Chapter 20: Notes for my Podcast: Grouping with a Prawn Cocktail Crisp. Episode 2.
Welcome to another edition of the Aegnus Nowak podcast. Remember to subscribe, like, and share if you enjoy it. Once again the podcasts comes to you from a secret location. I can’t tell you where I am, but I can tell you I’m in an attic room. Although it’s a bit on the small side, having a room to myself beats sharing one with my brother, who smells and snores, sorry Liam but this is a truthful podcast. I have a sloping roof that gets low enough over the bed that I have to be careful standing up. Yesterday I gave myself a stunning blow a monk would have been proud of by forgetting where I was and standing up too quickly.
Today was another good day in… well again I can’t tell you where we fought or the nature of the monsters we battled. There are some powerful people intent on crushing Lord Azanth into crumbs, or munching on him. And I’d hate to be the cause of that. I’m actually beginning to take a liking to our prawn cocktail friend. Wait, hear me out. I know you are going to say that this is how demons work: they are all friendly at first but only because they want to torture your soul forever. You can discuss this in the comments if you like. But the fact is, Lord Azanth can be quite funny. And he’s a big help to me. He’s obsessed with levelling.
Anyway, mid-morning I reached Level 7. That’s right! New skill time. Everyone older than fifth class knows that a Monk is a DPS class and that’s why pretty much every monk who reaches level 7 takes Flurry of Blows, which is an attack that nearly doubles your DPS by delivering multiple blows per attack and which is on a reset timer that gets shorter the more you level the skill. At high levels it absolutely is ferocious and if you are a monk who has Flurry of Blows, fair play to you. I bet your group loves you. I let Liam lecture me for a bit about why I should get it as my new skill, but the truth was I was much more interested in Still Heart.
Still Heart causes you to stay motionless and effectively you become an inanimate object, a statue of yourself. At low levels you fall to the floor when you trigger the skill and at high levels you can do this while standing. Also, the higher the level, the longer you can remain motionless. There’s a Redditor I follow (shout out to No Kode Katana). They are always arguing for Still Heart instead of Flurry of Blows and I’ve been convinced by them. Why? Because Still Heart drops your aggro by a huge amount. The game-mechanic idea is that monks hit so hard and fast, they sometimes cause a mob to turn its attention from the tank in front of them and go for the monk. With our low armour class, we monks lose hit points fast. So Still Heart is a life-saver. You trigger it and the mob turns back to the tank. That’s what the skill seems to have been designed for.
All right. You’re with me so far. Now, let me put the consensus position, which is that monks shouldn’t bother with wasting a skill to control aggro but instead they should manage battles with care. If for some reason the tank isn’t generating enough aggro, the monk should ease up, at least at the beginning of the fight. After about thirty seconds to a minute, a good tank will have so much aggro from using relevant skills that there’s no way the mob will turn, no matter what the monk is up to. And so instead of wasting a skill, you should take Flurry because your group wants you to be doing as much damage as possible.
No Kode Katana makes a different argument, not one based on saving your own life – don’t get me wrong, I’m happy to do that – but on the fact that with this skill you can split pull large groups of mobs. And there’s actually not a lot of ways to do that safely. Do a YouTube search on ‘monk split pulls with Still Heart’ and you’ll see what I mean. There are some amazing examples. Short version: you trigger the mobs by moving close to them, not by causing damage (that’s important, once you’ve delivered damage it’s much harder to get your aggro to zero), even big groups of monsters, like ten of them. You run. You hit Still Heart and what’s crucial is that even though you are lying there on the ground in front of these angry creatures who could tear you apart in seconds, they lose interest, like a cat when its toy no longer moves, and they go back to their starting positions. Thanks to the skill, your aggro is zero or even negative. Because they will have become strung out, you wait until just one mob is still within the proximity range to aggro and then you end Still Heart. There you are. You’ve got just one mob chasing you back to your group. Sometimes you have to bring three or four on the first split you just can’t manage to isolate one only. But with enough room to run around in; you can keep using Still Heart to split them up until you have the mob you want.
While Liam was extolling the benefits of Flurry of Blows, I checked in with Lord Azanth about all this. That’s the cool thing about Telepathy, you can be nodding away as if you are paying attention to your older brother, when actually you are holding an entirely different conversation. Sorry bro’; not sorry. It’s hard to imitate what the demon’s voice sounds like in my head, but the conversation went something like this:
Rash combat will be the undoing of us all. Our weakness is we cannot stand before our foes and trade blows. None of us can heal our wounded, nor wounds avoid once combat is joined. Our strength is that we can stand away from our foes and deliver attacks of surprising power. What use is Flurry of Blows to our style of fighting? What style of fighting is of most use to us? One that draws but one, two, or three enemies at the most towards us and by the power of my Intoxicating Scent and the Freeze of the mages, we hold them in place while we destroy them.
So you’re saying you agree with me? Still Heart is the way to go.
Indeed, it suits our strategy and no matter how powerful the skill, let us be modest enough to admit that Flurry of Blows does not fit. In the sphere of war let us remember that truth will always expose fancy and self-deceit. Let us prove honest in our limitations, most of all when the skill on offer does not fit in with our previous experience. For it is only thereby that we perceive the answers to the endless variety of problems, set for us by the nature of the world we live in.
He's gas, is Lord Azanth. I find I have to listen to the end of his sentences to figure out what he’s been talking about. I had one final reservation though, before choosing Still Heart.
Speaking of variety of problem, my only concern with Still Heart is boss fights. Sooner or later, we are going to have to be able to tackle boss mobs. And there, I’m worried that if Freeze is resisted or if the boss is immune to being rooted, we have no other hope than to cover me with Thornskin and for me to tank it. In which case, Still Heart is much less useful than Flurry.
You are mistaken, my young friend, for it is precisely when the creature cannot be held fast by the mages that your Still Heart is needed. Imagine we have attacked a powerful creature and discovered we cannot root it. Then must you run into the distance and attract its attention: perhaps harming it with your Ki Shock Wave. As the mighty creature nears you, you use Still Heart and it turns to the mages who have, in the meantime, been inflicting wounds upon the monster with Magic Missile. You stand up once it nears them and keep using your skill until it comes your way once more, only to find you are on the ground and of no interest when it has closed the gap to you. In such a fashion, we can keep the mighty but unimaginative beast moving back and forth.
Sounds good.
‘All right Liam,’ I said, ‘you can wrap up. I’ve chosen my skill.’ Call me a brat in the comments, but if you’ve got an older brother who is always taking charge, you’ll know why I gave him the impression I had agreed with him and taken Flurry of Blows as my Level 7 skill. He’s going to be in for a surprise tomorrow. I wish I could video the scene when I use my new skill and you could get to see his face when it happens. But don’t worry, I’ll tell you all about it in Episode 3.
Meanwhile, there’s one other topic I want to talk about in this episode, which is titans.
“In the beginning was chaos”, right? We all learn that at school. How only on the Plane of Life did rational beings prosper, but on all other planes humans, demons, and angels were surrounded by chaos and lived in constant danger. In an extraordinary and never-to-be repeated pact, the angel Lupulchra and the demon Tenebror agreed that they would combine their armies and subdue the primordial chaos created by the titans. One by one, they conquered the planes, with seven planes being assigned to the demons and seven to the angels.
That’s pretty much how it’s explained in my school textbook. That was thousands of years ago and if you look up old YouTube videos you can find Historians stating that Lupulchra and Tenebror were mythical, and questioning whether titans were even real. Well, now we know they’re real and they are making a comeback. Call us unlucky but ours is the first generation in millennia to experience unbound titans. Syceus is loose on the First Plane of Virtue, with the landscape changing daily in the wake of his travels. Nuska is loose on the First Plane of Wickedness, with entirely new mountain ranges being formed by her violent volcanic eruptions. And apparently … other titans are pulling loose from their chains.
All right. We are all interested in this and what it means for us. Already, there are a lot of humans returning to the Plane of Life from the affected planes. And this podcast has something unique to add to the speculation. The main reason why you might want to hit subscribe is to listen to Lord Azanth talk about this. Our demon crisp is really worried. I mean, he put it something like this: Truth is like a mountain peak for those who cannot fly, exposed and terrifying, with precipitate depths a step away in every direction. We therefore stay in the valleys in the comfort of ignorance. And remain in that ignorance even as the avalanche approaches that will bury us. Let us climb that mountain and stand in the light of truth, even as the winds howl around us. The truth is terrible. The truth is that soon Chronos will be unbound and then all sanity will be lost.