Monking in PvP and advanced techniques

More than any other class, playing a monk has more to do with your personal skill level than your build. Any inexperienced player can load up a Mo/Me MoR boonprot monk and head into battle and completely suck with it whereas a master can keep an entire team alive through some of the most adverse circumstances.

In my mind, having considered myself to be approaching mid-level competence in terms of PvP monking skill, I see two main ways for a monk to improve himself:

1. Knowledge of the situation
2. Reaction time and intimacy with your setup


I have worked with #1 by rearranging my GUI, asking my teammates to keep me informed mid-battle, carefully observing my positioning and that of my teammates, and increasing my general battle awareness. I am pleased with the results so far.

#2 seems alot more difficult to work with. I am becoming more intimate with my setup simply by playing with it more and more, but my timing is improving very slowly, and so I get to the meat of my post:

I have considered and toyed with binding my party members to my numpad numbers 1-8. I have played with this setup a bit in PvE and RA, and it feels extremely alien to me, although I'm sure with time this will improve. However, I have to wonder if it'll be worth it. This is a very large and fundamental change to my playing style which would take alot of time to get used to, and yet I'm not sold on the benefits of it. For one, it makes movement and more importantly kiting more difficult.

For those among us who consider themselves highly experienced monks, what do you think about this idea and just the general concept of improving your skill as a monk? What advice can you offer?


Thanks in advance.

This is very interesting, as I too would like to improve on my Monking in general. It seems to me, after playing with the binding of keys and the GUI, that simply these two (once you become accustom to them) help considerably. Such things as binding the members to easily reached keys, etc... help alot. Personally i've cleaned up the GUI alittle more to my liking, grouped some things together for extra speed and bound keys for my left and right hands for even more speed.

While trivial some of these may seem at first, that few extra tenths of a second or so can save peoples lives in a spike or otherwise. Not to mention it also helps your first point IMO, as it helps you to keep up with what is going on to better allocate yourself or your technique to suite the situation.

Currently, I am very skilled with healing and protection. Problem is my reaction time is slow. Number pad isn't a possiblity for me becuz I use the mouse A LOT.

Brother Gilburt

Well, by no means am I a "highly experienced" monk, but if, as you say, it's impeding your kiting and movement and therefore your ability to stay alive, I'd stick with a mouse. A boon-prot with 0.1 second reaction time is better than a DEAD boon-prot with 0.0000000001 second reaction time.