Monk Deep Dive Discussion!

Phuture

Sitoryp Underlying this is a problem that worries me more and more. The hotfix change to roundkick does next to nothing at the end of the day. if you gained 350dexterity and 40 damage at level 60, you would have to roundkick something for 2 minutes to do 500 more damage to it, assuming everytime you hit and everytime you hit for max dmg.

At the end of one hour, how many more mobs does that net you? Can you do harder content with it? The answers are weak, even for an exaggerated 350 dex gain. A far more realistic gain of 100dex nets you around 200 damage over 2minutes, with 100% hit rate and hit damage. That does't produce any measurable signal at all.
My level 24 necromancer gets a better bonus on two 3 second spells.

Why even add dex scaling if the only effect is going to be this pathetic ability damage boost? This is not a complaint about DPS, this is a complaint about the dex scaling mechanic itself as implemented.

We could have an honest debate over which stat is best for monks right now. It would be between strength, intelligence, agility, stamina, wisdom, dexterity. It is crazy for any class to be in that position.

I do not mean for any of my posts to come off rude. I love the game world and am strongly rooting for it to be a lasting success. I try to be constructive, and provide good and actionable feedback, that is specific and focused on exactly what is wrong in order to help the game.

I believe others might agree that it can be frustrating to see so many people giving constructive feedback only to have it fall on deaf ears. The disconnect at such a critical time is worrying to us, because we don't hear anything and then see something like the Dex scaling roundkick tweak and it makes us feel like we are playing a totally different game than the developers.

I'm very much rooting for this game to be a success in EA. As it stands, I plan to play, though I will not be playing as a monk unless major overhaul is done, and it is hard to advise anyone else to do so in good faith.

Phuture

Canaway

I honestly think the combat formula needs to be deleted and redone. It would take one day to do better equations for this, and it is the source of so many of their problems. It will cost them more time to avoid because its going to make balancing a nightmare.

Pocah

So I see fishing pole and grudgeshaft about equal in the maths. Does this also apply to the 4 choices of first weapons to? From bonebreakers(pretty easy to get 2) then upgrade to glacial then upgrade to hadir iron fists? Been trying to keep up on posts so was curious on first weapons as well what the testing has been like.

klok

Phuture Ive had this feeling for a long long time. Since a year ago when every hit on a target +-5 lvl would hit for 1 damage. And then the bugs with mobs spawnin with weapons causing mobs to do hit for 6x more dps. Now finding out the generated basic player hits are this bugged. This kind of thing is why dps meters can be a good thing, players wouldve sussed out this buggy combat behavior a long time ago.

BobWendal

Just posting more feedback after pulling in Fallen Watch over the past few days.
The tight spaces, close proximity to the party and mob density made it harder for sure, but still very doable. A mix of pacify and monk splitting went a long way to increase group survival. I was able to keep pulls small while our cc (inq) kept up with the fast respawn rats.

I was consistently using all 10 ability slots and constantly debating slotting different abilities in while also rotating through all 3 stances as needed. This felt very good.
FD was consistent and the LoS changes are working as expected. Even while in LoS I rarely had reaggro problems. Maybe had 3 crit fails on fd across 18 hours.

Pinning throw feels good as is. I can use it without expecting it to fail, fail rate has been good (only one instance of multiple fails in a row)and the gcd feels long enough to avoid exploiting it.

Canaway

Canaway
Up to 83 int sunstrike is up to 241 damage. Dps work around. Forget dex right now.

Also had a thought that level locking the full eventual benefit of the scaling would also curb twinking low levels that can now wreck its level of content. this is already somewhat applied with level requirements of spell effects on items.

Nideak

So I have played the updated monk for a bit, mostly in fallen watch.

I will not amend my previous thoughts on our overall kit, as it (and therefore they) have not changed. I would still like to see a complete re-work of stances to something new, unique, meaningful. Our taunt cooldown is still borked. Tons of work to be done there.

I will focus solely on our role as puller.

Pinning strike is much better now. I think I might like to see the root effect last a bit longer (1s?) just to allow better terrain/LoS manipulation. If you need extra time to separate the mob for those purposes,, you run into some issues with loitering.

Which brings me to mob loitering. Still horrible if you do not have the assistance of LoS/terrain. Mobs in MNM would definitely always go to the bathroom together. I do hope this can eventually be tweaked in the future.

LoS memblur is working far better than I expected. I do not think I had a single case of it not working as intended. In a place like FW, with a lot of ramps and hallways and turns, this allowed for quite a few creative techniques.

This brings me to my biggest gripe: I am still failing feign death far too often. I died multiple times because I critically failed back-to-back. In order to survive a singular fail in FW, I needed to pop stone, ethereal, mend, and sweeping. Anecdotally/vibes, it feels close to 25% of the time I am failing. I will actually sit down and just feign 1000 times in a row to give real numbers, but regardless the fail% IS WAY TOO HIGH. It's not an escape tool. It's a tool for our job. It should feel like a reliable tool, not roulette.

Unrelated:

1) All of our skills scale with us as we level now. Should Mend? I could argue different aspects of this, but the %heal and the cooldown both feel a bit on the weak end by the time you get to level 60. The cooldown especially feels punishing. As mentioned earlier, I need all of my buttons to survive a failed feign in FW. I am now severely limited for 5 full minutes. I do not think 3 minutes would be game breaking.

2) Please allow us to drag corpses while we're dead. Please. The macros in game make it difficult to drag an entire party with any grace and dignity. Let us flop drag. At some point, we need to put aside "GAME IMMERSION LOL THE MONSTERS WOULD TOTALLY SEE YOU DRAGGING THOSE CORPSES!!!!!!" and focus on the first word of that sentence. It's a game. I'm already functionally blind. Let me drag corpses.

Pocah

So what would level 50+ monks after past couple weeks rate monk dps tier wise? Monks A tier? Or B tier?

Phuture

Pocah
meme of ben affleck smoking
Don't worry about dps for now.

Fubsy

Pocah

B tier would be a stretch

However the variety of the kit is really good in my opinion. Are there some things I'd like to see changed(besides a bump in H2H dps) - yes but is it killing my enjoyment of the game - No

Soloing is still very viable with a couple of creative strategies, pulling has become solid and a lot of fun with some really creative options.

I think with coming tweaks and adjustments the class will be just fine

Baashem

Pocah

D tier. Dont cope guys, it is literally D tier.

I am 60 with only a few pieces of gear not available to me. An Ele's Wind pet can out damage me. Easily.

That said, the damage formula is still completely busted. Get yourself a 0 damage weapon and you are set.

Phuture

Baashem I think the most honest and least exaggerated review of any given class update, monk update included, is what happened to the price of the class BiS weapons after the update. Archer update spiked Dragon Sinew Bow. Spellblade update caused a Stirring Stick shortage and price spike. Rogue Update made fell trident and high tier chain armor very hard to find.

Hadir's fist? 1.5-2pp pre update, very very rarely did you see one for sale. Now I have seen several people selling 2 of them at a time, and got my second one for 20g.

Echoeless leggings? Several sets have been for sale for 10-15g, these were 1pp before.

Baashem

Phuture

Yes. Agreed. But remove the Echoless Leggings from this. Silent Nirra was confirmed bugged and spawning at a rate wayyyyy below what she was suppose to be. So her spawn rate was fixed in the same patch. Supply on these went way up.

But you are 100% correct about Hadir's Fists. I kept mine for the Deep Dive hoping that H2H would be made better and I could go back to using them. OR, worst case, the price on them would go up and I could sell them as I already had Mother's Sorrow and a Stirring Stick.

Turns out both assumptions were incorrect, we are in the 0 Damage weapon meta.

bosui

Are the 0 Damage weapons not just behaving the same as a held item that doesn't have damage/delay at all? Has their damage and delay been compared to being simply unarmed?

Phuture

bosui The dmg is far higher. I can explain why and have explained somewhere on the forums but it has fallen on mostly deaf ears.

I was testing a theory I had on what was wrong with the damage equation, and melee-dmg normalizer. I was curious what a 0-dmg weapon would do, as you cannot divide 0 into any ratio, and plugging a 0 into any multiplication function in an equation will nil out that value.

In more plain English, by using a 0 for wep dmg, you can get more info about the weapon damage formula, and possibly see where it breaks down.

The results support the theory that melee damage is being suppressed by an overaggressive normalization equation. This is a big problem for balancing the game.

It is very hard to explain how plugging a "0" in for weapon damage makes your dps go way way up without this being the case. The dps of a 0dmg 1hand weapon is far superior to bare-knuckle dps. The dps of the 2h 0dmg fishing pole is equivalent to BiS grudgehaft.

I find it likely that the 0 prevents the normalization table from being calculated. This is supported by the hit-dispersion. The number of Maximum-damage hits is ballpark the same, the number of minimum dmg hits against high level mobs is similar, but the number of hits you land in the 65-80% (of max hit) range is something crazy like 20:1. On non-zero dmg weapons, this range of hit values is populated more evenly.

In plain english- the graph of # of hits per dmgValue for the 0-damage weapons looks organic. The # of hits per value for other weapons looks very inorganic, with artificial looking patterns. The 0-dmg weapon performs equivalent or superior DPS to best-in-slot weapons.

This is uniquely monk-related as a discovery because other classes do not have the bare knuckle h2h dmg that we do, required to figure this out.

bosui

Phuture But is this how the 0 damage weapons are presently behaving?

My testing was done on a monk albeit at lower level but my observations were that using a 0 damage fishing rod in your main hand to attack was doing the exact same damage and delay of an empty fist at that same level. The combat log even showed "You punch" rather than "You crush." It was actually worse potential dps observed using a fishing rod over empty fist because the "Two Handed" tag prevented any off-hand swings.

It's entirely possible something has changed with those items since your testing was done, or maybe the weapons behave completely different at lower levels. This is still a beta test and things are constantly in flux so something that may have been true a month ago or a week ago may not be valid anymore and it's always a good idea to do follow-up testing.

Phuture

bosui Our testing involved parsing thousands of hits, misses, sorting them by mainhand, offhand, keeping identical strength values, avoiding melee abilities, keeping stance consistent, engaging in same level or identical mobs, using different level monks, as well as other classes with identical str/stat layouts for comparison. I'm curious if your testing involved any of this.

We did all the due diligence imaginable. We saw the "you punch" and "you crush" (we can read). We were meticulous down to the T. After we saw that, immediately got our hands on other fishing poles with real damage values to test whether they said "punch" instead of "crush" (they didn't - magic fishing poles with real dmg values say "crush"). The 6dmg fishing pole parsed much worse dps than the 0dmg fishing pole.

bosui so something that may have been true a month ago or a week ago may not be valid anymore and it's always a good idea to do follow-up testing.

I deliberately waited until the most recent patch and hotfix to gather my data.

After your post, I just went out and tested it again. The 0 dmg fishing pole hits harder than bare knuckle, still. I am not sure what level you are, as you have not included that or any of your experimental parameters, but I would imagine there are several other possible explanations for why you get the results that you do, beyond the simple assumption I lack the common sense to use only recently gathered data.

I am happy to explain my sources and methods, or even watch you hit things for 10 minutes with both and chart out the hit dispersion, avg hit, dps, etc. It might even be a useful data point depending on your level.

Geldrey

Phuture could any class use a fishing pole and get the same DPS increase? Or is it a uniquely monk thing?

Phuture

[unknown] This is a good question, and i'd love to know the answer to it.

As was previously noted, when using the 0dmg Blunt* fishing rod or construction hammer, hits read as Punch instead of Crush. There are several possible explanations, if you were to try to reverse engineer the formula in a way that explains this.

I would guess that other classes do not get the same increase, based on the punch read. This implies the hit values are connected to hand-to-hand damage, and unarmed skill, so I would expect monks to a substantially larger increase.

Comparing another class directly to monk would be difficult because of h2h skill alone. I would need to find a lvl 39 or 60 of another melee class who had maxed out h2h skill. You want to keep as many things identical as possible beyond what you are measuring for.

One test I could try, and I would invite others with high level char's of different classes to try as well, is to punch a few things in the NH courtyard, with no weapon, and then with fishing pole. It would be interesting to see if they have a similar % increase of max hit, even if their max hit was much lower, and help determine if this is exclusive to monk h2h tables or not.

Baashem

Overall DPS for the Monk now is way worse. Way. Way. Way. Worse.

Me, 8/4/26

Whatever change just took place so that more of our hits are at the low end of the damage range needs to be reverted (I’m 60 and have been hitting level 30 green mobs for 4).

Me. 8/5/26

And many more similar comments from others... Now most Monks are using 0 damage weapons because they are the best dps right now (It's a running joke).

Obviously the formula is broken, and a Dev needs to admit that, if not publicly at least to themselves.
A dev needs to work on a fix before EA, otherwise the Monk class is DOA on EA.
Obviously, this class community is passionate AND savvy, as we sussed this out quickly, despite being told we are imagining things. If you need help there are tons of people here that have offered.
Failure to do any of these things just shows that 'testing' in BETA is pointless, if Devs aren't going to listen when the community points out class breaking flaws, what's the point? If completely busted things (0 damage weapon better than 22 damage weapon) are not addressed in BETA, what hope do we have at launch?

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