Post
by Hexgoblin » Mon Jul 01, 2019 5:35 pm
Will monks receive an adjustment that most would consider a nerf when compared to their current state? When looking at how they currently perform in dungeons, and lack a counter readily available to at least a portion of player characters -- most likely.
As the update thread tends to state outright when something major goes in, any new features are subject to change, pending their impact on the game world. The same happened to Pale Masters, to a degree it's occured to Rogues, and Warlocks and Spellswords both went through many iterations before landing somewhere comfortable. Basing your mechanical enjoyment wholly around a flavor of the month feature is often going to yield disappointment. That said, none of the classes listed are currently unplayable or unviable. They can all be comfortably picked up and played throughout absolutely all of Arelith's dungeon content and perform just fine. Monks receiving an adjustment doesn't spell their doom as a functional entity.
Monks have historically been a troublesome class. Underwhelming overall, but simultaneously enabling more mechanical exploits than any other class through the monk speed feature, with the initiative re-roll exploit probably standing out as the most noteworthy. The fact that dedicated tinkering has enabled the capping of their HARD CODED speed feature, and without the use of haks at that, and thus opening the field for experimenting with the monk's other features -- should if anything reassure you about how much effort that goes into making monks something interesting on the side of development.
The issue the class faces right now, at least to my mind is two-fold. I think that the introduction of katanas as a monk weapon was unnecessary, and the cause of more balance problems than it was worth. Furthermore the amount of free feats monks receive post-epic freed up a tad too many feat slots for stacking Improved Spell Resistance. A workable fix, I think is the removal of free Epic Dodge, but keeping Defensive Roll to enable Epic Dodge to be manually taken as a pure monk. Also making their SR subject to lowering via breaching spells. Though the latter is no small task, given that the SR too is hard coded. So much like the speed, its source feat would probably have to be decoupled, and the SR granted artificially. That said, there might be neater solutions to the SR problem, concocted by minds more steeped in code wizardry than my own. I've seen it theorized by some of said code wizards that the SR could be capped to a certain monk level, as opposed to scaling all the way. The SR is an issue, in either case.
In the end, I don't think that "Arelith is a roleplaying server, minmaxers will always exist, stop taking powerful things away from casual players who just want to have fun!" is a good argument. A class that yields too easy of a result for too little effort will be exploited to the detriment of those very same players, by others with a different mindset. Either through PvP, or the markets flooding with expensive high-end dungeon materials that'll render what those more easy-going players find or produce obsolete.
Note. I am not an Arelith staff member, or formal associate of its development. The above is not gospel, but merely the thoughts of someone for a long time involved in the mechanical aspects of this community. It is my personal opinion that monks currently find themselves overtuned, and ought to receive an adjustment to their defenses. Primarily those relating to their coverage against spells in PvP, and yes, I am well aware that monks were always able to achieve the SR numbers they sit at now -- but back then they did so at much greater sacrifice.
If a character can enter a room full of other PCs, look around, and the player's internal monologue mirrors "hm, nothing here can kill me, my character can relax and act how it wishes without immediate repercussion" -- then something is off. If you're a monk and that's not a position you currently find yourself in regularly, then you're probably not playing it to the peak of its potential. In either case, this has been my attempt to shed some light for those still in doubt about monks being deserving of an adjustment, and to some degree those in distress about whether or not such a potential adjustment would reduce their character to nothing. Devs aren't out to get you, and are generally very capable and well-intentioned people.
Edit: I began writing this before seeing Ork's post. It wasn't my intent to combat his sentiment about the discussion being exhausted. I agree that it is.
Last edited by
Hexgoblin on Mon Jul 01, 2019 6:50 pm, edited 1 time in total.