I know this has been done in posts previously but I thought I would throw my hat in the ring in light of these recent monk changes. Id like to first address the new changes and then go on my vision of the class.
Double Punch Area Increase – This is certainly nice and will definitely help. Though not a very helpful change in my opinion. I always felt part of the challenge to good double punching was positioning and angling for best coverage.
Palm Strike, Knife Hand, 1 Inch Punch Damage Rework – More damage is nice so I wont say no. However I have little faith these will be significant increases. Were not going to be seeing Dragoon or Fencer numbers. While helpful, this is not what I feel we need.
Strike Debuff Duration Increase – These always seems very short to me and gave a very small window to deal increased damage. We have the same problem with knife hand’s armor break. Short duration debuff tied to a long cooldown. This change will help quite a bit.
Those were my thoughts on the incoming changes. Next ill go over my view and design goals of my home brew monk. The intention of the changes I’m about to purpose is to improve the game play for monks, not damage. While I personally would like to see monks as potent damage dealers, I realize healers shouldn’t fulfill that role(cough, plague doctors). But just because they shouldn’t be the best doesn’t mean they cant be pretty good. That being said what I’m really seeking are the tools I need to do my job and fun gameplay. I’m going to describe some generic changes to the game from the perspective of a monk and then move on to specifics with skill changes.
I have mentioned this several times in other posts but ill reiterate it here. Crowd control is obnoxious, unavoidable, and everywhere. You get knocked up and away, fly through the air, bounce off the ground several times, and finally get to your feet many seconds later. Bosses and even normal enemies have multiple attacks that do this and you can get stuck in a seemingly endless chain of character control loss. This is not fun, severely hampers your ability to do your job, and there’s no viable counter play. The only thing that you can do to avoid being hit is to not be in melee, which is in direct contrast with where monks need to be. The area on these types of attack are huge. I have frequently been hit by a boss’ forward attack while standing behind the boss. Double Punch has a longish animation and doesn’t allow movement and attacks come out with very little or no warning. So dodging is mostly out. I will provide a few ideas to combat this in my skills revamp. The next thing id like to see in the game is fist weapons. I cant begin to describe how annoyed I am after a round of double punching to see my character being its idle animation and have a mace appear in his hands. Bugs the hell out of me. I realize that there is a severe lack of gear in game and the developers should focus on helping everyone before helping us, but that wont stop me from dreaming. There are other classes that have weapons no one else can use; fencers, musketeers, cannoneers. Id like to see fist weapons that we equip in both hands. At the very least allow us to hide our clunky maces. Another thing that has caught my attention is the disparity in armor types. As monks deal entirely strike damage, plate is our favored armor type to face. Plate, however has the lowest representation, while leather has the highest by a large margin. So not only do we have less opportunity to deal increased damage, but we most frequently deal less damage. I know I said I was less concerned about our damage out put, but this is still a depressing revelation. A revelation that even IMC recognized and moved to fix in the form of the Oghma Gauntlets, but to my dismay it is swordsmen only. Being able to equip those gloves would be nice but what id rather see is more plate monsters and bosses.
Now I’m going unveil my revamped skills. I’ll spend a great deal of time speaking about Double Punch as it is our bread and butter skill and the launching point for the combo system I’m going to purpose. In its current form, this skill is already very good. Consumes stamina, and has no cooldown. We spend the majority of our time dealing damage using this one skill over and over. Hitting the button over and over is tedious so I have configured my mouse so all I have to do is hold the button down to Double Punch rapidly. This should be a baseline function. Mobility is typically a Monk trademark, but using Double Punch anchors our character in position. This makes avoiding boss mechanics very tough. We should be able to Double Punch whilst on the run, like Running Shot from Quarrel Shooter. Double Punching over and over, although effective, is kinda monotonous. The combo system I am purposing is shamelessly borrowed from Ragnarok Online, which is appropriate in this case. In Ragnarok Monks auto attacked until Trifecta Blow proc’d, and a delay occurred, giving the player an opportunity to use Quadruple Blow and extend the combo. A similar delay followed Quadruple Blow allowing the use of Raging Thrust. This was incredibly fun and demanded more from the player than just pushing buttons. I’d like to incorporate this into Savior’s Monks and expand on the idea. Rather than using auto attacks to start our combo, we will still use Double Punch. Double Punch will have a 1 in 3 chance to instead perform Triple Punch, indicating the start of a combo. The activation of Triple Punch will allow the use of a new skill I’m calling Combination Blow. Following Combination Blow, the Monk will be able to use any of its other skills as a Finisher. Using a skill as a Finisher will empower it and add other effects. So a combination will follow this format:
Double Punch until Triple Punch Proc → Combination Blow → Finisher
Double Punch – Double Punch is now a Channel Skill meaning it will continue to activate while the skill is held down. It also can be used while in motion. There is a 1 in 3 chance that Skill will perform Triple Punch instead. Triple Punch allows the use of Combination Blow for 1 Second.
Finisher – When Double Punch is used as a Finisher, Monk restores 15 Stamina.
Combination Blow – Consumes 3 Stamina, can only be used after Triple Punch.
Finisher – When Combination is used as a Finisher, increase Monk movement speed by 5.
Palm Strike – This skill no longer applies a bleed and now slows for 10 secs.
Finisher – When Palm Strike is used as a Finisher, increase area of attack and apply 100% melee debuff for 10 secs.
1 Inch Punch – This skill no longer applies silence and now roots the target in place for 5 secs. Increase the duration of the damage over time. Reduce the amount of SP damage.
Finisher – When 1 Inch Punch is used as a Finisher, The damage over time spreads to nearby monsters.
Knife Hand – Increase duration of armor break.
Finisher – When Knife Hand is used a Finisher, release shockwave applying armor break debuff in a line(Deprotect + Knife Hand hidden skill). This finisher will respect disabling knock up attribute.
God Finger Flick – Increase the range. Reduce the cooldown. It can also be used while in motion.
Finisher – When God Finger Flick is used as a Finisher, coin bounces hitting a total of 5 targets.
Energy Blast – Damage type changed to deal magical damage. Damage Increased.
Finisher – When Energy Blast is used as a Finisher, gain Swift Cast buff that allows Energy Blast to be cast instantly.
Iron Skin – Reflects all physical attacks while protecting the Monk. Reduce cooldown to 30 secs.
Finisher – When Iron Skin is used as a Finisher, grants the Monk Pain Barrier for 20 secs.
Golden Bell Shield – Monk is now able to Move while Channeling. Cooldown reduced to 60 secs.
Finisher – When Golden Bell Shield is used as a Finisher, grants damage immunity to party members for 5 seconds.
Now that I’ve shared my purposed changes, I’ll now try to justify them. I changed the bleed on Palm Strike to a slow because the bleed is fairly weak and a slow would help us dps a target thats trying to get away. If someone runs away from us we literally have no tools for stopping them. I also gave the Finisher version of Palm Strike a Melee debuff to make monks more appealing for groups. The uptime on 1 Inch Punch is very low due to its high cooldown so I increased its duration but lowered the sp damage for pvp balance. It is very hard to hit a moving target with 1 Inch Punch, so a 5 sec root is a just reward. The armor break on Knife Hand is very good however it too suffers from having a very low duration and long cooldown. The shockwave Deprotect + Knife Hand is a fun hidden skill to use, but the knock up is a quick way to get reprimanded by a party and blacklisted from Earth Tower, so it no longer does that. God Finger Flick is nice because it affords us a skill to use at range. It is also plagued however by an absurdly long cooldown. The range on the skill is also very poor. If you try to use the skill on a target that is running away, you must stop in your tracks to fire it, allowing the target to get even further away. So it can now be used while running. Energy Blast is our trademark skill. To use it correctly requires 5 seconds to full charge it, proper positioning to hit the highest amount of targets, and good aiming to you don’t accidentally fire and miss entirely. So a lot of things have to good right to make the perfect Energy Blast. Our reward for all that hard work is mediocre damage and having to stand still for 5 seconds and hoping we don’t get killed. It is our signature move and it blows. Other classes can to more damage instantly, with no setup, and on a much lower cooldown. Energy Blast should do a lot more for what it takes to work. In its current form it deals Physical and Holy damage. The Physical portion gets no bonus against any armor type and suffers a penalty against Magic armor. The Holy portion does more damage against Dark type monsters, but most Dark type monsters also have Magic armor. SO even when we do get a bonus, it is being penalized. It should just deal Magic damage. We use our Ki to generate the blast and it has Energy in the skills name. Using Iron Skin as a Finisher to grant us Pain Barrier, I think, is a great idea to solve out biggest problem. It is a defensive buff that we have to maintain in order to stay in the fight. Golden Bell Shield is a cool idea with far too many restrictions. You can get similar and better invulnerabilities from other classes that don’t have our hangups.
That’s it for my homebrew Monk. That went on longer than I expected but I had fun writing it. I appreciate the changes IMC are rolling out, so I thank them for their hardwork. I just had my own ideas on how I see the class. As it turns out I really care about the Monk class in just about every game I play. Obviously If this really existed in Savior it would be quite powerful and would probably need some tweaking to tone it down, but like I said the point of this remake was to make Monks fun, not overpowered. So thank you if you made it all the way through my rant. Sorry for the sloppy structure. I haven’t done any writing in some time, but it was fun so whatever. Feel free to comment or ask questions. If this thread gets a lot of traffic maybe someone from IMC will read it and steal my ideas that I stole from them.
so sad…