Noctu must be a monk. Nerf monks.

I'll give you that it's a flawed argument, but it still has merit. Yes monks do damage. So do warriors, so do bards. I still see monks killing the most during group combat. Monks serve as support AND damage all at the same time. Multiple afflictions, damage, and wounds that can get pretty ridiculous if your team's target is someone else. No one else can do this, other than warriors, and they have to be artied to be an actual threat. How can this not be seen as a problem? Now throw in they don't have to do much more than hit a button to start their offense and wait for it to be stopped to try again.

You probably see monks killing all the time because of the large number of Ninjakari that moved over from other guilds and the low number of bards. It's not like bard offence is difficult either. It just requires your train track to have slightly more buttons pushed on it. In teams, warrior offence is the same. The whole comparison is invalid. Talking about solo is likely to be your best argument.

Come to think of it, let's have some logs of competent people fighting monks post-changes. Without broken ppk and bomolini we'll see how it goes and whether the complaining is attributable to anything other than ninshi being unparryable.

EDIT: And noctu is a bard with 20% of my might. Nerf.

He's a bard, actually. Nerf bards.

Ninshi needs to be possible to parry and dodge.

No matter how anyone spins it, monks have been changed to be the easiest class to do well in now. My main worry is that they have made monks harder to hinder, while in the future their afflictions will be even easier to give with them all possibly be given an insta-kill based on ruptures. If they make it possible to parry and dodge ruptures for all of the specialties when they get them, then all monks may be manageable with good defensive tactics. I hope that once Ninshi becomes possible to dodge and parry, the means at which the other guilds will acquire ruptures will also be possible to parry and dodge.

Oh, and besides creating the forms, there is nothing complex about monks at all. Remember, I was one, so don’t try to tell me I have no clue about it. Also consider the fact that while other archetypes can be given advice on tactics, the monk archetype is the only one where all that needs to be done is tell a person to copy past the effective list of Katas. I’ve always said besides creating the forms, monk combat was extremely boring to me because the actual combat required nothing of me but to push a button once in a while. It is a good archetype for introducing combat to novices to the IRE system, but not something a person who truly wants to understand how to do well will continue play (IMHO).

Also, Bards should not be the loudest complainers about monks. Bards take more effort to do well on the fly, but they easily do more damage per second than a monk. Truthfully, I take more damage from a bard in a span of 3 seconds, than I do from a monk in 10. Besides some of the new changes that I think make things too easy for monks and the problem I have with the implementation of ruptures and it’s accompanying insanely easy insta-kill prerequisites, I find monks far easier to tank than bards by a long shot (Though I hear demigod warrior damage is obscene against cloth wearers too).

I think one of the biggest problems is that the last two archetypes were both made to reach the speed cap regardless of race. This is made worse, by the fact that races can affect this as well. Warriors could reach the speed cap, but only with hunting. They would have to sacrifice vital pvp stats to be able to reach the speed cap in pvp. Mages, Druids, and Guardians cannot hit the same top speed as monks and bards can just by transing their skills.

I think there have been concessions on rupture-based instakills. I've heard ninjakari talking about removing it and replacing it with something else because it's too inevitable, and when we designed Shofangi ruptures ages ago we left out a rupture-based instakill for exactly that reason. The question is whether that'll actually happen in the case of the Ninjakari, though.

EDIT: PS nerf balance bonuses. Been saying this for a long time now.

And i thought it was my skill that carried that day.. but it turns out, that when he appeared, i just needed to push some buttons while sipping cofee.. didnt even need to think what i should do.. then i played around with tetris after he got transfixed.. and when the skillset that i had decided to end it all it said to me.. "sorry pal, but im taking over" and just like that everything ended..

But --

err, if we are really OP.. then i made the right career choice..

I can picture that!! Thoros biting his tounge and concentrating on fighting and you playing tetris sippin coffee hehe

I agree, but I've also fought monks as Druid and Geomancer. Bards outdamage a monk any day of the week, but that's all bards have going for them. (the afflictions are easily handled in almost every situation.) Monks just have it all. Wounds, damage, afflictions, and soon to come, ruptures. So do warriors...but really...there is no comparison unless the warriors spent a good chunk of cash on arties

And Demigod warrior damage can be rough. Catarin jumped me, had me pinlegged in the first two hits and tendoned with the second two and half my health was gone. I wasn't "combat prepared" but it was an eye opener.

edit: @Nejii: My arguement about team situations is totally valid in every way. Lusternia is extremely heavy with team combat. To design a class with no consideration for team combat is laughable, and you can't compare warriors to monks as if they are on the same playing field.

Bards have it all.
Passive afflictions, active afflictions, damage, afflictions that increase their damage, passive effects that aren't quite afflictions but are otherwise useful (octave)...

It doesn't work like that. Ruptures and wounds, for example, are cured simultaneously. Our damage is like 800, compared to a bard's 2000. This is at demigod, too. And I do like 500 wounds per combo. Your afflictions are better than ours and can't be blocked, plus you have effects that make them uncurable. You're just as hard to hinder (except we don't have passives) and just as fast.

Oh yeah, we can't 1-hit pinleg anyone either.

Vis. edit: of course I can. For starters, team balance doesn't equate to solo balance. The fact that a warrior teams up pretty well with a monk has little if anything to do with the solo combat potential of either. They are distinct things. Besides which, going for the bards and mages first is pretty important. Bards in teams are lethal, that's why people try to go for them first.

Your damage numbers are a bit...off.

The 2000 is in the idiots thread. The other numbers I got yesterday; they're not off. And they weren't on wiccans or fullplated warriors either.

Is this minorsecond damage? i wonder how this went that high.. mine is just a shade over 1000.

Now, if this was a minorsixth/discordantchord damage, it should be the about this or higher.. because it needs a lot of setup, and is easily avoided..

Maybe so. The point is that you can't just throw out multiple things to make it sound like a class is better - you have to have more substance (which would require being right.)

See that's the point I was making. It's not the balance bonuses that are the actual problem. It's the design of the skill. The only reason the balance bonuses are that much of a problem is because the skillset is so damn fast. Since I first made Krellan as a moondancer and since I've been a Moondancer all I've heard is that you can't be a good fighter without being a mugwump. I think that actually holds true especially now that curing systems are better. Some of the skills just aren't fast enough. Monks and bards were made too fast. Music is on permanent mugwump speed. Bards are like on hexes speed except without the redrawing, masked affliction, but also potentially more than 2 afflictions a second.

It is not just the insta kills with ruptures. It is how ruptures are designed themselves. They stack on a person far far faster than you can ever cure them. Scroll does not help. Adding insult to injury is being unable to actually even apply health to a body part if it is in a ninshi grapple. Once the ruptures are in place, other very powerful moves can be done with impunity, without fail, and without any chance of being avoided.

I believe that is the greatest problem. That there is *nothing* you can do to avoid these things. Except run, pray to god to get pin leg or impale going if you're a blademaster, hope that they're really bad at curing (not that this really matters since there isn't much that actually hinders them), or die.

No, I am not just making this up, I have plenty of actual experience fighting against this as I have been picking fights with ninjakai for the past couple of weeks. Some claim that the problem is only with the races that have balance bonuses. I cannot see how that is actually the case though. With higher speed of course you stack them more but it's not like getting a rupture every 1.7 seconds as opposed to every 1.3 seconds is that big of a difference when your ability to heal them is based on 2 every 8 seconds.

Something needs to change with them. The wait and see tactic has been used. We've waited and seen. It needs fixing. The scroll thing was tried. I am uncertain how anyone thought that adding a cure that itself has an 8 second balance would significantly improve the healing rate on these things but well, as expected, it has not. Any attack that can give ruptures needs to be parryable or stanceable, or alternatively any time someone uses an attack that requires a certain amount of ruptures, that amount of ruptures is used up and goes away on the target.

To be fair, this is how we originally designed them, and we brought it up again for the summit (the heal scroll thing came out instead, I wasn't there so I don't know whose idea that was). I think the admin just don't like that idea since it doesn't make much sense.

Vis. the other stuff: you mentioned not being able to stance or parry them. For Tahtetso and Shofangi it's more than likely you'll be able to stance and parry them, so they won't be anything like as hard to deal with as the ninjakari ones. I think you'll find them a lot easier to deal with if that's changed for the ninjakari as well.

EDIT: To clarify, rather than "that amount of ruptures", we had it such that it would remove a set amt. of ruptures. That way you go from 5, to 3, to 1, to 0, and you actually have a reason to use the middle-lower ones.

It makes plenty of sense. You have a bunch of ruptures on a limb priming it for some serious damage to it. You then mangle that limb or something. Well you don't have ruptures anymore because that limb is mangled. Same as if you have a paper cut and someone comes and slices it open with a knife, well you don't have a papercut anymore.

EDIT: And I'm not sure what the "to be fair" means so much. Fair to whom? I don't really blame most of the monk committee for the mess that is the Ninjakari. As I understand it, the majority of the committee raised quite a few objections to various things that were ultimately ignored. I do blame the Ninjakari envoy who when asked about this sort of thing has taken the approach that his guild will be upset with him if he suggests these kind of changes so maybe next month will be a good month to balance them heh.

Hmm, I hadn't thought of it that way. Maybe they didn't either, or maybe that wasn't the reason they didn't implement it. Maybe someone from the summit kept a log and will be able to enlighten us.