Monk solo in ROS- what needs to happen?

So my monk hit 110 the other day. Has just a hair over 14k AA, which I know is low. I have EOK raid 2hb, 6 pieces of ROS raid TS armor, and the rest of the slots ROS group TS or comparable. 5/20 on Tears of Alaris, ROS research TS augs, and augs from prior expansions. Not bad, not great.

I have tried to solo trash in OT and Skyfire. Single mobs. Defensive lasts around 50-65% of mob health, then things get very hairy. If I use Heel for an entire mob, I see my HP continue to drop and drop. My healer merc struggles to keep up, even only casting just lights and remedy (only has 68 AA so is also low). I do have slow proc belt, EOK max AA on Armor of Wisdom and CA, ROS max AA on CS, and 7/12 on physical enhancement AA.

So I know high end geared/AA monks can solo ROS trash. Which is all I really want. But what I want to know is, what is acceptable gear/AA I would need to reasonably solo ROS? Half the slots be EOK+ raid gear and 20k AA? One third of slots with EOK+ raid gear and 18k AA?

I am getting a bit frustrated not being able to handle trash. I am well aware of ROS difficulty, but I also know it can be done. Knowing what type of baseline that I need will help me to decide how much time I need to invest to get to that point.

As always, thanks in advance for your responses!

Only theory based here but from what I understand.

min max Hdex.. both for the def checks and dps.
you basic semi burning everything. I was prob return and Shards landing and finish tear.. trying to see what is possible in swarms.

Note you toggle your agro to make the merc do a lil more.. merc clrs are ok pallys.. imo

can you link a profile? that may help spot glaring holes. my guess is you mostly have to max out defensive AAs Combat Stability/Agility, Armor of Wisdom, Physical Enhancement, Staff Block.

The CotF clicky Blood Drinker's Coating is also shockingly powerful for classes not used to lifesapping

Having about half RoS TS raid and half RoS TS group should be more than fine for trash. Your AA count is most likely your biggest problem. It pretty well takes max Defensive and Offensive AA's to make it tolerable. A gigantic chunk of your DPS will come from AA usage, so the more you have there the better it will get. I've played a friends group geared, low AA'd Monk before and it is a massive difference without those AA's.

Don't save your discs. Constantly cycle them, all of them. The faster the mob dies, the more alive you will be.

Even with that, though, you will either die on occasion or have to flop and let the merc die to reset the fight. That is just the nature of the healer merc right now, so not much you can do about that.

Push the AC and hDex as high as you possibly can as that will help both your defensive and offensive capabilities.

Thanks for the advice. In the past two nights I have maxxed out combat agility, combat stability, and armor of wisdom. Already have max staff block. Working on 7/12 for physical enhancement.

As far as hDex goes, I have like 1203 or so. Average amount? Too low? Enough to solo ROS trash? Thoughts?

I do not know how much time I can invest into the monk. I do not know how much time I want to invest into the monk. That is a hard question to answer, which is why I made this. If someone said I need 20k AA minimum then the monk probably becomes shelved. But more reasonable and realistic expectations for my situation results in more playing...

Honestly 20k is probably a good number, as for hdex... my alt ranger with a few pieces of ros raid gear and full ros type 5s hits +1625 HDEX .... do you have a magelo for said monk?

At the moment I do not have a magelo for the monk, more so because I do not want to be told min/max things like "get full ROS hDex augs from missions" when I have neither the time not energy to do such things. I min/max the magician, that is all the time I have to do such a huge undertaking.

I should not have asked the question in OP because I had a feeling it would be too difficult to answer in general terms. I feel right now I want to max out physical enhancement and see how ROS trash tanking goes then. If I can consistently and reasonably tank and be successful most of the time, I can live with that. If not, then I do not believe I really want to invest the time and energy it will take to get to a point of being consistently successful...

EDIT- just reread Symbius post. Initially I saw max AA for defensive, but this time I also saw max AA for offensives. Ugh. So maybe 18-20k AA is what is needed to do what I want. I just don't know if I want to take the time to get another 4000 or 5000 AA...

Understood. That is a lot of AAs in the current, non-Gribble environment.

Even if Gribbles were available in their previous form, there is no way I would subject myself to doing one of them for AA more or less doing 50 of them. I think I did maybe 3 lesson burns when COTF was current or prior expansion on the Gribbles run, and I would rather poke my eyes out with an ice pick than do them again for AA...

AA come real fast in RoS. Get some groups going.

You shouldn't expect to solo RoS effectively while missing so many basic defensive and offensive AA as a monk. Your gear is also fairly far behind.

Your monk is not your mage.

Ironically, this is why I made a mage (monk couldn’t molo everything I wanted in a mix of group gear and a few old raid rots).

Definitely echo what someone said about the blood drinker’s coating. It’s also worth farming things like the Silken Trilium, diplomatic papers, etc imo, every little bit helps.

No doubt.

Once you get a decent amount of RoS raid gear and most of your AA done you can solo pretty well in current content. The slow proc belt is huge as well.

Yeah my monk is using an EoK raid weapon with majority group gear at this point, so he gets rekt pretty hard in current content even with close to max aa. Back when cultural gear was a thing and easy to get he had a full vis set and could tank like a champ, monks when overgeared for group content are pretty sweet. I imagine it’s a good bit better with slow belt, at the time it didn’t work on block.

Basically in the same boat as many posters and decided to just scrap him. Some older raid stuff and mostly group gear. Block isn't the beast it once was.

From my experience monks pay a massive price always for a small benefit sometimes aka earthforce. Unless completely overgeared they tank no better than anyone else outside of earthforce and pay the penalty of horrible crit rate and disc uptime for it. Your honestly better off burning through problems as a rogue or zerker than being penalized for 40s of good out of every 3 minutes.

Or toss monks 100% more melee crit rate via AA and have zan fi be perma up and match battle stomp or lethality mod.

I agree 1000 percent with this. And not just a class difference, it is a time/experience/gear/AA difference all combined together.

I thank everyone for their input and advice. I created this because I know the class can do it, and was hoping to get a good idea of what the minimum is. While I have definitely improved things since the creation of thread (max CS/CA/AOW, 11/12 PE, slow belt, six ROS raid TS pieces, Blood Coating, merc gear)... I have come to the conclusion that it is going to take a lot of time and investment to get to the point I want to be at. While I am still playing the monk when I do play, I do have more lingering doubts as to how much longer I want to put into it.

While AA is much easier to get nowadays, time to game is not as easy. I have a couple short term progression goals I want to achieve with monk in EOK, if it is just too time consuming and difficult for that, then I may just take a hiatus during the week from EQ and only raid. Time will tell, but I do thank all of you for your comments and advice!

I put my monk in EoK G2 gear during Beta and was able to molo OT trash single most of the time. I do forget if it was before or after I maxed out the AAs on him, but I want to say that it was before. I am thinking that it is something in how you have your monk set up and how you fight with him, rather than the gear or AAs. Also, be sure that you have Intimidation on your spam key(s).

Intimidation? I thought that feared mobs and basically never worked. Did that get changed?

Yes, as part of RoS. There is now an AA called Intimidation; I think the first rank is auto granted at some point, and subsequent ranks are bought. It works a lot more now. On mobs level 70 (I thin) and below, it works the same as it always has with them running away. Mobs higher than that when it works they freeze up for a bit and damage done by our specials is increased by a certain % which increases as you have more ranks. It should help you both kill the mobs faster and survive longer.

http://www.raidloot.com/AA.aspx?name=Intimidation&class=Monk

I wonder if they meant to restrict ranks 2-10 of Intimidation to Ring of Scale. Makes the revamped skill still be unused on TLPs.

Beta is not live. Being able to solo singles "most of the time" is not being able to solo effectively.

Intimidation is great.