Changes to monk tiger stance and healing skill.

[theobserver]

This was a long time coming.

I've kept unusually quiet about monks, simply because the numbers involved for monks are unusually complicated and I wanted to stave off the lengthy discussion needed for any large-scale monk changes. Suffice it to say that Eldorian, whose combat calculator could tell me the success chances and base damage for every normal weapon attack made by any class against another target (taking into account char stats, proficiencies, level/luck/other differences, style/type superiority/advantages, and a boatload of every other factor) hasn't even managed to complete anything other than a rudimentary calculator for monks yet. Why? Because monks require so much custom code that it affects virtually every aspect of combat differently.

Take just one obvious and easy-to-explain example: damroll. Because of the high number of attacks monks have, +1 point of damroll comes out to roughly +1.6 to +2 points of damroll for fighters. (The same way that +1 damroll is better on a fighter than a mage due to additional attacks, except much more exaggerated for monks.) What this means is that the moment you start slapping rares on monks, they become enormously powerful damage machines. And even without rares, a test monk in a suit of worns easily chews through a warrior in a suit of red dragons because of all the dam-boosting skills monks already natively get. There's obviously something wrong with that picture. (And don't bother telling us how your monk got its ass kicked -- we're ran the numbers and conducted trial matchups, and the results of both are undeniably stacked in favor of monks IF you know how to leverage their skills. If your level 50 monk wasn't owning people, you sucked, plain and simple.)

The main problem has to do with Stryth's rather ambitious design for monks, whose numbers he could never quite get under control. Again, even our current team devoting much more time on this matter than Stryth did for purge, and with our using the much more sophisicated number-crunching tools at our disposal, still hasn't managed to turn all the nooks and crannies of various esoteric stances and hidden bonuses into a form that we could run straight numerical simulations through, either, and had to test using test characters on our test port (an extremely time-consuming process compared to simply running the numbers through a simulator). The various factors involved were greatly exacerbated by the enormous amounts of tinkering by various people who thought they'd "enhance" monks in various ways after Stryth left and before I returned. Some of these ways include:

* Adding even more attacks and attack types for monks.
* Beefing up tiger stance enormously in terms of both hit/dam bonuses, hidden combat bonuses, types of attacks allowed, etc.
* Allowed for training anatomy on mobs.
* 300+ hp healing skill.
* Encumberment restrictions completed eased.
* Changes to which skills were permitted under offensive/defensive empowerment.
* Numerous changes to chakera effects, types of chakera, chakera chances, etc.
* Spiritual mantra added because gee whiz, making tiger stance +30 dam would have looked even more ludicrous, so they broke it up into two separate skills instead without considering what such a damroll boost does to other stances as well.
* Even their gold carry limit was raised.
* And a lot of other stuff that's simply hidden in the code designed to make monks "better".

Most of you have taken the above for granted without taking a critical look at how or why they even came about, but I don't treat them so lightly. As most of you already know, I don't have a high opinion of the coding work done during my absence (gameplay changes like roiy/bodyslam, new classes like psi/druids, etc), and it is my opinion that monks were easily the most dramatically altered during that time. As someone who helped Stryth with the original testing and implementation of monks over purge, I find current monks to be, and I don't the term lightly, a cheese-filled abomination of what we had originally envisioned and implemented. A "working nerf" (like we did for roiy, etc) was needed to reduce the cheese-factor of the terrible current imbalances, until we could devote the time to properly tune the numbers in-depth. I'm warning you that because monk numbers are tough, fixing them is going to be a long and painful process for our staff to do, and there are many other projects (such as religions) that have priority over monks right now.

The final catalyst was the changes in our combat module, which of course also applied to monks. For example, the hit/dam boost that most non-giants received due to the str/dex recalculation gave monks a huge boost, since they were non-giants and since hit/dam already affected them so dramatically. Another example is with disarm entering much more heavily into combat with the changes to cursed weapons, which give monk yet another enormous advantage. And they're largely immune to many (though not all) of the combat style and weapon type skills as well. And so on. It was painfully obvious to me that I couldn't allow monks to go on as they were in the face of all these changes, and the only reason why it's taken so long for me to act was simply because I knew how ugly doing the necessary would look to players.

So what we have is simple: I could have very simply restored the old version of monks to make them what we had originally implemented over purge, which is something that would have been best for me since it's what I'm more familiar with, and it would be easier for me to fix long-term without all the "too many cooks spoiling the soup" problem of how various people have butchered monks while I was gone. Instead, however, I've resolved my team to the far more difficult task of fighting through these combat-theory and coding issues using the current model of monks as a basis, as a nod to continuity to make things ultimately easier to understand and adapt to for you. What this means is that instead of reverting to a version of monks that most of you will be unfamiliar with, I've chosen to keep monks as they are for the time being and to nerf only the most egregious monk offenses in my mind, the ludicrous changes to tiger stance and healing done in my absence. For now, anyway, depending how things go.

Most of you will not like these changes, or understand the factors that have forced my decision, and will likely instead chalk it up to some hatred for monks (ridiculous, considering how many hours I spent testing them over purge as opposed to merely sitting back, reaping the rewards, and complaining about what was "entitled") or maybe it'll be that I have something against your character or even you personally (paranoid delusions, anyone?). I know the knee-jerks will be coming to piss and moan about this -- but before you do, consider that I've (so far) left intact all the other changes that I disapprove of that have beefed monks up, and I doubt many of you have devoted as much time to studying ALL the stances as I have ever since the original conception, playtesting, and implementation of monks. I already know that there's more to monks than souped-up tiger stance and uber healing. And now it's your turn to prove it.
(Orginally posted by Burzuk)