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Putting aside practicality and whether it's actually worth it to do so, how ridiculous can we make the core monk ability? I'm curious. 9 + 1 Prestige + 3 Death's Usher gets us to a baseline of PL 13 with a death godlike monk while near death. We can get any of several boosts for elemental abilities via Lightning Strikes and Turning Wheel, but afaik those won't apply to Transcendent Strikes itself. What other PL increases are available?

So, I bought the game when it launched, but I've had zero time to play it until recently. There are 2 character archetypes I am interested in: An agile monk, who forsakes weapons, using dodging, parrying, and skill to win, over broad constitution and soak. A dashing corsair, renown for her fencing ability, and her quick witted tongue. This particular archetype includes the parry/riposte dueling style (one rapier or saber, and no shield). I have read that Rogues have Riposte as a skill, but that it is terrible. Is a chanter perhaps? or another class better suited toward this concept? I played through the intro as a monk, but realized that a lot of the monk guides seemed to toss out all care for RP dialogue options. I don't really like this approach as, well I don't get a lot of time, so the chances of me replaying the game are negligable, at least for quite a long time. So basically I am looking for a build for either a monk, or a rogue. That still satisfies dialogue checks to keep RP interesting. I am looking to do it with characters met in the world (checking the option to build them myself is allowed however, I will not be making adventurers at the tavern.) I had a stat spread of something (i'm out at the moment.) close to 18 str. Something con. 16 dex, 16 perception, something int, and 16 resolve. I seem to remember con and int being rather low. At any rate, I was curious as to whether a build of either of those archetypes would be able to do well in Hard difficulty. I don't particularily like dropping stats that low, but it seems to meet a lot of the dialogue checks I need to for the desired social impact in RP, and/or the deflection stat for parrying. Is a monk with lower con, and higher resolve, awful? Same question in regards to the pirate theme. Also, do resolve dialogue options always make you into a brute? I would much rather a sarcastic/dashing approach, say Dread Pirate Roberts, than an abusive its my way or the high way! type. I doubt it needs to be stated, but I have no interest in playing a ranged rogue. A sword in one hand, and a pistol in the other is a possibility, but it needs to be a rapier, or a saber. I am sorry if this post comes across rather convoluted, I am in a bit of a hurry and wanted to give people time to respond by the time I get to play!

Can monks use Dangerous Implements to acquire wounds? Just a thought.

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?

This came up during the discussion about Forton and I think that it deserves it's own thread: I think that, unless there are Asian inspired cultures that are believably worked into the presumably western setting, Monks should be taken in a different direction. I'm not talking too much about mechanics but more about feel and integration into the game world. It doesn't make too much sense to have ninja, samurai or Shaolin monks walking around a setting that is essentially (please correct me if I'm wrong) late Medieval Western Europe. I guess if they were few and far between and were noticed to be out-of-place by the population they could work, but that seems like it wouldn't be well implemented. What are your thoughts on this? What would need to change? How could they be implemented without breaking internal logic?