Monks, Grapple, and Paladins! Oh my!

Random thoughts I had while replying to the ranger thread.

I think monks are probably the class most in need of love at the moment after necro/bard changes have gone through.

Problem: Monks are very dependent on luck and a very linear lag strategy. Stances are not balanced.

Difficulty: To keep them from being too similar to blademasters.

Monk Paths:

So let's split monks into three paths: Europe (Christian theme), Asian (Buddhist theme), and Indian (Hindi/Jain theme). Monks already excel at lag and damage, so we should focus on on boosts that do not directly involve these. Ideally, we'd even lessen their lag potential and boost them in other ways. I think there is a lot of potential in weaponlock-style lag over trip-style lag. Each path would get a different flavor of beads (e.g. beads, rosary), different flavor of chii bolt affects, as well as:

European style monks might get their weight limit removed and some kind of active skill debuffs (I imagine a couple of skills (not spells) similar in style (not affect!) to minister, insomnia).

Asians would play the most similar to current monks. They could get buffs to the stances (esp. to mitigate luck, not to increase damage/lag) and even some flexibility in swapping stances on a round to round basis. I thinking of things like the different kicks, but applied to several skills (dirt, trip, disarm, whatnot).

Indian flavored monks would get a host of passive buffs, especially countering debuffs (esp. hp/mana/mv regen debuffs) and gain debuffs to their stances (esp. punishers against opponent skills).

The main drawback to adding these buffs to paths of monks would be to weaken their active lag potential. We have three options to play with: chii bolt, air thrash, and trip. My first thought is that chii bolt lag will be the best to tweak. If we take a lesson from weaponlock, a chii bolt could cancel your next few commands (randomize it a bit), with each input lagging you very slightly (like moving a room). That way you could 'break' chii lag before an air thrash lock, but at the cost of needing to be careful of your inputs and risking not getting your favored command in.

The gap between air thrash lag expiration and the monk trip is nice currently, given the thrashed a short opportunity to flee. However, air thrash could also be reworked to a punishing skill that damages or debuffs flying opponents (could be an active or passive skill). This would mean that air thrash gives a tactical choice to the opponent: fly and take the hit(s) or land and risk trip lag.

I think trip is a nightmare to change and balance well, so I see it more as a punisher for allowing the monk to get you to the tripping point.

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Grapple: I can see this functioning a lot of like weaponlock lag,  but it doesn't go through protective shield. The ninja is lagged a straight two rounds, but the grappled is lagged a certain number of inputs rather than a straight 'lag'

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Paladins could also use a lot of love. I can envision a few archetype paths for them, but I actually think they could use a more generic rework considering our current combat system. Since paladins will always have a major weakness to neutrals and heavy hitters, I don't mind them seeing a general tone up. I've always considered them lackluster at best.

A paladin may bless their weapon with holy fire. This is a special damage type that ignores all resists/vulns and does increased damage to all evils, but significantly decreased damage to neutrals. It adds the flaming flag and cause fear (no chance to neutrals, moderate chance in evils, high chance for evil supernaturals). It is applied in a similar way as blood vow (single weapon, lag, duration), and the weapon may only be used by the owner. Swords receive a special damage boost to this ability.

Paladins who use shields have a passive chance to completely avoid area spells and skills (this should be quite high as the paladin is sacrificing much offense against a caster here). They may also shield bash, albeit not as effectively as a warrior.

Paladins are innately immune to fear/hysteria.

Paladins gain +1 spellvl when wielding a staff.

Paladins gain the spear skill.

Adv. Mounted Combat allows paladins special bonuses while mounted.  The first attack of each round completely bypasses (chance = (prof + level)/2) most contact defenses (parry, riposte, dual parry, two handed), does half damage through shield block, and treats dodge normally. All weapons have +2 base damage. Adv. Mounted Combat only works outdoors.

Paladins gain the calm spell.

Always love the effort on ideas, Celerity.

I feel you could get the same depth if you changed it to specializations/masteries of stances, strikes, or spiritual.  Stances would be what was suggested and give you some fluidity at switching (within the same empowerment) at the expense of mp and cooldown.  Strikes would buff kicks (like a roundhouse kick to the leg to burn some movement or a sidekick to make them throwup their lunch =P) and air thrash.  Spiritual would be aura, healing, chii, and chii bolt.  And new skills to your taste.

Regarding monk pk, I both love and hate the randomness of monk pk at times.  I think more control should be given to monk player in determining the outcome because they're already going all in by choosing a specific stance to engage in.  I'm aware it'd be similar to 2 systems in-game already, but use a combo system (akin to a fighting game) where you use a combination of kicks and punches (active skills both) at 1 round lag input, but the end of the combo lags you for longer.  PPP = mp damage.  KKK = mv damage.  PKP = safe damage and harder to defend against (changing height constantly).  PPK = raw damage.  And other combinations available to expand on.  You could always put a hardcap on the end effect of the combination by virtue of you being more predictable and the target is getting use to it.

Would love to see some kind of rework to make defensive stances more satisfying to use in PK situations.  Though we already have counter as an automatic response to initiation and BLMs have predict to protect against/deny specific skills, I'd love to see a skill that would place you in a counter state for say 2 rounds.  If they use a skill that would trigger the counter, you'd deal counter damage in return.  The counterplay would be to let you sit there in lag and just not trigger it.  It would be stronger than predict in that it could counter more moves, but weaker because you have to actively trigger it.

"he first attack of each round completely bypasses (chance = (prof + level)/2) most contact defenses "

God please no. No more defense bypassing melee.  It's completely counter nature.

Want a nifty idea for mounted combat. Spears as you suggested for 1h spear mounded charges. And have the golliath be an actual mob that you ride and that kicks and bites in combat. Mounted combat would have a large change to auto-rescue your mount when your enemy targets the horse.

The problem with making Goliath into an actual mob is that heroism would mean you couldn't ride Goliath.  Perhaps another option for making mounted combat stronger would be to make it also a weak defense, where the paladin has a small chance (similar to, say, zerk bloodhaze) to ignore melee attacks as the paladin rides out of range or something along those lines but only while riding Goliath.

I really like the holy fire idea, especially giving it a bonus for sword+board fighting.

34 minutes ago, Pali said:

The problem with making Goliath into an actual mob is that heroism would mean you couldn't ride Goliath.  Perhaps another option for making mounted combat stronger would be to make it also a weak defense, where the paladin has a small chance (similar to, say, zerk bloodhaze) to ignore melee attacks as the paladin rides out of range or something along those lines but only while riding Goliath.

 

I really like the holy fire idea, especially giving it a bonus for sword+board fighting.

I do like the idea of making the GOliath a weak defense, what's your opinion of making it a weak offense as well?  Warhorses were known to bite/kick so the horse could do this in combat.  Bite would just simply deal damage and be what usually happens, rarely the horse could kick which could cause an effect of some sort as well as damage.

The reason I thought to give them a punch through defense attack as the first attack of each round would be to simulate a short charge (thus requiring outdoors). It would help to make their damage consistent across the board and would be especially useful against wimpy-tactic types. Something that I think fits the paladin persona well.

You can basically do whatever you want and call it adv. mounted combat. You could make it melee defense/offense, buff/debuff, mobility, backcutter charge, anything. Could be as simple as giving them the initiative in every round (their attacks go through before the opponent, regardless of dex).

Holy fire is quite nice, but you can't take advantage of vulns with it (not even undead vuln), so it would be situational, especially when thinking about using it on items like a chaosbane.

3 minutes ago, Celerity said:

Could be as simple as giving them the initiative in every round (their attacks go through before the opponent, regardless of dex).

Oh, THAT I like a lot.  It would add to the sense that the paladin is riding into and out of combat for the rounds, attacking and then dealing with the enemy's counterattacks as the paladin rides off.

We could perhaps also tie these kinds of buffs to heroism, so that they'd only work if the paladin's under the heroism effect - this would add to the appeal of using heroism vs using, say, the Vanguard or Blood Guard.

I like the + spell lvl idea when using a staff as a Paladin.  I kinda felt this need when I played my last one.

Perhaps scale with heroism. Heroism needs to be made very, very nice to compensate for losing a cabal charmie.

7 minutes ago, tassinvegeta said:

I like the + spell lvl idea when using a staff as a Paladin.  I kinda felt this need when I played my last one.

That's why my Paladins would grab the Black Dragon Skull. ;) Sure, I once had to kill the damned thing 23 times in a row for it, but the negative to mal doesn't hurt you at all.

Heroism is already pretty nice, IMO.  Being able to run forever is just lovely.