Game Mechanics: Tranquil Staff DPS -- The May 29th Patch

[Dontaze]

I recall, as do many of the monks I have met on this server, the Tranquil Staff being THE monk weapon of the Kunark - Velious classic era. It was simply the best thing a well geared monk could wrap his hands around outside of VP / NToV. The Project 1999 monk community regards the weapon no differently. Nearly every high level monk I’ve crossed paths with wields a Tstaff, or dreams of wielding a Tstaff if they don’t have one yet.

My understanding is that before the 5/29 patch of last week, the Tstaff (or any 2h weapon for that matter) was doing a bit too much dps. Max damage crushes did seem a bit frequent to me, but the dps never looked too outlandish. My frequent parses in 55+ groups fit me snugly between warriors / rangers and rogues on the melee dps spectrum, which is exactly where monks were designed to go.

After the changes to 2h damage last week, myself and every other Tstaff using monk I’ve touched base with cannot believe how much it has been crippled. Some monks say their bare fists out-damage their Tstaffs now. Others have reported their Tstaff dps getting bested by well equipped warriors. While this monkly hearsay has no data (yet) for me to include with it, the anecdotal evidence is quite compelling. I’d trust the word of respected p99 monks over archived Allakhazam comments any day, especially considering that many p99 players had firsthand experience as a Tstaff equipped monk during the years this server strives to emulate.

I could be wrong about all of this. Perhaps as a Tstaff wielding monk on p99, I have a bias that has skewed my observations of the past and present. Regardless, I hope the truth about the legendary Tranquil Staff (and by extension, classic 2h damage in general) can be uncovered through discussion and research. I never played a monk on live so I can’t comment much on the Tstaff’s performance in the distant past, but I am highly interested in doing whatever I can in the present to contribute to the knowledge of this topic. Extensive parsing of the Tstaff and other monk weapons / combinations is on my agenda for this week, so hopefully I can get some useful data out of that (Some preliminary testing of Tstaff vs. Adam Club + SoS dps showed the 1h combo consistently doing 10-15 dps more than the Tstaff, ceteris paribus).

That’s all I have for now. Looking forward to hearing from those that know significantly more about this topic than I do.

TLDR - Did the classic Tranquil Staff perform as poorly as it currently does on Project 1999, or does the post-5/29 Tranquil Staff do an injustice to this historic Everquest weapon?

P.S. - If any developers want to give me a parsing assignment or snag me for some testing in game, I’d be more than glad to help.