Monk

[darkgod]

BUt rememebr marvallis this class needs to pump wil so it'll end up with lots of stamina

[grayswandir]

Increased unarmed critical chance does not seem to show up on the character sheet? From tiger stance.

Attack speed remains 60, even with Ki combat.

Using Phoenix stance increases attack speed by 6.5 instead of lowering it by 11%. (combat_physspeed is weird. A value of 5 gives 20% attack speed).

Oh, so I can't overwrite versions. That was still the old version, that's why. The interface is still somewhat confusing me.

...

I just uploaded the next version, so try that.

Also, I don’t want to sound like a jerk, but Ki shield is just a bad shielding rune that drains your stamina. Most talent consume a lot of stamina.

No, no, you don't sound like a jerk at all. So it needs a much better conversion ratio, then? I think if you went with a dragon focused character it might be a lot stronger, though.

[marvalis]

So it needs a much better conversion ratio, then?

* 50% damage reduction is going to be overpowered. Balancing this by making it consume a lot of stamina seems self-defeating to me. Lowering the amount of damage reduction to 10-20% seems much more reasonable. I would not go above 30%.
* 70 stamina sustain is a lot. Perhaps lower this to ~40.
* Stamina drain can be something like 50%-10% of damage, or perhaps start even lower (30%-10% or something)

So for example,
if you get hit for 200 damage,
the damage you receive is reduced to 180-160 (90-80% of total damage),
and you loose 6-4 stamina (3-2% of total damage, or 30% to 10% of damage absorbed).

If you want to keep a high damage reduction, then it has to be limited in some other way, like a cooldown and then it should preferably be instant cast.
So you could have a skill that provides 50% damage reduction for 5 turns, costs no turn to cast, costs a certain amount of stamina, and will drain some additional stamina depending on how much damage the shield absorbs. For example, costs 10 stamina + 10% of all damage absorbed.

[donkatsu]

First of all, while I haven't tested this class in a normal game, I love the idea and the mechanics behind the stances. Please don't change the core mechanics.

Ki Shield is good in the early game but late game, you're going to have like 250 stamina and 1200 life. So the entirety of your stamina pool is going to be good for like, 600 health. Mages can heal that much health for a tiny portion of their mana pool. Granted, Ki Shield prevents damage instead of healing it, which is a little better, but not enough to justify the cost. The ratio should scale better, but not *too* well. 50% damage reduction at all times is obviously overpowered, so the resource cost does need to matter. In addition to making the stamina:life ratio better, I'd suggest keeping the 50% reduction and turning Ki Shield into something that you would turn on in the middle of combat, if you suddenly needed some added durability. The best way to accomplish this would be to either make it instant-activate, or give it some effect upon activation (sort of like a mindslayer shield spike except on activation instead of deactivation). One existing talent you could balance Ki Shield against would be the Sun Paladin's Retribution, which I think is good but not overpowered.

Again, great work and I hope this class gets fleshed out enough to be included in the main game. They already feel cooler than Brawlers.

[Sradac]

well you said this is a psionic / brawler hybrid, so give them Psi and have Ki Shield damage psi instead of health, but nerf their psi regen to something like .10.

[grayswandir]

So I went through with a tiger focused monk that didn't touch the mobility tree, finally losing to a worm that walks at Dreadfell 6. That's about average for me, so I consider that a good sign. I had a lot of trouble with Rantha and the Temporal Rift boss. Celia was eerily easy. Since I did well without Mobility, I'll probably change it to locked next time I upload a version. I also largely ignored the Ki Combat tree - I only had 3 points in it for a majority of the game. The brawler physical power bonus probably helped a lot here.

Also, Shell Crash currently lets you walk through walls. Oops.

Thanks for the suggestions for Ki Shield. I kind of want to make it something you keep on all the time as opposed to specifically activating it, but it's certainly an option. I was thinking, what if you made its absorption percentage scale based on how much health you were missing? So at full health, none of the damage is absorbed, but if you were at 0 health, then say 60% - 80% of the damage is absorbed. That way, you're only losing stamina when you'd really rather lose stamina than health.

Also, in review, Ki Mastery seems kind of lame, so I'm considering replacing it with this:
Inner Focus (Sustain) - Instant use, gives you stamina regen equal to (0.5 to 1.5) times your Willpower, but blinds you. At 3rd level you get blindfighting while it's active. Long cooldown.
I really like the idea, but it might be too powerful with Ki Shield. Thoughts?


Edit: I've uploaded a new version that fixed some bugs and did things the simple way: Ki Shield is instant and has a better ratio. This is likely to change later.

[necronomist]

I just tried a Monk (got to lvl 10) and the class is very fun; working out optimal skill combos to optimise damage and minimise cooldowns is very engaging and the class brings something new to the game. Some feedback and possible bugs:

I kept running out of Stamina, even though I invested in Dragon and Willpower; I haven't tried out Ki Shield yet, mainly because I fear that I won't have sufficient Stamina to play around with my cool abilities-also 70 cost sustain! It might be worth looking into reducing the resource costs across the board, although this might not be such an issue at higher levels.

Ki Combat does not seem to increase your Physicalpower at all. At lvl 10, I had 15 Physicalpower with 10 Str and 2 points in Ki Combat-possible bug? I used the Class Pack addon.

Thank you very much for this fun class; with some updating, I'm sure we will see its eventual inclusion of the Monk in the main game!

[Kaballah]

This is a pretty nifty class indeed, great job. I'm pretty impressed with how the different stances interact with each other. One thing I'd ask for is for the rank 1 talents for each stance able to be fired without a target, to allow stance switching when out of combat. Say, if you activate the talent and finalize it with no target under the cursor, or if self under the cursor, don't charge stamina and switch stance but place that talent on cooldown as otherwise normal.

[Kaballah]

I kept running out of Stamina, even though I invested in Dragon and Willpower; I haven't tried out Ki Shield yet, mainly because I fear that I won't have sufficient Stamina to play around with my cool abilities-also 70 cost sustain! It might be worth looking into reducing the resource costs across the board, although this might not be such an issue at higher levels.

I think if you invest into the rank 4 Combat Veteran talent you won't ever have that problem again. I'm OK with the high sustain cost personally, because you're encouraged to increase willpower as high as possible anyhow. There's a lot of sustains in the game that you can't realistically run until pretty late in the game, e.g. Probability Travel for archmage (250 mana) even though you can pick them up much earlier.

[stinkstink]

Any thought of the knockback skills (Shell Crash, Exploding Palm) having their stance shift swapped to Tiger? Seems like there could be some good synergy between those and Charged Leap, but I'm not sure if there's a better combo that would disable. They both put you in Dragon, is the intent to use them to clear some breathing room for Dragon's Heart?

[Zaive]

From what I understand, there really was no intent behind any of the stance changes. Each animal/stance corresponds to a cardinal direction (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_Symbo ... tellation)). The 2nd skill switches to the left, the 3rd across, and the 4th to the right.

I haven't gotten a monk far enough to really use any of the later skills, but some of the costs do seem a little high; I don't recall any other class having an active skill that costs 50 stamina, let alone, 80 I think, for exploding palm.
Well, except for the one berserker skill, but that's a special case.

[grayswandir]

I kept running out of Stamina, even though I invested in Dragon and Willpower; I haven't tried out Ki Shield yet, mainly because I fear that I won't have sufficient Stamina to play around with my cool abilities-also 70 cost sustain! It might be worth looking into reducing the resource costs across the board, although this might not be such an issue at higher levels.

I don't want stamina to be too easy to come by, but I definitely think some of the more expensive skills could do with cheaper costs. I'm planning on adding in a generic tree to somewhat alleviate this, see below.

I have been told that max ki shield is very strong if you also max out Dragon's Heart, so I'm going to add some sort of penalty to gaining stamina while you have it up. Maybe you only get 20% as much?

Ki Combat does not seem to increase your Physicalpower at all. At lvl 10, I had 15 Physicalpower with 10 Str and 2 points in Ki Combat-possible bug? I used the Class Pack addon.

Testing, this also shows up with the brawler in unmodified b41. The bonus physical power you get from levels shows up, but not from unarmed mastery.

This is a pretty nifty class indeed, great job. I'm pretty impressed with how the different stances interact with each other. One thing I'd ask for is for the rank 1 talents for each stance able to be fired without a target, to allow stance switching when out of combat. Say, if you activate the talent and finalize it with no target under the cursor, or if self under the cursor, don't charge stamina and switch stance but place that talent on cooldown as otherwise normal.

That sounds reasonable.

There's a lot of sustains in the game that you can't realistically run until pretty late in the game, e.g. Probability Travel for archmage (250 mana) even though you can pick them up much earlier.

That was the idea. I didn't want you to be able to run both ki strikes and ki shield at the same time until higher levels.

Any thought of the knockback skills (Shell Crash, Exploding Palm) having their stance shift swapped to Tiger? Seems like there could be some good synergy between those and Charged Leap, but I'm not sure if there's a better combo that would disable. They both put you in Dragon, is the intent to use them to clear some breathing room for Dragon's Heart?

From what I understand, there really was no intent behind any of the stance changes. Each animal/stance corresponds to a cardinal direction (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_Symbo ... tellation)). The 2nd skill switches to the left, the 3rd across, and the 4th to the right.

Yeah, I wouldn't be opposed to switching the order of the skills if someone wants to suggest a better combo, but the 3rd tier skill should always switch to the opposite side, etc. That provides a nice setup where you can't use the 2nd tier skill repeatedly until you get to the 4th tier in the one it switches to.



Anyway, I've coded up a rough generic tree for them that I'll be testing out over the next week. I specifically want it to not use stamina, and be nice for any class that uses mindpower. It uses willpower, and still needs a name.

Inner Peace: Sustain. Reduces mind damage by 20%, mindpower by a small amount (around 3 at max level), increases mind resistance and mental save by a decent amount (around 25 at max level).
Inner Strength: Passive. Increases your willpower by X% (around 40 at max level) for purposes of calculating resource pools.
Inner Clarity: Instant sustain with long cooldown. Reduces global speed, but every turn you have a chance to recover from a single detrimental mental effect.
Inner Sight: Sustain. Gives you a little mindpower and blindfighting, but blinds you and removes all telepathy. At higher levels it gives you telepathy all out to a range of 2 or 3.

[necronomist]

Anyway, I've coded up a rough generic tree for them that I'll be testing out over the next week. I specifically want it to not use stamina, and be nice for any class that uses mindpower. It uses willpower, and still needs a name.

Inner Peace: Sustain. Reduces mind damage by 20%, mindpower by a small amount (around 3 at max level), increases mind resistance and mental save by a decent amount (around 25 at max level).
Inner Strength: Passive. Increases your willpower by X% (around 40 at max level) for purposes of calculating resource pools.
Inner Clarity: Instant sustain with long cooldown. Reduces global speed, but every turn you have a chance to recover from a single detrimental mental effect.
Inner Sight: Sustain. Gives you a little mindpower and blindfighting, but blinds you and removes all telepathy. At higher levels it gives you telepathy all out to a range of 2 or 3.

Some initial feedback/ideas about the suggested generics tree:

Inner Peace: Mind damage is quite rare for NPCs, so reduced mind damage and mind resistance will not be very tempting. Mental saves and Mindpower are useful, but you will need to increase the amount of Mindpower provided and/or introduce an additional benefit-maybe confusion resistance?
Inner Strength: This sounds very useful-care needs to be taken with the numbers so that it is not OP for monks that focus on Willpower and useless for monks that focus on Dex, althought in the latter game, all monks should have decent Will scores.
Inner Clarity: This appears to be quite limiting-monks have access to the Condition tree (Unflinching Resolve), which provides a similar and broader effect and should have decent Mental saves, especially if investing in Inner Peace. Maybe change it so that it provides a bonus in Physical and Spell saves as a proportion of your Mental saves? However, that would make it quite similar to Chant of Fortitude.
Inner Sight: By my reading, the main benefit of this talent is that it grands you blindfighting; while this is quite useful against some NPCs (namely Dreads), the use of this talent would be quite limited. What if it reduces vision range instead and gives telepathy all within the reduced vision range starting at say radius 3, while higher levels gradually increase the vision and telepathy range?

Also, note that Monks currently have access to 3 generic trees, excluding Combat training. Another generic tree provides options, but also put more strain in terms of how to level them up, especially if they go anti-magic. On the other hand, they could do with the addition of a couple of (locked) class talent trees. Some ideas:

Ki Archery: Currently, monks have very limited ranged options and Ki archery fits the theme very nicely. A few possible talents:
Swift draw-switch to secondary set if the secondary includes a bow and fire an arrow that does 80%-130% damage
Ki archery-fires an arrow at a single target ignoring all other actors on the way with extended range that always hist and does more damage
???
???
If people like the idea of playing a monk archer, you could start with this unlocked and also include Bow Mastery as a locked tree.

Stance Mastery: Locked tree, starting at lvl 20. Would include 4 active skills that all start immediately available (similar to Mindslayer Shields) that would each switch you to a stance and do something else (eg Dragon skill could provide healing) and also increase the effectiveness of the stance passive abilities-this can be done in a way similar to Mindslayer, by increasing the effective Stance tree level for the purposes of calculating stance passive benefits. This tree would give you more options in combat and allow you to more readily switch to the Stances you are most heavily invested in. A good idea would be to include some AOE skills on this tree, since this appears to be an area that the monk is lacking in.

Sorry for the wall of text, hopefully this helps.

[grayswandir]

Inner Peace: Mind damage is quite rare for NPCs, so reduced mind damage and mind resistance will not be very tempting. Mental saves and Mindpower are useful, but you will need to increase the amount of Mindpower provided and/or introduce an additional benefit-maybe confusion resistance?

Confusion resist sounds good, but I don't want it to overlap too much with Inner Clarity. Maybe half the bonus to physical and mental saves as well?
Actually, I just got a neat idea. What if Ki Shield instead converts 50% of all damage you receive to mind damage, and then lets Mind damage hit stamina instead of health? That could make this a bit stronger, and would be pretty cool thematically, I think.

Inner Strength: This sounds very useful-care needs to be taken with the numbers so that it is not OP for monks that focus on Willpower and useless for monks that focus on Dex, althought in the latter game, all monks should have decent Will scores.

I'm thinking about also making this give a flat 20 stamina per level, or something like that. That way it would have some benefit at low levels as well.

Inner Clarity: This appears to be quite limiting-monks have access to the Condition tree (Unflinching Resolve), which provides a similar and broader effect and should have decent Mental saves, especially if investing in Inner Peace. Maybe change it so that it provides a bonus in Physical and Spell saves as a proportion of your Mental saves? However, that would make it quite similar to Chant of Fortitude.

Unflinching Resolve covers 5 specific effects, only one of which is mental. This covers every single mental effect. Having no mental effect last longer than 2 turns is definitely worth a small reduction in speed for some characters. It's also instant, which means you can use it after you get hit. Adjusting the speed penalty is probably the hardest part. For instance, a speed penalty of 5% would make this skill way too good, I think. Right now I have it ranging from 18% to 10%.

Inner Sight: By my reading, the main benefit of this talent is that it grands you blindfighting; while this is quite useful against some NPCs (namely Dreads), the use of this talent would be quite limited. What if it reduces vision range instead and gives telepathy all within the reduced vision range starting at say radius 3, while higher levels gradually increase the vision and telepathy range?

I was told last night that this overlaps a lot with some new stuff in b42, so I rewrote it. Now it gives a passive mindpower% chance to see any creature within talent level spaces, as if you had telepathy with them. You can activate it to blind yourself and give yourself blind fighting. It also allows you to always see yourself when blinded.

Also, note that Monks currently have access to 3 generic trees, excluding Combat training. Another generic tree provides options, but also put more strain in terms of how to level them up, especially if they go anti-magic.

I mainly wanted a will based generic tree for monks who didn't go antimagic. Since willpower is their main stat, I wanted there to be a generic tree for it. I'm considering locking Conditioning, but I'll have to test it out, first.

Ki Archery: Currently, monks have very limited ranged options and Ki archery fits the theme very nicely. A few possible talents:
Swift draw-switch to secondary set if the secondary includes a bow and fire an arrow that does 80%-130% damage
Ki archery-fires an arrow at a single target ignoring all other actors on the way with extended range that always hist and does more damage
???
???
If people like the idea of playing a monk archer, you could start with this unlocked and also include Bow Mastery as a locked tree.

I don't really see Monks doing archery all that well, at least not this version of them. If I ever get around to making a thrown weapons tree I might give it to them.

Stance Mastery: Locked tree, starting at lvl 20. Would include 4 active skills that all start immediately available (similar to Mindslayer Shields) that would each switch you to a stance and do something else (eg Dragon skill could provide healing) and also increase the effectiveness of the stance passive abilities-this can be done in a way similar to Mindslayer, by increasing the effective Stance tree level for the purposes of calculating stance passive benefits. This tree would give you more options in combat and allow you to more readily switch to the Stances you are most heavily invested in. A good idea would be to include some AOE skills on this tree, since this appears to be an area that the monk is lacking in.

Stance Mastery is definitely an idea. I kind of wanted to make skills that affected all stances equally, though. Like a passive that gives you 5% of the bonus for each stance even if you're not in that stance, or a boost to each of the first tier skills. Maybe the highest skill would give you a new ability for a stance if you have 20/19/18/17/16 points in that tree. However, Monk already has a lot of places to spend class points, so this tree is pretty much my lowest priority.

Adding some AOE is definitely a good idea, though. I just have to find a place for it.

Sorry for the wall of text, hopefully this helps.

No, this is really helpful. Thanks for the feedback.


Also, I'm planning on a small change to Pounding Blows. Instead of stunning for a turn for every hit, I want it to apply a 1-turn debuff that increases their stun duration by 1 every time they're hit by physical damage. So once you get the high attack speed for phoenix stance this naturally gets better.

[edge2054]

I'm thinking about also making this give a flat 20 stamina per level, or something like that. That way it would have some benefit at low levels as well.

I put in an inc_resource_multi value for actors in my local copy today. Assuming DG doesn't nix it in my patch it would let you add small numbers to the willpower gain ratio (so you could do like 0.5 per talent point for a total of 5 Stamina per Willpower).

It won't auto-update, the talent would have to handle that itself (I tried but failed to build a general autoupdate function for it). The call looks like this...

Code: Select all

	on_learn = function(self, t)
		if self:getTalentLevelRaw(t) == 1 then
			self:incMaxPsi((self:getWil()-10) * 1)
			self.max_life = self.max_life - (self:getCon()-10) * 0.5
			self.inc_resource_multi.psi = (self.inc_resource_multi.psi or 0) + 1
			self.inc_resource_multi.life = (self.inc_resource_multi.life or 0) - 0.5
		end
	end,
	on_unlearn = function(self, t)
		if not self:knowTalent(t) then
			self:incMaxPsi(-(self:getWil()-10) * 1)
			self.max_life = self.max_life + (self:getCon()-10) * 0.5
			self.inc_resource_multi.psi = self.inc_resource_multi.psi - 1
			self.inc_resource_multi.life = self.inc_resource_multi.life + 0.5
		end
	end,