Ick Swamp "Way of the open fist"

[Lujo]

Whait, what? AA's do magic damage now? Did they just stick it on everyhting they didn't know what to do with regardless of whether it needed a buff or a nerf? Did they change them in any other way? Because they were allready waaaaay above everything else the game threw at you.

And I don't think I mind magic attack it on vampires so much, as I mind having magic attack vampires in Ick Swamp on a Monk purist run.

Are we in the middle of one of those "force X feature to the extreme" phases with magic damage? If so, no wonder people are complaining about the monk

If I were mildly paranoid (and I have reasons for it, sort of, seeing as they like to spring such "lab rat" testing tecniques on us) I'd say I hope it's not some convoluted scheme to get the public to clamour for making the monk the way he was before. I'm sure it's not, but I bet a lot of people are feeling really bad about having to play monk right now. -.-'

[The Avatar]

At least Vamps (Alpha Vamp Fireballs!) and Frozen Trolls (Icy Fist of Doom) make sense. But animated armors are now hurling 2000 damage fireballs?

[gjaustin]

I'd say Animated Armors make more sense than Frozen Trolls.

They are animated with magic after all.

[The Avatar]

But their iron sword isn't magic is it?

[CznRhubarb]

Finally beat the level by getting the Pactmaker + JJ combo and restoring the monk to his former magic-resisting glory.

It wasn't really a satisfying victory though, as I knew I had gotten lucky to beat it instead of having actually earned the win. =/

[gjaustin]

[Lujo]

Don't feel bad about it, the level's unintentionally screwy, there's been stuff like that all over beta. the only reason to note that the JJ PM approach is unreliable, so to speak, is so that the devs fix the level to allow different stuff to work as well.

Also, if you can now compare how difficult the level was before, and how winnable it was after you got both hys and magic resists, you can probably see how powerfull and "exploity" the old monk was He started with something that you need to scum 2 specific gods for, on a level that allows bug-like levels of exploitation of said two gods, who are also considered the "best" gods to have on any level, and the difference turnes the level from "not humanely winnable" (it is with lots of scumming, maybe, but no way a sane amount) into, a breeze, was it? And purist on top of that, which is supposed to be hard for a monk, with the level make up specificaly difficult to do purist for most classes.

[CznRhubarb]

The monk may have been broken before, but now I feel the class is fairly worthless. The monk can't safely attack about 80% of the monsters in the game because they either have magical attack or they impart some negative status effect that compounds the monk's natural weakness (Weakening, -% Resist).

I think part of the reason the monk was out of control was because he has the higher max resists. Would he still be broken if he started with 50% physical and magical resist but had the standard 65% cap? I feel like that would be a reasonable compromise.
Or even give him 35% or 40% starting resists (both) with a cap of 65%.
Or give him 50% starting resists (both), but make that be his resist cap as well.

Really I would just like to try any modification to the monk that gave him magical resist again. As it stands I will never play him unless a quest requires it.

[Lujo]

There were numerous possible solutions to the old monk, but since there are now an almost equal amount of phys damage and magic damage monsters in the game, maybe his penalty is too steep. 50% phys was huge before, and the magic resists were an more of an afterthought for me, really.

And there does seem to be an inordinary ammount of debuff giving monsters in general, which sort of balooned during the previous efforts to deal with various strats. That would possibly also need cleanup too, in my eyes those things were a failed way to contain resists, and now that resists have been taken care of as a runaway strat, there really isn't so much need for so muny debuffers around.

It's more of a matter of fine tunining things in general than monk being horrible. If you have situations where monk sucks and, say, berserker rocks, than it's not about monk and berserker but the monster make up.

[Sidestepper]

Agreeing that the monk needs more tweaking. There are too many basic monster types that specifically counter his class abilities (Bandits, Dragons, Warlocks, and to a lesser extent, Serpents). The loss of magic resistance is worse that it looks like on paper. At first blush, it looks the same as a Berserker fighting a Goo Blob. In both cases, the hero does half damage while taking full damage in return. But, monsters like the Goo Blob have 'pay' for their resistances in the form of below-the-curve hit points and damage. Against Monks, Warlocks and Dragons effectively get 50% resistance for free.

I'd rather that Monks receive both kinds of resistance, but be given lower amounts. And I'd also really like Bandits to either lose their unfairly focused power altogether or have it drastically reduced.