Post Update 5 Lowbie Monk Personal Experience

[eveilsor666]

I'm not getting as much fun out of playing my monk any more!

-rant on- I just want to put this out there to see if any one else feels the same and it isn't just me!

I was happily playing my light path monk and had levelled it up to lvl7 before Update 5 came out. It WAS fun! I have TWF1 only.

It took me a while to get used to hitting the buttons for certain moves, and figuring out which hotkeys/mouse buttons to assign for what moves, and I still hadn't quite sussed it out, and that was my only problem with my monk pre update 5. Too many things to do and buttons to hit. Which is a nice little problem to have. I was learning how to play it, it was fun and enjoyable.

POST UPDATE 5

*cry*

My lvl7 monk is not doing as I "feel" it should be in combat. It just feels unnatural what my character is doing/not doing.

I am running up to mobs and holding down my mouse button to attack and most of the time ... nothing happens.

Seriously...Nothing!

It feels like some game mechanic is broken, and my monk doesn't want to even "try" to hit a mob. It is stood right in front of me. I press the attack button and it doesn't want to attack a mob straight away sometimes even though my fist are swinging! Go figure!

When it finally begins an attack chain, I tend to see 1 set of numbers come up inbetween swings, then after a delay a second set, maybe if I get lucky I throw my left hand at the mob as well and see another set of numbers immediately underneath it letting me know my off hand procced, but this seems to happen less than 40% of the time. It just doesn't feel smooth or natural the way the monk attacks any more and I don't enjoy playing it as much. I went back to do some low level quests I had done before, and they are taking me longer to complete even though I am 2 or 3 levels better off than when I last did them. I feel like I levelled down instead of up.

I won't get Improved Two Weapon Fighting until lvl9, and won't get Greater TWF until lvl15. I am hoping to god it improves the feel of combat and timing between animation and actually striking soemthing. I have decent AC and an invulnerability item right now which helps but quests are definitely taking longer than what I feel they should be. When the quests get harder my AC will help a bit but that invulnerability item will be less usefull in a lvl or two.

Before update5 my monk was progressing nicely, I was getting into it, and all of a sudden it feels like my monk doesn't actually know how to attack properly any more It is harder to predict when to use a special move as opposed to ordinary attacks as I can't get a "feel" for the speed within a fight any more as the numbers and timing don't match up with my swings and it feels more random and chaotic. It is hard to build up any momentum. It is extremely frustrating.

I also feel that mobs need to be much closer for me to hit them than before update 5 which is making me hold off on using ki until I know for sure a mob is close enough, but by then it tends to be too late as the mob has hit me all ready, or I have taken it out with my "delayed attack numbers above its head" but now have unused ki that could have been used to take it down faster and prevented it from being able to attack me as many times as it did. On the odd occassion if I stand still and let a mob run at me, and hold down the attack button I see numbers fly up before the mob is actually on me, but this is slower, and doesn't feel like an aggressive, offensive playstyle and makes me wonder just what exactly the "range" is between you and a mob/breakable actually has to be. It feels totally random, which isn't fun to play. I've noticed across all my toons thet running and hitting mobs has become a lot more difficult than it used to be, and the collision detection between player and mobs/breakables feels OFF.

Anyone else finding that at lower to mid levels they are hitting a lot less, and things just don't "feel" as smooth any more? I feel like I am pressing a button to ATTACK and I am not actually attacking at the right time and there is a significant delay.

Anyone out there in the same position as me after Update 5 and was around level 6 to 8 and doing things like STK, TR, Deleras, Sorrowdusk, etc and with TWF, finding that their monk played differently than before the update? If so, do you have any tips on how to overcome it?

I played my lvl20 twf rogue after the update and haven't really found much difference except for a slight DPS drop (until I took the new rogue capstone), but my monk and another low TWF build I have feel really hard to play and attacking just doesn't feel natural any more to me. My THF Paladin doesn't seem to be having as many problems, even though the no glancing blows while moving has had to make me stand still and fight a lot more as I was levelling it up from 5 to 10 Everything just seems OFF at low levels. Which is sad, as it was where I was having a lot of fun and learning to play the game with differnet classes and styles as one would expect. Lower levels is where I am learning my builds and to me this new update has really put a damper on the FUN you have at lower levels as it just doesn't feel like our characters are attacking naturally in rhythm with what we are asking them to do

It feels like a different game to me now.

Just my opinion.

[Xaearth]

It's because unarmed combat has a ridiculously pathetic reach. Now that offhand attacks are tied to mainhand hit detection, if a mob is moving you have a snowball's chance in hell of actual landing an attack, whereas before, even though you'd whiff, the separate hit detection combined with faster attack speed (wind stance) made it far less noticeable.

It's to the point that if something's moving, if I've got ki I wait till it runs at me and hold out a stunning fist hoping they run into it. If I don't, I stand there and let the morons kiting it kill it.

But it's okay, I finally got Devouts after 20 runs of Shadow Crypt.

[prybar]

My monk splashed cleric was really struggling at level 7 post-U5 whereas my acrobat monk splash blasted through the same content pre-U5. Simple, easy solution? Use 2H weapons. More reliable damage that's not tied to a proc chance and longer reach. Your to-hit will be higher as well. To stay centered and in stance, it means using quarterstaves but you don't have to. My cleric is running around in mithril plate and wielding a greataxe. When you hit level 9 and can get ITWF, switch back to handwraps.

[t0r012]

yeah I'm getting the same "out of sync" feeling.
feels like I'm fighting under water and the mobs aren't. 3 attack animations go off before anything processes. no hits no misses just dead swings, it is pretty darn annoying.

It was bad enough before chasing the darn kobold shamans hoping backwards up to ledges now you can't even get an attack in before they are gone.

[eveilsor666]

yeah I'm getting the same "out of sync" feeling.
feels like I'm fighting under water and the mobs aren't. 3 attack animations go off before anything processes. no hits no misses just dead swings, it is pretty darn annoying.

It was bad enough before chasing the darn kobold shamans hoping backwards up to ledges now you can't even get an attack in before they are gone.

lol exactly. I was running Deleras yesterday and those archers were jumping up high into cracks in walls I couldn't even see with my tiny halfling eyes. Trying to hit them once they got up like that was next to impossible, I gave up and moved on, and found something else to kill to get Conquest Bonus up. lol

Speaking of which, yesterday was the first time I took my monk into a group - Deleras xp rusn with my guild. The combat bug (if you can call it that) was even more noticeable in a group. When it is just me, the mobs run AT ME so at least I can hit them. When I am in a group and someone else pulls a mobs agro as I am trying to hit it is a serious pain. Especially when you have a special move prepped and you go to hit say a caster, but it moves to go for your caster or the intimitank or something and you totally waste your ki. I was hitting the "light strike button" and soemtimes for some peculiar reason it was actually hitting a mob that was behind the one I was aiming at. This detection thing is so far off and botched up it isn't even funny any more! I'm swinging my fists at several mobs aroudn us, and instead of just hitting teh one in front it seems to randomly decide what it wants to hit.

At one point I actually swung my fists, and numbers came up above a ghostly skeleton that had snuck up behind me, and I killed it. Now that is what I call UBER MONK POWERS!