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Official Thread: Monk Overhaul is Live!
Hi everybody!
The Monk Overhaul is now complete and live. We would like to give a big thank you to all the monks, envoys and testers that helped us brainstorm, design and implement the overhaul.
While we have spent quite a bit of time on testing and double checking AB's, there will likely still be bugs and errors, so please BUG and ABBUG as appropiate. We would also like to note that while we have considered group implications, we have not really had a chance to test the impact on group settings. There will be a special report to help address any glaring issues, whether they are too powerful or not powerful enough. If you have balance concerns, please talk to your envoy!
Lines may still be considered in flux - if you see a new line that seems a bit boring to you, please feel free to pass it onto us, either by way of your envoy or by messaging Ianir.
Regarding suggestions and bugs, please be very specific and tell us where things are and, if applicable, any relevant information to how to achieve that. We're going to be on overload for the next couple weeks, so anything too vague will be sent back and ignored.
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Some highlights of a few key differences between old monks and overhauled monks
* Momentum is removed and replace with stances. Monks progress though a set of 5 stances. The order of stances goes Base -> Twist -> Center -> Surge -> Killer. With Twist and Surge stances, you have the option to go High or Low.
* Stances provide two benefits. The first is based on the basic kata stances that will provide passive bonuses until you change or lose your stance. The second is active bonuses based on your monk stances that only activate once on changing stance.
* If you do not have masochism up (IE: Are in PVP combat), your stance will drop 10s after not performing progressing or regressing stance.
* You can use Boosting to give yourself a temporary 13/13 balance buff for 2p. It only benefits the form you are doing
* There is an urchin stance that allows you to move backwards or regress your stance. Using urchin costs more balance or you can use skills like Nekotai Kaife, Shofangi Shotah, Tahtetso Tahto'sho or Ninjakari Ninchu to regress for 2p and no more balance cost.
* Each monk instakill has been normalized to all function similarly, to kill your target based on bleeding/bruising or by possessing certain affliction, or a combination of the two.
There are other differences, but these highlight the big ones. Thank you for being patient with this overhaul. We realize it has been a long time coming, but we are pleased with the result and have high hopes.
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You may see a preview of all skill ABS at the following links:
Shofangi: http://ianir.ninja/shofangi.txt
Nekotai: http://ianir.ninja/nekotai.txt
Tahtetso: http://ianir.ninja/tahtetso.txt
Ninjakari: http://ianir.ninja/ninjakari.txt
- Ianir the Anomaly
Forum Avatar drawn by our lovely Isune.
7
(c) Iron Realms Entertainment 2012.
Comments
Impressions:
Shofang and Tahetsoo can build pretty heavy bleed from limbs though.
Estarra the Eternal says, "Give Shevat the floor please."
Nekotai stacks are very potent. I think Nekotai are well-off enough in that department. Ciaran says he has optimized his dust curing as much as he can, and he still gets haemophilia stuck long enough to get a bleeding tick once in a while. Though, I think I'm also at a very high rate of optimization at this point, since I was able to do some testing before release.
Basically, at around near optimized situations, Nekotai can stack their core dust affs for haemophila very potently. Will naturally need more time and testing to see how things turn out.
I experimented with a lucidity slush stack via the Nekotai poisons route, and it turned out fairly well in terms of the stack, according to Ciaran. I couldn't close out the fight and turn it into a real finisher, though. I think there needs to be some work done to make the poisons end-game a little more viable for Nekotai. I could get a good stack on him, but I couldn't translate that into a successful kill.
Bleed wise, it feels a little on the weak side. But that could be because Ciaran's clotting is very aggressive. I didn't discern in my logs below, which is a mistake that I realised only after the spars, to see what his mana level was at. He did say he had magicrown, though, and that it was probably one of the things that contributed to a weaker pressuring of his mana. Also, he suggested for me to use musicboxes, which I wasn't. That should help my mana pressure too.
Generally speaking, I could not get much chance to multiply bleed on Ciaran, because he never really ran out of mana to stop clotting super aggressively. However, I also wasn't allowed to do more than 2 or 3 chains of the full repertoire at once, because of deathprophesy forcing me to run. I think this dynamic seems fair on the surface: as a Nekotai gets pressured to go defensive, his ability to snowball gets cut off. As I gain more experience and optimize my mana pressure (adding musicbox etc), I should be able to (on theory) make headway.
At the very least, a burst into a kill within 2 or 3 chains is very unlikely, so if any change is to be made, it will be to push the multiplier values upwards, so that a Nekotai can snowball more. At the moment, the multipliers are definitely on the low side, and don't feel like they are contributing much. When a Nekotai actually DOES manage to proc it, it should give him an extra leg up to start snowballing. I'll make a report to suggest nudging the multiplier numbers up somewhat.
On to the logs: Logs #1 and #2 were the ones where I sat in the room and hit a little more. I did a lot more running to avoid dproph in #3, #4 and #5, so I didn't have much sustained offense. On hindsight, I should have just sat in the room and kept hitting, to see how a Nekotai going full glass-cannon would measure up against something like dproph.
From the second log onwards, Ciaran also stopped using his meld, to let me have more chances of testing, I think. So there was less hinder than you can expect when fighting against a melder. Even then, it didn't feel like I made much progress.
I asked Ciaran to provide his perspective logs as well, not sure if he'll have the time to do so. Actual logs:
#1: https://ada-young.appspot.com/pastebin/y2z_1NlL
#2: https://ada-young.appspot.com/pastebin/j4rGJM0i
#3: https://ada-young.appspot.com/pastebin/NTQuYbRA
#4: https://ada-young.appspot.com/pastebin/2UaJEZdO
#5: https://ada-young.appspot.com/pastebin/yvtBGRNu
P.S. ada-young site said that logs #2, #3 and #5 were very long, and it tried to compress them. I'm not sure if that meant any information was lost. If something looks weird, let me know.
Edit: also as a note, you'll notice a bit of stuttering in my offense in the logs. I'm still tweaking my offense scripts. Log #4, for example, had a period where I just kept assessing and doing nothing else. That's because my assess script died on me when I forgot to add some code properly.
It's a fundamental issue with bleeding based balance skills right now. Same thing happened previously with pureblade.
The idea to make bleed numbers less fixed and more % based wasn't a popular option. So right now you get to break points in mana where monks kill super easily/kill in a reasonable time/can't kill at all.
I understand there's going to be a special report that may look at bleeding as a whole that could try and fix this problem.
One: https://ada-young.appspot.com/pastebin/xyiu_Ftk
Two: https://ada-young.appspot.com/pastebin/iTEHpMsk
This also allows you to lower flat bleed significantly, therefore making things more reasonable on the lower end of the scale. If you're concerned about bleed overwhelming low mana targets at a speed that is far too unreasonable, this is the best route to take.
Monks are in the right position to take advantage of this now. Nekotai use haemophilia, and the other monks have proper ice-stacks for internalbleeding. Nekotai also have internalbleeding, but we lack the ice-stack to take full advantage (no ice affs on our kicks, and our first ice arm action starts from center stance), so it will always be very difficult for us to use internalbleeding as a core strategy. In return, we have, I think, the best dust/lucidity stack at the moment amongst monks. Haven't tried steamstacking.
Either way, those afflictions and routes allow monks to make use of multipliers to snowball bleeding. It shifts the tug of war from "how much mana you got" to "how well can you cure <insert curetype here>". Either dust, or ice, for haemophilia, or internalbleeding.
Nekotai still have vessels, but the vessels pressure (to my knowledge) is currently far less than before the overhaul. So I don't expect it to lead to a kill. But if could be viable.
Will write another post once I've looked through Ciaran's logs. Thanks for posting them.
I saw a number of big bleeds, all of which were clotted away before I got balance back. My Surge burst from the sprongma is pretty huge. It looks like I'm hitting the at least 4 or 5 of the sprongma poison req each time, and coupling that with the vessels and stun, I'm getting quite a bit of mileage out of it. There was one part at the very end when Ciaran was bleeding 2k+, and didn't manage to cure it before I used my killer stance. But I didn't use my finalsting. He got a dproph on me right after that. What a pity.
The bleed burst at surge is, arguably, too strong. If it's so reliably giving a Nekotai such a huge burst of bleed every time, then it'll basically be all about Surge->Finalsting. This happened thrice, though two of the times, Ciaran mass clotted it all away before I got balance back. I'll think about this some more.
I also see a number of places where my poison choices can be optimized more. Looks like Ciaran is prioritizing haemophilia above even things like blindness. I probably should have used that to my advantage more. That does prevent haemophilia from sticking very much at all - and prevent bleeding into a finalsting quite reliably, even the constant bleed pressure in his second log. Better choice of poisons might help.
Relapse is also a little lackluster. In Ciaran's first log, it proc'd 8 times, and gave an affliction once, and was shrugged 3 times. The other four times, nothing happened, probably because it relapsed an aff that was already on Ciaran. Didn't proc at all in the second log. It hasn't been changed for a long while. I think we might want to look at tweaking it somewhat.
Edit: Also, with the large surge bleed bursts, it opens up the possibility of using kaife to go surge -> killer -> surge -> finalsting for a few continuous bursts of bleed. Not sure how viable that is, though. Will want to try it and see.
A shaofang can get the bleed level to instant kill range in two or three combos if you don't clot.
I had blind, asthma and paralysis as higher prios than haemophilia and well in a group you can easily get hit with all four constantly so as your only able to cure off one or two or so before they all get reapplied. If your bleed hits over 500ish I would recommend switching haemophilia to be the first dust affliction cured. Otherwise it'll stick too easily and your bleed levels will just skyrocket.
It's better to just stay blind and paralysed and not dead than to try and cure them off to keep attacking and die due to bleed.
With monks being so heavy bleed focused, bleed stacking in groups will need to be looked at. Tracking bleed by source is one change that I think would at least give us the tools we need to find a happy medium. (Is it feasible to code though?)
The other issue is harbingers, I won't get into it any more specifically than to say that bleed stack mechanics were mostly focused and balanceable within Glomdoring. Now there are heavy bleed stackers across all orgs that have monks. This isn't the time or place, but I wanted to mention that they deserve a look at considering the sudden proliferation of bleed.
All monks are going to stack super well with mana killers though which is fine.
Harbingers are in a kinda odd place the bleed we do our selves is tiny for post overhaul vitals but we do seriously buff bleed effects from allies.
I really would like to see more base+% based stuff with bleeding or maybe clot as a base+% cost to avoid the mana break issues bleed concepts have.
Two monks is also twice as much haemophilia afflicting (not to mention paralysis/blind).
The cat's out of the bag on that one, though. I don't think we're going to move away from monks being bleeders.
Haemophilia prioritizing will definitely help in groups, actually. It doesn't matter how many people you have hitting you with haemophilia - get a single window to mass clot, and you'll be out of the insta-danger zone. It's something my logs with Ciaran has proven multiple times. I could get to insta-level bleeds, but a single window snuffs out any chance of a kill immediately.
What is more dangerous in group is flat bleeding. The main move should be toward multiplying bleed based on the target's bleed. Yes, I'm bringing this up again, because a flat + % bleed is definitely, and always, better than purely flat bleeding across the board. In groups, it will still stack onto itself a lot, of course, that's the nature with all groups. But it'll at least be better than purely flat bleed.
A 200 flat bleed attack, if done by 3 monks, will give you 600 bleed if they all hit you once simultaneously. A 100 flat + 15% currentbleed attack, even when 3 monks hit one-after-another in quick succession, no time to cure or clot in between, will give you 347 bleed (100 + 115 +132).
Turning flat bleed into current-bleed multipliers have the advantage of immediately dropping flat bleed pressure from the current monk set up. This will have immediate impact on groups. And also the further advantage of ensuring that monks can snowball - therefore not taking away their ability to kill. They'll still build on each other and kill much faster in groups - every class does so much faster in groups - but you won't see a huge spike of flat bleeding that immediately decimates your mana pool right at the first few hits. When it spikes (when the multipliers start kicking in), the numbers will go higher than what flat bleeding will be able to do, of course, since it's based on multipliers now.
In short, you can effectively halve current monk flat bleed, but still ensure they get kills (because multipliers).
I don't really see what's wrong with Harbingers specifically, though. For Harbingers, nothing much has changed. Nekotai have always been bleed focused, so they've always fought with a bleed based monk archetype at their side. Sure, the other monk guilds are also bleed focused now, so they will have more chances to fight with a bleed based monk - if a Nekotai isn't around, at least a Ninja might be around sometimes. But that's about it. It's not like they're getting a brand new additional class to the game that has never worked this way before.
That can like snowball into massive numbers though. It was kind of tried. It was the percentages stacking on top of the percentages on top of the base bleeding and the modifier damage that let tahetso do like 900 busing in a combo. Stacking percentages ontop of percentages got a bit crazy.
kick
100ish bleed from leg action.
+100 bleed from bleed modifer
+15% of current bleed=230 bleed total
punch
+60ish bleed from arm action(290)
+100 bleed from bleed modifer(390)
+15% of current bleed (448)
punch
+60ish bleed from arm action(508)
+100 bleed from bleed modifer(608)
+15% of current bleed (699)
Do note that those numbers are still better than a flat bleed, though. For example, your very last 15% of current bleed calculation is only a +91 bleed. And that's after rolling three times in a row - the bleed output is significantly less than if each of those 15% multipliers were a flat +100.
One "solution" would be to make the multipliers additive on themselves, and only be calculated at the start of the attack, before any bleed is done. That will allow us to isolate its benefits to only bleeding that was left over from the previous attack, and not ramp on the bleed within the form itself - which would jive more in line with what the design concept was. But from the way this currently functions, that might require significant coding effort? It'll be best if that can be done. Well, a re-look at the numbers from my side is probably needed anyway. Hrm.
So I support ideas similar to what Wobou is proposing with changing the monk bleed/bruise mechanics.
Pureblade bleeding was tuned to not really work in 1v1. In groups, it is significant, but still manageable. Monk bleeding is tuned to kind of work in 1v1. As a result, in groups it really isn't manageable.
I think monks need a refocus on specific affliction combos that they can attempt to set up and then capitalize on, with more/better ice delay abilities or just straight up give them a bit of low wounding capabilities. The latter may not be as popular but I think it could help with a lot of issues, including giving something to build for monks that isn't so volatile as bleed.
That said, giving monks wounding is easier now that flat wound numbers have been upped. You could give them less wounds than a warrior. The clincher here, however, is that monks probably shouldn't get wounds on all of their actions. I would recommend only letting kicks give wounds (if we're giving monks wounds) to limit it to one bodypart per form, so that monks can't just put a bunch of wounds on multiple bodyparts and just build wounds based on the virtue that they are all so spread out.
That does mean a reconfigure of monks to be very ice-affliction based, though. Which I feel is a pity (read: boring). But it's not impossible.
I think part of the issue is how deadly each affliction is individually. The majority of dust afflictions are kind of eh like you can just ignore them and they may do a little bit of hinder or damage but then the big ones like blind, paralysis and haemophilla will just lock you up and cause you to die. Could look into reworking the afflictions individually to make them fairly balanced. Like Make scabies as deadly as hemophilia etc
Giving them wounds seems a major change. That'd kinda require a total rework of monks though giving them wounds. Like the ice stack of some monks is already immense adding in wounds would require a reduction of sorts. I mean even if your just putting like 4 wounds on a tick some monks could spam double ice on the arms and a wounding kick. Thats 6 seconds of ice balance for a base 3.5 balance.
I figure just a bleeding rework overall would fix the issues?
I think that if a universal bleeding diminishing return was implemented you could place preclotting restrictions into the system.
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