Upkeep abilities

It's kind of one of those things they'll probably look at one day and decide to take the pruning shears to in the future. Like, i'm not sure if i'd like them removing those maintenance buffs, but i'm not sure i'd hate it either.

Form Shift was one of the biggest dealbreakers for me as a monk as someone who likes duty finder and just like... enjoying human interaction. Whenever I would try to type a message, I'd have to stop, Form Shift several times, then type more. Nevermind how bad it would make me feel whenever there was a loading screen or something. Yeah, no one is forcing you to do it, but it's the mathematically right thing to do, and make your run faster for you and everyone else, so you feel compelled to do it. Also please don't try to craft this narrative that somehow hitting this button outside of combat is somehow skillful or adding depth.

Maybe next expansion, when they hopefully get rid of the fist buffs (because they have almost no substantive meaning), they can make a Fists of Wind trait that grants movement speed and maintains GL outside of combat, under the guise the monk is assuming a meditative state when they are undistributed.

Yes they're kinda pointless and will probably be removed in 6.0 unless designers backtrack on what is effectively a bad design and go back to how things were. Many are hoping but chances are slim. This follows everything else they've done with class design, be it ressource uptime, stance dancing, crafting etc.. They've taken some of the core aspects of classes and have made them easier/braindead, all in an effort to not give too big an advantage to higher skilled players and reduce the skill gap. Makes their life easier when calibrating content, means people aren't as pressured to perform better, but makes the gameplay more boring with growing experience.
There's a limit to how much you can do this of course so they may add a bit of complexity for some roles (healers come to mind as being in a pretty bad place right now)

I'm on the fence. I hate spamming abilities to keep up my buffs while out of combat (especially if someone goes AFK for a minute before the boss in a dungeon), and I hate my buffs dropping. But, I'm afraid without the (however slight) risk for buffs to drop, the jobs might not have a level of stress/urgency that makes them engaging to play.

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Originally Posted by Esmoire

Form Shift was one of the biggest dealbreakers for me as a monk as someone who likes duty finder and just like... enjoying human interaction. Whenever I would try to type a message, I'd have to stop, Form Shift several times, then type more. Nevermind how bad it would make me feel whenever there was a loading screen or something. Yeah, no one is forcing you to do it, but it's the mathematically right thing to do, and make your run faster for you and everyone else, so you feel compelled to do it. Also please don't try to craft this narrative that somehow hitting this button outside of combat is somehow skillful or adding depth.

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Yeah. Instead of inventing workarounds why not just have the countdown timers on Enochian, GL, BotD, etc pause when you leave combat? Spamming abilities like Form Shift and Umbral Soul may work, but by the Twelve is it annoying. Job mechanics should work with me, not against me.

Really though, maintenance buffs are bad as a concept. They're decent at being skill checks but terrible at being fun. I want a buff that makes me feel like a god when it's active (Summon Bahamut), not one that makes be feel like crap when it isn't (Enochian.) Enochian, BotD, Huton, etc, are not fun buttons to press. On MCH I press my automaton button and think "sweet, robot time!" On BLM I press Enochian and feel nothing at best, and annoyance at having it drop off at worst.