Squishy Monks no more

by JR Cook - 10 years ago     show comments

Welcome back to BlizzPro! I’m Dannie “IAmDiR23” Ray, and today I won’t be writing about Diablo.

Instead I’ll call our good friend Cody Hamshire, also known as Vaeus, to the stand.

Lets see what Cody has to say about the state of Monk defense!

Squishy Monks No More

by Cody Hamshire

Hey everyone, my name is Cody Hamshire. I’m a long-time Diablo 3 player who has primarily focused on build crafting. I’m here today to talk about the concept of Monk survivability and how it’s going to be affected in the upcoming patch. I know a lot of you are curious to know how Blizzard intends to do to fix the Status Quo that led to many monk players having hung up their daibos in frustration. If you are one of those who have stuck with the Monk despite all of its problems, don’t worry! There’s a light at the end of the tunnel, and we’re not even that far away!

A Brief Introduction

Hello Monk players. Tired of clinging to ‘One With Everything’ for sweet life and still being gruesomely punished each and every time a champ or elite shows up because it’s just not enough? Since the Reaper of Souls release, the dodge mechanics of the monk has become a serious issue. With greater levels and advancements, comes higher damage. This means that you can easily die when you fail to dodge too many attacks on a row, or more importantly, when you are faced with attacks that simply cannot be dodged. It’s uncanny how fast your monk can go from Hero to zero in an explosion of parts amid a group of mobs, and now we’re going to discuss the reason this is happening on the live servers.

The core of the Monk’s survivability woes comes from how our base stat affects our toughness. Wizards and Doctors get All Resist from their intelligence, while barbarians and Crusaders gain armor for each stat point in Strength. Instead of those straight damage reduction bonuses, DH’s and Monks translate Dexterity to Dodge, which is arguably the weakest defense mechanic in the game. But while DH’s can cover for this weakness with a plethora of escape mechanics, high mobility, and hard hitting range attacks. Monks are instead expected to contend in melee combat, it is no wonder that they don’t stack up.

Dodge is considered to be a weak defensive stat because of its binary nature. This means that this defense applies in some situations but not in others. When an enemy attacks you, you have a chance to dodge his blow, but when you touch an elemental effect, you have no chance to avoid the damage. So a player with 80% chance to dodge seems invulnerable fighting most normal enemies , but the moment champs or elites with elemental effects appear, they might die so fast that they won’t even have time to observe what went wrong.

Normal enemies can be easily defeated by sheer DPS, it is mostly elite/champion enemies that put your survivability to the test.  This is where monks generally fall short of success .

The Good News

Dexterity & Survivability:

A major change is coming to Dexterity to benefit Demon Hunters and Monks. Each point of Dexterity will grant 1 point of Armor instead of Dodge chance. Dodge isn’t as reliable as Armor or Resistances and doesn’t protect you from some of the most dangerous monster affixes like Plagued or Thunderstorm. In light of this buff, the existing passives that grant 30% of your Dexterity as Armor (Seize the Initiative and Awareness) will be completely redesigned.

This means that monks will no longer have to rely solely  on that pesky conditional defense,as they will now be blessed with overall damage reduction so that all incoming sources of damage have a similar impact.

In conclusion, whereas this will cause an increase in how often we take damage from sources that could’ve been dodged, but the incoming damage will be greatly limited by our newfound damage reduction. This alone will result in a minor increase in survivability against normal monsters. However, our survivability against effects that cannot be dodged will rise greatly. This simple change will take away the shocking adjustment of going from generally ignoring most  damage through dodging to suddenly taking massive amounts of damage from sources that cannot be dodged.

Do we currently have options that make this problem less severe? Yes, we could all wear Blackthorne’s and we could all power-stack a single type of elemental defense and hang on to One With Everything. But is that any way to “live”? Should we be forced into a certain playstyle just to stay alive?  This mechanic change will give Monks back the most basic freedom that any Diablo class should have: The ability to choose the type or equipment and build they want.

Validation

To test my theory, I participated in PTR and copied my monk Sion, whom was featured in Theorycraft Thursdays as a low torment build, and decided to push him directly into Torment VI in the PTR (Replaced One With Everything with Harmony, as it is no longer available). I was able to perform, not without challenge, in a difficulty level I previously couldn’t enter because I would’ve died immediately from a few attacks that were not dodged, or a simple elemental effect from a monster (such as a frozen orb) could kill me in a hit or two. We’re looking forward to major shift in survivability as of the release of the patch, barring any unforeseen circumstances. Here are a few snapshots of my monk’s stats translated from 2.0.6 (Live) to 2.1.99 (PTR) so that you can see the shift for yourself:

[Sion, Americas Region (Live 2.0.6)]

[Sion, PTR (2.1.99)]

Theorycrafting note from Dannie Ray:As you can see, armor went from  59% reduction, to 81% reduction. This means that  we went from taking 41% of the enemies damage, to taking 19% of the damage.

since 19/41 = 0.46,  we are now taking 46% of the damage we used to take, that’s a 54% damage reduction. I don’t know about you, but I’ll take 54% damage reduction over 44% dodge any day of the week and twice on Theorycraft Thursdays. Again, that 54% is without counting All Resist on a later post we will see how All Resist affects our calculations.

Thanks!

Thank you for taking the time to read my article! For those of you that are Monk players, this article was meant to serve as a beacon of hope for the new future. With a bit of luck, we might have just done that! I know there are those out there who may have other points to make about 2.1.0 changes, and I entreat you all to get out there, do your research, and get prepared. Comments, likes, and shares are all greatly appreciated!

-Vaeus#1389

Catch me on Twitter @Vaeus1389!

Or catch me on YouTube.