Monks are probably one of... if not the best bashers out there. It all depends on what you bash as critters with resistance to your attacks will obviously be harder to kill. On the off-side, monks do get a lot more critical strikes than other classes, so it can possibly even out a bit.
Way I understand it, I'm not that good of a monk conoisseur myself (so if anyone with better monk knowledge would like to step in and correct errors I make in the process, feel free), shofangi do have something similar to back-breaker throw... it's called crunch. You'd need to grapple an opponent's head before executing crunch and the more wounded that particular bodypart is, the better chance to kill your opponent. Essentially, the same way a warrior might swing a weapon at the head to execute a behead or crushed skull depending on their specialization. I'm unfamiliar with how hard or easy that is to execute.
Tahtetso need their opponent to be prone, i.e. sprawled on the floor, then they need to execute an ability that causes a specific affliction, one that only works for the instakill and nothing else and is cured by regeneration, then follow up with another attack that will destroy the opponent's heart, killing them instantly.
Nekotai's insta is called finalsting, essentially an accelerated version of crotamine that kills at a much faster rate than the regular poison itself, plus it has the ability to bypass poison resistances and immunities. Of course, you'd probably need your target blacked out or locked for this move to go through even with the faster poison tick.
Both Tahtetso and Shofangi are Harmony monks. As such, they have access to another instakill, called deathtouch, although the way I understand it, it is close to impossible to pull off. In essence, if your target is under 2/3 of their max health, mana and ego, you can kill them instantly.
Firstly, monks are no better a basher than any other class. Monks get more hits per balance than a caster, but a monk's critical rate is exactly the same as any other class. They do not get any more critical strikes. If you look at pure numbers, of course they do more critical strikes, but they also do more actual strikes - in other words the percentage is exactly the same.
Secondly, the only advantage being a monk basher in other IREs have always hinged around their attacks being split. That means when they do get a critical strike, and kill a creature midway through their combo, they can go on and hit the next creature with the same name in the room, wasting no balance and overkill damage. This is not true in lusternia, when monk attacks are put together into a single block called a "form". Basically, you won't go on to hit other creatures if they die in the middle of your form, so monks are no different from casters in that respect. Finally, with damageshift in Lusternia (our version of Aetolia's overkill) casters no longer waste huge amounts of damage when they do huge crits on dying creatures. The wasted damage potential that casters traditionally had which combo classes didn't no longer exist with this mechanic.
In fact, monks are amongst the least effective bashers because they are locked into physical damage types, cutting and blunt. Lusternia has a rather unique implementation of damage type resistance for mobs, which means certain creatures resist certain damage types and are weak to others. Physical damage types receive the most mild modifiers from this system, most creatures are only slightly resistant or weak to either physical damage type. You'll very rarely find creatures that have a large weakness to any kind of physicals. This is both good and bad - it means physical classes have a large range of areas they can bash with little change of efficiency. It also means that for casters with access to elemental damage, they can far, far, easily outbash a physical class in areas that are weak to the element they can use. Of course, not every area has these, so they will end up running out of creatures and areas faster.
On to specific PK of monks: Shofangi crush is nothing like backbreaker, unfortunately. While the backbreaker does huge damage and has a prone requirement, shofangi crunch has neither. It is also much less reliable than the backbreaker, requiring far more than 3 hits to kill.
The Tahtetso insta is one of the more viable instas of the monk guilds, and can be achieved by stacking regen affs.
The Ninja insta is also fairly viable, best used in conjunction with the guild's stuns. It's probably more reliable to go for straight damage, though.
The Nekotai insta is fairly terrible, near to impossible to pull off unless you've done an extensive, proper set up, by the virtue of which the target is almost certainly doomed if you can do it. It's basically shortened voyria, and as you'll know, voyria is unstackable (it's unstackable here as well, since it always cures first before the only other affliction in its cure tree) and uses sip balance. To pull it off, you have to perform the Lusternian lock and maintain it for a long period of time (enough time for the voyria to kill), and if you can do that, you'll probably be able to bleed or damage most targets out already.
The harmony insta is also pretty much impossible to do in combat. It's a dual mana/ego insta given to an archetype that does physical affs, (no stacking of focus affs) and zero ego damage (beyond a couple of weak ones in Harmony). It can be done in groups, obviously, but you're better off doing your usual monk repertoire in most group combat scenarios.
Monks' normal repertoire, however, is very potent, as many have pointed out. They get average damage normally, but have several tools that can multiply this damage: target being prone adds a damage modifier, target wounds also add a modifier. They can end up doing huge bursts of damage every balance, alongside their fairly many afflictions. To add to this, of the two physical classes, their afflictions are not random. Not to say warriors can't choose what afflictions to give, but warriors always have to struggle against RNG (random number generator) and it's sometimes down to a matter of luck as to whether the affliction they give on a particular hit is what they want at that point in time - monks don't have to worry about that. Monk combat is not a mindless thing, however, and you'll find you need to strategize properly and put in quite a bit of effort and time to create the forms way before you start participating in combat.
Just as an aside, the harmony insta was changed kinda recently. Now needs 2 of vitals (h/m/e) to be below 2/3, which allows you to attempt an 8s soulless-esque timed insta.
More excellent info. Love it. Couple of final questions.
What avenues would be open to me to make money? There's always bashing
for gold, which will be a staple, but I was wondering if there are any
tradeskills that are guaranteed to return a profit if I work diligently
at it.
What other ways aside from Quests/Bashing/Tradeskills exist to generate income, if any?
Lesson pools is something else that is very different from the traditional IRE model. /confused
Think mantra deathtouch is more like 6 seconds. Whenever I got to initiate it in actual combat (3 times or so), the target got killed before the insta finished.
Monks have pretty much all of their offense condensed in their kata skillset, although actual warrior (weapon) offense comes almost exclusively from the knighthood skillset, too. Bards have the advantage that you can be very useful in groups without even specialising in Music. Perfectfifth is at apprentice Music skill level, and if you're a city bard, hangedman is at 50% into capable in Tarot. Leaves a lot of room to put lessons into survival skills or, if you prefer, aethercraft or influencing, if you like having means of leveling up in peace and at a proper pace.
There are some tradeskills that will almost always sell, provided you find a shopkeeper to take your stock: herbs. The downside is that it's extremely tedious, and you usually won't be making gold more efficiently than bashing/questing.
There are some tradeskills that will almost always sell, provided you find a shopkeeper to take your stock: herbs. The downside is that it's extremely tedious, and you usually won't be making gold more efficiently than bashing/questing.
Yeah, most cases you'll find people getting trade skills for the combat benefit they have at trans.
Forgiveness is the fragrance that the violet sheds on the heel that has crushed it.
Enchanters are typically in high demand (some specs more than others), but usually not until they're highly skilled for things like cube charging. It also takes some investment in Highmagic for the basic pieces outside of Spellcraft/Tinkering. Herbs and Poisons are nice in that they don't require anything but time investment and finding a shopkeeper/regular body of customers to sell to, but as noted it's tedious and far outshone by committed hunting.
Crumkane, Lord of Epicurean Delights says, "WAS IT INDEED ON FIRE, ERITHEYL."
-
With a deep reverb, Contemptible Sutekh says, "CEASE YOUR INFERNAL ENERGY, ERITHEYL."
However, theoretically, couldn't I build up a stock and have it in a Shop and then go hunt? Surely there's a balance to having a 'Passive income' at the same time as well as generating an 'Active income' through hunting and quests?
Regarding crunch, it's great for winning in the arena. At a minimum, for a chance to kill you need to have crunched someone four times previously, and their head wounds need to be at least trifling. The more crunches/higher the head wounds, the greater the chance that crunch will kill. It's a neat kill that's useless in any sort of group fight, imo, since most people are gonna be long dead before you get a chance for that many crunches. Of course, you need to actually stick a grapple before someone writhes out of it, but with a bit of work that is doable.
Tahtetso insta requires that a target is prone and has the regen cured aff on them (chest pain). If, when you hit balance, they still haven't stood nor cured chest pain, using the insta kill skill kills them. Will require that you boost (need 1500 ka) so you'll need 5 power handy.
Harmony insta requires 2/3 of health/mana/ego under 66%. For shofangi and the amount of bleeding they can potentially do, it's within the realm of possibility to get stats where they need to be to use it. I believe there's a timed component, and having never actually used it for a kill, I can't say for sure how exactly you get the kill through.
And, in addition to my final questions a couple posts up, assuming knowledge of the world, level 100, how much gold could someone hunt up in an hour unmolested?
I just checked CREDITS FOR SALE and it scared the crap out of me.
On a decent day as an okay basher, you could probably scare up 20k in an hour, without resorting to big pay out areas. Mobs accrue more gold the longer they stick around, and gold drops are based on level, so some forgotten areas with high-ish level mobs sometimes have mobs dropping 2k each, if no one has been around for a while. If you hit a string of these, 60k may come your way.
My understanding is top-tier hunters do pretty well by themselves (and that's probably an understatement). The high cost tends to be associated with a glut of gold, and even as we drain it from the economy, prices inevitably creep up to about where they are now. I suspect it's just 'the new median' because of the prevalence of gold (ie high inflation). Unfortunately, trade costs tend not to rise with it (economy tends not to be competitive enough, though on some levels it can be), so there's a huge disparity between income and cost-of-living (so to speak).
-Each type of influence has three attacks of that type that you learn as you go along in the Influence skillset.
-Each mob will be immune to one type, and weak to another type.
-You use an influence attack from your chosen type (they all do different things) to start an influence battle of that type with the mob. This drains their ego some.
-As long as you hit with another influence attack before the mob does, you won't ever get 'hit' back. Your speed and strength are both based on Charisma.
-However, you use up an increasing amount of ego with each successive attack.
-If you run out of ego before the mob does, you lose!
-The more you use a particular attack in that type, the more mob will become resistant to that particular attack.
-So, you cycle through all the attacks you have of that particular type, to keep their resistances low!
-There are defenses in dramatics which buff different influencing types!
-Successful influences will generate 'esteem'. You can hold up to 500 esteem in your reserves. You can buy figurines and imbue the figurines with the esteem you generate. Using that figurine's essence, you can offer to empower/defile shrines (This is the landgrab mechanic of shrines), or destroy the figurine by offering its contents to a god, generating godly essence for them and lots of karma for you. Or you can sell the esteem for other people to do one of the above things.
-Hour long cooldown on each mob, just like bashing.
The types have the following effect:
Charity: The mob gives you whatever it is holding, including the gold it would drop if killed.
Seduction: The mob attacks your enemies on sight, if you would be able to attack them (respects avenger/grace).
Paranoia: Prevents the mob from participating in quests.
Empower: Raises the mob's level/strength. No effect on xp gained (afaik).
There can always be a guild/city/commune sale of credits and other mortal/Divine run contests to acquire credits. Still, it usually isn't incredibly bad, not from what I've seen anyway.
Forgiveness is the fragrance that the violet sheds on the heel that has crushed it.
This is disturbing. Prices like that effectively remove the ability to hunt your way to Trans.
Definitely going to have to think about this. :<
It's difficult to make broad statements about prices based on the value as seen on the market. Part of it is just existing gold, but a fair part is also the rate at which gold is produced.
Come such a point that one is able to compete on a fairly equitable level for late-game bashing, gold is pretty easy to acquire, I'm told. Of course, influencing is good gold (begging, selling esteem) and great XP. There's also aether hunting, which probably is a bit difficult to get a good crew together, but manage it and it goes very, very well.
This is disturbing. Prices like that effectively remove the ability to hunt your way to Trans.
Definitely going to have to think about this. :<
It's difficult to make broad statements about prices based on the value as seen on the market. Part of it is just existing gold, but a fair part is also the rate at which gold is produced.
Come such a point that one is able to compete on a fairly equitable level for late-game bashing, gold is pretty easy to acquire, I'm told. Of course, influencing is good gold (begging, selling esteem) and great XP. There's also aether hunting, which probably is a bit difficult to get a good crew together, but manage it and it goes very, very well.
My statement was based on Enyalida's post that on a good day you'll earn around 20k an hour as a level 100 character. At that rate, and at the cost of 30k per credit it would take around 440 hours of hunting to Trans one skill. Assuming 10 hours a day doing nothing but bashing, that's nearly a month and a half. That's simply not doable by anyones measure. Not for one skill.
That's why I said it's daunting. If 20k/hour is not accurate and you can indeed gain gold faster than that, it becomes less. Even so, it's still daunting. The ability to put in the grunt work and earn your credits rather than buying them has always been the carrot to entice you.
I'm not someone who is against buying credits, it's just that I can't right now. Having said that, my last credit purchase was 15000. I also know things are easier now with Elite memberships (amazing things) but it's a concern I'm going to have to consider before getting my hopes up.
Hopefully tomorrow when more people are awake they'll be able to offer more insight into this.
This is disturbing. Prices like that effectively remove the ability to hunt your way to Trans.
Definitely going to have to think about this. :<
It's difficult to make broad statements about prices based on the value as seen on the market. Part of it is just existing gold, but a fair part is also the rate at which gold is produced.
Come such a point that one is able to compete on a fairly equitable level for late-game bashing, gold is pretty easy to acquire, I'm told. Of course, influencing is good gold (begging, selling esteem) and great XP. There's also aether hunting, which probably is a bit difficult to get a good crew together, but manage it and it goes very, very well.
My statement was based on Enyalida's post that on a good day you'll earn around 20k an hour as a level 100 character. At that rate, and at the cost of 30k per credit it would take around 440 hours of hunting to Trans one skill. Assuming 10 hours a day doing nothing but bashing, that's nearly a month and a half. That's simply not doable by anyones measure. Not for one skill.
That's why I said it's daunting. If 20k/hour is not accurate and you can indeed gain gold faster than that, it becomes less. Even so, it's still daunting. The ability to put in the grunt work and earn your credits rather than buying them has always been the carrot to entice you.
I'm not someone who is against buying credits, it's just that I can't right now. Having said that, my last credit purchase was 15000.
Have never had issues personally, then again I've never really kept track of my gold in/out. I usually give ludicrous tips for work as well... like recently gave someone 50k gold for roughly 5-6 minutes of work as an enchanter.
That said, maybe I am one of the outliers, I don't know, and even though I haven't really been doing a whole lot of bashing lately, it seems like I'm never losing any major quantities of gold. I'd say if I started bashing for the few hours that I sit around and chat, I'd probably be earning more than spending.
Granted, I don't buy credits with gold as I don't really need to, but if we're looking at it from a combatant's perspective, I've never hurt for curatives, and often buy items that are not necessarily needed for combat. Haven't really bothered to go looking for the cheapest stuff either, just find the first place that sells what I need and buy it.
Forgiveness is the fragrance that the violet sheds on the heel that has crushed it.
You can gain gold faster than 20k an hour, a lot faster, even. However, you have to be aware of how gold drops on mobs work in Lusternia: Mobs spawn with very little gold and accumulate gold up to a certain maximum connected to their level. So if mobs get killed constantly, they won't have much gold. To gold-bash effectively, you need to switch areas often and you need to find areas others don't bash all the time.
As a best-case example, the realm of Morgfyre has around 80 gentlemen these days, if I recall correctly. It doesn't get hunted out often since the mobs yell for order members to hear, but if you manage to bash them all and they're nicely fat and full with gold, you can easily clean it in less than an hour and they drop ~800-1600 gold each. That's 100k gold right there. There are other areas in the game that are less dangerous and don't get bashed out all the time, so it's worth checking around and finding out about them. As an alternative, charity influencing will get you the gold of a mob, too, but unless the mob is weak to charity, it takes quite a bit longer than high end hunting.
I tend to trans my skills at the roulette table. >.>
Everiine said: The reason population is low isn't because there are too many orgs. It's because so many facets of the game are outright broken and protected by those who benefit from it being that way. An overabundance of gimmicks (including game-breaking ones), artifacts that destroy any concept of balance, blatant pay-to-win features, and an obsession with convenience that makes few things actually worthwhile all contribute to the game's sad decline.
Yeah. I found a nice place that had 30 mobs each dropping 1-2k each, which made for a much higher output than I quoted (naturally). It's just not a sustainable rate of gain. You might get lucky once or twice with a big pay out area, but most areas don't get up that high - and if they do, it's a one or two time deal.
How much gold you make from hunting really depends on what hunting you are doing.
You can hunt for xp, corpses, or gold or some mix of those.
20k gold an hour is more along the lines of what I get from just regular hunting. If you sell the corpses and go to out of the way places you can make quite a bit more.
The amounts of xp/essence and credits/gold needed can be daunting but it's really not that big of a deal. There is a monthly contest for art and writing that gives gobs of credits as well as monthly promotions.
Plus guilds and orgs have credits to unload as well. That's one of the things you can look into when choosing where to go is how they give them out. Some have periodic sales and then some like Magnagora don't have sales but give them out for doing city related tasks.
Buying credits will always be the fastest but I think there are realistic avenues for gaining the credits you need without spending money.
If I were to give it a try, would Lobo Tahtetso/Shofangi be a good choice? I'm told the regen they can get is high.
Futhermore, these are my current skills. Would it be worthwhile to wait and try and get gold with them before making a switch? That musthave been my plan last time I played, but it's been 4 years and I have no idea if it's even worthwhile anymore.
At a guess, you look better off reusing this character than starting completely from scratch. Though Enchantment and Elementalism won't transfer well (all in all, you'll be losing 50% of the lessons involved), you'll have enough to trans Kata and spec from the outset. If you opt for Psychometabolism as your tertiary, you'll get to keep Psionics as is.
On the other hand, Newton Caverns is a small goldmine if you get a good routine going with the corpse hand-ins. Starting a fresh character would give you a chance to compare, and keep your existing character as a fallback.
Lobo is one of the stronger races for monk. Not for the regen (which is good) but for the high Str/Dex/Con and overall favorable resistances. Magic weakness is less of a hindrance than it was previously, and you'll have several options for boosting your magic resistance.
I think he's asking if it'll be worthwhile to switch now, or get some gold from his current setup and switch later, not whether he should abandon the character for a new one.
Changing into a harmony/lobo monk now is definitly going to make your bashing easier. It may not make it any faster (like I mentioned, mages compete on the same level as monks in pve perfectly) but you'll definitely be tankier. The only exception will be TK mages with forcefield up, but you don't have that set up in your current skills, as far as I can see.
PK wise, Lobo isn't the best choice for a monk. Speed is more important - but you can still compete perfectly well at neutral balance. I was neutral balance for the longest time and I didn't run into unreasonable limitations.
Comments
Secondly, the only advantage being a monk basher in other IREs have always hinged around their attacks being split. That means when they do get a critical strike, and kill a creature midway through their combo, they can go on and hit the next creature with the same name in the room, wasting no balance and overkill damage. This is not true in lusternia, when monk attacks are put together into a single block called a "form". Basically, you won't go on to hit other creatures if they die in the middle of your form, so monks are no different from casters in that respect. Finally, with damageshift in Lusternia (our version of Aetolia's overkill) casters no longer waste huge amounts of damage when they do huge crits on dying creatures. The wasted damage potential that casters traditionally had which combo classes didn't no longer exist with this mechanic.
In fact, monks are amongst the least effective bashers because they are locked into physical damage types, cutting and blunt. Lusternia has a rather unique implementation of damage type resistance for mobs, which means certain creatures resist certain damage types and are weak to others. Physical damage types receive the most mild modifiers from this system, most creatures are only slightly resistant or weak to either physical damage type. You'll very rarely find creatures that have a large weakness to any kind of physicals. This is both good and bad - it means physical classes have a large range of areas they can bash with little change of efficiency. It also means that for casters with access to elemental damage, they can far, far, easily outbash a physical class in areas that are weak to the element they can use. Of course, not every area has these, so they will end up running out of creatures and areas faster.
On to specific PK of monks: Shofangi crush is nothing like backbreaker, unfortunately. While the backbreaker does huge damage and has a prone requirement, shofangi crunch has neither. It is also much less reliable than the backbreaker, requiring far more than 3 hits to kill.
The Tahtetso insta is one of the more viable instas of the monk guilds, and can be achieved by stacking regen affs.
The Ninja insta is also fairly viable, best used in conjunction with the guild's stuns. It's probably more reliable to go for straight damage, though.
The Nekotai insta is fairly terrible, near to impossible to pull off unless you've done an extensive, proper set up, by the virtue of which the target is almost certainly doomed if you can do it. It's basically shortened voyria, and as you'll know, voyria is unstackable (it's unstackable here as well, since it always cures first before the only other affliction in its cure tree) and uses sip balance. To pull it off, you have to perform the Lusternian lock and maintain it for a long period of time (enough time for the voyria to kill), and if you can do that, you'll probably be able to bleed or damage most targets out already.
The harmony insta is also pretty much impossible to do in combat. It's a dual mana/ego insta given to an archetype that does physical affs, (no stacking of focus affs) and zero ego damage (beyond a couple of weak ones in Harmony). It can be done in groups, obviously, but you're better off doing your usual monk repertoire in most group combat scenarios.
Monks' normal repertoire, however, is very potent, as many have pointed out. They get average damage normally, but have several tools that can multiply this damage: target being prone adds a damage modifier, target wounds also add a modifier. They can end up doing huge bursts of damage every balance, alongside their fairly many afflictions. To add to this, of the two physical classes, their afflictions are not random. Not to say warriors can't choose what afflictions to give, but warriors always have to struggle against RNG (random number generator) and it's sometimes down to a matter of luck as to whether the affliction they give on a particular hit is what they want at that point in time - monks don't have to worry about that. Monk combat is not a mindless thing, however, and you'll find you need to strategize properly and put in quite a bit of effort and time to create the forms way before you start participating in combat.
What avenues would be open to me to make money? There's always bashing for gold, which will be a staple, but I was wondering if there are any tradeskills that are guaranteed to return a profit if I work diligently at it.
What other ways aside from Quests/Bashing/Tradeskills exist to generate income, if any?
Lesson pools is something else that is very different from the traditional IRE model. /confused
Monks have pretty much all of their offense condensed in their kata skillset, although actual warrior (weapon) offense comes almost exclusively from the knighthood skillset, too.
Bards have the advantage that you can be very useful in groups without even specialising in Music. Perfectfifth is at apprentice Music skill level, and if you're a city bard, hangedman is at 50% into capable in Tarot.
Leaves a lot of room to put lessons into survival skills or, if you prefer, aethercraft or influencing, if you like having means of leveling up in peace and at a proper pace.
Forgiveness is the fragrance that the violet sheds on the heel that has crushed it.
-
However, theoretically, couldn't I build up a stock and have it in a Shop and then go hunt? Surely there's a balance to having a 'Passive income' at the same time as well as generating an 'Active income' through hunting and quests?
And, in addition to my final questions a couple posts up, assuming knowledge of the world, level 100, how much gold could someone hunt up in an hour unmolested?
I just checked CREDITS FOR SALE and it scared the crap out of me.
Definitely going to have to think about this. :<
Forgiveness is the fragrance that the violet sheds on the heel that has crushed it.
Come such a point that one is able to compete on a fairly equitable level for late-game bashing, gold is pretty easy to acquire, I'm told. Of course, influencing is good gold (begging, selling esteem) and great XP. There's also aether hunting, which probably is a bit difficult to get a good crew together, but manage it and it goes very, very well.
That's why I said it's daunting. If 20k/hour is not accurate and you can indeed gain gold faster than that, it becomes less. Even so, it's still daunting. The ability to put in the grunt work and earn your credits rather than buying them has always been the carrot to entice you.
I'm not someone who is against buying credits, it's just that I can't right now. Having said that, my last credit purchase was 15000. I also know things are easier now with Elite memberships (amazing things) but it's a concern I'm going to have to consider before getting my hopes up.
Hopefully tomorrow when more people are awake they'll be able to offer more insight into this.
That said, maybe I am one of the outliers, I don't know, and even though I haven't really been doing a whole lot of bashing lately, it seems like I'm never losing any major quantities of gold. I'd say if I started bashing for the few hours that I sit around and chat, I'd probably be earning more than spending.
Granted, I don't buy credits with gold as I don't really need to, but if we're looking at it from a combatant's perspective, I've never hurt for curatives, and often buy items that are not necessarily needed for combat. Haven't really bothered to go looking for the cheapest stuff either, just find the first place that sells what I need and buy it.
Forgiveness is the fragrance that the violet sheds on the heel that has crushed it.
As a best-case example, the realm of Morgfyre has around 80 gentlemen these days, if I recall correctly. It doesn't get hunted out often since the mobs yell for order members to hear, but if you manage to bash them all and they're nicely fat and full with gold, you can easily clean it in less than an hour and they drop ~800-1600 gold each. That's 100k gold right there. There are other areas in the game that are less dangerous and don't get bashed out all the time, so it's worth checking around and finding out about them. As an alternative, charity influencing will get you the gold of a mob, too, but unless the mob is weak to charity, it takes quite a bit longer than high end hunting.
You, sir, are a monster.
Forgiveness is the fragrance that the violet sheds on the heel that has crushed it.
Futhermore, these are my current skills. Would it be worthwhile to wait and try and get gold with them before making a switch? That musthave been my plan last time I played, but it's been 4 years and I have no idea if it's even worthwhile anymore.
Common Skills Rank Pool
------------- ------------ ------------
Combat Inept Melee
Resilience Inept Fitness
Discernment Apprentice Intellect
Highmagic Inept Arcana
Planar Apprentice Mysticism
Discipline Novice Willpower
Environment Inept Communion
Influence Inept Magnetism
Dramatics Inept Performance
Arts Inept Finearts
Beastmastery Inept Magnetism
Aethercraft Inept Mysticism
Trade Skills Rank Pool
------------- ------------ ------------
Enchantment Transcendent Arcana
Spellcraft
Guild Skills Rank Pool
------------- ------------ ------------
Elementalism Transcendent Mysticism
Geomancy
Psionics Adept Intellect
Illusions Inept Intellect
On the other hand, Newton Caverns is a small goldmine if you get a good routine going with the corpse hand-ins. Starting a fresh character would give you a chance to compare, and keep your existing character as a fallback.
Lobo is one of the stronger races for monk. Not for the regen (which is good) but for the high Str/Dex/Con and overall favorable resistances. Magic weakness is less of a hindrance than it was previously, and you'll have several options for boosting your magic resistance.
Changing into a harmony/lobo monk now is definitly going to make your bashing easier. It may not make it any faster (like I mentioned, mages compete on the same level as monks in pve perfectly) but you'll definitely be tankier. The only exception will be TK mages with forcefield up, but you don't have that set up in your current skills, as far as I can see.
PK wise, Lobo isn't the best choice for a monk. Speed is more important - but you can still compete perfectly well at neutral balance. I was neutral balance for the longest time and I didn't run into unreasonable limitations.
Quick question for you @Lerad , what effects Monk Damage to mobs? Weapon stat? Str? Dex? Skill level?