Please Make Monk Fun Again

Monk in A Realm Reborn and Heavensward was incredibly fun and rewarding to play for its fluidity, mobility, and high attack speed allowing you to unleash a flurry of blows on your enemy.

Stormblood, however, saw the introduction of the Riddle of Fire skill, which has us trade our trademark speed boost from Greased Lightning for more damage, in spite of our job being built on landing a multitude of less potent attacks quickly. This goes against not only the job's flavor, but it also breaks its fluidity by arbitrarily reversing your speed boost for 20 out of every 90 seconds, causes managing uptime on Demolish consistently fairly annoying, and *heavily* encourages (forces) the double-weaving of oGCDs during its duration, where there often only feels like there's room for 1.9 oGCDs, adding to the clunky feeling of the game and punishing players without the ping to meet that demand. This also causes issues in openers that use both a potion and Riddle of Fire under Perfect Balance where, due to the occasional delay on potions activating in conjunction with the slow-down from RoF, you are unable to fit five GCDs in under Perfect Balance. Presently the only way to mitigate this in 100% of pulls is to purposefully delay activating Perfect Balance until half-way through the gap between Demolish and the Snap Punch you would use after it, which feels very unsatisfying to have to remember to manage, and wouldn't be a problem without Riddle of Fire (or the potion delay). The addition of this skill has made the job much less enjoyable for me to play, and while I've still been maining it for the past several months since launch, clearing and farming all of Deltascape Savage to give it a chance to change my opinion, it is still one I hold strong to, and am seeking an alternative job to play in place of it going forward as a result.

On a separate, but adjacent note, I would very much like to see Greased Lightning IV added to the game. With how the DoT from Demolish lines up with its duration for refreshing while under GL III, it even feels as though it was designed to be managed with just slightly more attack speed, that we might not have to refresh it with 6.5 seconds left to avoid risking losing a tick of damage from it, instead being able to regularly have 1-2 seconds left after going three rotations through our stances. The stripping of a bit of TP cost (and possibly to a lesser extent, the reduction in potency) from all of our GCDs transitioning into Stormblood also feels like a change made with Greased Lightning IV in mind. As a player and lover of Monk, I would happily take another hit to Potency and see our GCDs made more expensive if it would see us gain Greased Lightning IV, particularly in place of Riddle of Fire.

Please, asking as a Monk main of three years that has loved the job his whole adventure in Eorzea until Stormblood, give us back our speed and our flow. Remove Riddle of Fire, and if you're kind, give us Greased Lightning IV in its place.

Beyond what I've stated in my main post, I do feel there is much room for improvement in trimming skill bloat/some skills/traits that feel underwhelming. For example, even in spite of Steel Peak being made less useful in exchange for One-Ilm Punch having a non-diminishing Stun, I have yet to find a single case of the skill being useful. It only being available for 1/3 of my GCDs, costing 120 TP, and having such low potency makes it exceptionally unattractive, as it always has, and it finds no space on my hotbars. Arm of the Destroyer is also a skill that in its current state isn't finding any space on my hotbar, also being due to the unreliable nature of it being stance-gated, costing 120 TP, and not putting out enough damage to redeem itself on that front. I can only assume this skills still remain to make a three-part set with Rockbreaker as a third Weaponskill for each stance with a 120 TP cost. Were these skills to be re-attempted for actual viability, though, I feel they would need to be freed from their Style requirements, and/or made oGCDs. Or removed altogether, and either have their secondary effects added to our existing Weaponskills or oGCDs (like putting Stun back on Steel Peak and moving AotD's Silence onto Elixir Field), or left out of our kits completely, as they're skills we haven't been using anyway, and frankly, unless the Fist stances were removed, I wouldn't have space on my Cross-Hotbar+Expanded sets (32 buttons total, I don't personally like WXHB on Monk) to add those skills if they were made relevant.

Tackle Mastery also doesn't feel impactful as there are exceptionally few/no circumstances where the Earth or Wind effects are useful, making the trait a mere potency buff for Fire Tackle, but offering little else. Which is fine, I don't feel the job needs anything more there, it just also isn't something that felt satisfying to acquire as a player.

I do feel there is also room for there to be balancing adjustments made to make us more attractive as members of more serious raid groups, primarily either by way of adjustments to Brotherhood, or by adjustments to Ninja in particular, in its overwhelmingly valuable utility that, in my experience, every group argues is at least *almost* mandatory, if not actually mandatory for competing against other groups for various measures of accomplishment in endgame content beyond what the game itself provides, thus causing said groups to make Ninja an equally heavily demanded job for their static positions. This is a discussion for another thread, however. I just want the job to be made more fun to play. Balancing for raid viability can be done after that.

I do not main mnk but ill play it as secondary ill do agree put 5 GCD on PB with 90-117 ping ROF speed reduce & Pot delay is such pain in the ass.I have single weave somewhere on opener i hope we get the SMN treatment make this class fun & smooth again.This Job deserve to be great again!