Okay starting today I'm going to keep up regular postings about races, guilds, weapons, armor and other skills and how I've worked out balances. It should be noted, before reading, that I have already written a program to test the algorithms behind these skills, weapons, armor and how everything comes together for a fight in game. All skills were designed to do similar damage/defense of comparable classes at comparable percents while also taking into account the opponents level. So Before anyone goes crying about something being overpowered, be aware that I've done my best to balance these things out. Additionally, there will obviously be some testing in game, as that is basically what "beta" tests are for.
Today's entry: Monks
I probably know more about monks than any other class. Back in the day I used to quiz staff about the inner workings of the game, points in offense/defense as well as the bonus to defense when using martial arts, simple things. That combined with observing how percentages worked and were affected by stats, I reverse engineered a rough approximation of how it was originally designed. As I was comparing the mechanics of various classes, namely berserkers and monks, I realized that Trolls/Werewolves/Monks were really more similar than just being each realms "extra, no standard warrior" class. While the berserk skill produced massive damage increases at the expense of defense, martial arts/adrenaline/counter would alter the state of the monk for different purposes. It was never really determined how monks received the defense bonus when using martial arts, but I believe I found a way to approximate it, or at least have developed a balanced approach at it.
When the monk is not holding anything, he receives a 10% of his martial arts skill as an extra chance of evading the attack. Say the monk has 250% Martial Arts. That would mean there is a 25% chance the attack will miss. If the attack gets through this calcuation, then a normal calculation is done in the manner of the other classes.
Secondly, the monk also receives a 10% of his martial arts skill bonus to his armor skill percentage. I will get into how armor is calculated into everything in a different post but the algorithm, assuming proper training of the armor and martial arts skills, would be roughly equivalent to a plate wearer at 50.
I never really cared for counter's original design but I suspect that is because one of the big toning moments monks received was when I was around the mid-20s on my monk, so I never got to see the real benefit of a good counter skill, prior to the toning. The idea was that you went into a hyper-alert state, attacking anything that hit you, but you did no independent actions. You couldn't attack anything besides the automatic attacks from when something hit you, if there were a significant amount of enemies in the room you could run out of fatigue rather quickly and you had to "undo" counter, stuck with a timer, before you could do anything else, which meant if you bit off more than you could chew you had to wait an extra few seconds to try and escape. Obviously it had its benefits, you could clear a room pretty fast, or in a huge PVP battle do some decent damage, but its usefulness was generally only for moments when you felt lazy. Despite popular belief, going afk while countering was generally a really bad idea if you were in any area that could do damage. I believe for the most part it won't operate any differently here, it might do less damage, but its hard to tell since it was such a comparatively underused skill.
Adrenal move was very situational too. Unless you wanted to carry around a ton of melons, you didn't use it while hunting. In PVP it was much more useful but you had to pick your moments. The idea was you received a boost in your damage in exchange for losing a massively larger amount of fatigue for each hit. I want to say that you would be out in 10ish+ chops, but I can't remember clearly. Anyway, the bonus received from adrenaline is functionally the same as the berserk skill but instead of the drawback being a loss of defense, its instead exhausting yourself which can be rather damaging in its own way.
Spells are where things get different with monks. Everything else is basically the same, minus a few tweaks, but spells will be slightly different. I don't remember why I always teased staff about giving monks a dragon form, I know someone else thought of it, probably Grip, but the idea seemed intriguing. This is one of the places where I've attempted to balance out the three realms. In general, with cases where only one realm had something the others didn't, I took that and translated it into the other two in an attempt to level things out. However, I made sure that the original primary class holder of that skill, spell type or ability retained a better version. Essentially Werewolves are primary shapeshifters while monks and gnolls would be secondary shapeshifters. While Monks and Gnolls each received new forms at level increments of 10 (10,20,30,40,50) and would have roughly identical damage and defense capabilities, Werewolves receive at rough increments of 5 levels ( 2,7,11,16,20,25,30,35,40,45,50). For Monks and Gnolls, it will most likely always be beneficial to be in their highest level form, but for Wolves, the damage types and effects vary based on tiers. All forms in a tier would do the same base damage, but other elements or status affects would prove useful for different situations which brings me to my final point about Shapeshifting. It will all be done by spells. Doing this eliminated the need for training shapeshift and sitting around trying to shape for 5 minutes until it works. It also lets the shaper choose which form they want to use.
Also, I totally forgot until I had written all of this, and I don't feel like going back to edit it in, but Blood Coven Vampires do also still have bat forms. They are similarly tiered to wolves except at larger intervals mostly (2,7,14,20,25,32,38,45,50).
Feel free to post comments and thoughts about this. I will take it under advisement but there is no guarantee I will change it as I calculated the interaction between skills months ago.
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