I'm having difficulty developing my monk. I want him to have a good balance between his pscionic skills and melee skills. Should I put points into magic during level ups or should I only train those skills by casting spells? If anyone needs to know the rest of my party is bard, 2 bishops, fighter, and ranger.

Thanks in advance

With hybrids, i usually put 3 points into the spell skill (psionic, wizardry...), but not into the individual realms. If you don't push psionic, you won't be able to learn level 3+ spells for a long time. The other points go into fighting skills (martial arts, wand&staff, critical hit).

Your party has 2 melee fighters (fighter + monk), 2 casters, 1 range fighter and 1 mixxed character (casts spells from intruments, otherwise fighter or rangestriker, depending on how you develop him). 2 Bishops, together with a bard for haste. I don't think you need a real hybrid monk here. I'd play him as a pure fighting machine in this party.

I definitely agree that, for this party, you don't need a "balanced" Monk; pretty clearly his/her three most useful roles will be melee fighter, melee fighter and, uh, melee fighter; the Psionic stuff will be in the "nice to have" category. Your Bard will be able to cast several of the more useful Psionic-book spells, including handy Psionic-only ones like Haste, Pandemonium, and Cerebral Hemorrhage. Of course, should you choose, one of your Bishops will be able to cast all of them.

Push DEX and SPD until they reach 100, then raise SEN and INT. You'll probably finish the game before you max those two; if not, STR and VIT would be next. As Wereboar suggests, push your key melee skills (Martial Arts and Critical Strike), plus Psionics once you reach level 5 (up to then, I usually bump Throwing & Sling as the third skill). Buy Charm (or Mindread) and Relics books as soon as you can, and raise the Monk's Mental skill by practicing Charm/Mindread on NPCs and identifying items. By practicing as much as possible out of combat, you'll find that the Monk's magic skills come up quickly with no need to spend skill points on them.

Well, i usually raise dex and str first (dex for number of attacks, str for damage and to-hit). When they are maxed, i usually go for speed (not important with a bard) and vitality, since he is in front line. Int does little aside from granting powercast; it helps raising your skills, but that doesn't help much that late. Senses is for ranged attacks (and helps raising some skills), but i usually don't use ranged weapons with a monk. Instead i use martial arts for short range, staffs for extended range, and some weak magic if far away.

My stat progression for a melee-heavy martial-artist Monk is based on the controlling stats for the key skills, as follows:

Skill ---------- Controlled by
Martial Arts ----- DEX, SPD
Critical Strike --- SEN, SPD
Stealth --------- DEX, INT
Psionics -------- SEN, INT

STR becomes more important for a staff-user Monk, since the controlling stats for Staff & Wand are STR, DEX. However, using a staff throws away the 25% bonus the Monk gets for the Martial Arts primary skill. It also throws away the "Punch" secondary attack. There's one randomly-available staff with pretty impressive stats--the Zatoichi Bo--but that's probably the only Monk weapon that comes close to the damage and kill abilities of a high-level bare-handed Monk.

As Wereboar suggests, you may need to occasionally bump VIT; look at how much your Monk gets beat up and whether some additional HP are needed.

There's the Staff of Doom, always in the mountain wildernesse. Very impressive (high damage, high kill chance, high paralyze chance). It's cursed, and drains hip points (but than can easily be countered by an amulet.

And the Zatoichi Bo isn't random, it's always there.

So i usually go bare-handed (with a Bo as secondray weapon) until i get Staff of Doom. Then use it until i get Zatoichi Bo. With this one, i have very good close (martial arts) and extended fighting ability.
This only works well if you don't have many characters in the party that prefer fighting at range.

I go less on the controlling stats for skills and more on what the stats actually give in the way of combat bonuses. Throw in the fact that a level 7 haste spell (which the bard can be a source of, or the monk or bishop in this party) will add 70 points of speed to every party member. So my suggestion would be to pump 3 into Str and Dex no matter what you choose to fight with (martial arts or with a staff). Let the haste spell pump Spd. Once Str/Dex are maxed out, work on Vit and Sen. The Monk's stealth will help keep him from getting noticed/attacked alot, and he has monk damage resistance, so I'd say Vit can wait until after Str/Dex are maxed out. Str is really key, if he's going to melee alot you want to unlock Powerstrike ASAP.

There's the Staff of Doom, always in the mountain wildernesse. Very impressive (high damage, high kill chance, high paralyze chance). It's cursed, and drains hip points (but than can easily be countered by an amulet.

And the Zatoichi Bo isn't random, it's always there.</font>[/QUOTE]Is it? I don't remember seeing it more than 2 or 3 times over the course of the last several games. But I don't run Monks that often, so I may not have noticed it. However, the list at http://www.geocities.com/shau185/fullchest.txt shows it as being a possible find in some half-dozen different chests; usually, if something is a random find in various locations, that also implies that it may not show up at all. Or is this some kind of "random but guaranteed" item? I.e., if it hasn't appeared by the time you get to point [whatever], the game will force it to show up then.

You get the Zatoichi always with one of the deposit slips in the Rapax castle (along with the assassin cap and some amulet).

I never got it in any other place. But that doesn't prove anything; i didn't find anything on these lists (at a first glance, i'm missing Coil of the Serpent and Light Sword). But it's mentioned at that many places, and i already got most of the items (even of those that are only listed for one chest), so the list looks strange. Maybe it got changed with some patch.

in a previous run through the game -- one of the only times I was running a monk -- I found a zat bo in a random chest and then got the guaranted one at rapax castle. Of course, since I had decided at the beginning to focus on martial arts and sling instead of staff, it was a bit of a waste to give me two!