Monks

The monk class is old news by now, but I hadn't tried it until recently. I'm normally not one to spend a lot of time playing alts; I only played one character throughout almost my entire time playing WoW. But waiting for raid lockouts on the paladin is dull, so I rolled one to try it out.

The first thing I noticed was that this class kills things extremely quickly. At low levels, the 2-chi finishing move almost kills an even-level mob in a single crit! And the windwalker special move (Fists of Fury) is just absurdly strong. Pulling four or five mobs is completely feasible.

I'm not sure whether this is due to the monk being overpowered at low levels, or just the way the game plays nowadays. In any case, it was amusing to compare it to my memories of going Wand Spec (the recommended build) on my first character so I wouldn't have to drink after every mob. Of course, pulling two mobs at once would have been out of the question.

It's interesting to consider whether the earlier, harsh model or the new, forgiving one is preferable. Zipping around from mob to mob with no downtime is certainly more fun, and in my opinion corpse runs were much too frequent in early WoW.

However, the current model seems to trivialize the game in some ways. For example, the monk has an ability that causes your attacks to ignore a portion of armor for 20 seconds. It certainly seems like the game is encouraging you to keep this buff up, but when mobs die in a few hits anyway it hardly seems to matter.

I suppose what I'm saying is that the game should encourage you to play at the highest level it permits. If some element of skill is introduced, then practicing that skill should have a reward. The game should not be impossible for players who choose to ignore that element, but they should be at least a little less effective than those who do. Designing things otherwise seems like a recipe for unhappiness.