ear Tibians,

We followed your reaction to our announcement for the new vocation with much anticipation and were very happy to see the many positive reactions from the community.  A lot of questions emerged regarding the availability of monk equipment in the world of Tibia. This balancing insight will detail our strategy for designing and balancing the monk's new equipment and hopefully offer some intriguing context for the news teaser.

First, I would like to highlight some differences regarding the balancing design process for the summer and winter updates in contrast to a whole set for a single vocation. For our regular updates, we usually introduce a set of thematically coherent equipment for all vocations that has to be integrated into the vast array of existing items. Therefore, the upper and lower limits are predefined and the new items will be balanced accordingly.

Designing the set of monk equipment involved several additional steps, including defining the limits for each equipment type. Once we established that the vocation would be the monk and some of the lore was crafted by our content design team, it was decided to go with an zaoan look and feel for the equipment. This synergised very well with our intention to revitalise the fist fighting skill, which we interpreted in a broader sense as martial arts. Regarding the aesthetics of the new equipment, our graphics department did an incredible job, and there will also be an interesting insight article giving you more information about the process of creating the graphics for the new items.

The next step was to develop the roster of equipment that we wanted to introduce for the monk. There were several considerations when we started to design this roster. One of the most important overarching goals during the implementation of the monk was to ensure that the monk, with all its intricacies, feels like a natural part of Tibia.

To achieve this goal, we identified quest and monster rewards where players would expect to find new equipment for the monk. Another key consideration was to provide equipment for all level ranges. This includes giving the players interesting choices when planning their hunts by differentiating equipment for similar level ranges.

Speaking of differentiation, we also introduced two new attributes for equipment that helped us give the equipment special mechanics and a unique feel: Mantra and elemental bond.

Mantra is a new form of elemental protection that works similarly to armor but protects the monk against elemental damage (Fire, Ice, Energy, Earth) and can be found on all defensive equipment. This symbolises the deep and natural understanding of the essence of these elements. Our initial design exchanged armor with mantra but after some testing it became obvious that especially low-level monks would need some amount of armor to survive their journey in Tibia. Therefore, we reapplied some of the armor but lowered the upper ceiling that can be reached.

As an example, we will have a look at the monk robe and the merudri nanbando:

	monk robe Level: 0 Mantra: 7 Armor: 6  Mantra: 7 Skill: Fist Fighting +1
	merudri nanbando Level: 125 Armor: 7 Mantra: 13 Skill: Fist Fighting +3 Imbuement Slots: 1 Augment: Greater Flurry of Blows - Critical Extra Damage +8 %

As you can see, even low-level equipment will give some much needed protection against physical attacks. As your journey continues, you will find better armor like the merudri nanbando which will protect you even more effectively against elemental attacks (whilst giving you additional benefits) but the armor value will not increase as significantly. Anyone who has ever tried to wield a nunchaku or a bo while wearing a falcon plate will agree on the difficulty of not hurting yourself. 

Elemental bond is a new attribute that can be found on all monk specific weapons. It indicates the resonance of offensive power with one of the following elements: physical, energy and earth. This means spells will do damage according to the weapon’s elemental bond type. This defines a weapon similar to the elemental damage of swords, clubs and axes but focuses on three elements. As a result, it helps players decide which weapon to use in different hunting grounds and therefore allows multiple weapons to be efficient in the same level range.

If you compare, for example, the umbral katar (Level 120) with the bambus jo (Level 150) you can see that stat wise these weapons are not too far away from each other. 

	umbral katar Level: 120 Skill: Fist Fighting +2 Attack: 42 Defence: 17 Elemental Bond: Physical
	bambus jo Level: 150 Skill: Fist Fighting +2 Attack: 42 Defence: 19 Elemental Bond: Earth

What distinguishes them is their elemental bond which helps the umbral katar shine in hunting grounds with monsters being weak against physical damage whereas the bambus jo resonates better with the earth element and is therefore more efficient against monsters sensitive to earth damage.

We are looking forward to your feedback on the test servers and hope you have as much fun playing the new vocation and using the new equipment as we had designing them.

Happy testing!
Shazaya