Arelith

I want to start by saying I like a lot of the proposed monk rework, particularly as it changes them from being "vaguely Eastern-themed martial artists" to instead be very customizable, whether you want a body-and-mind-sculptor or an academic or what else you might want from a "monk" type.

However, I'm deeply concerned for what it means as a crafting-oriented player. The proposed monk can get 30 additional Crafting Points by investing into the Mind discipline. This is almost a 30% boost over the normal maximum of 106 (50+33 Ranks+3 SF+10 ESF+10 Gift). Worse, it can be compounded with another 15 CP from Cleric and 10-12 CP from Loremaster - both of which classes the Mind discipline has been explicitly outlined to work with for the purposes of counting Feats/Secret Knowledge to improve the discipline tier. The end result is that with the rework as listed, a Monk/Cleric/Loremaster can get over 160 Crafting Points - more than a 50% boost compared to the standard maximum when taking both Skill Focus (Craft Mastery) and Epic Skill Focus (Craft Mastery).

This probably isn't a problem for most players, but there are a few Commoners on the server. It is, theoretically, supposed to be the crafting-oriented class, because it does get 130 Tradeskill Points compared to the usual 70. But when it comes to actually crafting the things people want and crafting them regularly, a higher Crafting total tends to beat out your Tradeskill total, provided you're consistently making Mastery checks.

I didn't really mind Forge/Knowledge/Magic Cleric/LMs getting an advantage in CP, because I could at least rationalize that a Commoner could master two crafts while they could only master one. But with this monk rework, a Monk/Cleric/LM with 160+ CP can put in over 300 points of progress per rest period on an end-game item when most cost a total of 500 points or less. By contrast, a Commoner can only put in 212 points of progress at maximum - they sacrifice basically everything to be crafting-oriented, yet the Monk/Cleric/LM beats them out on crafting while also being considerably more capable of engaging in traditional dungeon content during crafting downtime.

I'd like to propose some compensatory adjustments to Commoner if the Monk's crafting abilities remain unchanged, so that the "crafting-based" class doesn't fall even further behind an actual "adventurer" class.

Shou Sweatshop coming right up.

This is already in discussion. The Crafting bonus points are WAY overtuned. That number should be brought down, IMO.

That's good to hear, then. In a vacuum, the currently posited Monk bonus of 30 is huge, but not necessarily a problem. I think a lot of the problem is how readily it stacks with the bonuses from Cleric and LM, particularly due to the Feat/Knowledge synergy for the Mind discipline.