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Assuming you want an Unarmed Combat build, you're going to want brawling, combat maneuvers, dodging, and physical fitness, and perception as primary skills. I'd also recommend singling Mental Lore: Transformation to make the most out of 1202 and other mental spells. I got climbing and swimming up to 20 pretty quickly, then more later. Any remaining TPs should be put into harness power and spells--but that will be the slowest (at least for my build)

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-The mind behind Rowmi's eyes.

Perception helps with aiming attacks, seeing bandits, etc. It's cheap and all around useful.

You don't need TWC, it gives a slight bonus to DS, but it won't make a huge difference.

-The mind behind Rowmi's eyes.

>Perception helps with aiming attacks,

Only if you use missiles. For melee its ambush. Open aiming skill for UAC is the average of CM and ambush skills.

You should train 5 ranks ambush when you want to start aiming your punches (probably somewhere around level 20) and add a rank each time you fail to find an opening. You'll need somewhere in the region of 5-10 ranks to aim the easy shots (punch leg to knock it down and punch head to finish it once its knocked down). If you rely on CM only, you'll find yourself waiting till level 40 until you can aim the basic blows reliably and you really don't want to do that unless you have a pocket mage keeping you permahasted.

> seeing bandits, etc. It's cheap and all around useful.

It doesn't help you aim, but I'd train it anyway for these reasons.

>You don't need TWC, it gives a slight bonus to DS, but it won't make a huge difference.

There are bonuses at 1 rank and 0.5x which are worth having, though the per rank increment isn't. You should start out with it at 0.5x. Low level monks have weak DS, though this changes as you pile up spells and levels of 3x dodge. DS is top notch for monks mid to high levels, but its poor low level and post cap.

1 rank TWC is always worth having, even if you decide not to keep it at 0.5x after you have 1220. I liked being able to take on bandits with no outside spells and kept it at 0.5x all the way to cap. (which was only really possible to about level 60 or so, monks peak mid level and become steadily less competitive thereafter, though they remain quite playable to level 90 or so) You'll also need 0.5x MOC for FoF purposes if you solo bandits.

>I'd also recommend singling Mental Lore: Transformation to make the most out of 1202 and other mental spells.

The bonuses to mental spells are terrible even without taking into account the huge TP cost. If the bugs in 1202 have been fixed (and I haven't seen a post saying they have, so I'd assume its still buggy) you might get 5 or 15 ranks to get to a suitable AsG at a lower level. If you have 5 for 1202, you might get a 6th for dragonclaw but beyond that, don't touch Transformation Lore. It will really hurt your ability to learn spells, which in turn will really hurt your TD at higher level. To avoid the worst effects of 1202 bugs, don't use accessories, and if you do use accessories, make sure your 1202 AsG would cover that area if it was real armor (e.g. if you have a padded/enhancive/crush resistant helm, you would want your Ironskin AsG to be AsG 8 or AsG 12 but not AsG 9,10,11 and would need to adjust lore training as you levelled and not wear your helm in some level ranges to manage that)

>What is the basic cookie cutter skills I need to make this an enjoyable class.

2x PF, 2x brawl, 3x dodge, 1.5-2x CM (start out at 2x, but once you have the key CMans you can let it drop back to allow you to pick up spells faster), 0.3-0.6x spells (you are aiming for 1220 then 120 which averages out at 0.4x but you might go a bit slower at the start if you are getting lore ranks and then speed up when there are no immediate CMans to buy), 0.3-0.6x harness (roughly 1 rank per spell but train a bit more if you feel the need, I tended to train it several ranks at a time when I felt pinched for mana but otherwise left it alone a lot)

You'll want MIU and/or AS at some point (level 40ish in my case was about when I started to need them and I built them up fast in the 40-60 levels) because outside spells are critical to controlling the TD weakness of monks.

Climb/swim I found I needed more than I thought I should, which I think is down to the 1202 bugs. 0.5x in whichever you need where you are hunting should suffice but they are dirt cheap since you'll have surplus PTPs so just train a few more ranks if you find trouble at a portal.

Set stats for growth. Unlike other classes there's basically no difference in TP and growth settings because there is a mismatch between training requirements and prime stats (prime stats are physical, but the training requirements are mental). I actually gained TPs when I used a fixstat near cap (I set STR, AGI and LOG higher than growth values because I didn't want encumberance pain, DS is poor at low level, and you need all the stat help you can get from LOG if you ever want to use our CS spells to any effect. In a normal cless setting prime stats high gains TPs, as a monk I paid TPs to get those stat benefits)

>That bug was fixed about 6 months ago. I believe we originally posted we couldn't deploy the update when it was first reported since there were some other pending changes holding it up, but it has since gone out.

I first raised issues when 1202 bugs were killing me while hunting the Stronghold (level 60ish). I got definite proof on a bug and started providing the training workround advice for it at level 75. There was no GM response until after I capped either on the report or the advice posts.

The previous bug I identified in this type of situation only took about a week to go from identification to can't deploy a fix yet, but another 5 years to actually get fixed so I am not going to assume that one that took 6 months rather than a week to get acknowledged is fixed until it has actually been announced and I've tested it.

What is the fix supposed to have fixed? The application of crush resistance in a helm is the only issue I had pinned down definitively, but I wasn't convinced performance against manoevers was working properly, or that padding was working properly.

>What is the issue you think you see with maneuvers? Which maneuver(s) do you suspect there is a problem?

I don't have good evidence, just a feeling that manoever performance in general was poorer than it ought to be. Things like I always seemed to still have 5s RT to run when everyone else was up after the group got ewaved. I felt I had pretty good manoever defense at the point just after I learned 1220 (mid 30s) but by the 60s and all the way to cap after that it seemed poor. There's lots of other things going on too though, so its just that I felt in general that I should have good manoever defense (due to square training, 1220 and no action penalty) and it didn't seem that way, and one of the things I thought might be happening was an inappropriate action penalty. I haven't done the month of testing in Shattered to crack the manoever formulas and prove it one way or the other though.

>As far as I know padding on armor accessories would fall into the same boat, or do you mean when wearing robes as well?

Always wearing robes with 1202, thats the design expectation isn't it? If I'm not wearing robes I'm not using 1202.

Some of the time I had robes with the basic Voln script on them but nothing else except the enchant about them. I did take to wearing AsG 7 leathers for Plane 4 and did train armor for that but that's without 1202 and I didn't do that enough to get a feeling one way or another for manoever performance. All the padding and resistance was on my helm.