Hey folks, 

 

As Obsidian has requested class feedback, I thought I'd start up a discussion on my class of choice: The Monk. Please note that I have only put a few hours into the beta and I am very open to the fact I may not be dealing in accurate information, I only wish to jot down my first impressions of the class.

 

To start, any RPG that has monks as a playable class is instantly better. This is clearly a fact. There's nothing more satisfying than going up to a knight in full plate mail and somehow punching him to death. That being said, the idea of an unarmed fighter is often executed poorly in RPGs. They either have way too little options available to them compared to their counterparts who actually pick up a weapon and swing it, or they function too similar to a regular warrior.

 

That being said, I believe the monk in PoE succeeds in carving out a unique spot with its wound mechanic. Through pain and suffering, the monk becomes stronger and dishes out huge amounts of punishment The only problem is that in the limited time I played, the monk had difficulty utilizing it. With no real threat generating abilities, my stalwart friend BB warrior was doing most of the pain-absorbing. That left me with a backup fighter that could use literally none of the abilities on his toolbar. 

 

Positioning is key to get anything done with the monk right now. If the fight begins with most of the enemies focusing on someone else, the monk is already at a disadvantage. In that split second opening round of combat, where everyone needs to execute something to tip the scales of the battle in their favor, the monk is sitting there, thinking to him/herself, "well I guess i'll just go punch something". 

 

In all the fights I did manage to get the enemies slashing at my monk, it was both entertaining and very difficult. Since my monk is wearing, well, rags, he's taking immense amount of damage, which is of course going straight into wounds. This is where the monk gets really exciting, as you don't know exactly how in trouble you are. I get the feeling when fighting that if I am not managing my wounds correctly, using them in the right way while also not allowing too many of them to build up, I am going to die. It adds a level of strategy that really makes me feel like my choice to play  a monk rewarded me with a unique game play experience. I have never seen this before in any RPG with monks in it, and I just hope that as I get more time with the game I get more options to get the monk going.

 

Has anyone else tried the monk? If so, I'd like to hear everyone's thoughts on the class. I only used a boiler-plate Str-based build so I'd like to see if anyone has gone into more exotic builds. This rumor that Chanters are awesome appears to be a fabrication, because I don't see any of them punching people to death! 

I ran into the same issue of not actually being able to build up Wounds.  I suspect the Monk will work best with a party based around the Monk and its unique mechanic.

I've found positioning the monk to take aggro relatively easy with the use of the scouting system.

 

I've also found that the DoT on Wounds winds up ticking me down incredibly fast when they are up, both stamina and health.  I believe stamina : health is supposed to be a 1:4 ratio for incoming dmg on most characters, but a wounds tick always seems to remove at least 1 health pt.  

 

Depending on how limited camping supplies are in the full game, ideally wounds would be relatively health neutral even if it does tick down stamina.  Otherwise, parties with active monks will be burning through the supplies real quick.