Combine these two (as in don't remove deepwounds but rather allow monks to choose wether they go with damaging the body or rupturing the 'nerve system'; or move from one to the other during the fight if necessary) and we get a very nice, versatile monk class that, properly balanced, would avoid the 'balancing flaw', be much more interesting and give much more room for tactics.

Agreed.


Though I also like the simple solution of taking rupture cures off of health balance.

I'm just thinking about what kind of monk class I'd like to play (general concept). Re-design is suggested in the thread title, so I feel free to do that.

How about:

Rupturing different body parts provides mainly afflictions hindering movement and healing. Ruptures are not cured by health, but a monk focusing on ruptures outpaces curing easily - there is no ruptures instant kill though. By hindering healing monk can then work on deepwounds/damage. Switching between those efficiently allows to build up deepwounds needed to finally terminate the target. Monk deepwounds instant kill could for example require enough deepwounds on all opponent's body parts.

Just a loose thought.

The Five Point Palm Exploding Heart Technique?

I think axelords discovered that requiring lots of body parts being critical deepwounds is a bad idea. (could be wrong)

But monks are different than axelords, no? Just saying, axelords have one hit every few seconds so they can't stack wounds on a whole lot of body parts simultaneously before you can cure them. Monks have 1-3 fast(?) hits so they can spread the wounds to different body parts. I don't know, I'm just saying that maybe it'll work this time? Axelords do not equal monks after all...

Yeah...but monk wounds are also a hell of a lot less than axelord wounds.

Replace "could be" with "am," please.

I know a few axelords who love Execute vs. warriors. Pretty much any Axelord I've got experience with, actually... with execute, you don't actually have to get the head to critical (and that's generally the most-defended bodypart against a warrior, with the other head instas).

I rather like this idea, myself. We'd see low-skill monks starting off with the brute force technique, mid-skill monks tossing in ruptures here and there to complement it, and trans-skill monks having the option of one way or the other, or the mix. It also creates an appropriate way for monks to deal with high defense opponents in a different manner than they'd handle low defense opponents.

@Shryke:
I read your post before I initially replied. I read it again when Daganev pointed it to me. I even went and read it again when you asked me to. But no matter how anyone describes it, it's still a fluid opposition with a threshold that can be tweaked. It becomes a race between the monk trying to get to that critical point, and the opponent who's keeping their wounds in check through applying/defenses while they build their offense against the monk. You call this obscuring the problem, whereas I call it... er, what should I call it? Change of perspective? I'm not trying to be snarky, but you're focusing on the 'they can or can't' aspect and I'm stating that this is true for every kill. They can or can't. But instead of looking at it as 'can they outpace curing', a simple numbers tweak makes it 'can they kill before being killed'. And isn't that the more important consideration in terms of balance?

The problem (highly simplified) is that, once a monk reaches a certain level of wounds on you, you have no chance of curing the wounds anymore because you're taking so much damage. It's kind of like telekinetics where, if they get so many vessels on you, you can't cure them with sip health anymore because you have to sip mana every round to cover the clotting. The difference is that telekinetics require a lot more time and effort to build vessels than monks do wounds, so having a system like this, where the direct side-effect of the offense prevents the curing of the offense itself, is a bit much for monks.