Monk Class Breakdown
All the new things: Stances, Disarm, Purify, Cleanse, Dispel, and Negate
Monk is here! As many of you know, Monk is Hubert’s absolute favorite class and for as much as I’d like to meme that he wanted to make everything overpowered, he was actually the one that reeled in the class a bit, and it turned out great.
The Monk is awesome. Not only is it easily one of the most fun classes to play in an array of MMOs, MOBAs, and D&D, but it’s also one that has a lot of room to be creative. In fact, potentially too much room. In turn, the Monk shook out to be almost three unique classes all wrapped into one – so everyone should quickly find their preferred Monk fighting style of choice woven throughout Monk’s disciplines.
The three disciplines each come with a different level of complexity and each with a clear approach to class fantasy:
1.) Closed Fist: Punchy punch punch to Daze, Exhaust, and Push targets.
2.) Open Palm: Balance, subdue, and neutralize in the form of Blind, Retaliate, and Disarm.
3.) Drunken Sway: Crowd control through Taunt, Evasion, and Pull.
Someone once told me that a true battle Monk is all about “punching fast and eating ass,” so that’s exactly what we set out to build with Closed Fist: a straight-forward melee dps that’s tough as hell to kill. It may be simple meat-and-potatoes, but I fully expect “damage Monk” to be a legit high-end damage dealer.
Open Palm, on the other hand, is all about understanding your opponent and controlling the flow of an incoming attack, even to the point of disarming the opponent.
Oh, what’s that? A new and improved keyword for Disarm? Why, yes ;)
Disarm Definition:
Target's current weapon set is unusable next Turn.
Target automatically swaps to its alternative weapon set.
Target gains 100% resistance to Disarm until target's next Turn.
Interrupts.
Legit, you just knocked your attacker’s weapon out of their hands. It’s that simple. Okay, it’s not actually that simple, it’s a combination of technique, timing, and situational awareness. But using your attacker’s own momentum against them is what it’s all about. Why deal damage when you can simply remove your opponent’s ability to cause trouble in the first place?
But that’s not all when it comes to Open Palm Monk. Open Palm brings us mindfulness, meditation, and clarity, which inspired the evolution and rework of Cleanse.
This is probably the first bit of bad news I have ever brought you guys (because the “Shroud” nerf was a blessing and you all know it), but we weren’t liking what we saw with Cleanse in testing. It’s honestly just too powerful within the context of a game in which status effects are so important to progress fights in a timely fashion. In turn, we opted to nerf Cleanse and release a new keyword in “Purify” to take its place.
Purify Definition:
Remove all negative status effects from target.
Updated Cleanse Definition:Removes a single random negative status effect from a target.
I’m a big Cleanse fanboy, so this was a tough one. But, it will result in a much more level experience and will also allow us to price Cleanse skills a bit on the cheaper side to help with some balance issues.
This move also called for the rework of the opposite end of the spectrum as well with Dispel and a new keyword Negate:
Updated Dispel Definition:Remove a single random positive status effect from target.
Negate Definition:Remove all positive status effects from target.
A little symmetry there makes my smooth brain feel nice, which leads me to my final Monk point: Drunken Sway and how it unlocked Stances.
Now, this is a style of play that I really enjoy and I hope you feel similarly. Whether it be Chen from Heroes of the Storm, Jackie Chan in “Drunken Master”, or even Po from Kung Fu Panda, Drunken style is something I’ve always thought was just the coolest way to fight.
But to have a Monk feel like it’s playing Drunken style, we needed to start thinking a little extra — and that’s what inspired Stances.
When you look closely at how Drunken style works, so much of it is based around entering a constant watery flow-like state that ups evasion, reduces damage taken, and frustrates the hell out of opponents. This was definitely a “hold my beer” moment and we wanted to really get it right. So, we knew we wanted a “sway stance” that placed your Monk into a state of readiness that allowed it to react, evade, respond, and flow all in one mode – and, thus, Stances were born.
That desire to have the Monk feel “reactive” or “ready for anything” quickly evolved in each Monk discipline path having a Stance that functions as the center of all of Monk’s lines of play:
Closed Fist = Power Stance
Open Palm = Ready Stance
Drunken Sway = Flow Stance
Each Stance is core to the class experience and each results in a very different feeling when you play that must be woven into your rotation, which is why we went with “Activated Passives” to harness that feeling.
Activate your Stance, do a bunch of Monk stuff that plays off of that Stance, activate your stance again, repeat as needed.
It will be a very fun class to play.
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