Search the Community

Because they fold so easily. Simply put, monks in the current system seem to have been backed into a corner. In a combat regime that rarely sees outright missed attacks, lightly armored brawlers just can't deal, at least if the game at this juncture is any indication. The ascetic martial artist is a well-worn but still potent archetype, and the professional flagellant concept that's been made for PoE is an interesting one, but unfortunately these guys just aren't any fun to play. One imagines that monks are meant to be a "high risk / high reward" class, but in practice they're just high risk. If I'm understanding this correctly through play, the idea is that the wound-soak system is meant to be the monk's armor equivalent - that is, other characters see their incoming damage soaked via their armor's DT. Monks, having no armor, soak up a like portion of incoming damage as fuel for their talents, so in theory they shouldn't be at a particular disadvantage - in fact, their ability to soak damage without armor should be a significant positive, since they don't suffer armor-bound speed penalties. However in practice this doesn't seem to be the case. A monk's damage soak is conditional - if you don't use your wound energy, it gets knocked out of your health bar instead. So monks play, as a dude on another forum put it, "hot potato" with the damage they receive, constantly expending energy or being punished for not doing so. They are by some measure the most micromanagement-dependent class of any I've tried so far (with the rogue a distant second). I'm not sure how the math shakes out but one imagines that a monk, played suboptimally in any given situation, is treated within the game as a guy going into melee who is actually not wearing armor - they take a metric ton of damage in every fight. Frontline classes tend to take a lot of damage anyway, but monks, for whatever reason, get knocked out very easily even when their health stays at high levels (though this is just delayed, since the unused wounds will be taken out of health later on). A monk who's flanked is as good as meat. A monk with wounds who is made unable to use his talents, for whatever reason, could end up dead without a killing blow having landed. Going into the beta, monks were the class I was most interested in, and the first one I played as. I soon dropped my guy for a paladin, and the game was much, much, much easier. It's possible, even probable that there are several unimplemented or unoptimized or just plain bugged features that would even the score for these guys and make them better functioning - the currently felt delays in combat commands hurt them pretty badly, for example. But at its core I'm just not sure the class can really work in this system, not in the seamless way other classes do. They're the runt of the litter. Also it was strange and not a little frustrating to me that I would start a game and discover that 2 out of the 3 active talents usable by monks require a melee weapon. I don't know if Josh had covered this, but I've always liked the idea of a formidable hand-to-hand opponent in a setting dominated by weaponry, and it was a bit strange to see what was essentially an inverse of 3E D&D monk design, with most abilities actually disincentivizing HtH builds. Is it simply the case that the talents suited to slap-happy monks aren't implemented yet?