used for Energy blast knockback and dots + supporting, while main focus would be on PD and other classes skills. This way we can get an extreme carry protector, as it will guard your main DPS from enemy melee characters, knockbacking them with Palm Strike, and then using One-Inch+Pandemic combo on them for enemy team devastation. But it’s heavily dependable on Pandemic range.
Beak mask level 1 would help to protect yourself, but there is only one level 3 status effect and it’s impossible to apply if there are no level 1 or 2 status effects applied, so bloodletting is a better buff and should be maxed. For that reason I’d rather get Cleric2 over priest3, but you can just get another cleric in your party for Divine Might.
Overall I still don’t think that PD is that much better, becuse if you have another PD in your party, monk3 becomes extremely powerful. Even if you don’t, it still has more CC and damage on a group of mobs with level 10 energy blast. Also if you go monk3 I’d recommend using Sunkus Maul till the end of the game, as it will provide more damage than any other weapon. You can as well enhance it to 15+ to achieve high patk values.
In my build, that includes Cleric2, I’d drop Incinerate completely to max bloodletting, healing factor and discerning evil(up to level 3-4), and get 1 level in Beak Mask and maybe fumigate (though it’s unnecesary).
Would like to hear your feedback about monks skill interactions with PD skills, so I would be able to decide about my R7 class choice and compare both variants.
