Counters, Counterstance and Focus
Counter is awesome. It helped me win every one on one ballista matches against rdm/nins, war/nins, nin/wars, drks, thfs etc and saved me so many times against very hard mobs. Even before I had max merits in counter I was already countering like crazy.
Sure, counterstance has that nasty side effect of reducing defense to 10% of the original, but that's why monks have 2000+ HP and paladin-like high VIT.
A friend of mine (a PLD o.O, Bardok) mentioned to me that he read counter is related to accuracy and focus, so I did more testing. The more I played around with my counter and counterstance and the more I found that Focus and counter/counterstance are strongly related. Basically if I use Focus I counter a lot more while it's active, and if i also use counterstance with focus I counter as high as 90% of the hits, with crazy strings of like 8 counters in a row. It's not the accuracy from focus that seems to be significant here either or at least it's not the main factor, since I tested swapping accuracy in and out and using accuracy vs atk food and didn't have anywhere near the same impact. I think it's just like how Boost and Chi Blast are related regardless of the side effect of boost also increasing attack. It's the number of boosts that counts, not the actual attack (you can test this with defender, atk foods, berserk, etc, none have any effect on the final chi dmg).
Here are a few example of why I love counter and counterstance:
On this date in [sea], one of the first tier of sea gods, the monk Ix'aern made the bad decision to use [hundred fists] on me... Notice how many times i countered its attacks. It looked like I was using hundred fists instead, or hundred-counters:
and here's another example, while farming on easy prey monsters, notice the 3 counters in a row right at the critical time of recasting shadows (as mnk/nin):
Sure, counterstance has that nasty side effect of reducing defense to 10% of the original, but that's why monks have 2000+ HP and paladin-like high VIT.
A friend of mine (a PLD o.O, Bardok) mentioned to me that he read counter is related to accuracy and focus, so I did more testing. The more I played around with my counter and counterstance and the more I found that Focus and counter/counterstance are strongly related. Basically if I use Focus I counter a lot more while it's active, and if i also use counterstance with focus I counter as high as 90% of the hits, with crazy strings of like 8 counters in a row. It's not the accuracy from focus that seems to be significant here either or at least it's not the main factor, since I tested swapping accuracy in and out and using accuracy vs atk food and didn't have anywhere near the same impact. I think it's just like how Boost and Chi Blast are related regardless of the side effect of boost also increasing attack. It's the number of boosts that counts, not the actual attack (you can test this with defender, atk foods, berserk, etc, none have any effect on the final chi dmg).
Here are a few example of why I love counter and counterstance:
On this date in [sea], one of the first tier of sea gods, the monk Ix'aern made the bad decision to use [hundred fists] on me... Notice how many times i countered its attacks. It looked like I was using hundred fists instead, or hundred-counters:
and here's another example, while farming on easy prey monsters, notice the 3 counters in a row right at the critical time of recasting shadows (as mnk/nin):