Since there is a host of feedback in the where do we go thread and that thread is meant to be updated as more a roadmap. I wanted to start this thread to better organize, encapsulate and address the myriad concerns arising from the changes introduced to monster play with the Before the Shadow update.

What really changed?

We brought the achievable ratings values for monster players to slightly under cap via corruptions and blessings to put more emphasis on skill buffs and group benefits.

On Balance:

There were some changes to the baseline stats on Monster Players as part of the Before the Shadow update, most were to bring the numbers closer to where they should be across the defensive and mitigation stacking of the upper end of the achievable range. This baseline was moved, partly into the corruption/blessing yields and bonuses.

Additionally, we made adjustments to BPE, resistance, and Finesse values for monster players and players. These adjustments made the number of maddening blocks, parries, evades, and outright resists lower. It also means that opponents will hit more often so the trade is equivalent between both sides of the fight.

Players and monster players can still earn meaningful impact to these stats with temp percentage bonuses, but the variability in whether a skill lands should be much lower.

In general, damage on the monster player side went up and mitigations went down, as ever, this will require more tuning and we will be making changes to bring these numbers closer to where they need to be and we will likely have a patch on this much sooner than later. It will not be part of a hotfix, but a quick follow-on patch, if warranted.

A word of note though, we are not going to make it possible to have best offensive and best defensive base lines or caps for monster player classes. There will always be trade-offs though most of those are built into the classes themselves.

On Blessings & Corruptions:

Blessings are a new addition and the pre-cursor to something a little grander. We expected that there would be hesitance and a reticence with this addition and it is not the final iteration by any means. Blessings are another step on a longer road that we are traveling with Monster Play and will need some tweaking along the way. The final iteration will be a new corruption for your chosen Clan - more on this later in the post.
In the short term, I want to highlight the goals of the different blessings and our approach to creating them.

Ongbúrz

Bruisers, focusing on pure defence. They sacrifice hit, crit, and damage for sustainability as a base bonus. They can make up for those shortcomings by assigning their corruptions into the areas where they sacrifice but they strength and speciality should be sustain.

Blogmal

Healers, focusing on keeping their allies in the fight. They focus on surviving against burst damage and landing their skills on their targets. They are somewhat healthier than other clans, and have pretty average sustained capacity to hit. They have that added bonus of reducing their induction times.

Krahjarn

Ranged, focusin on crit and hitting their targets. The Krahjarn clan, right now, are glass cannon style warriors. Don't expect to stay in the fight long, but they should be able to dish out good sustained and burst damage. They also reduce their inductions a little.

Tarkríp
Scrappers, make their way by being the healthiest, and somewhat survivable of the clans. They are front-liners. They trade burst damage for consistent damage and make it a little easier on the healers when they get into a scrap.

Shelob's Brood
Corrupters, dealing damage consistently and over time, they should consistently make you bleed and maybe bleed even longer. They are not very sturdy as a trade off.

Scara Pack
Ambushers, use consistent burst against their foes and have some mitigation to hopefully maintain for the remainder of their team after their alpha strike.

White Hand
Balanced, as their emissary says they offer a little of everything and for the most part allow the monster player to get right back to where they were before the creation of blessings with the proper corruptions applied.

That's a quick overview on blessings. The purpose is to push the boundaries of a starting creep to be more capable in the Ettenmoors and provide monsters, longer in the tooth, with some base specialization before using corruptions to augment and really specialize what they want to be.

Is it perfect? Nope. Definitely not, and we are not saying that this is done - no more work on it, pencils down we can all go home.

Will they need some revision and modification? Yes. Already planned.

Will they be expanded? Yes and I will explain more on this further down.

Are Blessings one size fits all? Heck, no! Blessings are meant to augment class/race combos and some fit better than others.

It is iteration one on Blessings and we made sure to provide a way for monster players to "get back to even" with the addition - the Balance blessing. This will net you a little damage at the expense of a little mitigation. The values are still higher with this blessing active than releases previous to the patch previous to Before the Shadow.

Expected Changes:

First, we are likely going to make a small addition to every blessing for flat armor value initially removed from armor potions. It's a small generic step for all monster players.

Scara Pack and Krahjarn need a little boost to damage. Compared to other blessings, these are a little lower than they probably should be. So this might make the cut for the update.

From a Free People standpoint - defensive stacking is under review.

Now what?

The Before the Shadow update has been live less than 24 hours and a lot of the initial feedback here is negative. This is not surprising as there has been a lot of significant adjustment that pushed monsters over the free people in the past few patches. We took a half-step back with the inclusion of blessings and need to make some more adjustments to solidify the footing for monster players. We will make some adjustments, they will be minor, in an upcoming patch to assuage some fears and I will tease the next step below.

TLDR;

We made changes and not everyone is pleased. We are listening and already discussing some minor changes to alleviate disparities. With the Balanced Blessing overall statistical balance is equivalent with a change in higher damage output and lower mitigations as there was with the previous patch - with an additional caveat that players and monster players are successfully hitting each other more often.

Monster Clan Allegiances

Disclaimer up front, while the intent is to get these in as quickly as possible, there is no current timeline as to when they will arrive.

The future intent with Blessings is to make them into Allegiances much like the free players have on their side. This new addition would have advancement built in over twenty ranks and provide all monster players access to rank 1 for every clan.

Advancing through the clan allegiance would award: appearances, tribal skills, base damage modifiers against hated races, clan traits and sets that help to make up for clan base shortcomings, new quests, bonus commendations, new potion channels, and class/race based skills per clan.