Monk Touch of Death, my thoughts.

[Taimasan]

Soooo..I copied my monk to the test server and tested out the 500 pt strike. And i have to say...I'm pleased. From what i see it has a 15 second cooldown so thats means I'm gonna do 2000 points of damage a minute with just touch of death alone, unless i roll a 1. I know this is not a huge increase compared to the damage barbs, pallys or fighters can put out, but it is definitely a huge increase for me anyway. But a strike I can use unlimited times a day, while I'm madstoned raged just takes the cake for me. My only gripe is that touch of death and the element debuffs run on the same timer. I was planing to do TOD then debuff and hit em with elemental strikes between cooldowns for the extra damage ><. But that is not gonna be happening. All in all I like the direction they are taking monks now, now for some more named/epic handwraps and some greenweave wraps, and I will be peachy keen. =)

[lyeman]

Why not use touch of despair then ToD? Or does the 25% increase not work on it?

[Taimasan]

Hmmm dunno dude, gonna have to test that out! The thing with Touch of Despair is that your need a Dark-Dark-Dark finisher to have it go off. Your random trash mob will hopefully be dead by the time I get 3 Touches of Death off in order to do despair. And any mob who I can beat on for that like its gonna have a hard time sticking or is gonna be immune. But I will get back to you on that, and see if it does a increase in damage. When i did the ToDeath(ugh these acronyms are driving me crazy!) in the combat log it was shown as pierce damage. So i was like hmm, so as long as i don't go up to any clay golems or skele's and use ToDeath im cool. I was in the battleground at the time so I went up to the rare clay golem and used ToDeath, all 500 points of damage went through, orange numbers, while my fists were still showing as yellow. So this tells me that is type of damage is indeed special and is looking like its going to go through all DR. Im gonna go test that right now though. Stay tuned.

EDIT: Tested it out and since ToDeath shows up and pierce damage in the combat log i.e. "(Combat): You hit Tiefling Infantryman for 500 points of pierce damage." im guessing it does not count as the 25% neg. damage increase that ToDespair gives. But it was a good try!
But you could if fighting a harder mob do 3 ToDeath's, throw a ToDespair and hope it sticks and they are not immune then spam fists of darkness for the extra damage while ToDeath's timer is reloading.

[Sirea]

It is a pretty cool change, I've run around the Devil Battlefield on Lama testing this out and Touch of Death takes a noticeable chunk even out of the devils and orthons out there. It's kind of hard justifying staying Light path now, when you could just make say a splash build with full UMD for self-healing to substitute for not having FoL. I may be investing in a LR for my monk once the Update goes live.

It's definitely nice to see the work they're putting into making monks more viable.

[Redicular]

Why not use touch of despair then ToD? Or does the 25% increase not work on it?

death touch is typed piercing so its not affected by any of our damage boosting curses(despair or the 4 new ones)

in theory it should be stopped by skele dr while bypassing rakshash/razorcat/crimson foot dr. one of VERY few(3, shuriken/rahl's might) ways a monk can pass those dr's, thank god that's never really important.