What's the best way to deal with monks as a warrior?

Rivius

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/16429247/monked.html

I made some tries at some arm affs here. How would you have approached it?

Xenthos

Leave the room.

I don't know, Acrobatics monks are like warrior kryptonite a lot of the time.  Rebound, stance, parry, acrobatics dodge to keep the wounding down, and then the fact that warriors don't have any form of hindering that doesn't further slow down the offense at low wounding levels.

However, in the log, I'm seeing way too much headslamming.  That's not going to accomplish much against them.  It's definitely not going to make them lose momentum, which is the key to Monk-fighting.  I think if you had focused more on actually going for the collapsed nerves on arms you might've gotten further, since he doesn't actually look like an acrobatics user and his parry / stance doesn't appear too optimal, though it's somewhat hard to tell from the log.

You needed to focus on his arms and legs instead of headslamming or going for the gut.  If you could get him tendoned that would also have helped.  Pin is nice, but actually getting him down for the time of a regen cure would give you much-needed time to push forward (and set his progress back).

Basically it looks like you were trying to be too defensive- in warriors v. monks it comes down to "who can put the other on the defensive first" and he got there fast and held the high ground the entire time.  You have to stop his offense or at mo5 he's going to just roll right over you, and for warriors the best way to do that is the high-wound-affs.

But the way I mostly approach it is:
Bring friends who are better suited to countering Monks. :P

Any class with decent hindering as part of the buildup towards their kill condition just wrecks the Monk offense.

Rivius

The headslamming was me trying to see if that would help stop the yanks for ninshi but admittedly that probably did more harm than good on my end.

Lerad

Generally speaking (I haven't read the log yet:) Monks primarily work off momentum, not off opponent wounds. Therefore, a good curing is secondary to hindering or momentum dropping. This is the iron rule for all monks. You cannot hope to keep up with their wound building (not to mention their affs) if you allow them to build momentum, and if they do manage to build wounds, their damage balloons ridiculously at the higher tiers.

And oh my god. I am 1 pagedwn into this log and this is incredible. I haven't looked at the Ninjakari in detail before this, but this is ridiculous. It looks as though ninshi stops salve applications 100%, AND does a ton of bleeding (300+) AND only costs 75 ka. What the hell. Ootangk is a 500 ka weight grapple that does 60 whooping bleed. And only has a CHANCE of stopping cures. And apparently, yank has a 100% prone+stun modifier that also only costs and additional 75 ka.

The bleed is ridiculous. This makes shofangi shred look like a walk in the park, and the nekotai repertoire look like a mosquito bite. I'm not sure if it's the additional bleed mod or ninshi/jakati itself, but the bleeding that can be done at 0mo is plain ridiculous. No other word describes it. 300+ bleed with a 0mo raze form? The nekotai bleeding kick does 200 bleed at 5mo.

You're missing the ashlamkh (kick) mangle line and the ninombhi (arm action) windpipe line:

<font face="Courier New, FixedSys, Lucida Console, Courier New, Courier" size="2"><font color="#8B4513"><br><br>Rastamutti</font><font color="#C0C0C0"> snaps an iron chain of dark crimson hue at your throat, crushing your windpipe.</font></font><font face="Courier New, FixedSys, Lucida Console, Courier New, Courier" size="2"><font color="#C0C0C0">Springing up, </font><font color="#8B4513">Rastamutti</font><font color="#C0C0C0"> whirls his leg around, pounding your right leg with such force 
that your limb crunches and dangles uselessly.</font></font>

If you factor that in, you should be able to realize you are locked earlier than before your system tried to cure out. That might have saved you, though he got lucky with his follow up form hitting all the affs that he needed, even after your green cured the best affs to get out of the lock. The ninjakari lock doesn't take boost, but is heavily poison dependant and thus generally speaking, fairly unreliable. He did his lock/followup forms 3 times in a row, and it's likely the average combatant won't even get locked by the end of it. You got quite unlucky with the curing, getting relocked (all his 4 chances of giving the required poisons proc'd) on the second form, and that finally killed you. The lack of power to green was a major reason you died, since one more chance at a green and it's likely he won't be able to stick the lock at all, though given that you had to use every bit of power to even do any damage to him at all, that's pretty understandable. Usually, this tactic won't even work, and burst organs would get cured.

He didn't need to burst organs, though. He didn't even need to do the fancy head concussion/chest strategy he played with a little. He could just focus on illgathoru legs over and over and he'd just damage you out. I'm not sure how much momentum illgathoru takes nowadays, but whatever it is, it needs to be increased. Illgathoru's cheap costs were a holdover from when grapples were absolutely unreliable, and even non acrobatic writhes had a decent chance of getting out before the ender. Nowadays, only acrobatics have a reliable chance at all, and with all the stun available in the skillset, even they will not be able to nullify much of a high mo ninja's yanks. The stuns, the cheap tendon, the ridiculous ninshi effects and cheap costs and the ridiculous bleeds come together pretty much disgustingly. 300+ bleed on a 0mo razing form pretty much disables applying health to cure wounds entirely, which unlocks ALL of the ninja wound based affs (kneecaps, elbows, prone+stun and the kata concussions) and makes the wound requirements moot. Either the wound restrictions need to be made relevant (by removing the bleeding and thus the ability to force targets to ignore wound curing) or the ka/momentum costs of these affs especially the prone+stun, to be increased. They pretty much ignore parry by default (grapples don't hit parry) and the moment a stance fails on the legs, and the first ninshi hits, it's game over for wound curing. The amount of bleed immediately locks applying health for anything other than hp/mp curing out of the picture. And once the wounds build, it's prone+stun pretty much every single form. Beyond ridiculous.

I'm not sure what affs a warrior can go for to counter this. Arms is definitely a must, to hinder. Even having 1 arm broken is a plus, as ninshi can't be used without both arms ready. I can think of spamming dendroxin with hemiplegy/nerves in order to slow down their attacking rate with ninshi, and going from there. Not sure how viable that would actually be.

Edit: Okay, so parry does stop armed grapples nowadays, I guess that went in with the rebound change. So that's something. He has to draw parry/stance away from your legs to start his ninshi bleed strategies with any reliability. You can manual your parry to switch to legs or update your system to see if you can automate it, but keeping stance/parry on your legs can prevent easy ninshi/tendons which then leads to stun and bleed hell. Keeping standing is going to be very difficult since they have a stun+prone modifier for a jakati hit to any bodypart (wound dependant, but with the bleed levels as it is, that's as good as irrelevant) but they won't be able to regen-stack your legs as easily without access to ninshi/tendon, and that'll give you a much larger window to be unprone before they hit again.

In the mean time, you'll need to try to find a way to get your affs in without using too many lunges, to save up for green. If you can, make a manual green button. If you see you're getting bled too much, hit it. The health cure and the affs cure will give you a chance to stand up and get out of danger (tendon can get cured by green, iirc). It'll hurt your offense, but burning all your power that recklessly against a class that can green lock you is always unwise anyway.

Lothringen

Short version: you can't.

Rivius

Hrm. I double-checked the triggers you mentioned and it seems I had them in. The crushed windpipe line is one I send a "quaff" for to test to see if it isn't an illusion. The second line seems to be akogh which actually breaks the limb instead of mangling it. I'll experiment a bit more with niricol and dendroxin and also try to save at least 3 power.

Also, Malarious told me it's around 50% salve failure. I'd have to ask around to find out if that's the exact number. If it were 100% though, we wouldn't be able to preapply.

Lerad

Ahh, you're right. I have quite a few inaccuracies in my understanding of the Ninja abilities. My bad. You got in a successful pre-apply 4 out of a total of 12 times, so ninshi isn't 100% chance to block preapply. The jakati chance to stun+prone is also legs only, so putting a lot more focus of your parry/stance on legs will definitely help counter the ninja repertoire. (It's the yank stun+prone that is any bodypart)

And you're also right about akogh. It appears my lack of experience (as I mentioned) with the ninjas is showing. The kick is akogh, and only breaks the leg. Ashlamkh is actually an arm action, not a kick, and it mangles when broken. And yeah, the moment you sent quaff and the system found out it was windpiped, it sent gedulah, which meant all the mangle/broken legs lines were properly registered.

And I also realised I missed the fact that he actually looped his lock cycle twice. So it was 6 consecutive forms for the lock. Yeah, shows how unreliable the ninja lock is, if nothing else. You made a few mistakes curing the first cycle, that if you improve, will definitely have helped to save you from their lock. It really isn't as reliable as the nekotai one. It's ironic that you died to that instead of the ridiculous bleeding instead.

I'll admit, you definitely had horrible luck with the lock. You actually tried to pre-apply for the first cycle, but it wasn't fast enough. You sent apply regen at 51638.84, and the lock form hit at 51638.97, and your command when through at 51639.10. Because of your quaff check for illusions, you ended up applying regeneration only 2.5s after he hit with that form, (which gave you windpipe+slickness+mangle half-lock) and that greatly slowed down the mangle cure. What's worse, somehow, your system didn't clear mangle when it finally got cured, at 51645.77, and ended up applying regeneration again, when you should have instead applied mending and stood up to enable your parry/stancing once more. The stance/parry would have given you a great deal higher chance of survival. If you could've parried or stanced any one of the three hits, he's shit out of luck, because all three hits and both poison applications in that form are essential for the lock. Akogh doesn't prone either, so you can definitely have had a chance at stancing/parrying all three hits.

The window was tiny, for sure, but that's also largely due to staggered lock curing. The first cycle (timestamps mentioned above) could've been almost fully cleared, with regen sent almost immediately. Instead, your system's anti illusion had you send a quaff check, and then a smoke myrtle to cure windpipe, 1s later to eat calamus for slickness, and then send apply regen. Instead, you should have a toggle to switch on your quaff illusion checker for group fights, and turn it off during spars or when you know for sure you're fighting a single ninja. This reduces, first of all, the delay from quaff checking. Upon curing windpipe, it should send a stacked eat calamus+apply regeneration, instead of just calamus, and then waiting for the command to go through before sending apply. Because a slickness blocked salve application doesn't take salve balance, even if slickness didn't cure (because of stupidity or something), your system can try the stacked command again. This should cut down your regen application from 2.5s in the log to 1+s with latency.

The second cycle was where your bad luck really showed. He got slickness/asthma poison ticks on both the first and the second form to proc. That locked you in, and since you didn't have enough power to double gedulah, you were stuck with burst organs. Poison proc is partly boosted from wounds, so he also had the rng to his advantage that late in the match, after all the wounds were built, and since mangle can't be gedulah'd, it's a 100% re-lock on that second form as long as he can get the poisons to proc. Nothing much you can do there except to save power for a second green.

(P.S. You were also tumbling in the wrong direction, it looks like.)

Rivius

Hey, Lerad, thanks a whole lot for your analysis of my log. I didn't even catch those curing errors you mentioned, mostly that I re-preapplied after illgathoru already went off (which by that time is pointless) and that I didn't catch the mangle curing. It took me a while this morning to find out why the latter happened, but it was some derpy carelessness I had with my timers that made them fire too early, making the line not register. I never had this happen before, so thanks a lot for helping me catch that. You're right that that could have helped me stand up a lot faster during that first time he tried at the lock.

I'll see about sending calamus and salve applications together. Never really thought about doing it, but it could make a huge difference and worth exploring.

Saving power for green is something I try to do, though I really do need to use power to build wounds and against that kind of hindering, I need it as soon as possible. I'll try conserving 3 power or so on me when possible, but I'll really need to try to figure out some wound-building strategy that works solidly for monks. One thing you did mention was using niricol and dendroxin more, which is something I generally try to do but must have forgotten to here.

Your feedback's been pretty great and valuable, so thank you again.

Cyndarin

So here's the deal with monks. You are either 1) a class that has a lot of heavy hindering passively or as a part of your kill method or 2) you aren't. 

If you are, you can sit in their room and manage them. Guilds like Nihilists, illuminati, geomancers, other monks, etc.

Guilds that require timing and landing specific afflictions that don't hinder or don't hinder overly much as their natural progression of their offense have a much harder time because they are running constantly. Bards, wiccans, warriors vs tattoos. 

It actually speaks of a larger disparity in the game that I've kind of talked on for a long time. The classes that kill you while hindering you to oblivion and the classes that don't. A Nihilists can lock you up and kill you and neither perfect curing nor playing defensive will save you. Once the lock is started, you are dead. SD on the other hand has to set you up and you will be stabbing them in the face the whole time. Same goes for warriors. Monks lean towards the NIhilists side of things. 

That and monks are never going to be fixed. Momentum is just a bad mechanic because there are no requirements that the target be a certain status, it's all on the monk to just race to 5 momentum. Bash hindering forms until 5 and then faceroll. I hate fighting them, though luckily twists don't reset so I can lame fight them sometimes.

Veyrzhul

My general tactic is to try and tank the monk offense as long as possible and see if I can build any wounds at all. Usually, you'll fail at first if you haven't done those kind of fights against that guild a few times already since the curing needs improving/fine-tuning, and even after taking care of that, buildings wounds is of course not a given. Anything other than warrior attacks are a waste of time. If you start having to resort to headslam or web (the fact aside that they don't help much), you might as well just leave. An exception is perhaps ecto for Necro warriors, although even for those, it doesn't really help promoting their warrior offense, so unless they try setting up a sacrifice, it won't help.

Rastamutti in particular seemed to have pretty average robes the last times I did a long 1v1 against him, so if that hasn't changed, you probably have a chance to beat him 1v1. If he has got better ones now or learnt trans tattoos, then I don't know. It's been a long, long time since I've had well runed-out weapons, so I can't say what's theoretically feasible and what isn't.

Hiriako

In the end it comes down to being able to stack afflictions that will be able to keep the monk down. I'm not sure most specs can manage it, except for knowing PB can. In that case, it's a matter of bursting wounds into a tendon/collapsed nerve train. Cavalier might be able to, if the monk isn't hindering too severely. That, or a little luck getting shattered ankles and knockdowns leading into crush leg and severed spine. Warriors have a hard time against monks though.

Also, if you see lifedrain (Psymet skill, glowing eyes after hit) then read disruption. Either it'll slow them down as they put it back up, or weaken their healing of wounds.

Rastamutti

Let me preface with this, this has been extremely encouraging for me. When I started getting working forms
you were the person I still couldn't get a single bit of wounds on.

Defensive suggestions:
First thing I've noticed, I see your mana drop but don't see an actual clot after the ninshi.
I'm assuming your system gags this but I'd make sure.

Second, your system did show bleeding on the yank. I'd go ahead and just clot a good bit
then do the show bleeding. A ninshi does about 160 bleed with two bleed runes and modifiers.
My yank does about 300 bleed, with two bleed runes, on all body parts minus the head. I'm not
sure how high it is there but I know it can get awfully high when I do a level 6 momentum boost.

Third, treat preregeneration like stupidity. Sent it at least twice to bypass the ninshi chance
of stopping it.

Fourth, your stancing was extremely lacking. My kicks do a lot of my wound damage. If you
can stance those off, it'll cut back a lot on my damage and wounds.

Fifth, for some reason your parry would go to chest from one kick, while your head/right leg
had some massive wounds. Your chest never even hit medium wounds the whole fight.

Sixth, towards the end your rebounding stopped coming up. Made it a lot easier for me to go
for my lock combo.

Seventh, I agree with Lerad. I really don't think your system is registering crushed windpipe right.
I see you get hit with a combo that lands crushed windpipe and slickness so you quaff but and
try to eat calamus. Later, when your system gets the quaff message it then prioritizes curing the
crushed windpipe.

Eighth gets an example:
Springing up, Rastamutti whirls his leg around, pounding your right leg with such force
that your limb crunches and dangles uselessly.
Rastamutti snaps an iron chain of dark crimson hue at your throat, crushing your windpipe.
Rastamutti jerks back an iron chain of dark crimson hue as it strikes, lacerating the
flesh.
A magic aura flares around you and completely absorbs the damage.
You notice that your sweat glands have begun to rapidly secrete a foul, oily substance.
Rastamutti lashes out at your right leg with an iron chain of dark crimson hue, mangling
it with a fleshy thud.
Rastamutti jerks back an iron chain of dark crimson hue as it strikes, lacerating the
flesh.
You feel a tightening sensation grow in your lungs.
show bleeding
quaff
eat calamus
(acorn): Curing 'slickness' with 'eat calamus'.
[51648.09|45%h|41%m|100%e|4p|100%en|93%w] elrxkdbp<>-
(-913h)

You may drink another health, mana, or bromide potion. (3.93)
sip health
(acorn): Curing 'severe hp damage' with 'sip health'.
[51648.27|45%h|41%m|100%e|4p|100%en|93%w] elrxkdbp<>-

Your mind is able to focus once again. (1.58)
You bleed 182 health.
clot 7
[51648.29|42%h|41%m|100%e|4p|100%en|93%w] elrxkdbp<>-
(-182h)

[debug]: 168 bleeding.
Your crushed windpipe inhibits your ability to swallow.
evoke gedulah

^ Your system delayed a good while right there noticing the situation. See

Offensively:
Stay offensive, the stuns you get from some of your moves help slow me down while getting you
somewhere.
Talk to Kelly, she has some good ideas with sleeping/impaling. They've slowed me down a bit.
Assaulting my legs gets tendons that slow me down. Also seems to help you build great wounds.
Try to keep me down like that.

Karlach

I found Monks an absolute pain as a 2h wielder, too easy at low level afflictions to take out an arm and thus shut down my whole offence. Essentially if I don't get an early collapse nerve and chain them I'm screwed.

Rivius

Hey, Rastamutti, thanks also for your comments and suggestions. I'll be looking over the log again to see if I catch these issues. Just some comments:

1) My system gags the clotting but it tries not to overdo it to prevent forcing any sips. I have a lot more health than I do mana so I can soak up a bit more bleeding before needing to clot. Either way, the bleeding here felt really, really high and I don't believe I can tank that indefinitely without eventually needing to sip.

2) Sending regeneration twice actually won't help here because the ninshi block still consumes salve balance. There was a delay after I regained salve balance during one point of the log, which was due to a timer error. Hopefully I've fixed that now...it's a very messy bit of code.

3) I was wondering if you could help me catch the oddities in my parry and stance. The grey numbers on my prompt are the timestamps I can use as reference. I admit it usually works okay, though it probably isn't optimal. As I know it, you can parry and stance weapon attacks but only stance kicks. Since kicks are the bulk of a monk's wounding, I try to prioritize my stanced areas for those that are kicked more, and divide my parry amongst the parts hit by the weapons.

By default I stance legs, and that's where most of your kicks went at the start, so you never saw that changing in the beginning. It seems that for most of the beginning, you would prone me midform (with either dhatogh or mantakaya) so that your kicks always bypassed stance as well.

Which was the point where I had a lot of head and right leg wounding and parried chest? I'd like to investigate that part, but I'm finding it difficult to find.

4) When did you notice rebounding stop coming up? The last point at which you razed it was 51654.03. I didn't smoke rebounding after that because that was the point at which you locked me, and your lock utilizes and requires chansu. I died shortly after. So it seems as if I had it kept up the entire fight.

5) The timing that quaff picked up the lock is inconsequential. I greened before your next form and if you look at the time stamps, the time difference between the hit and the symptom line is 0.41 seconds. 

As far as the impale and sleep thing goes, you can see at 51519.79, I did actually try that out, but the poisons didn't cooperate and I need three to successfully hit to pull that off. I tried to go for collapses but I didn't have much luck procing it or building the wounds for that.

I'd like to spar you some more for practice to see what else I can do here, and I extend that to monks in general. They are kind of my kryptonite next to guardians/wiccans and I'd like to see better what works or what doesn't.

Rastamutti

2) My bad. Thought it didn’t take salve balance on the fail. I need to fix that in my own code then. <?xml:namespace prefix = o ns = "urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:office" />

3) 

[51456.15|77%h|39%m|100%e|10p|100%en|91%w] elrxkdbp<>- 

 

headslam Rastamutti

You stand up and stretch your arms out wide.

stand

stance vitals

(acorn): Adjusting stance to 'vitals'.

unparry

parry rleg 100

(acorn): Adjusting parry to rleg.

[51456.34|

[51493.10|89%h|80%m|100%e|9p|100%en|88%w] lrxkdb<>-

 

clot 1

 

You have recovered equilibrium. (4.11)

stance vitals

(acorn): Adjusting stance to 'vitals'.

unparry

parry rleg 100

(acorn): Adjusting parry to rleg.

[51493.30|89%h|72%m|100%e|9p|100%en|88%w]

[51528.92|87%h|70%m|100%e|1p|100%en|85%w] elrkdb<>-

 

 

You have recovered balance on all limbs. (4.50)

assess Rastamutti

stance chest

(acorn): Adjusting stance to 'chest'.

unparry

parry rleg 50

(acorn): Adjusting parry to rleg.

parry head 50

(acorn): Adjusting parry to head.

[51529.01|87%h|70%m|100%e|1p|100%en|85%w]

[51544.87|55%h|37%m|100%e|1p|99%en|83%w] elrxkdbp<>-

 

You stand up and stretch your arms out wide.

stance vitals

(acorn): Adjusting stance to 'vitals'.

unparry

parry rleg 100

(acorn): Adjusting parry to rleg.

[51544.90|55%h|37%m|100%e|1p|99%en|83%w]

There are more. Just figured that’s enough.

4) Sorry, you do it by smoke pipenumber. Made me overlook a good bit of it.

5) Due to lag between client and server.. I’m just not sure you’re right here. I think that time makes a big difference. Almost ½ a second in 3 second combat is a good bit of time.

 

Rastamutti

Too lazy to go through and fix the copy/pastes. Sorry for the color problems.

Cyndarin

"Stance the kicks" is a weird suggestion.

 

Not sure that's actual advice. Of course the goal is the stance, whether it works is a different story.

Rivius

First three timestamps actually show you hitting my head and chest with kicks for a good bit, so naturally my stance went to vitals. The last one definitely does look like I should have stanced kick, so I'll see if maybe it's taking too long to react to changes. The irony is, your next kick (and strike) was stanced there anyway...

But thanks again for helping me look. I see at least one thing there that's a little odd.