Criticism on Stormblood's Monk

[LeeraSorlan]

They haven't known what to do since 3.0 lol. It feels like the plan is "ignore monk and hope its problems magically go away" :c

What was wrong with 3.0 monk? 3.0 monk was perfect imo

[Shurrikhan]

What was wrong with 3.0 monk? 3.0 monk was perfect imo

This. Still had full modular control, many more skill-speed tiers able to use non-standardized rotations, and had a very strong out-of-range filler skill. There were improvements that could have been further made -- especially to certain recast times, but it was without a doubt the best gameplay Monks have had, despite many fundamental issues in regards to TP or certain fights' designs leaving it out to dry.

[SpeckledBurd]

What was wrong with 3.0 monk? 3.0 monk was perfect imo

He wasn't saying that anything was wrong with 3.0 Monk, he was saying that it seemed like the devs had no idea where to go from there. I'm inclined to agree, all of the Heavensward additions except Purification make sense on paper, and even if Tornado Kick in practice ended up being useless it was still overall a net positive.

I would not say the same of the Stormblood actions. Deep Meditation makes Meditation worse at mitigating damage loss in down phases, Riddle of Earth can flat out not work because damage takes too long to come out, there being no damage, the damage being avoidable requiring you to do something stupid, or you can just get screwed by a deployed Adlo. Riddle of Fire makes you go slow so naturally everyone hates it, and despite being designed to work with Brotherhood for doubleweaving the proc rate on Brotherhood is so abysmal that even in a full physical party comp it can still fail to give you one Forbidden Chakra. In 4-man's that percentage is 100%, you may as well not use Brotherhood there for all the good it does you.

[wereotter]

What was wrong with 3.0 monk? 3.0 monk was perfect imo

The problem with 3.0 monk wasn't so much that it was bad, but that the game evolved and the job didn't. We're seeing that same problem still in 4.0

Before Heavensward, selecting your DPS was a much bigger deal since you had MNK for fights with magic damage and you had other DPS for other fights. Then in Heavensward, DRK was introduced and that reason to bring a monk was gone. This was especially bad considering how much magic damage was in Alexander, so monks should have been great, but DRK was just used instead. This was also the time of the rise of the DRG-NIN-BRD/MCH meta which excluded the job entirely. Monk still brought high personal DPS, but it wasn't that much higher than other jobs to justify its presence, and a lot of the raid mechanics had to be adjusted for your monk so that they wouldn't lose greased lightning.

Come Stormblood and not only did monks lose their INT down utility for raid comps not using DRK, but they were also entirely overshadowed by SAM with their massive numbers. Monks got what we wanted as far as more raid utility and a way to get chakras in-battle, but it seems that they were just treading water with us. They gave us Brotherhood in exchange for eliminating our INT down. We now have exclusive access to Mantra, but there aren't many instances where that healing buff makes enough of a difference to change anything for healers. They gave us Deep Meditation in exchange for massively reducing the potency of Forbidden Chakra.

This isn't hard to fix, I just don't think they were really thinking when they were implementing changes to monk. There have been lots of ideas out there as to how to evolve the job, but it just hasn't been done, and now its been ignored for so long that it's becoming a problem.

[echo78]

This. Still had full modular control, many more skill-speed tiers able to use non-standardized rotations, and had a very strong out-of-range filler skill. There were improvements that could have been further made -- especially to certain recast times, but it was without a doubt the best gameplay Monks have had.

I ran max SKS MNK in creator. There was no special "bootshine twice before doing DK again" rotation or anything like that. With max SKS you could rotate fracture and TOD with literally every DK/snakes cycle. You'd also run out of TP in literally 2 minutes without goad or purification (rip TFC). You could modify the opener to use fracture before TOD during perfect balance (IIRC I needed at least 950+ SKS to do this). Depending on the fight you could also do less or no form shifts to refresh GL3 (the transition from phase 1 to 2 in Zurvan EX and inception in A12S being examples).

But if you cared about doing as much DPS as possible then the best SKS tier for MNK in HW was as little SKS as possible. If the whole "lol no TP" thing wasn't a problem back in HW then running a high SKS build could have actually been somewhat viable.

He wasn't saying that anything was wrong with 3.0 Monk, he was saying that it seemed like the devs had no idea where to go from there. I'm inclined to agree, all of the Heavensward additions except Purification make sense on paper, and even if Tornado Kick in practice ended up being useless it was still overall a net positive.

Oh, there was a ton wrong with HW monk but talking about HW monk is pointless now :P HW monk was fun, sure, but that doesn't change the fact it was the worst designed job in HW. Only DRK/AST (being meta doesn't mean they were well designed jobs) were even close to being as poorly designed as MNK imo.

When you compare what MNK has gotten in HW/SB with DRG and NIN it becomes painfully obvious they have no idea what to do with monk. DRG/NIN have gotten things that actually expand and improve DRG/NIN. MNK has gotten a variety of useless skills/traits (purification, tackle mastery, brotherhood when your not in a party), niche/situational skills (meditation/TFC in HW, form shift, riddle of earth, tornado kick), RNG skills that are automatically polarizing for a job that was previously based off skill and not luck (deep meditation, brotherhood) and skills that conflict with other parts of MNK (riddle of fire which might as well be B4B with a slow trait, earth tackle, tornado kick and riddle of earth again!). If I could I'd remove every HW/SB skill except for elixir field and form shift lol. Just blow it up and start over.

[LeeraSorlan]

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I heavily disagree, monk in SB was one of the better jobs. i mean sure, if you wanted the monks rotation to change drastically, it was underwhelming, but for those of us like myself, who only wanted monk to get better QoL things and keep the monks core gameplay the same, then HW monk is one of the best designed jobs that came out of HW..

it literally gave me everything i wanted out of monk. the only real negative i could even see (which isnt a negative to me personally) was some fights made you lose GL3, and there was no getting around it, but it was few and far between so i didnt care. and chakra was a downtime gain only (tho i disagree with SBs RNG gain so it didnt work out here either) but it wasnt a big deal. Nothing else felt flat about monk

Elixier field was and is amazingg, Form shift is incredibly helpful, chakra was extra dps and tp gain, cant really hate on that. tornado kick was underwhelming as far as lvl 60 abilities go, but meh. HW monk was really just ARR monk, except 100% better.


SB monk is another thing altogether, and one i disagree with, if they deleted every SB skill from monk, i wouldnt be mad. i like the job, but its clear to see how they dont understand what monk wants and moving it away from the skill based gameplay of ARR and HW (its still skill but now its a bit of RNG too) and turning it into RNG was a bad idea, and slowing us down every minute and a half was also not a good idea.


Its hard to complain about HW monk, it was the perfect job to me

[Shurrikhan]

I ran max SKS MNK in creator. There was no special "bootshine twice before doing DK again" rotation or anything like that. With max SKS you could rotate fracture and TOD with literally every DK/snakes cycle. You'd also run out of TP in literally 2 minutes without goad or purification (rip TFC). You could modify the opener to use fracture before TOD during perfect balance (IIRC I needed at least 950+ SKS to do this). Depending on the fight you could also do less or no form shifts to refresh GL3 (the transition from phase 1 to 2 in Zurvan EX and inception in A12S being examples).

But if you cared about doing as much DPS as possible then the best SKS tier for MNK in HW was as little SKS as possible. If the whole "lol no TP" thing wasn't a problem back in HW then running a high SKS build could have actually been somewhat viable.

Yes, TP was Monk's Achilles Heel in HW, without a doubt. I, too, built for max SKS, but frequently had to swap a benchmark lower to be even remotely sustainable, and had I been running with more serious statics, even that would not have been permitted.

But... there absolutely was a bootshine twice before DK rotation, so long as you let DK drop for Demolish and the following Dragon Kick. And that didn't even require max SKS. It just made it applicable in 1 additional rotational string per BFB period as opposed to the benchmark lower, and allowed DK-drops on DK alone (+/- ToD), thus allowing SP during the usual Demo drop stage with a slightly delayed ToD if a jump split your Demo from your DK and ToD timings, making it just beautifully lenient while still decisive, imo. Which is why it's just so great and horrible. The most perfect gameplay I'd ever seen in XIV, was a trap.

Oddly enough, though, it was also the one time that Purification almost made sense, if its recast time had just been massively reduced. And yet, what happened with its design once we entered the realm of infinite TP...?


To me -- though Tornado Kick, Meditation, and Purification all felt poorly tuned or lacked a finishing sensible retouch -- the only ability in HW not to augment Monk's tactical toolkit was Elixir Field, as there's nothing about it Howling Fist didn't do before and couldn't have been worked into potencies elsewhere -- not that I didn't love it. And then Stormblood design just went in the absolute direction. Rather than augmenting our ability for decisions, it's like they figured that complexity was somehow a matter of least control possible baseline while giving the most buttons possible in ability kits, no matter disfunctional or contradictory they were.

[echo78]

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I've spent more then enough time in the past talking about how HW MNK was a trainwreck on other forums and in game, I don't really feel like pointing out its never ending number of flaws again. If you thought the job was perfect then go ahead, people can have different opinions lol.

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Doing 2 bootshines before DK was a DPS loss, even at high SKS. Its like trying to do 2 FT on DRG before refreshing CT. You could do it, sure, but it wasn't good.

[Shurrikhan]

I've spent more then enough time in the past talking about how HW MNK was a trainwreck on other forums and in game, I don't really feel like pointing out its never ending number of flaws again. If you thought the job was perfect then go ahead, people can have different opinions lol.

No one's debating that it put Monk in an often horrible position relative to DRG and NIN or that it didn't suffer from severe technical or tuning issues. The gameplay was the point of praise here, nothing more.

Doing 2 bootshines before DK was a DPS loss, even at high SKS. Its like trying to do 2 FT on DRG before refreshing CT. You could do it, sure, but it wasn't good.

Even if an AA fell within the DK-less period every time, Demo-Drop was still a potency gain of 28 to 35 potency (within currently available crit chances + BL), iirc. The relative potency gain was higher, even, if at higher stat portions of Determination, lower portions of Critical Strike.

A Demo Drop sacrifices 7 potency from Demolish, 9 to 9.4 from the AA, and 15 from Dragon Kick itself for an auto-crit (and two additional globals of DK coverage). At a 10 percent effective CSR bonus, that would amount to a nearly a 64 potency bonus or a net of 33 per 18 seconds (diminished over nonapplicable strings to roughly a 1.63 pps bonus). I'll agree fully that due to the sheer amount of oGCD damage in the Monk toolkit relative to how small that SkS rotational benchmark pps bonus is that SkS would have been non-optimal even with infinite TP, but I very, very consistently parsed higher using DK drops for 1 to 2 GCDs during max and near-max SkS tiers on applicable strings than by clipping DK by more significant portions, as I would otherwise have been forced to do. Monk macro- and micro-rotation have never had that much complexity before or after.

In the meanwhile, had Phlebotomize and Chaos Thrust DoTs combined had even just 40 potency less over their durations, double FT would have been optimal at as high as a 2.34 GCD. Though sadly, again, their benchmark thereafter by which it did in fact become viable was just as TP-prohibitive as Monk's DK-gap rotations.

The funny thing there is that if not for Lance Mastery, DRG would have actually seen some of that potential complexity returned to it with Stormblood, due to the removal of Phlebotomize, and yet the potency bonus occurring only on the second Dragon weaponskill removed, through the relative non-viability of any and all clipped combos, any chance of that. (We later got a deemphasis of HT that pushed towards it, but only after a further buff to LM that drove us away from any possible breakpoints by which to escape 1, 2-2-2-2-2, 3-3-3-3-3; repeat.)

I guess where you see a solely a trainwreck, I see something that got narrowly, narrowly close to potency values that would have allowed for far more interesting internal balance points by which to allow for available macrorotational complexity, and wanted to see the rotational variance they could have caused if that tuning were thus perfected, rather than the system gutted just to trim off "niche" potential gameplay. HW Monk was flawed, but damn did it have great potential, though sadly just to be crippled in SB -- in a better relative position numerically, but as if its very viscera had been trimmed and jumbled about randomly within.

[Blazephina]

My main issues with the class are:
1. It feels like it has lost its place
2. Most of the major changes to it are totally rng driven, if not rng ON TOP OF rng.
3. Probably biggest reason is my class has not felt like it has evolved at all since I played it in ARR.

My bread and butter is still the same 6 buttons over and over. Every other class has gotten meaningful abilities that add to their rotation. See dragoon fang and claw wheeling thrust and then the addition of lance mastery. See ninja 3rd finisher added in HW (armor crush) to reset huton. Literally every single ability I have received is button bloat and the core of my rotation is UNCHANGED since the release of the game.

That all said I have no gripes with my classes actual dps output, sure you can make the argument it should do more but I could actually give a fuck about how much dps it does at this point. My gripe is that my class isn't fun anymore and hasn't evolved in any meaningful way.

There are tons of ideas on this job that have been generated from these types of threads over the years on how to evolve the class. I would honestly be happy if they made a sandbox sever, implemented our ideas one at a time to see how they work, pick the ones that make the class enjoyable again, and then just change potencies until the job does exactly the same dps as it does now.