Thanks for the info. I am sorry as well. I do state from my personal experiences, but that isn't hard core evidence either. Again thanks for the replies.
I'm really hoping since the Monk class was pretty much ignored in beta (with a few exceptions), that the Monk Class is really looked @ hard on Round 2 of the fighter changes.
Having been in beta has left me jaded. I keep finding myself remembering exactly how many monk threads we had on the go and how many pages each thread. Monks have been shafted so thoroughly all the way thru the beta I can't bring myself to log mine on and instead I'm working on my shiney new SK. /yours disgustedly Veg.....
Couching@Crushbone wrote: This right here is the biggest thing they missed the boat on with the whole group tank and single target tank idea they have implemented. Any schmuck who can hold aggro on a group of mobs sure as heck can lock down a single mob. This needs to be addressed and fixed somehow. Full Moon's casting time needs to be reduced to make it useful (and not by using AA's to make something useful which seems to be the SOE way), or the damage needs to be increased significantly. The frontal arc restriction on Dragonfire needs to be removed and the damage on it doubled at the very least. Also, make it deal some kind of focus damage or at least physical damage so it is modified by all of our other dps mods we get. Making it a true combat art and removing the frontal arc restriction will help that CA significantly. Since our AE's do a pathetic amount of damage in comparison to a true AE class it would help to remove the max number of mobs restriction altogether, but at least increasing it will help in certain areas. A point blank ae taunt via AA's would be good. Something like that could take the place of the worthless Peel AA we get. We also need better dps choices. As our TSO tree stands Five Rings is probably the only one dps option I will end up taking. There have been plenty of great ideas in terms of dps, tanking and utility thrown out on the beta boards as well as here, but everything we say seems to fall on deaf ears. It's rather unfortunate because there are a lot of ideas that will address problems we have without making us overpowered.
xKHONSx wrote: Silly idea, but what if all group taunts were changed to affect every mob in the group *except* for the one you target? That makes single target taunts worthwhile when compared to group taunts. Of course you'd need to change some numbers. Both single and group taunts would need an aggro boost to make up for them no longer stacking, but it would solve the problem of group taunts being better in all ways versus a single target taunt. If other classes complain, tell them that rapidly switching your targetting has always been a measure of a Monks skill, as represented by our extreme lack of AoE damaging skills requiring constant switching to maintain aggro. Now everyone is equally challenged to hold aggro.
I have played most classes and have kept my monk since day one and monk will never be a fighter (i.e. tank) class. With anything not in cloth or leather having a huge mit advantage, with our paltry DPS and agro control, there is just too much wrong to be an efective tank regardless of the situation without a major revamp to avoidance, DPS, AOE and agro. Being in the middle, at the bottom of both tanks and DPSers while sharing some features of both, makes us totally useless against any of the major game content. I really don't care if they improve the "tanking" or DPS abilities, so long as they balance one of them or give us a choice. I really don't like an SK, Guardian, Paladin, Zerker, etc. five to six levels below me (little more mit, less agro control and 2k less health) always selected as the tank. I am only there to "save" the true DPSers and healers if they should gain agro. Up to and part way through EoF we could be of use. We could tank reasonably well and would not decrease the overall effectivness of a group by being a DPSer. With the right group configuration we could do very well. With the changes to epics and our inability to affect them and the increase in difficulty in higher level content that is no longer the case. At 25 years old (mostly pre-EoF) I was a great fighter and raided a few days a week but now I am turning 80 (high EoF and TSO) and trying to fight more and harder mobs. I can see why we are left out most of the time. There should be no "middle" ground. There should be a distinction between a "tank" monk and a "dps" monk in terms of brawler, monk and shadow AA trees. Let the player decide what role they want to be and define his/her character. The devs certainly do not have any idea what to do with monks.
XunSarak wrote: I'm in the same boat with you man. I've played since launch and the only time Monks were incredible tanks were way back before the huge avoidance nerf/change back near launch. Prior to that my monk could tank as well as any other fighter and it was fun. Since then it's just gone downhill. I don't even consider my monk a tank anymore and refuse to tank anyways. Pre-EoF I was in a pretty hardcore raiding guild, you know what the monk role was in the raids? Bait. I'd go into labs or any other dungeon, if we couldn't down the boss. I'd pull the boss down a corridor, tsunami and then FD my way back to the raid as they snuck past. That was my entire job. The times I did tank those yellow and orange raid mobs punched me into the ground, and when I wasn't tanking I was more or less busting my butt just to keep up with the DPS so the guild would see me as 'raidworthy.' And it's not just because of 'lack of skill' or some other bull that people fling around these forums, I had pretty good gear, better than most of the others in my guild. Raid tanking is just not for monks.. and there's the problem.. if we can't tank.. what do we do? DPS? well.. okay.. so we'll dps, the opposite of tanking.. but then we get done in by all the other dps worthy classes.. so what are we exactly aside from cannon fodder? I've tanked plenty of times for small instances, easy ones. But even then if I have an assassin or a wizard or some other dps class and I pull more than one mob or a group encounter, there is no way I'm gonna hold group aggro, and my specs are designed around aoe group aggro. No threat transfer in the world can help out. So I have no idea where a monk sits, especially when our alter ego, the bruiser, can do both tanking and dps better than a monk. So what, we're utility now? Awesome.. I'll just join a raid and put myself on autofollow while I go do something actually interesting. Even if we lost the whole 'hybrid' ability of a monk, I'd take it better than sitting in the middle of nowhere doing LFG over and over again hoping some group will have trouble finding any other class to take.
Our lack of AE agro is really upsetting. It is unfun to tank instances in TSO, SOE was provided plenty of feedback regarding our limitations in this aspect and they ignored it. I could understand if other tanks had the same issues, but they don't, no other tank has to go through this stuff.
Crane Twirl needs to be changed to aoe autoattack, maxxed its only 16% chance to proc a set amount. this skill hasnt scaled for us well at all. Autoattack increases for every fighter every expansion due to new weapons damage increase. Even guardians get an aa aoe auto, zerks have 100% all the time anyway. If guardians can aoe auto, monks should be able to as well. We are supposed to be the dps fighter remember?
Playing this game anymore is feeling like a waste of money, I have to work my @$$ off tanking groups in TSO, and seeing these parses in raids with high end gear from last expansion + avatar items, I can hardly compete anymore, its insane...Id trade a haste buff anyday for a hurricane, or the strength of the bruisers ae's...I hate the fact that Crane Flock is only 16 sec long on a 2min 41sec recast...Crane Twirl helps none... Seriously if we dont get to be overpowered like the other tanks, why do we need to even tank, make us full dps, if not and your gonna make us tank, give us the ability not to get yelled at for not holding hate on overpowered dps'ers now. I just dont know, we are definately on the bottom of the class list of most useless...even below summoners and dont tell me we arnt cause from what i see we are.
There are things I have complaints about, and things that I don't...I consider myself fairly lucky, as I'm one of the few monks with a solid spot in a raid alliance and get treated quite well by them. I consistently parse as second teir dps--that is to say, I'm usually hovering sixth, seventh, or eighth on the parse below assassins, swashies, the MT SK, and half of our casters(yeah, I totally don't know how that happens, I keep telling myself that its just because she's completely awesome) but above the bards, rangers, and other half of our casters. Its pretty obvious looking at the parse too--there's the folks parsing 7-9k dps, and then a big drop off and me leading the folks parsing 4-6 dps. Honestly, I feel pretty good about where we stand dps-wise. I outparse those scouts and mages that don't know their classes as well as I know mine, or don't have as nice gear, and fall in solidly behind the ones that do. But I go a long way towards helping our MT survive, I have an incredible buff that upps casting speed, attack speed, and our chance to hit (Many thanks to SOE for letting the AA special on monk and bruiser raidbuffs stack, btw!) In short, am I a member of a class that you would want to have a couple of on a raid? No. But any raidforce worth its salt should have one monk or bruiser that REALLY knows what they're doing. Lucky for them, monks and bruisers tend to have a fair bit of skill with their class, a side effect of having to work really fricken hard to get anywhere. My surviveability, frankly, is great. There was a long period of time when avoidance tanking was really in trouble, especially after LU26, but now its starting to work quite well again, and with our mythical's bonus to mitigation I find that in terms of how I survive I am equal (against group encounters) to any other tank. The only real area where I feel we are sorely neglected is in terms of AoE aggro. If I'm in an ideal group setup, i.e., a coercer, dirge, and swashy in group, then I do just fine. But without some serious hate transfer it is a nigh heart-attack inducing experience to try to keep aggro off of something like a warlock in TSO. It wasn't a problem in RoK or EoF because then group encounters were rare, and on the few occassions when you had them they consisted of two or three mobs, a number that can easily be tabbed between. But with encounters of 15+ mobs we're in trouble. Our AoEs, the few ones we have, have caps on the number of enemies that they can hit to the point that they cannot even hit every mob in a single TSO encounter. The 8 mob limit needs to be gotten rid of, period. We need shorter reuse timers for our group taunt, dragonfire, and full circle, and more damage on all three of those abilities. Crane flock needs to be a full AoE, instead of just frontal. And if we could have just a bit of AoE autoattack... In short, I like where we stand in terms of DPS. No, we aren't scouts. Yes, shadowknights and zerkers and bruisers can often outparse us. But its a fairly solid position. I like where we stand in terms of surviveability--its a different way of doing things, but that just makes for the kind of differences that make classes unique. But in light of where things are going with this expansion, we need some AoE aggro desperately.
From my point of view, my tanking abilitys are kinda ok right now. I have tanked a lot stuff in Tombs of the Mad Crusader so far and with all the defensive stuff we got from our TSO AA Tree, it wasnt much harder to keep me alive then it was to keep the other tanks alive. I have 7 Avatar Items from Kunark, so i am not speaking for any other monks but me. I am sure, a monk with other gear will have serious problems tanking tso mobs. What i dont understand is, when monks ask for more open ae dmg or taunts to have more control of group-encounters, devs always tell us that we are no ae-tanks, we are single-target dps-tanks. So, if we are the dps tanks, why are SKs parsing up to 9k on single mobs ? I can understand why SKs and Bersis parse 10k on group-encounters but while a bersi has a hard time parsing more then 6k on single targets, a SK parses very close the same as a monk. So after raiding tso beta for 8 weeks and now raiding live i can pretty much say, the new king of tanking whatever you want to tank is a Shadowknight. He outparses Brigands on group-encounters, he outparses monks on single-encounters and he has as much defensive abilitys as a guardian has... grats SOE. And one more thing about "monks are no AE-tanks" ... SOE, do you think it is clever to introduce a new tank system, splitting tanks in AE and non-AE tanks, while 90% of the mobs in TSO are multi-mob encounters ? And do you realy think AE-Tanks have as much problems holding agro from single mobs as single-target tanks have problems holding agro from group-encounters ? .... LOL Hey, lets make a complete Expansion just for ae-tanks, next expansion we do is just for melee-speced mystics and the next expansion will be for naked assas that dual-wield BBQ-Sticks. I sugest, you devs should play a monk, grouped with a warlock or a wizard and then tell me how often you have agro in those 20 tso instances. I tell you how it works ... you pull a 6 mob encounter ... one will be on you, one will be on the brigand, the other 4 will be on the warlock. (Sorry for the bad english, im german) Noogard - Exordium Everfrost
GoblinSharpshooter wrote: Good post. I believe that no "heavy wearing plate tank" should out dps a monk on a single target mob. It just doesn't make sense how a lighter armored melee who should be able to strike and recover much quicker is being out dps'ed by a more encumbered plate/chain melee class or classes. Its like an 18 wheeler truck fully loaded accelerating from 0-60 in 5.2 secs just like a Mustang and the truck gets better gas mileage doing it. I can understand the better ae for plates but just don't see how they are allowed to be better even at single target. I don't think there will ever be balance as long as there are six tanks. Both brawlers for a long time seem to have a stigma about their tanking and dps abilities and I think it will just be that way as long as the game lives.
Aull wrote: No its not, some of these people could dps like an assassin and tank like a guardian and still complain. Yes monks need help imo, expecially on aoe aggro, but the idea the bruisers just flat out own monks is a complete fallacy imo. Yes brusier may be sligthtly better now (and only after 200 aa), but players skill > all. Alot of this groaning is coming from people with their mythicals and yes the bruiser mythical is very nice and better then the monk mythical. But how many brawlers at 80 have their mythicals? Maybee 15-20%. The fact is that unless the bruiser has their mythical tsuami owns anything a bruiser has for tanking until the bruiser gets over 182 AA's, a monk gets tsuami at level 50 something. Yes monks need some loving , but player skill > all. No raid leader with a clue is going to dump a good monk just to grab some random bruiser to raid with. I still think the monk raidwide is better to, that casting haste help everybody in the raid, the bruiser buff is mostly melee focused. That -10% hate does nothing for a priest or a raid with a good tank and RL who knows how to set up groups so aggro stays on the MT. Anyway I am all for monks getting some love, but this idea that you should just delete your monk is hysterical hyperbole. The brawler classes are much more even now then the were in ROK tbh. When bruisers were pretty much at the least desirable class in the game for raiding purposes.
GoblinSharpshooter wrote: This is the real issue here. SOE has divided tanks as aoe vs single target tanks. Then cut the reuse on rescue in half and made a bunch of new AA abilities the seem to primarily focus single target rescue like abilities. Where are the AOE rescues? I have grouped with the supposed aoe tanks (SK, zerker, paladin) and let me tell you their single target aggro is also very good. I will be the first to admit that ROK was rough on SK's and zerkers to some extent, but this expansion just seems like overcompensation.
I agree lack of AE aggro is what is hurting monks in TSO, at least in the group instances. I think there are a number of fairly simple changes any or all of which could be made that would help us without us being made AE gods like zerkers, e.g.: - Make Sneering Assault encounter-based - Change Enhance: Dragonfire to widen the cone and NOT extend the radius (16m is dangerous!) - Make Crane Twirl proc more often, more like 32% than 16% - Make Crane Flock an area of effect ability like Crane Twirl - Change Everburning to be an AE damage/taunt proc (having 300+ haste in raids is kinda pointless) There's plenty more ideas like this people have floated, but they seem to be falling on deaf ears.
It's amazing that all of these great ideas go completely unoticied by the devs. It is really dissapointing... BTW I agree that we should have a choice of either being a "tank" or "DPS".
Monks are a flexible class, this is one of our defining features, and we should have the option of choosing which one you want to be. I keep two AA specs, one is for tanking, one is for dpsing. I also keep an extra strongbox full of gear that I can use to switch from tanking to dpsing. I do like the way the TSO AAs let us choose--we have one AA that buffs our offensinve stance, and one that buffs our defensive stance. This is great because the mirror lets us keep two AA sets, so I have one in which I choose the defensive buff, and one in which I choose the offensive. I'm honestly a little frustrated with our brawler line. The abilities are fantastic, sure, but the way in which its set up prevents us from really making a definitive choice between dps and tanking. The lines go like this: useless stat increase extra attack proc/major dps increase increase to defensive abilities final attack Because each line includes both offensive and defensive abilities, I can't, for example, put all or most of my points into defensive things like I have with the monk and TSO lines. This I think is a real problem. As for fixing monks, theres a very simple, very effective solution: change our dragon rage proc to encounter wide. Done. Fixed. Satisfied with my class.
