What's the point of Ki Barrier?

[Tarkus the dog]

This new ability doesn't make much sense to me. It's an instant active without downtime unless you've spent all the charges which is really only significant in PvE, when it comes to PvP you won't be using up all the charges anyway so it's not like the opponent can play around it. Barb rage, another instant active ability, you gotta time well and if you don't -- a minute of downtime in PvP is very significant for the enemy to take as an advantage against you, Ki Barrier on the other hand can be up for the whole duration of the PvP so it really doesn't matter when you choose to use it. If it was a passive nothing would really change, except your quickbar would look a little different.

So what's the point of it? Is it a coding limitation? Feels like a button to press just for the sake of pressing it with zero complexity attached to it and there's already so many active abilities these days it can become a bit overwhelming.

[Shadowy Reality]

The only difference I see is that you can be caught off guard, if someone is stealthed, invisible, etc, you may not have time to press the button before you are attacked.

[Paint]

As Kenji has stated before, it was to allow finer-tuned control of Wisdom to AC. As it was described to me, the active bonus is necessary because of a quirk with the scripts making it frustrating to responsively update the soft portion of the wisdom modifier to AC without causing bloat that could make the server chug.

So yes, it's basically a coding limitation brought on by a desire to have more control over wisdom to AC in the future.

[Ork]

If the proper way of coding this ability causes server bloat, why have it at all? It's frustrating since wisdom AC wasn't ever an issue.

[Goldeen]

OP pretty much spells it out that it more or less just seems like an extra button click that is only worrisome in PvE or certain /caught off guard/ situations with PvP. It feels like the coding issue doesn't seem to be created by monk, but the changes made to monk later on. It would be better to solve the problem instead of making a workaround.

[I will never sleep]

If it's a coding limitation, why is it introducing downtime to a class that previously had none before...?

[AstralUniverse]

Yeah this ability doesnt make sense at all and all go further and say that the up coming monk rework doesnt make sense at all either but I'll go into more length about that in the monk thread when I have time.

Over all, I fully agree with the "why have this at all?" part of the feedback, and I too have heard Kenji saying it's supposed to help controlling monk (or now, just wis-ac dips in general) power, yet I dont really understand how it's supposed to do that and I actually rn dont think it does that. It just adds complexity where there's no use for it and it doesnt imo create any building diversity.

[Dreams]

The point of it is to make it seem like certain combinations get less AC than they do, to justify stronger class mechanics. Frog eyes at Vigilante