Quarter Staff during the first 10 levels. An honest review.

Hello, I am hoping this feedback will help improve new player initial reaction to the game.

In my experiences playing Monk, I've come to the conclusion that it is easier to level with eiter Primal or Bow skills than it is to do so with Quarterstaff.

If I were to describe the current state of the quarter staff to a new player, I would describe it as " A terrible leveling weapon with trap options, which evolves into the corner stone of most monk builds."

To streamline the experience of going through this post, I am going to list my proposed changes first, then the justification at the end, so that people can scroll through this post easier.

To improve the leveling process for Monks, I recommend the following changes be made to the tiers of the following Monk Skills

1) Tempest Furry + Ice Strike, decrease their Tier from 5 to 1, so that these skills can be unlocked with a level 1.

This will improve new player experience by allowing them to experience melee combat by using, what is considered in the community to be core components of most melee Invoker builds (seconded only by Bell and Charged Staff).

The ability to play around with these skills as early as Act 1, will allow players to decide, which of the 2 elements they would like to focus on, while leveling their monk. At the same time, this allows players to gain satisfaction of playing an elemental weapon class, while helping generate new study data for you (GGG) on figuring out how to improve melee further.

2)Change Falling Thunder and Killing Palm from Tier 1 to Tier 5, so that they replace Tempest Furry + Ice Strike.

These skills, are more suited for this tier level, because they become available around late Act 1, early Act 2, where you will have the necessary tools to make this skills function optimally, without needing to go through a build up process.

Falling Thunder can succeed on it's own as a Tier 5 skill gem, provided you get a wand with the Power Siphon skill, a ranged execute that generates power charges on kill or simply wait to unlock it after you get the Resonance Passive and Combat Frenzy Gem.

Meanwhile, there is the possibility that Killing Palm can become a viable Frenzy/Power Charge Generator for future Dagger and Spear skills, so I will refrain from brainstorming how to rework this. (which may also increase the need for the Resonance Passive).

3) In regards to the Tutorial Area for the Monk, I recommend replacing Falling Thunder with Glacial Cascade, which is a very good early level gem, that can work in killing the Miller and the adds. I vouch for the viability of this gem as it helped me clear all of Act 1, including beating the final boss of Act 1 on the first try.

4)Regarding Frozen Locus skill. I find this skill to be subpar in it's current form and in need of a minor buff.

In it's current form, this is a weaker and less useful version of Escape Shot. I believe this skill should cost 2 combo points and then make you jump as far back as Escape Shot does, so that players can learn from this Tier 1 gem how combo works, while also unlocking a decent defensive ability.

As it currently is, I'd recommend new players to just grab a Bow and Escape Shot instead of using this subpar dodge, because the jump back range is greater and you generate freeze build up on cast, rather than having to wait for enemies to break the ice.

5)This last bit is a personal request, could we buff Wind Blast by having be a Tier 3 gem and not a Tier 5 gem. I find the effect to be very desirable around level 9, when there are the small minions with the explode on death mechanic, but had found no use for this in early Act 2...although there some seem to be a lot of on death mechanics that frustrate content creators at end game...

After your announced patch launches, I don't think you can justify sacrificing a level 5 skill gem for this, while a level 3 skill gem for such niche utility could be seen as a more adequate cost.

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Justification for changes:

The reason is simple, the combos are strong and viable as soon as you enter the game. The combos in question are Spark + Firewall and Lighting Arrow + Lighting Rod.

In contrast, during the early levels 1-5 Monk provides very clunky and unsatisfying combos such as Falling Thunder + Killing Palm, which is not self sufficient like the previous combos mentioned.

For Falling Thunder + Killing Palm to work you need to soften the enemies with skills such as Ice Nova or Poison Burst arrow to set up enemies for being executed with Killing Palm, then in a 20 second time frame find the next group of enemies and unload the fully charged Falling Thunder.

Then you need to repeat the process of softening enemies with other skills so they can be primed for repeating this inefficient cycle.

By contrast, during early levels, even Warriors can clear a map quicker than Monks, while using fewer skill gems (2 as opposed to monk who needs 3).

Overall, this makes depending on Falling Thunder + Killing Palm strongly suboptimal when compared even with a Warrior who relies on Rolling Slam + Boneshatter during the early stages of Act 1.

As for Wind Blast + Frozen Locus....these are niche skills, which are too expensive for what they do.

Frozen Locus in particular is so bad, that you are better off using Escape Shot in it's place.

Meanwhile, Wind Blast is ok, but the daze and lack of experiment opportunities with Bows, Spears, Crossbows and Daggers, paired with lack of synergy between Monks and Physical Damage causes this effect to be too expensive, in regards to what it provides to Monks.

you don't even grab any staff related passive until higher levels

equip a crossbow and call it a day until level 20s

That's often the way with skills being gated behind levels (PoE1 has almost every build starting off with that terrible bouncing fireball)

However, glacial cascade is perfectly viable for killing everything up to level 14 as long as you get the positioning right

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auspexa#1404 wrote:

you don't even grab any staff related passive until higher levels

equip a crossbow and call it a day until level 20s

That's bad design imho due to several reasons.

1)RPGs are partly about a power fantasy. If you go through the hassle of starting the game as a monk and passing the tutorial, then at that point you are invested in the power fantasies provided by that class.

2)When the tutorial gives you a specific weapon, that is the developers way of saying that it's important for the class fantasy. Same for the skills it recommends as part of the tutorial.

3)As a new player, if the tools given to you by the devs, don't work as intended, what will most likely is, you will refund the game and assume the game is made by people who don't understand what it takes to make a good RPG of any kind.

Crossbow, is a few steps away from the class fantasy proposed by something like monk. Most RPG enthusiasts will not be motivated to go outside the class fantasies presented for games they are trying out.

So again, if as a dev, you fail to implement a successful interpretation of a game fantasy, then your whole game is pretty much a failure at this point, since it fails to do the basics properly.

At this point, I am pretty sure, no one will stick with Monk to see if it works with a Crossbow and either roll a different character, or just refund.

4)This is EA. If issues like this aren't solved during these inception phases, then the game will fail to appeal to people who aren't familiar with PoE brand.

The worst thing you can do to an RPG is what Digital Extremes did to Warframe, make a game that is so twisted and overloaded with details, that you need a Wikipedia site rolling in tandem with the game, so you can figure out how to enjoy the game, without making too many mistakes which will cause your game experiences to be bad.

5)I'm not saying it's not doable to finish Act 1 with the Quarterstaff. I'm saying I've hit one too many trap options in Act 1 and that damaged my ability to enjoy the leveling process during Act 1.

"

draco359#5475 wrote:

3)As a new player, if the tools given to you by the devs, don't work as intended, what will most likely is, you will refund the game and assume the game is made by people who don't understand what it takes to make a good RPG of any kind.

If there's people that are that quick to judge the whole game based on a rather small issue, so be it, fkem.

The first 10 levels don't matter.

It's totally irrelevant.

Glacial Cascade + contagion till ice strike. Ice strike + contagion and ed till tempest bell. Use all in conjunction and you can shred clear and bossing free. Monk gets a juicy cluster of % spell damage while wielding a melee weapon which helps scale the accumulating inc spell damage contagion gets by it reapplying to new enemies (it will also spread essence drain too). Ain't nothing wrong with staff at all. You just gotta know how to approach building a melee monk properly. Invest in defenses early and let ur weapon damage carry until like level 15-20. Invest in attack damage nodes which scales with anything ur using.

You can also opt for stuff like the meta lightning damage buff and shooting projectiles expending power charges or w/e but thats up to you on how you want to build your monk.


The reason attack damage and skill speed are a thing early on is because monk is by design supposed to be pretty flexible in how you can approach playing one and its so people can test skills and see what they like before pathing into a definitive weapon type.



Im currently into mapping right now on a ssf hybrid monk and he's a ton of fun.

The first 10 levels are the time when someone decides whether they are going to stick with the game or not. Arguably they are the most important levels.

This is early access feedback. Its not build guides.

Monk early game is very awful. I didn't know how to get charges for my bell until I realized that I had to use the basic attack and ignore my skills to use it, which just felt wrong.

Most people recommend using a bow or another non-staff weapon shows how bad the new player experience is with Monks and should be changed. Glacial is good for early ranged damage but there isn't a solid melee attack until 14 and you can pick up ice strike. Many people won't last that long if they don't like the class and don't want to use a bow / wand instead.

If you invest in literally a few freeze build up nodes, by the time you get to a level where you can equip ice strike as a gem. You'll be reliably chilling and freezing enemies and shattering packs. Run herald of ice for even better clear (btw for some reason herald of ice can also proliferate contagion farther than intended because the enemy explodes essentially allowing u to dot up enemies even offscreen, contagion also spreads essence drain poison as well if u run that as a support lol.)