We need balance between light and dark again!

[NaturalHazard]

Beware the dark side.

[Xeraphim]

In my opinion, and ymmv, Jade strike, Tomb, Dismissing strike, Kukan Do are, frankly, more annoying than awesome.

Smite is a half-assed lame attempt at catching up to Touch of Death.

Jade Strike helps, but the save is WAY too low.

Tomb of Jade is kind of cool, but is extremely limited on targets by saves and effectiveness, and thus is essentially a wasted hotbar slot unless you are a level 20 doing favor runs under level 10.

Kukan Do is the only truly useful ability in the entire Shintao line.

As for Touch of Death, it needs to be Untyped. It needs to get past Death Ward, Boss Ward, Epic Ward, whatever. I haven't played my Ninja since the update due to working on a couple half orcs

[Soleran]

Are you sure about that? I know it doesn't seem to result in increased burst damage for single-strike increases like FoI or the earth^3 finisher, but I'm not sure it wouldn't result in more damage if the NSIII gave a permanent increase to x3. Guess it would depend on how it was coded.

Yea you must have some crappy dice becuase in my last life with wisdom of 28, I was hitting 500s on almost everything, when it comes to raid bosses you gotta cut it some slack, cause the saves are gonna be abnormally high. Fortunately the endgame content is not composed of 100% end boss fighting, maybe something around 10%.



That is incorrect.


This same rule also applies to rings. Try doing the 3xearth finisher that raises crit multiplier by 2 and see your burst effects.

I stand corrected it's been so long since I've looked at that I didn't even think twice.
Either way yowza.

[Fafnir]

The animation time on KD is thoroughly annoying. Come it and SF at short range - no comparison.

The only good use of KD is to pull teleporting mobs (eg. barbazu, orthons) to you in Devil's Battlefield or Vale when they will arrive stunned. A gimmick at best.

[Slowe]

On paper Shintao looks better than Ninja at the moment, but I'm holding my fingers crossed for a good Ninja 3 and hopefully the overhaul (or merely tweaking) of dark finishers.

[gurgar78]

As for Touch of Death, it needs to be Untyped. It needs to get past Death Ward, Boss Ward, Epic Ward, whatever. I haven't played my Ninja since the update due to working on a couple half orcs

ToD is currnetly unaffected by Boss Ward and Epic Ward since those abilities only prevent instant-kill effects and do not prevent negative energy damage.

Death Ward, however, does prevent negative energy damage and will therefore negate Touch of Death damage. Fortunately, there are relatively few mobs which cast this spell and it's not often that you will run into non-undead/construct enemies which are immune to ToD.

I do notice that the mino shamans in Frame Work cast it though. =/ This severely annoys my PM wizard. I had to use scorching ray on them when I was farming for the set. What? Spending mana to kill something??? Inconceivable!

[Marten]

I'm sorry, but I just can't get past the title... balance and again, when was there ever balance? Monk was gimp, then Dark got a boost while light got ignored for 6 months... didn't see a lot of calls from Dark players then for "ballance" it was, you're so gimp, play dark

I feel for the dark players, you had something and it was good and you got use to it and now that has changed, but light getting a boost has nothing to do with what happen to dark... are you going to be calling for "balance" when you get the third part of your Pre or going back to, "you're light, you're gimp, play dark!"

How about just, keep showing monks some love... keep us on the front burner for a bit and oh, btw... *motions hand left to right in front of his face* this is not the nerf bat you are looking for. Move along, move along.