Are dark monks now pointless?

[whomhead]

PLEASE NOTE: ANY AND ALL USE OF THE WORDS GIMP, GIMPITUDE, GIMPITUDINAL, OR GIMPORIFFICAL IS NOT INTENDED TO ACTUALLY APPLY TO ANY CHARACTERS, PLAYERS OR MINOR DEITIES. I use them merely to raise a question in tongue-in-cheek fashion. I sincerely offer my deepest heart-felt apologies to any game users hurt by my insensitive approach to discussing how magnificently gimporiffical your beloved dark monks are. /note. You may now proceed to your regularly scheduled thread.


It used to be that dark monks got shadow fade at level 6 and then touch of death at 9. Together, these were such a potent combination of offense and defense that to not go dark meant any character with more than three levels of light monk was, to put it bluntly, utterly and irrevocably gimp.

After U19, if you go dark monk you get.... an activatable attack that does paltry damage (and is one of about 5 hotbars worth of activatable damage attacks you can choose from), a few random debuffs, and the ability to waste AP on some ninja poison special moves that you can use once a minute.

Light monks get the healing curse, and the ability to cast a decently boosted mass cure critical wounds approximately once a minute. Plus all the goodies dark monks used to get.

So, am I missing something, or has the gimpitude undergone a complete reversal?

[Soulfurnace]

Dark monks enhancements are still better, but now you can heal yourself with fists of light. (HAH.)

[Uska]

Your statement is so utterly incorrect it hurts my brain. Dark monks are fine now and Light monks were great before and are even more so now

[Soulfurnace]

Your statement is so utterly incorrect it hurts my brain. Dark monks are fine now and Light monks were great before and are even more so now

Light monks, great before...
Go on, I'd love an explanation. Banishing fist didn't quite work on much at endgame.
Nor did, quite honestly, any light/dark monk DC abilities.

[Ayseifn]

I went dark on my HM, Shadows Cannot Exist Without Light is awesome. What might look bad for a certain build could be awesome for a different one.

[Replliw]

Your statement is so utterly incorrect it hurts my brain. Dark monks are fine now and Light monks were great before and are even more so now

I wholeheartedly agree with this statement. However, you can't tell minmaxers something like that, because they won't understand you. If one build has a slight advantage (e.g. 20.4 more dps at level cap) then the other, then it's uber. The one with 20.4 dps less- "pointless" and "utterly and irrevocably gimp". There is no grey area here. And for all that's unholy, don't even mention that they are both viable and fun unless you think a pitchfork would make a good addition to your physique.


As to the OP: Yes, go play a barbarian.

[TeacherSyn]

It used to be that dark monks got shadow fade at level 6 and then touch of death at 9. Together, these were such a potent combination of offense and defense that to not go dark meant any character with more than three levels of light monk was, to put it bluntly, utterly and irrevocably gimp.

After U19, if you go dark monk you get.... an activatable attack that does paltry damage (and is one of about 5 hotbars worth of activatable damage attacks you can choose from), a few random debuffs, and the ability to waste AP on some ninja poison special moves that you can use once a minute.

Light monks get the healing curse, and the ability to cast a decently boosted mass cure critical wounds approximately once a minute. Plus all the goodies dark monks used to get.

So, am I missing something, or has the gimpitude undergone a complete reversal?

It really depends on something that DDO cannot fully control: Your expectations.

Ninja Spies had it far, far worse before U19, relying mostly on the Dark Monk's then-only awesome attack, the Touch of Death. They also got sneak attack damage and that was it. They once had the elemental debuffers now present in the Henshin Mystic line.

With U19, the Ninjas gain Vorpal on any piercing and slashing weapon by 20, superior stealth improvements with the new AI change, and one continually-underappreciated attack: Poison. It's now a VERY potent damage-over-time effect used by many enemies to damage or kill. Go visit the Drow in the Underdark and see how your characters get very nasty DoTs from Drow fights. Even Arraetreikos long-in-place CON poison now works more reliably in the Shroud...with a 1,000 point death blow if you ignore the initial poison. Got hit with that yesterday.

The Ninja Poison is bad going in and out. It takes patience and the right weapon to use it, but if you're the pushy-button thrashing reflex-gamer sort, it might not be what you think is useful.

As others have mentioned, being able to neg level a crowd continually with ki is terribly effective.

The Shadow Veil effect lost only the passive ki regeneration, but you retrieve a bit of that from other enhancements.

In short, to play a dark Monk means going Ninja. There's hardly anything gimpy about these characters now.

As for Shintao, I find it has a tiny gimp...it overly favors the Earth Stance. I would have preferred to see a more dynamic benefit to each stance.

[whomhead]

Your statement is so utterly incorrect it hurts my brain. Dark monks are fine now and Light monks were great before and are even more so now

By statement, I assume you must have actually meant question. Because, you know, I asked the question "Are dark monks now pointless?" You see that little squiggly thing at the end? (Oh! There it is again!) That's a question mark. It denotes a question.

And hey, thanks for the well-thought out and insightful answer....

As to the OP: Yes, go play a barbarian.

Honestly, I'm quite surprised by the anger in some of these responses. Calling me a min-maxer, and telling me to go play a barbarian...? What the heck, dude? I truly thought it was clear that the phrase utterly and irrovocably gimp was so over-the-top as to be obviously not meant to to be taken seriously. You can play any dang thing you want, bro. Knock yourself out!

Oh yeah, and thanks for explaining all the great things that dark monks have over light. I feel so much more informed! Wait, nope. You just cast some veiled insights and then left a lingering stink in the thread on your way out.

Legit thanks to Spencerian and Ayseifn for providing actual information. I assume Ays meant Every Light Casts a Shadow, which seems to be quite nice... if it weren't a tier 5 ability in the Henshin line, which I (and I'm fully willing to admit I am probably missing something) find to be a lot of AP used in a sub-par tree, plus it locks you out of touch of death.

In response to Spencerian, I haven't tried using ninja poison yet as all of my monks are unarmed, and I can't see any way to reliably get ninja poison going to any great degree unless, as you indicated, one uses slashing/piercing weapons. Is that something most monks are doing these days, even after the nerf so it doesn't work with ranged or unarmed? I think it is great that shortsword-using monks have some goodies going for them now, but I still don't see many/any pure monks (implied by your bringing up the Ninja Master core ability) running around using SS or kamas.

If unarmed, then the only way I see to get ninja poison stacked is using the touch of despair finisher and actually successfully landing the finisher (which is a fort save, so pretty high on most mobs) and then using the finisher AGAIN to set off the poison exploit. That's a very drawn out process to get that damage burst. Probably good for bosses, but nigh impossible on trash.

Finally, I should clarify that by dark monk I simply meant taking the Inevitable Dominion feat over Harmonious Balance. Many of the abilities mentioned so far, including all of the abilities in the Ninja tree except the poison exploit, can still be used with the light monk feat. Likewise, almost all of the shintao abilities can be used by a dark monk.

So please, enlighten me oh great, wise, and beneficent forum-densizens on the value of Inevitable Dominion.

[HatsuharuZ]

OP, people are going to take your words at face value unless you have a sarcasm tag or something. We're not exactly having a face-to-face conversation here.

As for your question: No, I don't think so.

Why don't you go play a dark monk and find out for yourself?

[Ayseifn]

It's Shadows Cannot Exist Without Light, you take the one that's opposite to your path. It's a 10 sec DoT with a 6 sec cooldown and if the mob dies you get an AoE cure for 100+ heal amp. Once you get used to it you can just run around tagging mobs for people and moving on or DoTing a couple of mobs close together, I have renew twisted and heal scrolls too but this gets me through most quests for free.

That's the main reason I went so deep in HM, the other is the acrobat tree isn't worth going deep on. If you're building a staff user you'll probably mix in monk and rog levels and go dex or str based anyway, so skipping all the DC based attacks is fine.

[whomhead]

Why don't you go play a dark monk and find out for yourself?

Because I don't have a whole lot of time to play, and thought that I could use the forums to ask questions and get answers in a more efficient time frame. Was there some other purpose for the forums to exist that I'm unaware of?

I think I asked a whole bunch of really good questions in my second post, which you've obviously read, so why not answer some of them?

[Memnir]

I didn't like the changes to Ninja at all.
Changed over to Shin and am really enjoying it. Not sure what that says about the changes over all, just that they weren't for me. It could also be that this is my second-life Monk, who was also Dark on their first life, so I was also likely very bored with dark overall. But, the character was stalled out near level 20, and had been for over a year. No interest in playing them. On a whim, I changed over from Ninja to Shin, and now the character is 20 and growing, suddenly fun again.

[pasterqb]

Touch of Death is a massive waste of AP and makes other tier 5 prestiges unavailable so not good at all. Shadow Double is good but you obviously don't need to be Dark to get it.

The only reason i kind of like Dark is for the Touch of Despair fort reducing ability on raid bosses. DC will obviously be low but combined with the penalty to fortitude save from Improved Sunder it will be decent. Lets my monk debuff the Boss by 50% Fort (25% tod +10% Sunder +15% Eagle Claw Atk) With that being said their are no end game raids making it meh.

Assuming you're talking about pure monks then Light is by far better cause level 18 and capstone are just so good compared to the **** you get from Ninja Spy.

[Teh_Troll]

Light monks, great before...
Go on, I'd love an explanation.

They could Hjeal meh!

[sephiroth1084]

Yeah, have to agree that dark monks have gotten rather weak.

Part of this is due to no longer requiring Dark path for Shadow Fade (Veil), but it's also got to do with a lot of Ninja Spy now requiring non-handwraps, and the Dark/Dark/Dark finisher being DC based, and without any real way to boost it to make up for levels 21-28 not increasing the DC (and EE mobs having super-inflated saves).

Light was kind of weak before, in part because nothing it got was quite as strong as Shadow Fade and Touch of Death. Now that they can get the former, and the latter is broken/nerfed, they've pulled ahead.

I'd love to try more of the Ninja Spy stuff on my monk, but I refuse to change over to short swords.

This is a problem the monk trees have at the moment: you can't go very deep into Henshin unless you spend a lot of AP on staff-only junk, and you lose about 1/3 of the Ninja Spy tree to piercing/slashing only stuff. If you're unarmed, there's a lot of stuff in your class enhancements you can't use, which is kind of puzzling to me.

[Steevye]

Yeah, have to agree that dark monks have gotten rather weak.

I'd love to try more of the Ninja Spy stuff on my monk, but I refuse to change over to short swords.

This sums it up for me too. My formerly ninja spy halfling is now a shintao in his second life. Touch od death was working moderately well when he hit the cap when it was 25, but by the time I figured in the ED stuff it rendered the build underwhelming, but he could still do wicked unarmed dmg.

I guess when I play monks, I want unarmed combat. It's one of the most unique facets of the class, and I just feel guilty using short swords or kamas on a class that I bought with the intention of avoiding weapon use.

I'd definitely not call the tree gimp, but I'm personally enjoying shintao way more than I ever did the ninja.

[Munkenmo]

Dark monks and Light monks have both taken a hit in some regards:

As someone who first started playing as a light monk in 09, swearing by it religiously till mid 2011, then joining the dark side. I can tell you that The damage on a dark monk did used to be substaintially better than our light counterparts. Now days though, 2 dark features are no longer tied to monk philosophy, Shadowfade & sneak attack dice. For 11ap any monk can pick up 2 sneak dice and shadowfade.

Given that I've got 2/3 of my toys back regardless of path, I now look at it like this:

Dark attacks:
Fist of Darkness
Touch of Death (t5 ninja) (also been nerfed, no longer procs on offhand)
Shadows can't exist without light. (t5 henshin)
Touch of Despair (finisher) (still worth it thanks to the neg level, the dc against bosses is laughable)

Light attacks:
Fists of light:
Align the heavens
Every Light casts a shadow (t5 henshin)(would be totally awesome if not for the terrible ap options in henshin)
1min 25% cheaper sp costs (great ability before the rise of shiradis)


I'm honestly not likely to use any elemental related attacks at all at level cap vs trash, as I need ki to sustain Quivering Palm & Stunning Fist. Fortunately since QP & SF don't break the finishing chain, I'm still able to use touch of despair with it's negative level.

Against boss fights, I'm far more likely to be cycling lots of elemental ki strikes & unbalancing strike (ruling out touch of despair).
Since I pick up Shintao t5, I don't have either of the dark related T5 abilities (I went Shintao cause the henshin/ninja options to reach t5 really suck for an unarmed monk). As a light monk though, I can at least keep up Fists of Light and have the option to throw healers 25% off sp costs.

So looking at the philosophy choices now and way I play, in 2013 I still pick dark monk. Purely because of the probability of it providing options I'm more likely to use.

*note: I look at this choice as how it effects me at level cap. My monk is an unarmed, earth stance & Wisdom based t5 Shintao, running mostly in EE's. I run in byoh groups where fists of light healing and align the heavens makes little if any difference.

In heroic levels I'm also more likely to pick up dark, henshin mystic tree is actually quite nice vs low hp enemies + the t5 100hp heal is more effective when your a lowbie with little hp.

edit* tl;dr: I still prefer dark.

[inspiredunease]

/snip

Thank you, you've actually genuinely made me question why I still have the light philosophy at cap, I think I still somehow had it tied into the tainted strikes in my head (which I do still use at cap for various reasons). However I would like to question your reasoning on the levelling process, as I would still prefer to pick up tier 5 Shintao earlier rather than later on an unarmed monk, and so would prefer to have FoL/Healing Ki for easy-button self-healing. If you've tried out both, I'd be interested to hear your comparison.

[whomhead]

I'm honestly not likely to use any elemental related attacks at all at level cap vs trash, as I need ki to sustain Quivering Palm & Stunning Fist. Fortunately since QP & SF don't break the finishing chain, I'm still able to use touch of despair with it's negative level.

Against boss fights, I'm far more likely to be cycling lots of elemental ki strikes & unbalancing strike (ruling out touch of despair).
Since I pick up Shintao t5, I don't have either of the dark related T5 abilities (I went Shintao cause the henshin/ninja options to reach t5 really suck for an unarmed monk). As a light monk though, I can at least keep up Fists of Light and have the option to throw healers 25% off sp costs.

So looking at the philosophy choices now and way I play, in 2013 I still pick dark monk. Purely because of the probability of it providing options I'm more likely to use.

Is the DC of touch of despair really high enough to land on trash in EE? What's your wisdom to get a workable DC, especially as I'm not aware of any ways to increase the DC beyond just 10 + monk level + Wis mod? If we assume 60 Wis, which is probably towards the high end of sustainable wis, then it would have a DC of 55 VS a fortitude save. I guess it is good VS casters, but probably not so much on anything else. Seems like a lot of work for one neg level on trash caster mobs, which are probably far more easily/quickly taken out with QP or stunning fist.

In reading your post I have to say that I'm surprised you still come down on the dark side if you aren't going for the t5 Henshin ability.

Perhaps the conclusion is that both are only minimally useful at level cap, unless you go t5 Henshin? Which of course comes with the significant downside of being very expensive in terms of requiring AP on spent bad enhancements for unarmed monks. Does that about sum it up?

[Uska]

By statement, I assume you must have actually meant question. Because, you know, I asked the question "Are dark monks now pointless?" You see that little squiggly thing at the end? (Oh! There it is again!) That's a question mark. It denotes a question.

And hey, thanks for the well-thought out and insightful answer....



Honestly, I'm quite surprised by the anger in some of these responses. Calling me a min-maxer, and telling me to go play a barbarian...? What the heck, dude? I truly thought it was clear that the phrase utterly and irrovocably gimp was so over-the-top as to be obviously not meant to to be taken seriously. You can play any dang thing you want, bro. Knock yourself out!

Oh yeah, and thanks for explaining all the great things that dark monks have over light. I feel so much more informed! Wait, nope. You just cast some veiled insights and then left a lingering stink in the thread on your way out.

Legit thanks to Spencerian and Ayseifn for providing actual information. I assume Ays meant Every Light Casts a Shadow, which seems to be quite nice... if it weren't a tier 5 ability in the Henshin line, which I (and I'm fully willing to admit I am probably missing something) find to be a lot of AP used in a sub-par tree, plus it locks you out of touch of death.

In response to Spencerian, I haven't tried using ninja poison yet as all of my monks are unarmed, and I can't see any way to reliably get ninja poison going to any great degree unless, as you indicated, one uses slashing/piercing weapons. Is that something most monks are doing these days, even after the nerf so it doesn't work with ranged or unarmed? I think it is great that shortsword-using monks have some goodies going for them now, but I still don't see many/any pure monks (implied by your bringing up the Ninja Master core ability) running around using SS or kamas.

If unarmed, then the only way I see to get ninja poison stacked is using the touch of despair finisher and actually successfully landing the finisher (which is a fort save, so pretty high on most mobs) and then using the finisher AGAIN to set off the poison exploit. That's a very drawn out process to get that damage burst. Probably good for bosses, but nigh impossible on trash.

Finally, I should clarify that by dark monk I simply meant taking the Inevitable Dominion feat over Harmonious Balance. Many of the abilities mentioned so far, including all of the abilities in the Ninja tree except the poison exploit, can still be used with the light monk feat. Likewise, almost all of the shintao abilities can be used by a dark monk.

So please, enlighten me oh great, wise, and beneficent forum-densizens on the value of Inevitable Dominion.

another one for the list