Welcome to the world of real combat! No more two or three move death combos for you now.

I was always a fan of staying away from insta-kill, unless I was griefing or the person needed to die fast.
I'm just not a fan of being nerfed to hell either, although I did help with the testing, I'm 99% sure that the one or two ideas I came up with didn't go through.

But I've been fooling around with the forms and Gahtirak'sho is just as hard as to pull of as let's say.. the harmony mantra deathtouch, severedspine is a bit harder to lock in now that it costs 2 momentum and the requirements for insta-killing are sprawl not prone, which means I have to use a -kata- non-speced move to throw you down which uses two arm balances, and somehow keep severed spine on you to whip out the killing move, but I'm not artied in anyway so maybe that will help, in a couple of months or so.

People did it before severspine. There are quite a few ways to prone someone, I see an easy one that doesn't cost momentum in your kata spec.

Why is severed spine necessary, exactly? I played around with a Gahtirak'sho kata for awhile and all I really did was keep your ankles and legs broken.

Severspine made it really easy and basically impossible to stop.

The one time I encountered Ruiku in a combat situation, he killed me with grapple-grapple-grapple-instakill, while there was nothing I could do to escape before death. I'm very thankful for these changes, and I hope to see some monk strategy evolve that requires a little more attention to the fight.

You'll figure it out soon enough, and if there are things to be tweaked here and there as more people are now testing these updates, the regular Envoy process should suffice from here on out.

I just remembered/noticed that Lorina wasn't using illusions either! Not that it matters, really...

Treant has terrible illusion detection. If you can, use it against them.

Just because illusions get through sometimes doesn't mean it's terrible. Sheesh! When you write your own system and you get everything perfect, you give me a call.

I've actually done pretty good against illusions, especially with the Harmony passive to detect them.

And the one time I encountered you Iasmos, I was hyperactive and sitting at 5 momentum, the -2 momentum from switching targets has changed that. I only grappled you once, to toss you to the ground.

I never know what illusions to use. I just use phantasms. It's always fun.

Was he grappling with Bairak?

Locks your head with the tahto, causes blackout and leads to windpipe on the next form. Can also tahtai through rebounding and apply poisons, uses both arms. Bairak.

Although Tahtai costs 3 Power, in a way that is unbalanced, if someone throws up rebounding in a middle of a form, I have to stop, terminate(lose balance) and then raze, by which time I have already lost 1 or 2 momentum and usually with most fighters I will be a couple afflictions behind.

Or don't use autokata? That's the whole point.

If you're at least three moves into a kata, you can just switch to a new one. No need to terminate. Shouldn't be doing that in combat anyway.

The whole design concept of monks has been changing. Before, it was a fairly newbie friendly kata system (friendly in relation with most Lusternia combat) in that one alias could inact a series of attacks prebuilt. Now, it is considered too strong and the design philosophy has been changing to a more warrior like design. Warrior afflictions, warrior razing, warrior scripting of offense. Essentially, while no one wants to claim they are removing the kata system, the changes have been enacted to create a situation where the kata system will always be second tier to individual or duo forms.

This doesn't make sense to me personally, as I fail to see how or why making monks mirror warriors is good for either class since comparisons will be constantly raised between the two to validate changes from here on I believe. IE, warriors have that so monks should have this, monks have that so warriors should have this. I would personally rather see two strong classes than two classes that feed off of each other with the current extent that Tahtetso at least does.

Far too late for that now. Monk combat is already a foregone conclusion at this point. Better move onto what other stuff about them you can find.

Heh, nothing is a forgone conclusion with enough complaints. Spiritsingers got a rewrite, I can dream.