taek

According to the DPS vs DR spreadsheet made by awesome players here in this forum: DR 0 Hunting Bow > War Bow DR 1 - DR 13 War Bow > Hunting Bow DR 14+ Hunting Bow = War Bow

I'd say Monks if you can sustain wounds and stay alive...a big if. Torment's Reach nets out to ~250% damage on a single target. Your initial attack hits, +50% damage added The Torment's Reach cone activates, doing damage again on the same target & everything else in a cone Turning Wheels adds an indeterminate amount of damage, which goes down as you use Wounds for TR. A fairly normal situation for my monk even at low levels is to reach 10 wounds (+50% damage) w/ TW. Then unload with TR spam, so the TR gets +50%, then +45%, then +40%, etc.. Monk also has some similar questionable spellstrike bonuses like Barbarian. When Jolting Touch activates from my stiletto, enemies affected get hit for both Jolting Touch shock damage AND turning wheel fire damage. Monk also has a built in AE retaliation passive, which does the equivalent of 1H average weapon to everything around him. A monk would be more limited...but Moon Godlike. +40 health per trigger at level 8, 3 triggers per encounter = 120 endurance healing per fight. That's a lot of "free" wounds on top of normal healing. Moon Godlike is basically the monk's version of Blunderbuss for Ciphers.

This build would be much tankier than anything a barbarian can build. Barbarians "tank" ablatively, they just absorb damage with a high health. Once that's gone they vaporize pretty quickly. Their starting 15 deflection is awful and their core ability Frenzy drops deflection by another -10. They're actually one of the squishiest classes I've played, which is part of their appeal I suppose. Monk's Wounds system can be a huge turn-off for people. Starting a fight with no resources to do anything can suck and a lot of people just don't like to take tons of damage to play the class correctly. This build looks like a tanky-DPS type. The only class that feels similar is Paladin and those need some work IMO.

Barbarian, but it's bugged to all hell. Things will melt, but they certainly aren't intended and you might as well put the game on Easy/Normal. I'm avoiding playing the Barbarian until they do a bugfix pass on them and we know what's intended and what's not.

When starting a new game on 1.04, after char creation the game says its paused but you cannot unpause it. I workaround it but switching apps and returning, but this does not seem like intended behavior.

I am continually confused by people who find it strange or off-putting that POE Monks use weapons. Chinese Monks, the most famous being Shaolin, were required to master both unarmed and weapon forms. Japanese Buddhist warrior monks (Sohei), used everything from Naginata to Tetsubo to the Bow and sometimes used the same armor as Samurai. European fighting monastic orders were the Knights Templar, Knights Hospitaller, and Teutonic Knights and they were fully decked out in heavy armor and weapons. POE has been more accurate to the term "monk" than most RPG games.

They're useless for anything remotely challenging, so the only use I get out of them is taking down weak enemies without using a spell so it's Cat for me.

Can't you get just any early spells you want by making an adventurer, taking his grimoire, and getting him killed?

You don't need a high INT as much as the other casters. A lot of the Cipher powers hit a target and splash around it with lesser effect. EG Mental Binding paralyzes the target and the surrounding AE are only Stuck. And other casters need a high INT to maximize the Foe-Only area of their spells, Ciphers don't really have that issue. If you don't care about duration, then INT isnt doing much for you. I will say that if your Cipher will be your primary CC you should care care about duration. Just because you have the focus to cast multiple times, it doesn't mean you will hit high defense enemies, and the one time you do hit you will want it to be as long as possible. But if someone else is handling CC (another cipher, wizard) then I think you can lower int for a DPS Cipher.

I think at level 19 my Monk's fists will be 27-33 damage each +21 accuracy

Wizards, Priests, & Druids with per encounter spells for all spell tiers is going to be insane.

This works for me..for a little while until my barbarian disintegrates trying to tank with 8 PER/RES. I understand how damage is output, but I don't understand the part that makes this a good tank? Barbarians aren't really viable tanks IMO. They have only a handful of abilities that are relevant to tanking and have one of the worst starting Deflection scores in the game (15). They start 10 behind Paladins & Fighters, and this build has Deflection penalties as well. A few DT from Fire Godlike is nice but you need a lot more than that to tank at Hard/PoTD. It's a fun retaliation build but I'm not sure how you live unless you're just more powerful than the content/difficulty level.

There are definitely some UI display errors. I believe one example (unless the patch fixed it) was that as a Cipher if you picked up both 1.2 damage whip talents, your char sheet said you were doing x2.4 damage (1.2 + 1.2), but in combat it felt more like 1.4 or 1.44.

I think the Chanter would benefit greatly from a more flexible point system. Some weaker, 2 point Invocations would help immensely, even if they are less powerful than summoning a Phantom. If anything, it would give the very passive Chanter something to do on those quickie fights. They also have no talent support to improve their mechanic. Ciphers can improve their focus gain, casters have access to talents that help spell use, monks have a talent to increase Wound generation, Chanters have nothing.

I think at this point the easiest path would be to rename the Monk class "Berserker" because that's closer to what it approximates. The class wants to get hit. It can activate an attack speed buff if it takes damage. It gets a damage buff if it takes damage. It can activate a stun if it takes damage. It can activate an AE Crush attack if it takes damage. Best with medium armor and weapons. It would also get people better prepared for how they should play this class. You want to get hurt, but you don't want to tank the entire enemy group like a Fighter tank either.