First thoughts

[Fecerak]

Logged onto lama and made a monk 20 quickly. My first thoughts:
- The amount of melee power in henshin is fairly ridiculous, making all monks want to spend a bunch of points here (probably 41, even), but the enhancements are mostly useless. This causes a very feel-bad situation where you feel forced to spend a lot of AP on abilities that basically do nothing just to get the cores to get the melee power.
- Handwraps didn't seem to work at all - I only appeared to do the base damage of my weapon when wielding handwraps, all bonuses from strength/shintao/whatever didn't seem to apply at all.
- The changes feels to the enhancements overall felt as though they were meant to improve the monk with the least amount of work possible. Consider spending some more time on replacing old outdated enhancements instead of giving them small buffs that make them more relevant because those buffs mostly do nothing since many of them aren't worth taking anyways.
- Consider cutting the elemental stances feats from being tied to character level and make them tied to monk level again, since the main issue with monks has always been that the class is really frontloaded, and the change to this that happened a few years is a part of it that I'd prefer to see gone.
- Improve the later cores in shintao and ninja spy as those are basically the only reason for a monk to stay pure if the ridiculous situation in henshin is adressed since everything else has been frontloaded.
- Consider tying more things to monk levels to make them a bit more backloaded. Maybe for instance buff stunning fist DC to 10+1/2 character level+stunning fist modifiers+1/4 monk level, and quivering palm DC to have monk level instead of monk level/2 in DC.
- Consider trying to give monks some unique abilities in T5s and later cores that define them instead of just handing out power in terms of melee power/PRR/whatever. Give us a reason to play a character that heavily invests in the monk trees instead of just trying to fix everything by just doing whatever is easiest.
- Improve the base damage of the elemental strikes, or make them scale with a fairly high percentage of melee power (say 400%, making earth strike with 100 melee power be +80 damage which seems reasonable).
- Give Henshin another T5 enhancement or 2. Giving them something that greatly improves the elemental stances would be a cool and defining benefit from taking T5 Henshin for instance.
- Overall make sure that a decent amount of the enhancements are worth taking in many builds instead of pigeonholing each tree so incredibly hard - why can't I be an unarmed ninja-spy or a quarterstaff-wielding shintao (I'm totally fine with having a few weapon-specific bonuses in each tree, making taking say 20-30 AP in shintao really strong when going unarmed, but don't totally exclude henshin/ninja spy, just give us some options. Have each of the trees be fairly unrelated to weapons except having 1 enhancement each tier tied to that weapon, and then have most of the cores make up for the slack could be a nice idea for instance).

Overall, these are just my quick thoughts/ramblings, though I'm sure theres some value to be found somewhere.

[Taimasan]

Handwraps not working at all, trees looks incomplete. Only can get stats on handwraps being totally unarmed(no wraps) even then does not look like stances are affecting unarmed(fire stance not helping crit range, etc). At this point this is so rough I don't see the point in testing, it would be a waste of my time. I will wait until a more up to date build if we get one.


Btw, which way is the dojo?

[Rykka]

Handwraps not working at all, trees looks incomplete. Only can get stats on handwraps being totally unarmed(no wraps) even then does not look like stances are affecting unarmed(fire stance not helping crit range, etc). At this point this is so rough I don't see the point in testing, it would be a waste of my time. I will wait until a more up to date build if we get one.


Btw, which way is the dojo?

It's in Market by the trainers.

Hen seems to be worth spending any number of points in on the strength of it's cores.

Shintao is still necessary for Ironskin. So 11pts there. I was really hoping Monk was gonna get a bit more PRR and MRR somewhere

Ninja training still says it only does dex to hit/damage on melee weapons. but shurikin seem to work.

[FuzzyDuck81]

I think quivering palm could do with some updating - maybe change the monk level from the DC calculation to character level, so it continues to scale better in epic levels, or just have number of epic levels added to it? Also, I think it'd be nice if things that grant +assassinate DC would work on it, as an instakill-type attack, which would add to it's viability in the high levels while not granting anywhere near as much as when it took into account +sunder DCs.