[Feedback] Monk General Feedback for 0.5

1. How was your experience league starting as Monk?

It was my first time playing monk, but I had access to leveling uniques due to the monk being my second league character.

Gameplay started really slow and clunky with Killing Palm and Falling Thunder.

Killing Palm is just annoying to use. Swapped it out ASAP and never looked back.

2. What did you like most while playing Monk in 0.4?

The snappiness of the abilities and the mobility that is integrated into most skills. Lightning skills in particular feel amazing. Siphoning Strike, Gathering Storm, Falling Thunder. All great skills.

3. What did you like least while playing Monk in 0.4?

Power Charge generation. I heard most people play with frenzy charges and other shenanigans to alleviate the issue of power charge generation (I don't, I use Siphoning Strike). This feels like a design flaw to me. When most of your playerbase chooses to use a niche notable instead of what the class offers baseline, something is wrong.

4. If you could add changes for the Monk class (skills, Ascendencies, gear), then what would you want to add?

Fire & Earth skills. Give me access to all elements. Let me roleplay fire/earth bender. Also see point 6. for that.

5. Are there any skills you'd like to see rebalanced or changed?

Buff Siphoning Strike to generate more power charges. I am against reworking it as a more movement oriented skill. The skill itself is fine.

Invocations are terrible and we have three of them as our recommended spirit reservation skills... Rework Invocations or provide more fitting alternatives.

Combo as a mechanic is underutilized. Current combo is boring and doesn't feel like you combo anything. My suggestion: take a look at windwalker monk mastery in WoW and its impact on gameplay and go from there. Combo definitely has potential as an optional but fun mechanic.

6. In the future, what additions or interactions would you like see introduced for Monk?

As a quarterstaff user casting spells without using a 2nd weapon set should be more viable than it currently is. Weapons are too restrictive, buffing only attacks or spell damage. Maybe add more and slightly stronger "increased spell damage while wielding a melee weapon" passive clusters on the passive tree.

1. How was your experience league starting as Monk?

Not recommendable. It feels clunky, mana hungry, the array of low-level skills doesn't fit so well (I wish Ice Strike was available for Level 1 Skill Gems, for instance), weak early choices on the passive tree and action speed is so slow and doesn't fit the monk well. Being melee is also a weakness on top. Monk is one of the weakest characters early for these reasons.

3. What did you like least while playing Monk in 0.4?

The fantasy and the possibilites of the Invoker Ascendancy

4. If you could add changes for the Monk class (skills, Ascendencies, gear), then what would you want to add?

Acolyte is obviously quite bad and underplayed for a reason. It comes with such massive downsides and stuff like the Void Illusion on dodge has no place in the endgame. Darkness is also way too weak, especially if compared to say the Withchunter's Sorcery Ward. The passive tree needs more (early) raw damage and action speed nodes, maybe the quarterstaves and skills themselves needs more attack speed. Better early game skills instead of Frozen Locus (which I especially dislike for having to precisely hit enemies with the very tip). I miss the old Tempest Bell... Ya'll can say what you want, but I think the Attribute Stacking Tempest Flurry from 0.1 was absolutely amazing and it's a shame it's gone. It being gone feels especially unjustified while stuff like reverse chill and Twister + Whirling Slash mobility exists and thrives. Bring it back and don't nerf these new builds (these creative builds is what PoE2 should be about!)

I was thinking of a QoL buff to Killing Palm that could improve Monk's early game:
"Dash to an enemy and Strike them, marking them with a Soul Mark for X seconds. Defeating the enemy with a Soul mark grants a Power Charge.."

The conditions for this is that the Soul Mark only provides one Power Charge, is unaffected by "Gain an additional Power charge" supports, and only the Mark only applies to the main strike hit. However, if you're culling enemies, then it will be supported by the "Gain an additional Power charge" supports and the Soul Mark is ignored (to prevent people from gaining two Power Charges on one enemy by applying Soul Mark and then culling them also).

Does this sound too strong or sounds fair?

"

Darkomantis#0042 wrote:

4. If you could add changes for the Monk class (skills, Ascendencies, gear), then what would you want to add?

My feedback will be for invoker:
1) Meditate needs to be usable while shapeshifted. Right now if you use talisman on both weapon sets, you can't even activate this skill.

2) Unbound Avatar feels way too clunky to use, might be better off just making it into a cooldown ability rather than having to deal with all the unbound fury stuff (which is essentially just a different name for Glory). The duration is also ridiculously short compared to some other ascendancy abilities like Infernalist's Demon Form, which provides similar damage boost while being able to be maintained indefinitely with enough hp regen.

3) 'I am the Blizzard' and 'I am the Thunder' could probably use a small boost, they are really weak for ascendancy nodes.

4) Elemental expression needs major rework imo.
- Remove the mana cost (Fire Spell on Hit from Smith of Kitava has 0 costs for example, on top of having no proc cooldown)
- Allow us to choose the expression that gets procced instead of having it work based on stat distribution, like how deadeye/pathfinder gets to choose certain paths for their ascendancy. Right now all 3 expressions don't even scale in the same way (fire is aoe, ice is projectiles, arcing bolt is chaining). This makes optimizing damage extremely annoying, considering that most builds tend to have quite a spread of stats for support gems or uniques.
- Add some form of scaling damage from attack increase% as well. As it is, the expressions are spells and spells heavily scale based on level, which you are limited in due to melee weapons only having attack/melee levels. Could also make it gain additional levels based on levels gained from +melee/attack levels.

5) '...and Protect me from Harm' feels out of place in the ascendancy.
- Vast majority of invokers go for either pure ES or ES/Eva hybrid partly due to the passive nodes they have immediate access to, while this ascendancy node seems more for pure Eva or Eva/Armour hybrids.
- ES/Eva hybrids naturally have no reason to pick this node due to their lower overall Eva to begin with
- There are several ascendancy that provide better boons to pure Eva builds like Amazon/Witchhunter.
- For Eva/Armour hybrid builds, Tactician does a much better job than invoker would due to immediate access to related nodes and much lower penalty on the related hybrid ascendancy nodes.
- Disciple of Varashta gets to have Sacred Rituals, which function similarly in providing "free" damage reduction without any penalty to their ES, unlike the penalty to Eva/Armour that this node has. Why?

+1