Dinadass
Dalayan Pious Diety
The Matron's Grasp are a tier 13 item, and when they were created (and for quite some time after), they were the best dps option in the game for monks and beastlords. Considering their tier and also the sacrifice of losing a bunch of stats from not having weapons equipped, the fact that they were the best dps available is logical. Whether or not they were balanced is a matter of debate, but I think it's pretty universally understood and accepted that bare fists should be better dps or utility over same-tier weapons for monks and beastlords since you're sacrificing 400+ HP and substantial AC/Resists/Etc at the high end to use fists. At lower and mid tiers, bare fists with appropriate gloves do outperform on-tier weapons (substantially so for the most part), but at the high end this is no longer the case.
Here are a pair of tier 9/10 gloves:
Silence- +10 H2H, 6 Magic Dmg, 6% 125dd proc
Handwraps of Twisted Souls- +10 H2H, 6 Dis Dmg, 4.5% 400dd proc
Matron's Grasp- +5 H2H, 6 Fire Dmg, 2.9% 640dd proc
There is absolutely no reason to use Matron's Grasp due to how severely they were nerfed. They lost 15 H2H, 2 Fire Damage, and got a worse proc. Currently, tier 9 gloves parse nearly identically to Matron's Grasp. Here are some really basic ideas to get Matron's Grasp back to being an actual dps upgrade-
-Substantially increase the proc rate
-Give back the H2H and Ele damage (honestly this might not be enough by itself given how terribly monk/bst melee scales but it would be a start and could be easily parsed and tweaked more).
-Change the proc to something that is either higher single target, or something that provides a debuff/buff/etc to be worth using sometimes despite not being a flat dps increase.
Jumbers said over a year ago that H2H mods were being evaluated, and nothing has been done since then. Woldaff said that if people posted numbers showing that the nerf to Matron's Grasp (and Silence) was too extreme, they'd be brought up to where they should be, this never happened despite dozens of parses and posts.
I do ~800 dps against a parse mob with typical buffs (no bard/cunning), using s2 and dps combo, with Horok and Fist of the Dawn which are both tier 12 weapons. Matron's Grasp with no weapons is right around that much as well. Entropy's Spine, the only tier 13 monk/bst weapon, does a bit more. I feel like BW gloves doing 10 or 15% more overall damage would actually make them situationally useful. Enough of a boost to use sometimes, but not worth the stat loss in other fights, that seems like balance. What we have now is not balanced, and hasn't been for like 1.5 years.
Here are a pair of tier 9/10 gloves:
Silence- +10 H2H, 6 Magic Dmg, 6% 125dd proc
Handwraps of Twisted Souls- +10 H2H, 6 Dis Dmg, 4.5% 400dd proc
Matron's Grasp- +5 H2H, 6 Fire Dmg, 2.9% 640dd proc
There is absolutely no reason to use Matron's Grasp due to how severely they were nerfed. They lost 15 H2H, 2 Fire Damage, and got a worse proc. Currently, tier 9 gloves parse nearly identically to Matron's Grasp. Here are some really basic ideas to get Matron's Grasp back to being an actual dps upgrade-
-Substantially increase the proc rate
-Give back the H2H and Ele damage (honestly this might not be enough by itself given how terribly monk/bst melee scales but it would be a start and could be easily parsed and tweaked more).
-Change the proc to something that is either higher single target, or something that provides a debuff/buff/etc to be worth using sometimes despite not being a flat dps increase.
Jumbers said over a year ago that H2H mods were being evaluated, and nothing has been done since then. Woldaff said that if people posted numbers showing that the nerf to Matron's Grasp (and Silence) was too extreme, they'd be brought up to where they should be, this never happened despite dozens of parses and posts.
I do ~800 dps against a parse mob with typical buffs (no bard/cunning), using s2 and dps combo, with Horok and Fist of the Dawn which are both tier 12 weapons. Matron's Grasp with no weapons is right around that much as well. Entropy's Spine, the only tier 13 monk/bst weapon, does a bit more. I feel like BW gloves doing 10 or 15% more overall damage would actually make them situationally useful. Enough of a boost to use sometimes, but not worth the stat loss in other fights, that seems like balance. What we have now is not balanced, and hasn't been for like 1.5 years.
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