Twist is crazy good. Use it until envoys get their shit together.
Enjoy!
If people cry about you using your class' skills, that's on them.
This is shit advice. If you think Twist needs fixing, you should have someone submit a report for Inquisition.
Forums broke my paragraphs, what the hell.
You're right.
I am jaded however. Combat balance in Lusternia is a joke. The overhaul has been declared complete despite all evidence to the contrary. I appreciate the admin are working towards a good solution, but twist and inquisition are the most tiny minor problems in an ocean of work to be done. (Hi monks)
Yea after seeing Wobou or Tarken level damage I think any team needs to focus the monk first or at least have someone hindering them. They'll kill basically anyone who stays in the room if left to their own devices.
Monks in general are fairly lop-sided at the moment, yes. Some of their old limiters are gone, some of their old strategies have been knocked down in efficiency, and the compensation tweaks to the damage formula has shifted their position (and boosted their effectiveness in some areas where they arguably did not need much help) in the meta. The old wounds-amplifier system had the advantage of providing huge bursts of execution level damage that felt good to the monk, and also helped to severely limit their output if they didn't manage to build wounds. It tied into the old dynamic of more health damage = less wound curing nicely, where the low damage at the start of a monk fight means they have to find specific weaknesses in the opponent's defensive repertoire (either through rebound/parry bypass to build bleeding, or through regen-based prone afflictions) in order to get a starting boost to their damage to start the momentum rolling.
With the removal of the wounds system, and the subsequent boosting of nominal damage to compensate, that dynamic is gone, replaced with a less punishing build-up curve for the monk, but also a more linear, yes/no tug of war. Even bleed based monks, Nekotai in this specific instance, can get boned in a 1v1 if the opponent puts all their mana to clotting, and thereby almost ignoring the mechanic entirely. In the past, doing so almost certain guaranteed the Nekotai a mana-sip or two, which means more wounds, more vessels, more bleed, and more snowballing.
Nekotai also saw a significant drop in the effectiveness of their marjoram stack and their greenlock. The divesting of most important afflictions from the old herb balance into the new overhaul balances means that building a full marjoram stack of afflictions has both less effect (does not interfere with curing other afflictions) as well as can be remedied much faster (marjoram can be eaten simultaneously with dust, or any of the overhaul cures actually). The overhaul has generally nerfed strategies that have a dependence on old afflictions - which is unavaoidable.
On the other hand, the elevation of paralysis as an aff, in both its effect and priority, has lowered both the versatility, and the need to be versatile for Nekotai. Paralysis whenever possible, all day, all night. That's true for warriors as well, generally speaking, but synergizes well with Nekotai poison potency and the additional poisons-boost-damage modifier that we get. Blindness used to be the premium Nekotai aff because it was herb-only (thereby synergizing with the marjoram stack) as well as helped the Nekotai avoid hinders by preventing opponent attacks, but had the weakness of not allowing the Nekotai to ignore parry. With blindness on steam now, paralysis is just simply too efficient to pass.
Today, monks in general, and Nekotai specifically, have access to heavy-wounds damage pretty much from the word "go", which compounds the ability of bleed based classes to sneak up additional damage to overwhelm an opponent in group fights. This is further compounded with the sheer importance of paralysis and therefore its ubiquity in use everywhere: we have gone from a burst damage class to the most reliable consistent damage source - either paralysis or prone will be on our target from the effects of our team's offense - we don't even need to land it ourselves, ensuring our damage will not be mitigated. For comparison, ballpark figures of 2k damage in the past was achieved with either full hits on a heavy wounds bodypart, or with prone+medium wounds. 4k damage would be end-game for a monk, requiring critical damage and prone (for Nekotai, possibly less, as the use of the poison-boosting-damage mod has always helped us get a burst form off earlier) - though those numbers are also with the lower health totals of pre-overhaul levels, of course.
Of course, if your team doesn't use paralysis for some reason, then you see a drop in how consistently you can put out damage. But that's unlikely in today's combat climate, to say the least.
All that said and done, I think Tarken needs to be given his due credit for figuring out Nekotai combat in this limbo state. I was scratching my head when most of the affs were converted, wondering how best to fit myself into the new meta, and it took me a month or two to update my forms. I probably have a number that are still not optimised. He had it figured it out in much less time, and with only minimal input from me. It's easy to say "monks are broken, OP, no thought in monk combat etc", but it's really no secret how opaque the monk momentum system is for newcomers, and how confusing it can be to figure out how exactly to make it work. It might be less strategical today than before the overhaul, but consistently putting out damage the way Tarken has done is not something you can muddle through with an eye closed. I think it's not fair to Tarken to just point to the mechanical lop-sidedness (which is valid, yes) and ignore the effort he has put into the theory, the testing, the sparring to reach where he is now.
Edit: In the log above, Tarken didn't use Scorpionfury, as far as I could see. Sfury is generally great, and so useful that I would have it permanently switched on, if it didn't last so short and therefore make me forget all the while. It's one reason why I attempted to nerf it at least a little bit in 1389, but the admin want to wait until after they convert monks over to the overhaul cures to avoid the double effort - which is reasonable, I guess.
I assure you, I wasn't trying to point out Tarken. The ability to deliver (To a robe wearer, mind) 39.4% damage, 890 bleeding, 3 seconds of herb balance[slicedleft/slicedright], 3 seconds of dust balance [paralysis/haemo], a burst vessel while missing 4 poison applications just seems a little crazy. This wasn't a prod at anyone in particular, just showing the .. mechanical ceiling of the current incarnation of monks.
Also, assuming this was mo5 with scorpfury the damage and impact of the form could have been radically increased with the use of angkhai/angkai because I'm most certain angknek/angknek kaiga|spronghai|sprongk {sprongcree} doesn't fill out the 1000mo when scorpfury fills a lot of the poison mods and razing for you.
(I'm the mom of Hallifax btw, so if you are in Hallifax please call me mom.)
== Professional Girl Gamer == Yes I play games Yes I'm a girl get over it
Why would it be so difficult to put monks in the new wounding system now? You can just use the current 1hander/2hander idea, maybe less with each hit. Afaik, monk modifier-afflictions (even the really killy ones) worked on light/medium wounds in the old wounding system, and then of course damage scaled with wounds and paralysis/prone.
I think the multiplier on paralysis needs to be nixed, if it hasn't already (which I thought it had).
SUPPOSEDLY I have 20% physical reduction from my aethersuit, but Tarken is able to do 2.5k damage forms from momentum 0. I wish my staffcasts did that
Actually, only the damage part is new. 39% damage used to be only unlocked at high wounds levels for a monk - definitely so for Nekotai, since all our spec'd slashes and kicks deal the exact same damage (and wounds pre-overhaul) as the basic slash and kick, which is to say, 600-700 damage max at no wounds, no prone (edited to clarify, that's 600-700 damage for a FULL form. Basic slashes deal around 150-200 damage, kicks deal 300-400 damage, depending on your artifact level). Nekotai has always been able to put out a large number of afflictions in a single form.
My old angknek/angkenk/sprongk form would give my target 3 marjoram affs and potentially up to 5 poisons, if I used beast spit, nekotai spit and nekotai dart-kick. It could also have a vessel on top of that as well, yes, but usually I'd use that form to do a sprongk to the gut instead of an arm/leg, since the gut pinched-nerve doubled herb balance. With the right choice of poisons, I could give up to 7 affs that took 3s of herb balance each to cure. Most of them would be fluff and don't do anything - but they would be indispensible for my followup greenlock: the 6s I need to build back to 5mo to do a greenlock would possibly only give them time to cure off 2 afflictions (if they were unlucky and their marjoram eats did not cure the pinched nerve), and with smart targeting of bodyparts, I can apply marjoram affs that were not given during the initial burst during the interim form needed to build momentum.
The weakness of that is, naturally, parry - which will not be covered by any of the affs I give (paralysis and focus body meant it was useless as an aff to buffer for greenlock, and would never last long enough to affect the interim form), and the fact that the downtime is huge - both beast spit and nekotai spit have a usage cooldown, and the dart-kick has an ammunition count of 2, and require time to set up again, without which my 5 poison output drops to 2. The greenlock's 5p and 3mo cost also prevents repeated usage - a core tenet in burst based strategies.
All of the above don't really work in today's meta. Neither the stack nor the lock are much good nowadays for that purpose, with the overhaul cures making it impossible to stack enough affs that cure slowly enough for a follow up greenlock to make use of- which itself has dropped in reliability due to aforementioned changes. The marjoram affs that were given (slicedleft/right) don't actually do much - in Tarken's strategy, they provide a minimal amount of passive bleed if they remain uncured, which they won't because of overhaul cures, but any bleed is better than no bleed. The extraneous affs beside paralysis and haemophilia are just that: extraneous. It's the damage that would not have been there pre-overhaul, because it would have taken any Nekotai a far longer time to hit that level of damage - just a 4mo or 5mo form won't cut it without wounds.
As for converting monks to the new system, I'm all for it as much as any other monk. Malarious has been organising monks to give feedback to the admin consistently and provide them ideas - it's not for a lack of trying. He's come up with at least 3 proposals on how to convert monks to either the currently in place wounds system, or alternate systems. They have other priorities, so they'll get to it in their own time. In the meantime, we're also waiting.
Though monks certainly are in a weird place and well deserve their upcoming (hopefully) changes, seems like most (if not all) classes involve less forethought or tactics to win now and rely increasingly on brute force of one variety or another to shortcut through combat or fail.
I mean, that's not necessarily a bad thing, given how ridiculously daunting monk combat can be for a newbie trying to figure it out, just as an example. Simplifying combat in general across the board to make it more accessible for newbies was also one of the overhaul goals. Some people might even argue it's not gone far enough yet - but well, I don't think it's overall been too bad thus far, at least, it hasn't made things worse in my opinion. Just my opinion, of course.
Nodding once, a mother's kindness in Her ancient voice, Lisaera, the Hallowed Crone says to you, "And I will watch you well, little one. I admire your courage.”
Silver crystals form in the ethereal haze of the storm glass amulet, twisting and writhing like trapped smoke, until distinct words that only you can read solidify in the cup of the chalice, "Your strength is potent and you are wise, Torgaddon, but remember to use your might to shield the weaker ones of the Serenwilde. They will need people like you to keep them safe. I watch with pride, My child."
You guys should have charged our room earlier, you sat back throwing runes at me and Tarken until someone on your team died. I'll see if I can get the log and tidy it up if you want to see the other side of it.
EDIT: I think at that point in tors log, he was sapped?
I haven't faced Tarken outside of groups, but in my experience from other Nekotai in spars, they have a really good dust stack, with paralysis, haemophilia and blindness and good burst bleed. 1250 2000 bleed for Finalsting was quite achievable on me as a Warrior. This may not be viable when I'm Institute with the Magicrown.
Shofangi have a nice dust stack potential as well, and really high damage, but with a bit less bleeding, but must go all the way to 0 unlike Finalsting. Repeated arm mutilates every few forms is also great hinder as well. Add Harmony and they're quite resilient as well. Crunch is also a really cheesy 1v1 kill method that will be guaranteed to work eventually, with no real defense. Deathtouch is kinda niche but occasionally is an option.
Tahtetso last I heard were bugged with Gahtirak'sho sometimes not working when it should, and sometimes working when it shouldn't (something about wounds req being converted to rng, I guess?). Otherwise they seem a bit less powerful than the commune monks, but I've less experience.
Ninjakari I haven't had enough one on one time with to really evaluate their state.
Hallimonks with their aeonkick + asthma move + dust stack that they can do every few forms is quite strong. They have less direct damage however.
Finalsting is 2k bleed, actually. It's still very achieve-able, especially on warriors or classes that are really good at keeping up their health, or systems that are not as optimised to keep bleed low, or during team combat.
A stack into a greenlock is no longer really viable because of the dearth of buffer affs that don't do anything except to interfere with green/gedulah. The Nekotai herb stack has always been about the quantity rather than quality of the affs - in the new meta, the affs are more powerful, but the only ones that matter are paralysis and blindness. Haemophilia being on it as well is the highpoint that helps Nekotai on the flip-side, pushing them toward pure damage and bleed strategies, though - in the past, haemophilia was a dual cure with yarrow/sanguine, which made it difficult to stick and capitalize. The new meta has certainly made it better.
That's about it, though. Sickening and powersap are underwhelming choices for a Nekotai, but are at least still available as a poison, and vomiting is great for passive damage... but with only that handful of affs, it's not going to stay uncured for very long. None of these, including both paralysis and blindness are also available as slash/kick affs, which means it's entirely based on poisons. The only dust stack aff Nekotai have natively is therefore haemophilia.
I'm not really intending to push for a viable greenlock for Nekotai post-overhaul for this reason. It'll be difficult to balance, and difficult to pull off. A sweet spot for bleed to keep the new Finalsting central to the kit is probably the best.
1st in Ethereal Glomdoring, where I severely underestimated my opponent and was thus caught off guard. Also in the panic, I somehow subbed in that ' instead of fly. https://ada-young.appspot.com/pastebin/7Tqa5npm
I think you're undervaluing the dust stack . With the monk balance being as short as it is, if you're delivering any of the other two afflictions you're forcing the other person to expend a focus in order to keep pace and keep themselves either not paralysed or not haemophilic. They're either ignoring powersap and vomiting with focus or they're fumbling their cures rolling on them. Indeed, with monk balances are short as they are and with the rotation of mellitin and saxitin you can most likely easily outpace the target's curing rotation and within several forms ensure that all the available afflictions are present.
(I'm the mom of Hallifax btw, so if you are in Hallifax please call me mom.)
== Professional Girl Gamer == Yes I play games Yes I'm a girl get over it
I tried running some numbers, but I'm at work, so my ability to do so was very limited, and I gave up after a while.
I suppose the numbers would have only been a minor point anyway, since on second look, your argument is disputing my statement that the quantity is more important than the quality. I'll concede that might very well be true, since post overhaul afflictions are decidedly more potent for a variety of reasons (no more focus as an extra cure, removal of fluff affs etc) - it certainly could be that a dust stack without a large number of buffer affs is also valuable right now. That does still mean, though, that greenlocks are not really salvageable.
A dust stack as a supplement to a bleed strategy might work very well, but not to support a greenlock finisher - greenlock strategies have always revolved around quantity. If the meta is shifting toward a more intricate dance of maintaining a very small number of high priority afflictions on the target and forcing hard choices through that, that's great - but won't save the greenlock.
The dust stack is more of a hindrance to stop the target fighting back or hindering back I feel. In a way its not the dust stack that kills you. Its that the dust stacks stops you from hindering the monk as easily.
EDIT: One on one anyway, the dust stack wont really stop me clotting away the bleed and such it'll delay it a few seconds at the very worst. Which could lead to a bit more damage if I cant clot the bleed off before the bleed damage hits on yourself.
I mean, if you can outpace their dust expense and force them to expend focus in order to cure bleeding that seems like a pretty solid way of killing someone, especially if it means disregarding powersap in the process.
(I'm the mom of Hallifax btw, so if you are in Hallifax please call me mom.)
== Professional Girl Gamer == Yes I play games Yes I'm a girl get over it
On looking at Maligorn's logs, I saw a couple of problems with m&m's handling of bleeding. There are probably a couple of extra triggers that I can mail to Sidd to make it easier to handle. After that, it's really shrug city. The damage alone actually doesn't do that much, and would have been okay if m&m's bleed handling was improved. The last 3 bursts of forms that catapulted the bleed from zero to 3k was definitely the clincher in the fight where Maligorn lost, and certainly impressive, but there were many windows that m&m could be tweaked to catch up with clotting.
That would have forced Tarken into a longer attrition fight, to build vessels from the occasional mana sip and then build up bleeding from there. With paralysis being unable to hinder TK offense, Tarken would have lost that tug of war, most likely, as the second log proved. Though that one highlighted a number of problems with Tarken's own vessel curing, too.
Especially when you have low to mediocre resists, you need your active hindering to survive a monk offense, so the paralysis+blind definitely helps your offense (does the bonus damage on prone targets apply for paralysis?). Or if you ignore the haemophilia too much the bleed builds and then you die from that. Adjusting my curing to prioritize haemophilia when I'm at high levels of bleeding increased my resilience there, but with good rng a few forms in a row, it's still very deadly.
On monk greenlocks, I think in some ways they were overrated pre-Overhaul. Monks could do a pretty decent pressure strategy by doing wounds, damage and bleed simultaneously, all pressuring sip balance, and the scaling damage eventually overpowered the target's defenses, no greenlock needed. @Wobou did this very well, but I saw monks of all guilds do similar things. Of course, greenlocks were and should still be (if they were at all achieveable) highly useful in groups. I miss that strategy as I thought it was neat. Dust stack is alright but is much more binary.
Comments
Forums broke my paragraphs, what the hell.
You're right.
I am jaded however. Combat balance in Lusternia is a joke. The overhaul has been declared complete despite all evidence to the contrary. I appreciate the admin are working towards a good solution, but twist and inquisition are the most tiny minor problems in an ocean of work to be done. (Hi monks)
Perfectpvpexperience
Edit: In the monk's defence I did just have my rebounding pipe decay. Probably wouldn't have made much of a difference looking at the balance windows.
== Professional Girl Gamer ==
Yes I play games
Yes I'm a girl
get over it
Anyway, last I heard, monks were getting overhauled Soon™. So my current estimate for overhauled monk release will be shortly before Ascension 2025.
Would love to see monks be non-broken. To be honest I didn't find Wobou to be toooo insane, but I have dodge and such to help me out.
With the removal of the wounds system, and the subsequent boosting of nominal damage to compensate, that dynamic is gone, replaced with a less punishing build-up curve for the monk, but also a more linear, yes/no tug of war. Even bleed based monks, Nekotai in this specific instance, can get boned in a 1v1 if the opponent puts all their mana to clotting, and thereby almost ignoring the mechanic entirely. In the past, doing so almost certain guaranteed the Nekotai a mana-sip or two, which means more wounds, more vessels, more bleed, and more snowballing.
Nekotai also saw a significant drop in the effectiveness of their marjoram stack and their greenlock. The divesting of most important afflictions from the old herb balance into the new overhaul balances means that building a full marjoram stack of afflictions has both less effect (does not interfere with curing other afflictions) as well as can be remedied much faster (marjoram can be eaten simultaneously with dust, or any of the overhaul cures actually). The overhaul has generally nerfed strategies that have a dependence on old afflictions - which is unavaoidable.
On the other hand, the elevation of paralysis as an aff, in both its effect and priority, has lowered both the versatility, and the need to be versatile for Nekotai. Paralysis whenever possible, all day, all night. That's true for warriors as well, generally speaking, but synergizes well with Nekotai poison potency and the additional poisons-boost-damage modifier that we get. Blindness used to be the premium Nekotai aff because it was herb-only (thereby synergizing with the marjoram stack) as well as helped the Nekotai avoid hinders by preventing opponent attacks, but had the weakness of not allowing the Nekotai to ignore parry. With blindness on steam now, paralysis is just simply too efficient to pass.
Today, monks in general, and Nekotai specifically, have access to heavy-wounds damage pretty much from the word "go", which compounds the ability of bleed based classes to sneak up additional damage to overwhelm an opponent in group fights. This is further compounded with the sheer importance of paralysis and therefore its ubiquity in use everywhere: we have gone from a burst damage class to the most reliable consistent damage source - either paralysis or prone will be on our target from the effects of our team's offense - we don't even need to land it ourselves, ensuring our damage will not be mitigated. For comparison, ballpark figures of 2k damage in the past was achieved with either full hits on a heavy wounds bodypart, or with prone+medium wounds. 4k damage would be end-game for a monk, requiring critical damage and prone (for Nekotai, possibly less, as the use of the poison-boosting-damage mod has always helped us get a burst form off earlier) - though those numbers are also with the lower health totals of pre-overhaul levels, of course.
Of course, if your team doesn't use paralysis for some reason, then you see a drop in how consistently you can put out damage. But that's unlikely in today's combat climate, to say the least.
All that said and done, I think Tarken needs to be given his due credit for figuring out Nekotai combat in this limbo state. I was scratching my head when most of the affs were converted, wondering how best to fit myself into the new meta, and it took me a month or two to update my forms. I probably have a number that are still not optimised. He had it figured it out in much less time, and with only minimal input from me. It's easy to say "monks are broken, OP, no thought in monk combat etc", but it's really no secret how opaque the monk momentum system is for newcomers, and how confusing it can be to figure out how exactly to make it work. It might be less strategical today than before the overhaul, but consistently putting out damage the way Tarken has done is not something you can muddle through with an eye closed. I think it's not fair to Tarken to just point to the mechanical lop-sidedness (which is valid, yes) and ignore the effort he has put into the theory, the testing, the sparring to reach where he is now.
Edit: In the log above, Tarken didn't use Scorpionfury, as far as I could see. Sfury is generally great, and so useful that I would have it permanently switched on, if it didn't last so short and therefore make me forget all the while. It's one reason why I attempted to nerf it at least a little bit in 1389, but the admin want to wait until after they convert monks over to the overhaul cures to avoid the double effort - which is reasonable, I guess.
Also, assuming this was mo5 with scorpfury the damage and impact of the form could have been radically increased with the use of angkhai/angkai because I'm most certain angknek/angknek kaiga|spronghai|sprongk {sprongcree} doesn't fill out the 1000mo when scorpfury fills a lot of the poison mods and razing for you.
== Professional Girl Gamer ==
Yes I play games
Yes I'm a girl
get over it
== Professional Girl Gamer ==
Yes I play games
Yes I'm a girl
get over it
I think the multiplier on paralysis needs to be nixed, if it hasn't already (which I thought it had).
SUPPOSEDLY I have 20% physical reduction from my aethersuit, but Tarken is able to do 2.5k damage forms from momentum 0. I wish my staffcasts did that
My old angknek/angkenk/sprongk form would give my target 3 marjoram affs and potentially up to 5 poisons, if I used beast spit, nekotai spit and nekotai dart-kick. It could also have a vessel on top of that as well, yes, but usually I'd use that form to do a sprongk to the gut instead of an arm/leg, since the gut pinched-nerve doubled herb balance. With the right choice of poisons, I could give up to 7 affs that took 3s of herb balance each to cure. Most of them would be fluff and don't do anything - but they would be indispensible for my followup greenlock: the 6s I need to build back to 5mo to do a greenlock would possibly only give them time to cure off 2 afflictions (if they were unlucky and their marjoram eats did not cure the pinched nerve), and with smart targeting of bodyparts, I can apply marjoram affs that were not given during the initial burst during the interim form needed to build momentum.
The weakness of that is, naturally, parry - which will not be covered by any of the affs I give (paralysis and focus body meant it was useless as an aff to buffer for greenlock, and would never last long enough to affect the interim form), and the fact that the downtime is huge - both beast spit and nekotai spit have a usage cooldown, and the dart-kick has an ammunition count of 2, and require time to set up again, without which my 5 poison output drops to 2. The greenlock's 5p and 3mo cost also prevents repeated usage - a core tenet in burst based strategies.
All of the above don't really work in today's meta. Neither the stack nor the lock are much good nowadays for that purpose, with the overhaul cures making it impossible to stack enough affs that cure slowly enough for a follow up greenlock to make use of- which itself has dropped in reliability due to aforementioned changes. The marjoram affs that were given (slicedleft/right) don't actually do much - in Tarken's strategy, they provide a minimal amount of passive bleed if they remain uncured, which they won't because of overhaul cures, but any bleed is better than no bleed. The extraneous affs beside paralysis and haemophilia are just that: extraneous. It's the damage that would not have been there pre-overhaul, because it would have taken any Nekotai a far longer time to hit that level of damage - just a 4mo or 5mo form won't cut it without wounds.
https://ada-young.appspot.com/pastebin/5FBZU0Mp
Silver crystals form in the ethereal haze of the storm glass amulet, twisting and writhing like trapped smoke, until distinct words that only you can read solidify in the cup of the chalice, "Your strength is potent and you are wise, Torgaddon, but remember to use your might to shield the weaker ones of the Serenwilde. They will need people like you to keep them safe. I watch with pride, My child."
Edited to be nicer.
EDIT: I think at that point in tors log, he was sapped?
I haven't faced Tarken outside of groups, but in my experience from other Nekotai in spars, they have a really good dust stack, with paralysis, haemophilia and blindness and good burst bleed. 1250 2000 bleed for Finalsting was quite achievable on me as a Warrior. This may not be viable when I'm Institute with the Magicrown.
Shofangi have a nice dust stack potential as well, and really high damage, but with a bit less bleeding, but must go all the way to 0 unlike Finalsting. Repeated arm mutilates every few forms is also great hinder as well. Add Harmony and they're quite resilient as well. Crunch is also a really cheesy 1v1 kill method that will be guaranteed to work eventually, with no real defense. Deathtouch is kinda niche but occasionally is an option.
Tahtetso last I heard were bugged with Gahtirak'sho sometimes not working when it should, and sometimes working when it shouldn't (something about wounds req being converted to rng, I guess?). Otherwise they seem a bit less powerful than the commune monks, but I've less experience.
Ninjakari I haven't had enough one on one time with to really evaluate their state.
Hallimonks with their aeonkick + asthma move + dust stack that they can do every few forms is quite strong. They have less direct damage however.
A stack into a greenlock is no longer really viable because of the dearth of buffer affs that don't do anything except to interfere with green/gedulah. The Nekotai herb stack has always been about the quantity rather than quality of the affs - in the new meta, the affs are more powerful, but the only ones that matter are paralysis and blindness. Haemophilia being on it as well is the highpoint that helps Nekotai on the flip-side, pushing them toward pure damage and bleed strategies, though - in the past, haemophilia was a dual cure with yarrow/sanguine, which made it difficult to stick and capitalize. The new meta has certainly made it better.
That's about it, though. Sickening and powersap are underwhelming choices for a Nekotai, but are at least still available as a poison, and vomiting is great for passive damage... but with only that handful of affs, it's not going to stay uncured for very long. None of these, including both paralysis and blindness are also available as slash/kick affs, which means it's entirely based on poisons. The only dust stack aff Nekotai have natively is therefore haemophilia.
I'm not really intending to push for a viable greenlock for Nekotai post-overhaul for this reason. It'll be difficult to balance, and difficult to pull off. A sweet spot for bleed to keep the new Finalsting central to the kit is probably the best.
1st in Ethereal Glomdoring, where I severely underestimated my opponent and was thus caught off guard. Also in the panic, I somehow subbed in that ' instead of fly. https://ada-young.appspot.com/pastebin/7Tqa5npm
2nd in the arena 5-10 minutes after, because I was so shocked. To replicate the situation, I didn't use my meld. A false start included. https://ada-young.appspot.com/pastebin/YlGED1gh
In summation, I think my cutting resistance is really abysmal and that's why I was suffering so much.
== Professional Girl Gamer ==
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Yes I'm a girl
get over it
I suppose the numbers would have only been a minor point anyway, since on second look, your argument is disputing my statement that the quantity is more important than the quality. I'll concede that might very well be true, since post overhaul afflictions are decidedly more potent for a variety of reasons (no more focus as an extra cure, removal of fluff affs etc) - it certainly could be that a dust stack without a large number of buffer affs is also valuable right now. That does still mean, though, that greenlocks are not really salvageable.
A dust stack as a supplement to a bleed strategy might work very well, but not to support a greenlock finisher - greenlock strategies have always revolved around quantity. If the meta is shifting toward a more intricate dance of maintaining a very small number of high priority afflictions on the target and forcing hard choices through that, that's great - but won't save the greenlock.
EDIT: One on one anyway, the dust stack wont really stop me clotting away the bleed and such it'll delay it a few seconds at the very worst. Which could lead to a bit more damage if I cant clot the bleed off before the bleed damage hits on yourself.
== Professional Girl Gamer ==
Yes I play games
Yes I'm a girl
get over it
That would have forced Tarken into a longer attrition fight, to build vessels from the occasional mana sip and then build up bleeding from there. With paralysis being unable to hinder TK offense, Tarken would have lost that tug of war, most likely, as the second log proved. Though that one highlighted a number of problems with Tarken's own vessel curing, too.
On monk greenlocks, I think in some ways they were overrated pre-Overhaul. Monks could do a pretty decent pressure strategy by doing wounds, damage and bleed simultaneously, all pressuring sip balance, and the scaling damage eventually overpowered the target's defenses, no greenlock needed. @Wobou did this very well, but I saw monks of all guilds do similar things. Of course, greenlocks were and should still be (if they were at all achieveable) highly useful in groups. I miss that strategy as I thought it was neat. Dust stack is alright but is much more binary.