The decision you'll need to make is which of the two schools of thought you subscribe to most. Both can get you to where you'd like to go, trading time for ease of play in most cases. Think hard, and pick between:
*Leveling up a farm toon*
Take a class that can level quickly and efficiently farm gear or platinum to twink out your monk and make his leveling much easier. Good examples here are necro, druid, mage, and enchanter (doesn't level as fast, but if you're good at charm soloing you'll be able to pull off things no other class can). An additional advantage to this is that if in the future you decide you want to create characters other than the monk, you will always have a reliable character to farm up the gear neccessary to make those toons easier as well. The drawback is that it takes time to level any character and if you go the route of farming the gear rather than buying it you'll take even longer. You are setting your eventual monk back in the overall scheme of things time-wise, but when you finally do begin playing him it will be a night and day difference in what you're capable of doing.
*Embrace the struggle, main a melee first*
Stick it out on the monk. You'd be suprised how many decent players there are on this server that will toss you some plat here, or spare gear there to make the grind more bearable. You won't have the cutting edge stuff, but when you have nothing even the smallest upgrade makes a difference. You'll hit 60 on this monk much sooner than you could hitting 60 on a farm toon and gathering up all the gear. The drawback is that you will be more reliant on groups and goodwill than you would otherwise, and it'll take a dedication from you sometimes to keep that xp bar moving.
In the past, I'd always been part of the leveling toon first to make life easier later group. This time around I've decided to start p99 as a bard main and just embrace the difficulty. Either path will get you there, so take the one that suites you best.
|