U38 Balance Changes

[Hjarki]

Double Daggers
- Single Dagger: When fighting single weapon style with a dagger: +20 Melee Power
(?Bug?: Does not work when wielding ANYTHING in off-hand, including orbs.)

I haven't tried rune-arms, but Single Dagger doesn't work with bucklers, orbs or empty off-hand. My best guess is they simply forgot to implement it.

[Krell]

[*]Legendary Dreadnought :

• Current: +3 MP per core
• New: Unchanged . Another spike in our DPS testing showed that, with few exceptions, most Melee builds are best served by being in Legendary Dreadnought. It does not need the help; it should remain competitive, even with these changes.

Keep in mind that it seems that most the portals in the game kill blitz. If you're testing with max blitz, either fix the portals or shorten the timer to start another blitz.

[HuneyMunster]

Grandmaster of flowers is a really intersting epic destiny for monks that is dead now because the DCs don't take into account combat mastery bonuses, how can I play a destiny which abilities get up to 58-70 DCs while for endgame it is required around 90-100...

The Ki attacks could do with being boosted by tactics as well as melee power. Though at least now it maybe an alternative to LD.

Spending EDP on 6 Wis(12 EDP), A Dance of Flowers(3 EDP), Piercing Clarity(2 EDP), Perfection of Soul(3 EDP), Hail of Blows(1 EDP) and your main stance and you've spent all your EDP. You could even go with Perfection of Body and Perfection of Mind and if you have the saves you will never fail a save to all attacks on Fort, Reflex and Will.

[RevCo]

In addition, the process of this balance check helped us identify a bug where characters who were Two Weapon Fighting (as well as those using Handwraps) were receiving Doublestrikes, Offhand Attacks, and Offhand Doublestrikes at a far lower rate than intended while moving. We've now fixed that internally. For comparison, most fighting styles deal similar damage numbers while moving vs. standing still; TWF on Live deals about 40% less damage while moving because of this bug. With Update 38, Two Weapon Fighting damage will be roughly the same when standing or moving, as it is for other styles.


Based on the above, we're confident that an adjustment is needed. We understand that Melees are not in the strongest place in the top-end meta right now; we aren't trying to kick Melee when it's down. Rather, we're trying to bring the Melee outliers in, so we can better balance Melee as a group. Consider this some first steps that will allow us to better make other ones down the road (such as improving Melee Defense).

[/LIST]

Hello Steelstar,

Could you advise whether moving counts as turning or pivoting towards an enemy. IE, my twf toon is in the middle of a mob, I keep turning to face my next foe yet still in the same spot would that be moving? Thank you for any clarifications.

RevCo

[Selvera]

Hey, these changes are a step in the right direction. Duality nerf was very much called for. But...

I'm a little worried about how much power you're taking away from stick builds (many are monk splashes these days), given all the difficulties they have in the game currently. (Bad critical profiles, named item reliance, baba quarterstaff isn't very good, item durability, 25% doublestrike becoming less relevant with all the other trees/items/pastlives etc which give doublestrike).

The main problems with Grandmaster of Flowers has always been that there just isn't very much useful in the destiny.

• The lily pedal attacks don't have damage that scales with anything (they should scale with MP just like the henshin abilities, and would synergise with henshin if they did). And their DC's can't get high enough for the toughest content (as mentioned by above posters).
• The stance upgrades are exclusive, since you can't be in multiple stances at the same time, and aren't powerful enough to be worth investing in multiple stance upgrades even if you wanted to switch stances often. (Would recommend having the same enhancement upgrade all stances in different ways)
• Feather falling is super easy to itemize, and even if it wasn't; a monk with slowfall is essentially better off then having featherfall anyways.
• Tier 5 feels like it's seriously missing a big "defining feature" of the epic destany. This is the tier that Legendary Dreadnaught gets devastating critical, Unyielding Setinal gets 20% HP and Divine Crusader gets Heavenly Presence and Celestaial Champion... big powerful passives which define what the destany does and makes it unique. Grandmaster gets... an ability that's similar to a tier-1 caster destiny ability, a fire-stance specific +1[w] damage, and a pedals move (given all the problems of those above).

If some of these problems were shored up and the ED was given a little bit more in terms of goodies, then 10 melee power would not be needed, it could be a 5 or 6 melee power per tier ED.

I'm sure someone could write you a similar list about the shortcomings of shadowdancer and why it could use more interesting/unique buffs instead of pure melee power.

As for Fatesinger... I'm totally in agreement with this buff; although I do feel like perhaps it could be spread out a little between melee and sonic spellpower; perhaps 9 melee power and 3 sonic spell power per tier. Or maybe 9 melee power and 1d2 sonic damage (scaling with spellpower) per tier.
Anyway way you do it; I'm looking forward to seeing if some of my swashbuckler builds and feel like it's not just something I have to get through to level up the destiny; but rather a viable alternative to LD.

Primal Avatar also sort of feels like part of the reason it needs 10 melee power is because it's missing an iconic/powerful tier-5 ability. Perhaps if Spirit boon was more powerful and didn't draw from the same resource-pool as treeform it could be the "iconic tier 5", or even better; if winter's bite wasn't a lackluster guard ability, and did more damage and/or had a higher proc chance and granted some form of defense beyond the "when the enemy deals half of your health in damage have a small chance to deal a small amount of damage and slow them 25%". Ability that it currently is. Could be cool for the new bear tanks; especially if it proc'd on enemy spellcast. Unlike GMoF, Primal avatar does feel like it HAS some nice perks for melees, they're just not quite enough of them and/or not reliable/powerful enough to make primal need less then 10 melee power right now. If the tree was just slightly buffed in proc-chances or effectiveness, it could easily be a 6 or 8 melee power tree instead of 10.

Divine Crusader currently has multiple abilities which say they grant +2 melee power; however they're bugged to NOT give +2 melee power. Are these going to be fixed so that they do give melee power? And if yes are they going to be +2 like before, or +3 like the new DC tree?

In all; I'm glad you're doing work on improving the melee ecosystem. I do really love my monks, fighters and fighter/monks, but it would be feel competitive on a paladin or barbarian or maybe even a melee artificer.

Now... next are you planning on addressing Great Crossbow vs Repeating Crossbow vs Shuriken vs Longbow vs Throwing Daggers vs Other thrown weapons? There's some very significant power disparities between the ranged builds and what they're capable of.

[LT218]

What's sad is that after further consideration on the proposed nerfs to melee power in the Henshin tree, a pure 20 Kensai stick build would be a better stick build than a pure Henshin, which is a class and tree that is supposed to be purpose built for quarterstaves.

Consider that a pure Kensai would get the following bonuses that applied to quarterstaves:

• 60 Melee Power
• 21 Doublestrike
• Haste AB
• 7 extra action boosts
• +13 damage
• Multiple activated attacks with various +W multipliers and bonus damage

A pure Kensai stick build would have more melee power, similar doublestrike, better and more action boosts, more +damage, and better activated attacks versus the proposed Henshin nerfs. In fact, a pure Kensai stick build probably holds its own very well in terms of DPS versus a pure Henshin in its current melee power form when you factor in the advantages of Haste boosts and having enough of them to run them every time they're off cooldown. It gets even worse when you consider doing the same Kensai build with non-quarterstaff weapons and their superior base damage and crit profiles.

This leads me to seriously call into question the validity of the "internal testing" that showed that Henshin staff monks are currently significantly ahead of other good 2HF builds, particularly Kensais, Thief Acrobats, or a multi-class combination thereof.

[chrysahor]

Hey Steelstar,

In regard to handwraps, I'm not sure how to understand your statement.
Are you going to simply change the handwraps from ravenloft or are handwraps losing their ridiculous 2hf status that gave them those bonus in the first place? (giving extra strenght bonus on both hands and extra range).

Overall I think this is positive change for the game. I hardly see those propositions as a nerf, ppl are using this word for anything nowadays.

Duality is fixing something that wasn't intended. All in all most of the builds are getting a boost if they go out of the LD comfort zone, even if they used HM MP.
I already didn't use LD on recent builds since ravenloft loading removes blitz and death in reaper means long CD on blitz.
With the boost to other ED I actually think LD will need some boost (prob +20MP on blitz to makes it good risk vs reward).

Ninja was not in a good position, but I can see how running in gmof or SD with an extra 36MP and not wasting point in HM will actually help. They could still need a couple of adjustment (crippling strike is useless in reaper not that it ever was real good), touch of death even in blitz + prowess doesn't have any bite. Consider making it an upgraded version of quivering palm for armed monk, maybe dex based?
Ninja players don't want to be shuri throwers, they want to be armed monk, using both ranged and melee when the situation fits. Any chance of seeing something like that happening? Vistani was actually pretty close to what ninja could have been.

For HM I don't understand the results. Like many said they are in a bad position even with 75MP. Now some fotm builds will get their MP more in line, but that will not help them. I hope you can find an original solution for them. Ki attacks were lacklusters even on MP loaded builds

[lyrecono]

Keep in mind that it seems that most the portals in the game kill blitz. If you're testing with max blitz, either fix the portals or shorten the timer to start another blitz.

+1
yeah, i noticed the dev's don't seem to test in a real environment anymore (if at all)

[Dalsheel]

This is why we can't have nice things. The well established by Turbine "bait and switch" tactic continues with SSG. I actually came back to the game and purchased the expansion after seeing the Aasimar race and Duality wraps. I came back to play Aasimar monk with Duality. And now you're nerfing both the class and the wraps...

You should have thought better and tested longer before announcing the raid gear and even more before releasing on the live server.

[Ladislaio]

Testing an extensive number of builds (over 40) in terms of DPS: A pure 20 Monk, using Handwraps, with most of its points in Shintao and the rest in Henshin, did significantly, unquestionably more damage than any other build we tested. It was not close. More than 30% above anyone else. Far below that, the #2 build had most of its levels in Monk, the #3 was another pure Monk, and #4 had a significant number of Monk levels as well. The #7 build in terms of raw DPS was 20 Monk Henshin Mystic using a Quarterstaff. No Monk builds we tried ranked below that.

Thank you for noticing this and stating it so very clearly.

Based on the above, we're confident that an adjustment is needed. We understand that Melees are not in the strongest place in the top-end meta right now; we aren't trying to kick Melee when it's down. Rather, we're trying to bring the Melee outliers in, so we can better balance Melee as a group. Consider this some first steps that will allow us to better make other ones down the road (such as improving Melee Defense).

Melee is still in a better spot than ranged for dps, esp with the VKF change killing the top tier ranged dps builds. When you have a party with good CC they do pretty dang well... Perhaps improve melee quality of life by making it more fun to play a CC caster instead of just fingering everything?

Handwraps
You've likely seen some threads by now about Duality, the Raid Handwraps from Ravenloft. We'd initially given Ravenloft handwraps damage dice akin to two-handed weapons in the pack. We'd had some reasons for it at the time, but we missed the mark on this one (especially with Handwraps benefitting disproportionately well from the increases in internal damage dice) . We're planning on dropping their dice from [1d6+6] to [1d6+3].

THANK YOU. Are Morninglord's handwraps going to remain with coruscating 9? And, at great personal risk to myself, I must ask if the Macabre handwraps will remain at their broken DPS level of being 6[1d6]? Given the nerfs to Henshin MP this may not actually be that bad anymore.

Legendary Dreadnought :
Current: +3 MP per core
New: Unchanged . Another spike in our DPS testing showed that, with few exceptions, most Melee builds are best served by being in Legendary Dreadnought. It does not need the help; it should remain competitive, even with these changes.

### VERY IMPORTANT ###
LD does need help. Too much of its "good stuff" is dependent on having Master's Blitz running. This is near-impossible to do consistantly with THF builds and inconsistent with other builds (except thrower builds). Could we get some of the ranged/melee power moved out of blitz stacks and into other areas? For example, perhaps reduce each blitz stack value by 2 (loss of 20 melee/ranged power), add 1 melee/ranged power to each core(gain of 6 m/rp), make Advancing Blows grant 2 m/rp per stack (gain of 10 m/rp), and make Devastating Critical passively grant 4 m/rp (total recovery of 20 m/rp)?
Also:

Keep in mind that it seems that most the portals in the game kill blitz. If you're testing with max blitz, either fix the portals or shorten the timer to start another blitz.

Please unstack so heavily on blitz in LD, or it will go from THE ED to be in to something you sometimes have to level.
HOWEVER For everyone, esp the devs, remeber how LD interacts with the Prowess set. Prowess provides a boost that lasts for 10 seconds every time you use an AB. This means that you have 33% uptime in most ED's with the set. When you are in LD you get all of your boost's cooldowns reduced, making the 'normal' boosts have a CD of 20s. This improves the uptime of Legendary Prowess to 50%. Effectively this is a gain of 12.5 melee power with prowess from being in LD. (Even without any regen you can keep boosts running for over 10 min constantly in LD so yes, this counts. I don't think I've ever run out on a thrower with dragon's blessing in the off hand either.)
5 pc prowess + 2pc melee power NOT in LD = 10+10+25 = 45 melee power (effective)
5 pc prowess + 2pc melee power in LD = 10+10+37.5 = 57.5 melee power (effective)
3pc Long shadow + 2 pc Sucker Punch + 2 pc One Against Many = 10+10+10 = 30 Melee Power (and 14d6 acid damage)
2 pc Long Shadow + 2 pc Sucker Punch + 2 pc One Against Many + 1 rare Melee Power = 10+10+10+5 = 35 Melee Power
As one can see LD does improve damage for Sent weapons even without blitz. But it would be nice to rely so heavily on Master's Blitz.

Divine Crusader :
Current: +2 MP per core
New: +3 MP per core

This seems a little light. Are you planning on fixing No Regret and Castigation so that they actually grant Melee Power as they state? (Haven't tested personally recently, but the wiki still says that they are bugged)

---
As said above, these changes are a step. They aren't meant to address issues with Melee Defenses, Ranged/Magic DPS (short of the Vistani change), or anything beyond trying to make a more balanced Melee ecosystem.

Thank you SO MUCH for addressing these issues. Yay! I'd love to see a published list of what your dps tiers were, and see if they follow what my little group thinks they are, but I can understand that you wouldn't want to do that.

also BUMP to a FR dwarf race that can take silvanas for a throw-your-weight around maul build!

[Ladislaio]

This leads me to seriously call into question the validity of the "internal testing" that showed that Henshin staff monks are currently significantly ahead of other good 2HF builds, particularly Kensais, Thief Acrobats, or a multi-class combination thereof.

The Henshin Stick build would still have a 15% attack speed advantage on the Kensi.

Doublestrike doesn't roll over to tripple strike currently. TA mulit-classes have a problem with this, which may have hurt them in these rankings.

[Paisheng]

As an uber completionist my monk was finally standing tall with casters in kill count....as I think a melee should have opportunity to do when maxed out. My daughter who is on her 2nd life monk was having fun playing again since the update and getting the Duality wraps as she felt she was contributing well to DPS help in the group.

I can understand adjusting the wraps as you are, but whacking down one of the monk trees 45 melee power is brutal. If you want to take it away from low hanging fruit then I suggest:

Core 1 3 mp Core 2 6 mp Core 3 9 mp Core 4 12 mp Core 5 15 mp and Capstone still reward with 25 mp

This is still a bit less mp (45 vs 50 for first 5 cores) than before but those invested as henshins don't feel the nerf like others who are just splashing into the tree will.

As for overall philosophy I agree that monks are a bit glass cannons, so their higher dps was a fair trade-off. They don't get the prr or especially mrr of other fighter/melees. Will they get such compensation? Then all melees will be the same. But if you feel all melees do deserve approximately the same dps, then you have to argue they deserve the same protection and defense as well. I would rather have the trade-offs to make classes more appealing and less homogenized.

Let the monk shine again. Just buff up the other melees in their unique ways so they shine too.

[Morroiel]

If you ever needed more proof that the devs are out of touch with the game, this is it folks.

Henshin Qstaff builds are garbage at the moment and have never been in meta / top tier in the entire lifetime of this game.

[Wipey]

As for overall philosophy I agree that monks are a bit glass cannons, so their higher dps was a fair trade-off. They don't get the prr or especially mrr of other fighter/melees.

This "glass cannon" is the second time in this thread.
Care to elaborate which (melee) class has better defences ? 200 + prr, 45+ Dodge, 25% Incorp, improved evasion, great mobility, okay hp, ac and saves. Not to mention crowd control options and DCs for it.

There's nothing "glass cannon"y about the monks I see or play with ingame.

[LT218]

The Henshin Stick build would still have a 15% attack speed advantage on the Kensi.

Not when you factor in Haste AB and all the 7 additional boosts a Kensai gets. Since the reality of running missions and moving through dungeons is that you're not meleeing non-stop, the on-demand 30% haste boost that stacks is more useful than a constant 15%.

Or if you prefer, splash 2 Rogue and pick up the 15% attack speed from TA and still enjoy the advantages of all those Kensai boosts since it stacks. Either way, Henshin gets left in the dust.

[lyrecono]

This is why we can't have nice things. The well established by Turbine "bait and switch" tactic continues with SSG. I actually came back to the game and purchased the expansion after seeing the Aasimar race and Duality wraps. I came back to play Aasimar monk with Duality. And now you're nerfing both the class and the wraps...

You should have thought better and tested longer before announcing the raid gear and even more before releasing on the live server.

another returning player.....that is ****ed and might leave again......

Anyway dalsheel, you should know better, they don't seem to play test things properly and if they do open up lamania, they ignore the player base's feedback anyway

[JP457]

If staff monks are so badass, why am I the only one I ever see in groups? We should be hip deep in staff monks. We aren't. Something is wrong with your testing.

[edrein]

I haven't tried rune-arms, but Single Dagger doesn't work with bucklers, orbs or empty off-hand. My best guess is they simply forgot to implement it.

As I stated earlier in the thread, it works with Runearms currently on live.

[Paisheng]

This "glass cannon" is the second time in this thread.
Care to elaborate which (melee) class has better defences ? 200 + prr, 45+ Dodge, 25% Incorp, improved evasion, great mobility, okay hp, ac and saves. Not to mention crowd control options and DCs for it.

There's nothing "glass cannon"y about the monks I see or play with ingame.

More specifically I said "a bit" like a glass cannon. Not completely glass. Maybe Plexi-glass I can give you a short off the top of my head answer now, more specifics in a day or as I have to go to work shortly.

Start with MRR. Monks are capped to 50 with cloth, all other melees have twice that or more available. Very much glass against spells.

Hit Points which you say are just "ok" would seem to be recognition that that Fighters, Paladins and Barbs are much more than ok. Very good in fact. So lack of HP makes monks glassy.

The incorp almost everyone can get from equipment, one of the reasons its not really needed after level 12 with greensteel. I don't even bother trying to get it out the ninja tree for that reason. To to me that is a wash therefore with other fighters, not a perk.

And I need more research, but I believe the others melees, with perhaps the exception of Barbarian, can get higher AC than the monk, though I would not call their AC glass. It is respectable. I would need to get back to you on PRR as well, but it is my understanding that most melees can topple monks in that field as well.

So monks do appear to be a bit of a glass cannon compared to the other melees. Monks do get an edge to dodge. Regarding saves, Paladins are better I am told. Monks have some specialized cc to make their class unique, like jade strike, but other melees still have trip, and weapon stun, sap and some unique abilities and/or spells to compensate.

My bottom line is that if all melees deserve the same dps output, then they all deserve the same defenses as well....which would make them all rather bland. So if you are going to nerf their melee power and ultimate dps then give them 100 mrr and shore up those other areas that the other melees are superior with....I mean why should they have better HP, better MRR, etc. Let all things be equal!

....Or let all things be equally special.....

[edrein]

Are you going to fix the aasimar bonds so they stop toggling off every time you instance, step through a door in quest, exit/enter a quest, etc. The same issues that plague Legendary Dreadnaught's Blitz.

To clarify. I don't mind it toggling off on rests. But having to constantly micromanage the form when merely walking through the quest is beyond frustrating. The bonuses are nice, but at the moment the hassle is not worth it.