Pure melee classes in general need help and the monk sits right there at a the bottom. So what if the devs give monks a 20% damage increase. They'll be in line with the other pure dps classes but still provide nothing in unique abilities or bringing anything extra to a group or raid. Maybe monks needs to have more group orientated abilities along with boosting damage. For example, an an aura that increases crit damage. Monk gets 50% increased crit damage and those that are effected by the aura get 25%. It doesn't have to be crit damage, it could be chance to crit, over-haste or accuracy. I would hope it would be unique to the monk class as to bring something extra to a group or raid.
Problem with that is it perpetuates the paradigm that everyone must boost everyone else around them. That's how we got into this mess. Monks are poor now because they are balanced around having the biggest ADPS effect (weapon delay type effect) at all times. This was somewhat okay when ours was better than the castable buffs, but now that the beastlord fury line has reached our weapon delay level, we look poor next to people that get it. Monk crit rate is extremely low, so when Shaman epic is hit, they gain less of a benefit than the other pure melee (and a lot of hybrids at this point). Combine this reduction with the accuracy increases and other effects that are raining down like candy, and the discrepancies become more apparent. When you look at the monk on an island, they're a pretty strong class. They just don't benefit like the other melee do from the big ADPS effects, and a lot of things that make them strong solo or in a group become irrelevant on raids, like our slightly higher defense (raid boss is still going to 1 round us). Our disc reuse timers are very long, so that even when discussing sustained we fall behind, since other pure melee will disc 3-4 times to our 2. Sad as it is to say, I've started a character to replace my monk if the next AA round doesn't bring some much needed relief for our class. I really hope it doesn't come to that, because I always enjoyed the style of the monk and the general tool set, but the tool set doesn't matter if they aren't the tools needed to do the job.
I've been banging on about our disc timers for what seems like a year, and even now the only disc we have that is amenable to fast reuse is Speed focus. Its still pretty long (13 mins or so) compared to zerk or rog fast discs though, and its touch and go if it's up for back to back events, as exemplified in CToV. It gets worse when you look at our other disciplines, with one that is 30 mins reuse. And its our weakest.... I started another class (rog) in anticipation of RoF, but I just don't have the heart to shelve my monk. And after 12-13 years of exclusively playing one class, why should I have to. Monk or nothing for me...
I don't have a monk, but they must be hurting. I realized after looking at this thread that I haven't even seen a monk in months!! They used to be such a great class and everyone seemed to be starting one. No idea what happened, but they are becoming endangered species lol.
I will say that I am seeing less and less Monks around than before too. At one point and time, you used to see Monks around every corner. You couldnt get rid of them and guilds were sick of Monks trying to app to them. Gone are those days. Yeah, Monks need help. They are quitting or rerolling as another class these days. Its a shame.
One thing everyone forgets and I haven't seen posted... is that there is a huge perception issue with our class. I've been playing since 2002 before Ykesha expansion came out. Since then monks were strictly known as 'pullers' and often the best pulling class, well over bards before /melody. Now I have raided and grouped with some pretty freaking amazing bards in the past, even before /melody so /hatsoff. The last few expansions have pretty much eliminated pulling from the game, so what does this mean for monks? The average player knows monks only for pulling, not for dps, not for anything else. What do you think happens when you remove the primary niche for a class? People forget about them and don't need them, don't want them and don't want to bring them anywhere, because all other classes fill out roles that monks do not. I won't bother listing what monks 'don't' have here, as it's not the point of my post. The point is, pulling MUST come back to the game. The last few expansions have been painstakingly too easy compared to the expansions of years ago. In the process of trying to keep the population and making things easier, the monk class is dying and fading away. Without pulling as our primary role, we're avg dps at best, good or bad players alike, groupers or raiders alike. Back in the days of PoP, LDON, DoN and many others, it used to be that if you didn't have a great puller you may as well log out and come back another day. Now anything can be pulled by anyone and 90% of our AA, Disciplines are for pulling. So without pulling we're completely left without anything to do. I've been a grouper, and a raider and a grouper again, raider and now today a grouper and I see it every time I login, noone has a need for our class. So the options are, bring back pulling, making it necessary for our class to be wanted so we have a use for these thousands of AA's we dumped in for pulling abilities or spent time camping disciplines to help pulling.... OR .... come up with some new role for our class by making us equivalent DPS of Rogue/Berserkers so we are actually a sought after class for groups/raids. /rant off
Let's be realistic, pulling has been farmed out to so many classes nowadays that it won't have any effect on monk's desirebility in groups / raids. Some classes even can pull better than monks. Unless you take away that ability from all other classes again - which I would not support in any way - this is a one way road and not reversable. If monks should not be a primary DPS class, what's the "Vision" for monks today and for the future?
Being realistic is not expecting the developers to forget about pulling when we literally have over half of our AA dedicated to it. They'd have to completely redesign the monk class from scratch.
To be dead honest, I never see pulling becoming a prominent class role for any class ever again. Any class can pull these days.The dynamic of the game has changed a ton. Monks need to just concentrate on becoming a top tier DPS class.
I've seen a lot of good idea's for Monk AA's. One of my favorites being a Savage Kick like AA. One thing I could think of, would be more AA to bring Zan Fu reuse down another 2 mins so that it becomes a permanent buff just like RB is for Necros. We need something that raises or DPS passively and NOT more ranks of flying kick junk. I realize this is gonna be hard to do being were maxed on everything like strikethough, ect., Which leads me to my next idea... One thing I think they should do is bring back monk ONLY weapons and give them a higher ratio. Provided it's a nice boost and not just a few damage higher, this would solve a lot of the problem for us. It would up our sustained and burst DPS. I think this has been over looked and needs to be highly considered. This would be very easy for the Devs to do and solves a lot of the problem with very little effort or critical thinking like the AA require. As for discs, we need a new GOOD dps disc. Eye of the storm was a great idea but fell short. I was very excited when I saw it in Beta but it turned out to be not as great as it sounded. As you all know by now, one of the main problems is were out of slots/timers. This is why many of our discs share a timer with another disc. Something I think that has also been over looked is Jab Through. It is totally useless now and it's on a slot that is not shared with anything else. A new burn disc could be added to replace it without affecting any of our current ones. We do NOT need 3 Endurance discs! 3 of our 13 new discs are endo regen. This is absurd. With Innate death, Rest is the only endo disc we need. I've NEVER ran out of Endo with ID/ rest combo, even after a death. The Eight-Step line also needs to be taken out. No monk in their right mind uses Eight-Step over Synergy. That would open 3 new discs for us right their. I also think we really need a group DPS booster to make us worth being put in DPS group. Every single melee DPS class has some kinda DPS booster for the group, except us. I can't remember where but someone mentioned a DPS aura. Not to bad of an idea, although it would suck to loose master's aura. We need something more along the lines of a 1-2 min group DPS booster buff. (Like Warcry, Beastial Alinement, ect.) I'm not saying those exactly but something along those lines. OR bring back something like Fists of Wu, but something relevant that actually helps a lot. Fists of Wu was our only group dps booster for the longest time. I absolutely loved it. However, this does not not solve our current problem. I love to see this at some point but right now we need personal DPS by far the most. All in all, monks need help bad. I really hope this stuff is not falling on deaf ears. I love this class dearly, but it's getting out of hand now.
A story to show why monks need help: 45ish mains raiding NTOV. Any item not bid on can be rolled on for alts. Every item had 5-15 rolls except the monk items that had 1.
It will not matter if Monk DPS is raised to that of berserker and rogue as most monks are out of the gearing cycle. Who's going to take a monk for a spot who does not have any gear because raids didn't want them in the past. So suddenly, Monks are supposed to keep up with rogues and zerks? Not going to happen you still have to gear them up and their dps will still be crap. Gotta give monks more than just a dps buff, they gotta have something to boost their group/raid. I've been looking at rangers now: nice group buffs, better tanking than monk, fade/cover tracks, tracking, ranged damage that out dps' monk melee damage, 40s self heal that can heal more than mend, headshot, unresistable snare, knockback, root, etc. Melee in general just don't compare to hybrids and casters for the most part.
Rangers group attack buffs aren't worth mentioning. Our ac buff is nice. We do have auspice to bring to the raid; I'll give you that. Cover Tracks is on a 9 minute timer and can be interrupted easily. Our ranged damage only exceeds monk melee while we disc (when not discing, it doesn't even exceed our melee), our snare is not unresistable - runspeed immune definitely resists it, our fast heal is on a 30 second timer and I'd say it's about equal to mend. Don't make class comparisons if you don't know what you're talking about. Had to make those corrections, but I still support monks getting a dps boost. I wouldn't mind at all if monks did more damage than me.
Gladare has a point, the points Naproxen made may have been a little off base, but it is true that rangers bring much, much more than monks do to solo, group and raid. We all appreciate the support that all of the non-monks have given, both in this thread and outside of it. I hope everyone realizes that none of us want rangers, beastlords or any other class nerfed in any way(although, 100% disclosure, I do miss making ranger deathtouch jokes. Anymore if they're made it's out of jealousy rather than any amount of truth.) We just want our class fixed.
