To be honest I think the balance problems are getting to the point where it seems clear that players can no longer be trusted to actually have sound judgment when it comes to balancing the game. They are neither impartial nor unbiased and do not necessarily possess the skill to take a look at the big picture beyond their own personal skills.

I understand that.

However, what the people in said monk summit have been telling us on the forums, is very different from what they appeared to have agreed on from the results.

That is what frustrates me.

I've conducted a few tests with Aniri before my wife called me away for dinner. From what I have noticed, monks are not stopped by any of the things I felt kept them balanced (on average). Their forms keep going even when hitting shields, entangled, and stunned. In the case of acrobatic monks, spring up now allows them to near completely ignore being knocked prone as long as they are back up before the next form comes through. The change in speed seems to not be that much different than before, but now the first few forms are no longer significantly slower. So even if one does stop the form, they can easily start over again without the former penalty they use to incur.

In my opinion, monks have become the perfect class for those who do not desire to learn the intricacies of Lusternian combat. All they have to do is copy well known Kata Forms, acquire a system, and jump right in with the killing. At least before, a person who understood how monks worked could easily hinder a monk who only knew how to hit an alias for his/her Forms. I will test some more, but so far I seriously feel the basic manner in which monks work has been made unbalanced. If ruptures and a rupture required insta-kill were added to all of the monks today, then all of the archetypes would end up being ridiculously overpowered.

Oh and adding one random rupture cure every 8 seconds (healing scroll) does not help anything, if the person giving you the ruptures can give them faster than every 2.0 seconds, and the attacks that gives them can not be parried nor dodged.

I think you should just do it yourself instead of involving the players. I know you're trying to keep things fair, but for some reason I would just rather one impartial person do it.

These changes do not look to be great. They don't even look very good. They actually look quite bad. The one way to beat a monk was to stop the forms. As a Celestine, I do not have very much health, or very many defenses to boost my tanky-ness. A monk can easily tear through me in a few seconds if I'm not working hard to break up the forms. Now that's going to be even harder to do.

Like Estarra said they have been changed around some. Also PPK was all I ever heard about in the forums over and over PPK this PPK that, they made it so a monk can't simply use PPK to hurt you anymore.

Embrace changes, stop fearing it.

I never complained about PPK, because most monks didn't use it. I assumed that every monk I fought with would fight honorably, and so far they have. They actually used their skills.

They may not be able to kill you with PPK so easily (Still doesn't look like a bad move to use, though), but now they can kill you easier with everything else. They shouldn't have boosted their ability to use the rest of their forms, rather they should have nerfed PPK. I really thought monks were balanced in practically every other area (dunno about Shofangi), they were fast, but you just had to think quick and try to keep them from tearing through you.

And I'm not really afraid of change, I just don't like. >.>

You have a point, we shouldn't have rushed to judgement so quickly. It looks like it addresses the ppk issue somewhat (Though we were told the stun was being removed, so we are a little bit confused). Balance stacking is still a huge issue. Now kata are even more difficult to disrupt? (given it was very easy to at first...but this scares me a bit) Aaaaanywho, sorry to jump the gun a bit. We were just expecting improvements, and we got a double edged sword. We're just cautious. Thanks for working hard though <3 <3

Yeah, my jaw dropped as well.

This does address many of the frustrations of combat from the monk perspective, but it overall boosted monk potency by not addressing the problems that currently make monks overpowerful. The solutions implemented were also a bit odd, in the case of some of the temporary imbalance issues.

Instead of making unarmed modifiers so expensive, and weakening punch deep wounds... why didn't we fix the breaknose issue and assess from there? Or was it decided that even without breaknose, unarmed combat was too potent? It feels like... we nerfed sap entirely because it was too potent at ground level (as an analogy - I'm not making that assertion).

One of the balancing aspects of the kata mechanic (fast and potent, can be interrupted) is that latter part... it can be interrupted. While I do think that certain forms of interruption were too effective, not every class has acrobatics dodge. Breaking limbs, stun, paralysis and those kinds of effects are the abilities that tend to be available broadly, and so should be the predominant method of interrupting monk offense. It may be that I don't know what I'm talking about, not being a primary combatant, but this seems somewhat obvious to me.

Though on the topic of breaking katas, I'd still like to see the kata mechanic go away entirely. There's still the issue of Kata in aeon effects, inability to change stances or other abilities that require balance, or rapidly adjust tactics to changing combat situations.

Heh, monks were not really balanced in areas other than ppk. It was total reliance on a couple of broken (in the "too good" sense) skills for the most part. PPK is now gone for every legitimate purpose, although if they kept huge breaknose stun in - you'd think it'd be gone by now, but the announce post doesn't sa so - that may be still usable. So now for Shofangi it'll be trying to get some use out of grapples, whibuta, boganj and kumaki if your opponent has bad discipline. You may also see crunch start being used.

Tahtetso will be, uh, hemiplegy.

EDIT: Btw, the kata being stopped actually has relatively little effect now since the speed continues as before. I don't follow why this is even a complaint. Btw, those things all still hinder us, it just means we "chase balance" when they're cured. You can set your systems to do that for your own attacks if you want.

GAh, thats exactly the problem.

...but it isn't a problem. We could make our systems do it for us if we wanted. YOU could make YOUR system do it for you if you wanted. If it's that big a deal, do it yourself and see how well it works. Now that forms are uniform speed you'll find there's very little difference.

EDIT: Maybe this is some misunderstanding about the speeds. Our forms don't speed up anymore. That means they don't get to really fast rates, they're now uniform. If there are problems, it's to do with overpowered faelings, hyperactive or rushing, not the kata mechanic.

No you can't, because you still have to deal with lag. No effective fighter is going automate his/her attacks, except for monks whose attacks are already automated. Also, stopping a monks Form string was a big way of keeping monks from getting up to full speed and overpowering a person's healing. The main part of doing that was the monk had to start all over again with the slower start. Now, that is not the case. The monk does not have to start all over again, heck the monk does not have to do anything all. There was a reason I called myself a Train when I was a monk, and now it seems that child rails were added to the sides. The class now requires even less thinking after the initial Forms are created than before, and actually one can just copy the form styles from others. So in the end, the class requires no real thinking at all offensive wise.

Can you explain how automated balance-chasing is better for monks than for anyone else? It allows us to get grapples off, but anything else could be replicated by a warrior. Especially since a warrior could actually set their balance-chasing to hit different areas or update on the fly, whereas monks will still be walking into rebounding/stance/parry. In that respect a warrior would actually be better off with this system than a monk.

We now don't GET to full speed anymore, so it's not like you even need to slow us down to make us start from that level.

Sorry, my system, no matter how well Catarin codes it, will not be able to bypass aeon.

They are uniformly fast now Nejii. You know that. You know you do not start slow and speed up, you start fast (a little slower than what was top speed) and stay fast.

So the only issue is how it avoids aeon or choke? That's what all this fuss is about? It'd be within reason to change it so a form now counts as one aeoned/choked action (this makes curing in choke mostly impossible for monks, but choke needs a nerf anyway so we'll ignore that for now). I don't think the envoys would mind much if you suggested that to them.

EDIT: Geb, that's not what my tests are showing, but if anyone has accurate stats for how fast forms went before we can find out.

Eh, whatever is said here, we'll see how things go over the next few days. I'm assuming there's still a lot more monk changes coming. At the very least, spec alterations for the Harmony monk guilds, when they mingle in the rupture system.

Not that I had any intention of being a contender in the War Seal event, but I'd have hoped these problems were resolved before that took place.

Maybe tests are showing different, but the announce post said second forms are "a little slower."

If it has slowed down to the point that my healing can keep up with it, that's fine and dandy. My healing could -not- keep up before, unless I broke the forms. Now I can't even do that.

y'know, I'm finally back to a normal person schedule after this weekend, but I think I'll extend my absense another week or so. No point in coming back to frustration when it was hard enough for me before.

I talked to Aniri who was performing the forms on me, and she did not notice much of a change. What is even more alarming is that she was not even using any speed mods.