Adept vs monk: the final nail in the coffin

[Kajhera]

Did you just criticize both a comment and a comment criticizing the logic of that comment as contrary to a prior claim?

(I almost abandoned that post because I can't be bothered to figure out who posted what. But alas it posted without me. This post is largely pointless too.)

[Lycanthromancer]

If you're arguing his monk is notably unpowerful, I'm not sure how him using a lot of ACFs proves anything about the monk's core skeleton.

Hi Welcome.

If anything, then he "proved" that the core Monk skeleton is really underpowered.

More fail.

I used Libris Mortis

This isn't a Core-Only concept to begin with.

Jaronk's comment about using less books (guess what, it always will since items/feats are the only noncore thing an adapt can have) is being taken way out of parturition.

Stop trying to contribute SorO.

Oh, right. You aren't.

[Kajhera]

... of course, that is a very odd thing to be taken way out of.

Though quite frankly I *would* like to keep the animated dead as far away from childbirth as possible. Even if you reign undead them to have profession (midwife), thank you.

[Lycanthromancer]

... of course, that is a very odd thing to be taken way out of.

Though quite frankly I *would* like to keep the animated dead as far away from childbirth as possible. Even if you reign undead them to have profession (midwife), thank you.

Or you could just turn the babies into wights and laugh maniacally as they gnaw their way out and proceed to plague the living.

MUAHAHAHAHAHA!

[veekie]

What is a Qinggong Monk?

The idea is you take this ACF with this ACF and this feat on top of this chassis.

Result: Beer powered monk with enlightenment lasers and rocket punches.

[Bozwevial]

This isn't a Core-Only concept to begin with.

Jaronk's comment about using less books (guess what, it always will since items/feats are the only noncore thing an adapt can have) is being taken way out of parturition.

The debate here isn't about core versus non-core. The debate is about the degree to which each build relies on material beyond its initial printing.

Giacomo's monk uses five books for six substitution levels (Player's Handbook 2, Exemplars of Evil, Complete Champion, Dungeonscape, Planar Handbook); Tome of Battle for Martial Stance, Snap Kick, the discipline weapon property, and a maneuver-granting item; Complete Champion again for Knowledge Devotion; Complete Scoundrel for skill tricks; Unearthed Arcana for Item Familiar; Complete Warrior for Rapid Stunning; Magic Item Compendium for the Scout's Headband, Third Eye Improvisation, Ghost Shroud, Winged Vest, Greatreach Bracers, Ki Straps, Healing Belt, Torc of the Titans, and Heartseeking Amulet; Dragon Magic for the Fanged Ring; and Savage Species for the Necklace of Natural Attack. I think that's everything, which amounts to twelve sourcebooks outside of core.

JaronK's adept, on the other hand, uses Libris Mortis for Corpse Crafter, Mother Cyst, and Nimble Bones. Oh, and Tome of Battle for a maneuver-granting item. That's two additional sourcebooks. If we were to take your stance that only items and feats count in this respect because those are available to both parties, we have eight sourcebooks to two.

Granted, if we take the class and available material as a whole, the amount of sourcebooks used is meaningless. However, I'd invite everyone to consider a quote from Giacomo himself:

To illustrate how much the expert uses his class abilities you say it is way less item-dependent than the monk, but the whole point is not about magic item dependence, but how much additional stuff (mundane items, rituals, magic buffs and magic items) in total you need to perform.

In terms of "additional stuff," the monk uses quite a bit more than the adept, and there's still some debate as to whether the monk can perform as advertised.

[Sinfire Titan]

Granted, if we take the class and available material as a whole, the amount of sourcebooks used is meaningless. However, I'd invite everyone to consider a quote from Giacomo himself:

To illustrate how much the expert uses his class abilities you say it is way less item-dependent than the monk, but the whole point is not about magic item dependence, but how much additional stuff (mundane items, rituals, magic buffs and magic items) in total you need to perform.

In terms of "additional stuff," the monk uses quite a bit more than the adept, and there's still some debate as to whether the monk can perform as advertised.

That's actually pretty funny Boz. Good find!

[JaronK]

Huh, I forgot I'd used that maneuver item.  It was a throwaway at the end.  Okay, well, that's two splats then... could easily be one, as that item is hardly critical (but it is handy).

JaronK

[Lycanthromancer]

This isn't a Core-Only concept to begin with.

Jaronk's comment about using less books (guess what, it always will since items/feats are the only noncore thing an adapt can have) is being taken way out of parturition.

The debate here isn't about core versus non-core. The debate is about the degree to which each build relies on material beyond its initial printing.

That, and the sheer amount of effort it takes to optimize into usefulness. The adept hardly requires any (just a feat or three), whereas the monk? Yeeeah...

[JaronK]

And the Adept hardly required any of it, considering none of his Libris Mortis feats were even used significantly in this fight.  I was just building the Adept I had talked about... not one designed for this fight.

JaronK

[Sir Giacomo]

I am overwhelmed...
...will post more next weekend (no time until then  ).

- Giacomo

[X-Codes]

... of course, that is a very odd thing to be taken way out of.

Though quite frankly I *would* like to keep the animated dead as far away from childbirth as possible. Even if you reign undead them to have profession (midwife), thank you.

Or you could just turn the babies into wights and laugh maniacally as they gnaw their way out and proceed to plague the living.

MUAHAHAHAHAHA!

They already did that in Twilight.

[Shinzen]

... of course, that is a very odd thing to be taken way out of.

Though quite frankly I *would* like to keep the animated dead as far away from childbirth as possible. Even if you reign undead them to have profession (midwife), thank you.

Or you could just turn the babies into wights and laugh maniacally as they gnaw their way out and proceed to plague the living.

MUAHAHAHAHAHA!

They already did that in Twilight.

See, the rest of us wouldn't know as we didn't read or watch it. Except maybe the first book. I try to forget but it's still in my nightmares.

For shame.

[SorO_Lost]

Oh, right. You aren't.

I learned from posts like yours.

... of course, that is a very odd thing to be taken way out of.

Though quite frankly I *would* like to keep the animated dead as far away from childbirth as possible. Even if you reign undead them to have profession (midwife), thank you.

While Firefox has successfully implemented a spell checker, it has not came up with an idiot checker.

The debate here isn't about core versus non-core. The debate is about the degree to which each build relies on material beyond its initial printing.

And what value does that have? Does your entire group lack books and you're using... Well hell the SRD is six or more books. Idk, a PHB and candles? Where are you really going with this? WotC's online releases is enough to make another ten or twelve publishes books of content. Hell my phone has more jpged rules then we have collectively posted here and with them, book count has never been an issue with any DM I've ever played under. In short, book limit is nothing more than a limitation of rules the DM has access to, which you as the guy with all the rules for your character, can provide. And if your DM is blanket banning entire lists of books you wanted to use, it's called karma for your behavior here.

While you are sitting there going "Diplomacy + Greatest Core Monster You Know ? I'm useful!" and bitching about how lazy you are to come up with a detailed build under some shabby excuse and instead built entirely on someone else validating your combat capability, Gia put forth effort. Sure it may come up short, flawed, and accident prone. But at least he isn't talking about how great someone else's pokemon are and submitting his ideas rather than bashing someone's concept in every post they can.

Don't complain about how some one is more resourceful than you, it's why you're here. To learn them.

[Sinfire Titan]

See, the rest of us wouldn't know as we didn't read or watch it.

For you, there's TvTropes.

[Bozwevial]

And what value does that have? Does your entire group lack books and you're using... Well hell the SRD is six or more books. Idk, a PHB and candles? Where are you really going with this? WotC's online releases is enough to make another ten or twelve publishes books of content. Hell my phone has more jpged rules then we have collectively posted here and with them, book count has never been an issue with any DM I've ever played under. In short, book limit is nothing more than a limitation of rules the DM has access to, which you as the guy with all the rules for your character, can provide. And if your DM is blanket banning entire lists of books you wanted to use, it's called karma for your behavior here.

Let me put it this way. If I made a commoner build using seven different splatbooks that managed to kick the ass of a CR 12 dragon, that would not prove the supremacy of the commoner. That would prove the supremacy of the various options pulled from those books. Likewise, a monk build which relies heavily on magic items, feats, skill tricks, and the like from a wide variety of books does nothing to prove or disprove the hypothesis that the monk is worse than the adept. It only proves that this particular monk needs a wider variety of books to be effective, and the degree to which it is effective is still debated.

The most you can assume any DM or player has are the core rulebooks and the books from which the players' classes come. It doesn't matter that WotC has a wide variety of available material free for anyone with an internet connection; book limitations are frequently the result of perceived balance issues and not availability. Players frequently have little room in which to work, and while the ability of a class to work well with few other sources isn't an absolute metric for power or balance, it's certainly a major determining factor. If you can only make a class viable with a great many sources open to you, you have a class that is only viable in corner cases, regardless of how easily those sources are obtained.

[Bauglir]

Here's the thing. Your monk exists, and whatever of its features are accessible only by monks are points in its favor. However, Tiers have to take into account real games, besides theoretical power. This is why certain options for ACFs can move a class up or down a Tier, and why such cases typically get their own separate entry.

You can present any Monk you like, but given the number of splats involved and the fact that each has a nonzero chance to be banned, vs the Adept which is playable (if not super-effective) right out of the box, and the particular optimized one discussed here which only uses (but doesn't really rely upon) Libris Mortis and the Draconomicon (for dragon zombie rules), I'd say it's fairly obvious that your Monk has a strictly lesser chance of making it into any given game. That's a point against it, and while that's not enough to come to a complete conclusion about the class' overall power (after all, have any of us really been allowed to play a RAW Spell-to-Power Erudite under a DM who actually understood the implications of it?), it is a single piece of evidence.

When combined with the base Monk's general inability to function, that does tend to weigh against it. Also, bear in mind; which of your ACFs of choice can your build do without? That's another perspective to consider. Adaptability. If your Monk works only with that specific combination of variables, then it's an outlier on the power curve. So would be an Adept necromancer if it couldn't control significant undead without access to Libris Mortis or something, but it can. If your Monk doesn't really need many and is just using them as an optimizational edge to build on one (or two, at most) ACFs, then you have a decent argument for that ACF moving the Monk up a tier.

EDIT: Corrected a stupid typo.

[X-Codes]

... of course, that is a very odd thing to be taken way out of.

Though quite frankly I *would* like to keep the animated dead as far away from childbirth as possible. Even if you reign undead them to have profession (midwife), thank you.

Or you could just turn the babies into wights and laugh maniacally as they gnaw their way out and proceed to plague the living.

MUAHAHAHAHAHA!

They already did that in Twilight.

See, the rest of us wouldn't know as we didn't read or watch it. Except maybe the first book. I try to forget but it's still in my nightmares.

For shame.

The extent of my involvement in that disaster is watching the first movie.  I heard about the undead-baby-ripping-itself-out-of-the-womb bit from a friend who read all the books.

[Shinzen]

... of course, that is a very odd thing to be taken way out of.

Though quite frankly I *would* like to keep the animated dead as far away from childbirth as possible. Even if you reign undead them to have profession (midwife), thank you.

Or you could just turn the babies into wights and laugh maniacally as they gnaw their way out and proceed to plague the living.

MUAHAHAHAHAHA!

They already did that in Twilight.

See, the rest of us wouldn't know as we didn't read or watch it. Except maybe the first book. I try to forget but it's still in my nightmares.

For shame.

The extent of my involvement in that disaster is watching the first movie.  I heard about the undead-baby-ripping-itself-out-of-the-womb bit from a friend who read all the books.

The question at that point of course is "If they didn't think that to be enough to stop reading, why are they still your friend? Do they collect skulls? Should you be sleeping with a sword?"

[X-Codes]

Well, she collects swords.