New Monk Guide!

[mev]

Hi all,

I wrote a new monk guide (http://wiki.project1999.com/Meviin%27s_Monk_Mechanics) on the wiki. Check it out if you're interested, and let me know if you have any feedback.

[Seteris]

Humans don't level 20% faster, Iksars level 20% slower which means human level 25% faster (100/80=1.25) compared to Iksar.

[Jimjam]

You say it is hard to bandage in combat, but it is actually very easy.

Set up a key so you can swap target between yourself and the previous target. I use 'tab' for this. Make a hotkey with the command /stand in it. Make a hotkey for bind wound.

Now you just have to hit tab, bind wound key, stand key, tab again and attack.

By using the /stand command instead of the sit/stand button you can ensure you don't accidently sit down and don't risk taking a round of max damage hits.

Note, casting spells interrupts bind wounds, but procs do not.

As such, this technique is useful for any class that regularly melees at low health without casting spells (e.g. a monk, warrior, or even hybrid that has ran out of mana).

You can even use this to heal nearby group mates too. A good social macro would be

/target (tank)
/pause 110, /doability n
/stand
/assist (MA)

(n is the number of the abilities window where the bind wound key is set to). Precede any commands with a /pause as appropriate if you are suffering lag.

[maskedmelon]

You say it is hard to bandage in combat, but it is actually very easy.

Set up a key so you can swap target between yourself and the previous target. I use 'tab' for this. Make a hotkey with the command /stand in it. Make a hotkey for bind wound.

Now you just have to hit tab, bind wound key, stand key, tab again and attack.

By using the /stand command instead of the sit/stand button you can ensure you don't accidently sit down and don't risk taking a round of max damage hits.

Note, casting spells interrupts bind wounds, but procs do not.

As such, this technique is useful for any class that regularly melees at low health without casting spells (e.g. a monk, warrior, or even hybrid that has ran out of mana).

You can even use this to heal nearby group mates too. A good social macro would be

/target (tank)
/pause 110, /doability n
/stand
/assist (MA)

(n is the number of the abilities window where the bind wound key is set to). Precede any commands with a /pause as appropriate if you are suffering lag.

As of a few days ago, the bind would not succeed unless you retargeted yourself before/as the skill refreshed. Have to go back and double check if I just wasn't receiving the completion message or if I was in fact not receiving the bind. Meant to make a post about this, but here it is.

[Baler]

@Mev Good work!
I've spent a ridiculous number of hours reading on the wiki. So it really brings me joy to see another person share their experience and knowledge about a class they enjoy.
I like how you linked important things! Keep up the good work!

[mev]

Humans don't level 20% faster, Iksars level 20% slower which means human level 25% faster (100/80=1.25) compared to Iksar.

It makes sense to think of "percent faster" and "percent slower" as ratios rather than additive or subtractive quantities. Multiplication and division are inverses of each other, so x * 1.2 / 1.2 = x. 20% faster means multiplying by 1.2. 20% slower means dividing by 1.2. So, using either term is correct.

To be specific, the experience required per level is 20% more for Iksar (eg, 1200 XP to get to level 2) or 20% less for humans (eg, 1000 XP to get to level 2). 1000 * 1.2 = 1200. 1200 / 1.2 = 1000.

The reason that you're getting a weird result is that you're doing it half as a ratio and half as additive / subtractive. That is, you wouldn't get 100 and 80 because that's subtracting 20, not dividing by 1.2.

If you want to see the numbers and play with them yourself, you can check out this spreadsheet: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1ke9KOtMcR90puNfcecUwpg2MOWsm2LtYzrT3wEKuusE/edit#gid=0

[mev]

You say it is hard to bandage in combat, but it is actually very easy.

Set up a key so you can swap target between yourself and the previous target. I use 'tab' for this. Make a hotkey with the command /stand in it. Make a hotkey for bind wound.

Now you just have to hit tab, bind wound key, stand key, tab again and attack.

By using the /stand command instead of the sit/stand button you can ensure you don't accidently sit down and don't risk taking a round of max damage hits.

Note, casting spells interrupts bind wounds, but procs do not.

As such, this technique is useful for any class that regularly melees at low health without casting spells (e.g. a monk, warrior, or even hybrid that has ran out of mana).

You can even use this to heal nearby group mates too. A good social macro would be

/target (tank)
/pause 110, /doability n
/stand
/assist (MA)

(n is the number of the abilities window where the bind wound key is set to). Precede any commands with a /pause as appropriate if you are suffering lag.

Yeah, fair enough. I didn't discover bind wound in combat until I had almost gotten my Robe of the Whistling Fists, and the normal practice is to bind the clicky to the same key as kick, so it would be annoying to actually do. But it is probably doable. I changed "hard" to "annoying" in my guide ;)

[mev]

@Mev Good work!
I've spent a ridiculous number of hours reading on the wiki. So it really brings me joy to see another person share their experience and knowledge about a class they enjoy.
I like how you linked important things! Keep up the good work!

Thanks!

[jolanar]

Great guide. Probably the best one for monks by far. If I remember correctly the rest of the monk guides on the wiki should frankly just be deleted because of the amount of misinformation or lack of relevant info.

[Nixtar]

Great guide but disagree on the TBoots.

Why is it better to buy SoW pots? Gets extremely pricey in the end and all you need to do to keep TBoots up is cast it every once in awhile. Its not like you're going to be active so much as a monk you can't stop for 1.5 seconds.

TBoots is the budget alternative or for those who do not want to wait for someone to finally sell a MQ or to camp one yourself. Personally, I fall into this group of people. :P

[mev]

Great guide but disagree on the TBoots.

Why is it better to buy SoW pots? Gets extremely pricey in the end and all you need to do to keep TBoots up is cast it every once in awhile. Its not like you're going to be active so much as a monk you can't stop for 1.5 seconds.

TBoots is the budget alternative or for those who do not want to wait for someone to finally sell a MQ or to camp one yourself. Personally, I fall into this group of people. :P

TBoots are worse than SoW pots in some situations and worse than JBoots in other situations. The situations when TBoots are a good option are extremely limited.

SoW pots cast SoW, which is superior to TBoots / JBoots. SoW lasts for 36 minutes whereas the others last 18. That is very nice when you're heading into a dungeon and can't re-SoW. SoW also improves movement speed by 55% instead of the 35% you get with the other options.

Also, SoW pots cost 10pp per charge, which means you would get 500 charges of SoW (300 hours of SoW) before you would break even on your purchase of TBoots even assuming you didn't care about the speed boost from SoW or the extra SoW time in dungeons. I'm not sure I've spent that much time on EQ in outdoor zones outside of a group with a SoW class in total, and I'm pretty sure that I haven't spent that much time since I got my JBoots. So, SoW pots are cheaper, and you also don't have to spend all that money up front (which is better for the time value of money -- after 300 hours solo outdoors, you probably have a lot more cash on hand and can afford something like JBoots).

In short, if you care about the 1-2k that you'll save by getting TBoots instead of JBoots, you probably would be better off saving 5k now and just getting SoW pots as needed.

If you can accept that, then why would you ever get JBoots? Because they can cast instantly! This is extremely handy in many situations. A few that come to mind:

Trash buffs: if you're fighting or pulling casters, it's important to make sure that your first few buff slots are filled with things that you're okay getting dispelled. Some mobs (eg, Phinegal) proc 4 slot dispells too often to combat even with instant trash buff clickies, but normal spell casters will cast dispel infrequently enough that if you have 2-4 trash buffs on top, your good buffs (eg, Focus or Aego) won't get dispelled. Any instant cast buffs (Monk epic / Shrunken Goblin Earring, Robe of the Whistling Fists, Bracer of the Hidden, Kromzek Surveyor Scope, etc) are amazing for this! There aren't a lot of these items, so if you are outdoors, it's great to have JBoots for this purpose.

Recasting during a pull: if you're pulling casters and didn't stack your buffs properly, your SoW / TBoots might get dispelled. When that happens, you have to either flop (which can be risky when pulling casters!) or pull without SoW (which can be risky if the mobs you're pulling have SoW). TBoots or a SoW pot won't work because you have to stop to recast it. JBoots lets you recast without missing a beat.

Circle kiting: If there are too many mobs at once in a raid situation, it's common to have someone grab an extra mob (especially a boss mob) and kite it around while the rest of the raid fights what they can handle. Bards are the best candidates to do this since they have Selo's (which they can cast while running, similar to JBoots), but I have filled in as a kiter quite a few times. My SoW has faded in these situations plenty of times before, and if I didn't have JBoots, I would have needed to kite without SoW, which would be annoying and possibly result in my death (and the mob's return to the raid) or my needing to flop (which would have resulted in the mob's return to the raid).

Resetting the global cooldown: this isn't relevant for monks, but other classes can use JBoots to reset their spells when outdoors (though they probably would use either a class specific item like a Rod of Insidious Glamour or an item that's usable indoors like a Shruken Goblin Earring).

In other words, you should only get TBoots instead of JBoots if: you have 5k to spare and you wouldn't buy anything else good with that money, you don't have 6-7k to spare, you don't care about the speed boost from a SoW pot, you don't care about the duration boost from a SoW pot, you expect to spend over 300 hours outdoors without anyone to SoW you, and you don't expect to make enough money in those 300 hours to afford JBoots, and you don't care about the many reasons why instant casting is cool.