I'm thinking about making Winnae a monk, since it's a class I haven't played. I might be able to take him to the ninjakari, but I'm also wondering about joining the Shofangi (since I'm sure they'd let me join ). But, got to remain a tae'dae...

So I wonder, which one would a tae'dae do better at? From what I've seen of Thul, his main contributions to PvP are usually waylay/truss etc., or build up momentum and drop it on someone, both of which seem to be tae'dae friendly. Shofangi don't have stealth, but what else can a monk do? I haven't seen many monks try to build wounds, how feasible is it? Since while a tae'dae monk would lack some of those stealth moves I mentioned, it would be tankier and combined with some harmony buffs, how well would it wound? Or is wounding out of the question because monk wounding is dex based (I think?).

I turned off rebounding and let Ilaveuse beat my ass over and over, Treant handled wounds incredibly easily. Kept having to Full out of the damn greenlock, though. It seems really sexy to drop on someone over and over.

Do you know if she was using wounding weapons though? Most monks seem to use speed weapons to build momentum, though I know a couple Celestian monks use damage weapons sometimes.

Tae'dae have crap for dex, I'm not sure it would matter. I'll ask, though.

Not sure about the viability of a balance impaired strenght monk. Thul does it, so... guess it can be done. I have only a few bits of advice. First, most of the specialized kata afflictions proc on momentum. Building wounds is moot unless you are working in the unarmed kata affs (which doesn't benefit from weapon speed. Not sure what this means for you. I believe wounds increase health and bleeding damage. Try a psymet monk using doublepain and kata strength soft in unison for heavy wounding, not to mention psymet boost to strength. Secondly, I believe monk choke moves are based largely on strength. No wounds with choke, but this might be another possible option.

That's interesting, I'm only just now really going over the skillsets in detail. So wounding for monks = damage, not afflictions? If so, since damage stat also = damage, you would want to have two weapons to do wounding --> hp damage strategy, and since momentum is important, you're looking at 3/6 weapons unless you focus entirely on momentum?

My contribution to PvP is largely utility, it should be mentioned. I might be able to knock down a couple of smaller people, but as far as Glom's demisquad goes, I'm probably the least fearsome. Some of that is tae'dae speed and stats, some of that is Psymet being lousy on the offensive front. As a Demi with my stats strategically placed, I've got 14 Dex, which is suboptimal for a monk... not sure exactly what it affects, but I do miss my attacks an awful lot. Speed malus hurts, too... there are a couple of grapple maneuvers that I'll just never be able to get off as a tae'dae, in addition to just the basic "hit more often, get more momentum" thing that monks have (always go with top speed weapons.) It's possible to make a tae'dae monk work, you'd just be far better off working as another race.

On the bright side, bashing is ridiculously easy.

I think Thul is right on this avenue. Tae'dae monk is mostly for utility, but utility isn't a bad thing. You won't be able to pull off the awesome grapples, but that's not always necessary.

From a Ninjakari perspective, utility includes: chain drag, basic hold, prone, low level soft locks
Stealth gives you waylay.
Acrobatics would give you scissorflip.

On the downside though, Thul -is- a demigod, so he has the advantage of the stat boost and SHRINK. Demigod + race is different than just race.

Just to add to the above, you'll more likely be hovering around 11-12 dex since you're not demi. Maybe 12 if you use dex foods. Demi helps with the stat adjustments quite a bit due to both the +2 to dex, as well as trading buff weights towards dex from str due to size. I hover at 14 dex with acrobatics instead of Thul's psymet, so stat-wise they're probably similar - and 14 isn't overly low dex, so eventually that'd work out okay.

Monk afflicting pretty much comes down to: place mod in form, hit, get affliction. Damage scales pretty dramatically to wounding on the body part though. Kind of like... the inverse of a warrior, almost.

Exactly. We have to work for it, monks don't.

The hilarity is in the truth of that statement.

Shofangi would definitely be more viable for a tae'dae monk than ninjakari as you'll be less reliant on grapples. Low dex will hurt your damage and wounding (dex increases wounding which is applied before damage, and wounding increases damage) but as Shofangi your goal will be to repeatedly greenlock until they run out of power. At that point it won't matter if you do a few % less damage.

Tahtetso are the most wound reliant spec for afflictions, followed by Ninjas and Shofangi who mainly rely on wounds for the stun to proc on dhatogh/hook.

Geb has said that he was able to reliably build wounds for a damage kill as shofangi. Sadly I didn't get a chance to see it and in my experience with high level or tanky types, building wounds for damage kill requires your opponent to be so heavily messed up (i.e. prone for a long time) that it's faster to continue down the affliction route.

If anyone's interested, wounding only increases damage above medium wounds on the targetted bodypart. The max effect it has is 2.5x damage at critical wounds and it scales linearly between 300 and 3750

wound mod = 1 : wounds < 300
= 0.000435 * wounds + 0.869565 : 300 <= wounds <= 3750
= 2.5 : wounds > 3750


The wound multiplier is applied before other damage bonuses like hard, soft, prone, war blessing etc. You can use this to get an idea of what is required to build wounds and damage someone out.

So, rather than making a new thread since this one was just made...

what is Shofangi like as a combat style? Like, I really love Nekotai and its use of poison, along with its thematic feel.

My issue reading over Shofangi on the wiki is that.. for being "Bull" based, it seems like it might as well have been based on Stag, since its got the same sort of skills as Stag (Gore, Stomping, Kicking people out of rooms).

I'm just curious as to how it actually plays, and if its a fun/interesting style of combat, like Nekotai seems like it would be.

If it was based on Stag, I think I'd love it a lot more, thematically.

They use staghorn shofas... which can be moonblades... basically they're stag + moon + bull + kephera, which may be too much theme for one class, but then Serenwilde does have a lot of stag stuff already. You could probably make triggers to say stag related things after your attacks though to make it more stag-like!

Another question I have... when it comes to monk weapons and runes, there are two-handed monk weapons? Do they work the same as two-handed warrior weapons when it comes to stats and runes?

The help file says that runes will boost a two-handed warrior weapon less for example, but doesn't mention monk weapons there. And while chains appear to be two-handed, and I've only seen one-handed nekais, and I think I've seen one and two handed tahtos? But what about shofas?

If I remember correctly, tahto/jakari weapons are always two-handed and nekai/shofa are always one-handed. I can't answer the question about runes, never having used them before. For what it's worth, I do have a tahto with 190/190/220 stats. Maybe that might answer your question without me really knowing what those numbers even mean? (Beyond knowing that they're damage/precision/speed)

EDIT:

There's always Casilu's knock-knock joke with Bullkick. I suspect that it will work with Starkick, too.

EDIT 2: Oh hell. For (science! Oh wait, Hallifax has no monks yet) posterity:

That only works when you're a psychopath.

We have so many monk threads now... How does giving poisons with monks work? I seem to take on a lot of them, but are those special skills or is the chance to give a poison higher for monks than it is for warriors?