>The following is a list of things that I was thinking about
>over my past few characters, and I think could be some food
>for thought.
>
>1) Monks seem to be brutal to deal with if you're a melee
>class. I mean just brutal. Intensify is ridiculously nice.
>When combined with respond (to take away weapons fairly
>reliably) and anticipate (to avoid your Achilles' Heel from
>any given class) it seems quite unbalanced for any sort of 1v1
>fight. I understand that maintaining enough mana to really
>perform at optimum capacity is a challenge. Even still I think
>monks are just too beefy for most melee classes, even if the
>melee class preps up to a decent degree.

Other people addressed this, but I thought the general opinion was that monks were one of the weaker paladin specializations.

Seriously, I can count the PK-successful monks ever on one hand.

>2) Frost giants are really neat and interesting to play. The
>more hp/less dex aspect gives them a unique feel when you're
>playing one. Iceblade is also a nice niche inherent. And while
>their iceblade turns no_disarm at lvl 41, it's still only avg
>21 or so with no progs or anything at level 45. I think it'd
>be neat if iceblade got beefed up either in avg, or given a
>wintery prog or something. I don't know, they just seem
>lacking when compared to other niche and nice inherents
> forgecraft/heatwalk/wingsweep/swiftstrike/faerie fie/stone
>skin/call lightning are all beautiful in the right scenario)

Compared to a fire giant I don't think they're doing that bad.

>3) Racial edges for the under-played warriors. (Mainly looking
>at gnome/wood-elf ones as those are the only ones I have any
>experience with.) The gnome ones felt balanced. I had a brief
>stint as a no-name nexan gnome warrior wanna be and the edges
>helped bring me up to something resembling par, without making
>me a monster. I think gnome warrior has the capacity to be
>badass with the right combo though.
>
>Wood-elves however just feel really, really tough. I'd like to
>see a nexan/outlander one with the edges, as my only sample
>size of observation are rager ones...but even still, they seem
>kind of stupidly beefy. I think the main one is Natural Weapon
>Spec. They just seem damn near impossible to hit while hitting
>really, really hard. Especially given that some combos have
>really nice, not very limited, natural weapons they can get.
> Mainly thinking about swords/spears and staffs/daggers
>here.)

Well, the first thing I'd mention is that these are combos that a year ago no one would play on a dare. Svirf warrior was 100% strictly better than gnome and arial/elf/d-elf and in some cases half-elf/half-drow were strictly better than wood-elf depending on what you were doing. Now the analysis of trade-offs is a lot more interesting, I think.

As far as tanking goes, by the way? The gnome edge is strictly, mathematically the better of the two.

>4) Resist magic change: I think that this made dwarves/svirfs
>really buff in that(if I'm understanding this correctly) they
>now have an inherent 20% dam redux to nearly all elemental
>attacks. Combine that with some basic prepping or rager resist
>and that's a LOT of dam redux against a lot of things. It
>doesn't feel completely right to me(but then again this change
>is super new so I could be crazy).

Understand that before resistances were redone, dwarves had resist magic. This meant that a lot of the time they had 33% resistance against most of those things. But what was and wasn't magic damage wasn't extremely consistent or intuitive. Lightning bolt? Magic lightning. Pillar of the Heavens? Nonmagic lightning. Lightning damage weapon? Could be either.

So in a lot of scenarios this is a downgrade for former resist magic races; in others it's an upgrade. Overall it's probably about a wash but at least you know what to expect as one or when fighting one.

>Do any of the Immstaff feel the similarly about any of the
>above, or is everything about where they want it to be?

Things always get adjusted from time to time, but these things are all in the ballpark of correct to me.