MNK Rework is a great start

Gonna throw some more in the pot. But ever since SB, MNK has been in a position where you never lost GL. Literally TK was used a lot because how easy it was to get back GL. The same kinda applies in ShB where you're always in GL unless you get screwed by cutscenes. IMO making it a permanent triat is pointing it in the right direction. Some may say its just a button mashing job now, it always has been THE button mashing job, the point of it is going fast. People are going to have different opinions about the job.

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Originally Posted by Fast_Iain

Gonna throw some more in the pot. But ever since SB, MNK has been in a position where you never lost GL. Literally TK was used a lot because how easy it was to get back GL. The same kinda applies in ShB where you're always in GL unless you get screwed by cutscenes. IMO making it a permanent triat is pointing it in the right direction. Some may say its just a button mashing job now, it always has been THE button mashing job, the point of it is going fast. People are going to have different opinions about the job.

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I disagree to that "button mash" job sentiment. Most jobs have structure to know when to use certain skills and adapt no job is just 1-2-3 with nothing to seek out.. besides "that" one. Due to the ties of positional no Melee job will ever be dunce levels of the Accessibility agenda that plagues the gaming industry

As a monk main at first I loved the idea of the GL change. but the more I play it something just feels super odd and off about it. I still don't know how to do the new opener and now I feel like I play worst then I normally did. Before I could say I was decent and silightly above normal now I feel like I just picked it up. I don't like the new opener I've been seeing on the net and I didn't like the TK opener either. HW monk was the best monk I feel now. I miss THAT monk. This one feels like it has no backbone. I'll be going back to sam for that backbone until I relearn monk again. The thought of no GL spamming sounded nice on paper until I got to play it sadly. Maybe I just suck.. :c

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Originally Posted by Raikai

My hopes and personal wishes for further improvement to the current kit in 6.0 are:
- A tracker for Twin Snakes and Demolish built in the job gauge.
- The job gauge itself features a tiger... Why not a different frame to signal the form you\\\\'re currently in? If by some reason you have to interrupt your rotation, it\\\\'s a good way to glance and see what stage you\\\\'re at.
- Shoulder Tackle damage componenet replaced with a stun or a slow. It might be just me, but I hate when OGCDs movement utility abilities are tied to damage, because it\\\\'s never up when you actually need to move, as you have to weave them in for the dmg.
- I think Fists of Earth and Wind really need a buff on what they do, because it\\\\'s almost worthless to swap Fists for their utility. SSS gives a movement buff... Why not let that buff change according to the Fist you\\\\'re at?
- The Forbidden Chakra, it would be great if it had the same range of Enlightment or even a 15yr range. This would be amazing to have some damage to do while out of range running from stuff.
- Arm of the Destroyer moved to below level 20. It\\\\'s a major pain to partake in Roulettes that take you to a low level dungeon and you simply don\\\\'t even have an AoE.

Of course, I\\\\'m also expecting some new mechanic to replace the complexity lost with GL stacks. I wonder what they have in mind, since it\\\\'s basically a new thing. Maybe they can expand Fists functionality and interactivity, or maybe a new fourth animal form?

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If you did the rotation properly pre patch, snakes and your dot were always up or just about, you can keep track of them on the buff/debuff bar, putting them on the job gauge is redundant and adds nothing to the job.

The job gauge features a coeurl, as in coeurl fists/stance, monk lore in general.

Shoulder tackle used to have dmg + stun, the stun was removed, you have two stacks of shoulder tackle, if you know the fight you should always have at least one stack up when you need it.

Fists of wind got a buff this expansion but a bunch of whiners got it removed, now it’s worthless outside of town.

You’re melee, you don’t attack from ranged, although a proper buff to have been implemented would have been a ranged skill like nin/drg/sam/pld/drk/war/gnb all have.

Plenty of jobs don’t have aoe under 20 it would be a qol, but go play drg if you really want to suffer without aoe.

As someone who has played MNK since ARR, the most recent changes suck, and makes me not even want to play it, but hey now people who couldn’t figure out how to keep greased lightning up can!

Having played Monk as my main DPS now since the middle of SB, I can honestly say I do not care that we no longer have to manage GL. Can you honestly tell me you didn't mind losing GL to situations outside of your control? I really enjoy cutscenes and down for the count causing me to drop GL and forcing me to reopen whilst everyone else, for the most part, gets to carry on with only minor hindrance. Did you really enjoy spamming form shift once that got changed? Did you really love being at the mercy of RoE proccing to save your GL back in SB?

I'm sorry that some people who play Monk are now angry over GL being removed as something you had to manage but I can say that I 100% prefer what we have now to what we had then. Now my opener is buttery smooth, I no longer have to double weave during my opener and clip my gcd just to make sure things go out on time for the rest of the raid and now I ramp up immediately, there's no delay anymore so now I actually quite enjoy reopening when applicable. You can say removing GL management has casualised the job if you want and yes, I see a lot of people say that now GL is gone, they might be more inclined to play the job, but to argue that it is casual and braindead now is foolishness. With GL gone, we are no longer shackled by it and this will hopefully allow the dev team to actually create some new, meaningful skills that aren't just GL extenders.

As for the RoE change, yeah i'm a little sore about it and in the current savage tier I'd be very happy to have kept the old RoE but it is what it is. There will always be people for and against positionals. I like them and I don't think SE have plans to remove them anytime soon.

Just wanted to drop my own feedback in this thread.

MNK is much improved from it's prior iterations. Greased Lightning was a design dead-end that no longer coheres with the way content is designed and presented, so I think dropping it was the right move. Making Perfect Balance usage-based rather than time-based is very welcome and makes it function reliably at all levels of ping and skill speed. I was unsure about the Riddle of Earth change initially but it works fairly well.

MNK still needs more work, but I wasn't expecting an expansion-tier rework in a mid-expansion patch. The new changes get it into a decent new base state where hopefully it can be further improved in 6.0.

These are what I feel are the current outstanding issues with MNK:

Chakra
In the absence of Greased Lightning, MNK lacks a standout defining mechanic which unites its entire design and toolkit, like NIN's Ninjutsu or SAM's iaijutsu + kenki. The form system is pretty much already at the limit of how interesting you can make it while still fitting with XIV's design, while Chakra is very barebones and has several issues besides.

There are only two things to spend chakra on, a single-target attack and an AoE attack. This makes Chakra pretty boring from a gameplay perspective since there's no real thought put into using it, you just hit the relevant button when it lights up. But on top of this, the RNG nature of gaining chakra combined with the fact that you can only hold a max of 5 chakra (with chakra-spending abilities also costing 5 chakra) means that overcapping chakra is a serious issue. It's typical to lose at least 2-3 or more chakra in a given brotherhood/PB window just because you can't spend chakra fast enough, or because the chakra comes in at inconvenient times. The unpredictable nature also means you sometimes have to delay your other abilities such as Elixir Field which can cause issues with buff alignment later on. This is an even bigger problem in 5.4 because the proc rate for chakra was increased, so we are getting more than ever before.

At minimum, the cap for chakra needs to be increased to 10. It's fine if Meditate only lets you build to 5, we just need an overflow buffer for when we're getting more procs than we can use. Ideally, MNK should also have more actions that interact with chakra to make it a more interesting system.

Abundance of useless/overly situational skills
The biggest offender here is the Fists stances. Since no changes were made to Fists of Wind and Fists of Earth with 5.4, except to remove Riddle of Wind, these skills have essentially been rendered worthless because there is no real battle situation where a MNK would choose to use their effects over the 10% damage buff of Fists of Fire. The Fists stances need a thorough examination and redesign to make them more compelling, or otherwise they need to be removed and replaced with more useful or interesting skills.

Anatman is also another failure of a skill that no longer has any true use. It's purpose was obvious when it was introduced in 5.0, a way to keep Greased Lightning during downtime. But this was almost immediately rendered worthless with 5.05 and the change which allowed Form Shift to refresh Greased Lightning. Even worse, Anatman allowed for a higher DPS opener which lead to the awkward situation of MNKs standing still doing nothing in the middle of battle and relying on invisible server ticks to do optimal DPS. With 5.4 Anatman is now a truly worthless skill, the situations where it offers any combat benefit whatsoever are rare, and the amount of benefit it offers is miniscule. It's even less useful than Shoha was before it was changed. Anatman either needs a full redesign or to be removed and replaced with a better skill.

Six-Sided Star is a tricky position because it IS useful, in some circumstances. However using it properly is difficult as it requires very strong knowledge of the content to know when and where it is useful. Additionally because it is on the GCD, timing it is awkward; you often find yourself in a position where using SSS would be useful, but you can't use it because you need to move away from the target before your GCD is refreshed. The change to make it increase movement speed is good, but not enough to make it feel like an integral part of MNK's kit. MNK already has something to do while disengaged from the enemy (charge chakra), and since SSS locks you out of your other GCDs for several seconds, it conflicts with the desire to use Meditation. There is potentially a design for SSS which is intuitive, feels good to use, and meshes with MNKs kit, but I feel like it'd be simpler to just replace it with something more broadly useful like a backstep oGCD ability.

Lack of interesting buffs/abilities
I'm glad that Tornado Kick is finally a usable skill, in some ways for the first time since it was introduced over 5 years ago. But it is a bit boring that it is just flat damage on a cooldown with no other interactions. This is especially ironic because 5.0 removed Howling Fist and Steel Peak for being the same thing.

Besides this, there is no real need for Brotherhood and Riddle of Fire to be separate abilities because they have the same cooldown and are always used together. Their effects could be merged into a single buff to save on both button space and rotational inputs. This is especially true because Riddle of Fire is just a boring +% flat damage with no other effects due to having its GCD slowdown removed in 5.05. I'm definitely not suggesting bringing that back though.

Abilities which require no thought as to their use are boring because you just press them when they come off cooldown and then forget. Well-designed abilities should either make you think more carefully about when to use them, or affect your rotation in such a way that you must play slightly differently while the ability is active. Brotherhood, Shoulder Tackle and Perfect Balance are good abilities, but things like Riddle of Fire and Tornado Kick are dull and need work.

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That about covers it. Obviously I wasn't expecting any of this to happen in 5.4, or at any point between now and 6.0. But I'm certain the devs are already thinking about or in the middle of designing job updates for 6.0, so I think it's important that they examine the feedback now. MNK is finally in a decent state, but it has a lot of potential that it's not living up to.

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Originally Posted by VentVanitas

Thanks, we all needed a laugh.

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Yeah, dude has 15 posts since 2014 and uses most of them to insult the "casuals" and other players. Probably won't be last long. He'll get bored after he's done berating everyone and flexing how great he s compared to everyone else.

Monk does need some more tweaks, which will hopefully come in the next expected with a better rework.

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Originally Posted by PangTong

The biggest offender here is the Fists stances. Since no changes were made to Fists of Wind and Fists of Earth with 5.4, except to remove Riddle of Wind, these skills have essentially been rendered worthless because there is no real battle situation where a MNK would choose to use their effects over the 10% damage buff of Fists of Fire. The Fists stances need a thorough examination and redesign to make them more compelling, or otherwise they need to be removed and replaced with more useful or interesting

Abilities which require no thought as to their use are boring because you just press them

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I agree they need to expand the chakra system, they should at least up the amount to 7 to correspond to the belief of the 7 chakras, there is a whole pool of information about chakras they could use to make this more interesting and engaging.

Fists of wind was nerfed effectively making it useless, they actually did something with it, and people who can’t handle losing greased lightening to a cut scene are responsible for the step backwards.

I’ve lost track of the amount of times that fists of earth has prevented a wipe in dungeons/raids/trials (including ex). It has uses, situational yes but situational skills give jobs depth, and some of them are more useful in synced content (very much part of the game) and I think that’s where SE fails by listening to the forum whiners too much, some people think that every skill you have should be used in end game raiding, or it’s useless and that’s just not the case.

I preferred the old Anataman, I found it more useful then most people I guess.

I could not agree more. I had left monk as one of the last jobs to level to get the mount for leveling all jobs to 80 because, old monk was very unenjoyable to play personally. It just was to tedious to play but, the changes in 5.4 have made it one of my favorite jobs to play. I finally feel like a martial arts master with flying fists and kicks of fury. I cannot wait to get it to 80 and play the higher level content with it.

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Originally Posted by Ariel_Valmont

I’ve lost track of the amount of times that fists of earth has prevented a wipe in dungeons/raids/trials (including ex). It has uses, situational yes but situational skills give jobs depth, and some of them are more useful in synced content (very much part of the game) and I think that’s where SE fails by listening to the forum whiners too much, some people think that every skill you have should be used in end game raiding, or it’s useless and that’s just not the case.

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Situational skills can be good and interesting additions, but the situations where they are useful actually need to exist with enough frequency to justify occupying a hotbar slot. I've played MNK for 5 years, and I could count the times where I got any use from Fists of Earth on one hand. It's a personal damage reduction on a non-tank job which doesn't have a raise. If you're being attacked as MNK in the first place, something is already going terribly wrong. You have to assume the tanks are dead and your enmity is high enough that the enemies are attacking you instead. But even in this case, Fists of Earth is only useful if it can prevent your death for long enough to revive the tanks. Since it's only a 10% damage reduction, you are probably going to die anyway. Essentially, by the time you're in a situation where Fists of Earth might be useful, a wipe is already nearly guaranteed.

Not every skill needs to be rotational, but skills which have no obvious use in normal gameplay and content can't really justify their existence.

Stances are remnants of an old system of DPS agro management. I believe the stances were a complete oversight by the Dev team and not recognizing the the lack of desire of coming out of one stance as a DPS. Reminds me of the ninja stances from YEARS ago that got the axe in HW I think?

The stances for mnk have and in of themselves always been trivial. Like you I can probably remember only ONE time I used fists of earth and it was when our tank died in Dazmel Darkhold on the 2nd boss due to standing in AOE. I flipped over to fists of earth and due to high DPS I held agro easily. Back then we had featherfoot and this accompanied with bloodbath, second wind, haymaker, fists of earth mnk could truly hold it's own in a tank situation until the tank was rezzed or until the mob was dead.

Where I think monk went off the rails was from 1.0 into 2.0. Monk has always been considered a tank from 1.0 and a lot of that carried over into 2.0 with bloodbath, second wind, haymaker, fists of earth and in 1.0 you also got Taunt (now provoke), but is no longer available on monk currently from 2.0 onwards.

Monk is a failed experiment of a former tank in 1.0 being turned into DPS while still holding onto a LOT of skills focused on tanking into 2.0. I totally believe monk could have been a tank in 2.0 if it weren't for the positional's. Which I feel were tacked on to put monk in the DPS category to make it compelling to play. If positional's weren't there and monk kept everything from 2.0, it would be a tank. My god your role + cross class allowed: Foresight (defense), Skull sunder (enmity generation), fient (slow enemies), keen flurry (parry chance), Bloodbath (HP regen), Not to mention featherfoot (evade chance), Haymaker (counter on hit ability that slowed), Fist's of Earth (damage reduciton), Mantra (increased healing), one ilm punch (removed buffs).

This ALL makes me believe and this held true in FFXI for monk. But Monk was going to be the 3rd tank in 2.0. There I said it.

Paladin - mitigation tank
Warrior - Life steal tank
Monk - Evasion/dodge tank (and without positional's this would have been AMAZING)

I truly believe monk with it's high DEX and Evade chance monk was a "dodge tank". Fist of Earth in 2.0 gave 10% damage reduction...Fist of Fire only gave 5% damage increase.

Haymaker was actually REALLY strong with 180 potency and a slow effect when a monk evaded an attack. Pretty reminiscent of Shield Swipe with pacify on block for a paladin.

The key here is positionals, and the unessicary need for them at ALL in this game. FFXIV didn't understand what it was until heavensward. After the complete overhaul of 1.0 and 2.0, heavensward was the real start of battle mechanics imo. Everything before it was something to get them started with the game. Monk was just a by product of an old system that nobody liked, and monk has been confused as to how it fit in the DPS world ever since leading up to 5.4.

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Originally Posted by Sqwall

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Haymaker, Fists of Earth and Featherfoot were all Pugilist skills not Monk skills. Monk seems to have always been intended as a DpS what with Fist of Fire (damage up) and Dragon Kick (Blunt Resist down) being locked to the Soul Crystal. The "Tank" skills Pugilist had seemed to be more a sign that the alternate Pugilist job was planned to be a Tank just like how many of the Lancer's "tank" skills pointed to an alternative Tank job. The failure to properly balance Arcanist for both Scholar and Summoner killed a lot of plans, but I don't think Monk was ever a failed Tank in the making.

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Originally Posted by Ultimatecalibur

Haymaker, Fists of Earth and Featherfoot were all Pugilist skills not Monk skills. Monk seems to have always been intended as a DpS what with Fist of Fire (damage up) and Dragon Kick (Blunt Resist down) being locked to the Soul Crystal. The "Tank" skills Pugilist had seemed to be more a sign that the alternate Pugilist job was planned to be a Tank just like how many of the Lancer's "tank" skills pointed to an alternative Tank job. The failure to properly balance Arcanist for both Scholar and Summoner killed a lot of plans, but I don't think Monk was ever a failed Tank in the making.

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To add to this, iirc the general idea was that classes would be flexible with what they can do, and the jobs would sacrifice that generality to be more efficient at a given role, however, this being an mmo where efficiency is the only thing that matters, outside of some niche early pvp stuff that element of the system was rarely used.

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Originally Posted by Ryaz

Yeah, dude has 15 posts since 2014 and uses most of them to insult the "casuals" and other players. Probably won't be last long. He'll get bored after he's done berating everyone and flexing how great he s compared to everyone else.

Monk does need some more tweaks, which will hopefully come in the next expected with a better rework.

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If you feel that insulted, because i highly doubt that anyone of the pre-commentors is a decent savage player or have played monk the last half year, than it´s completely up to you, you know?

But that some guys think, that losing FoW, the new RoE and a high speed button smashing opener are an improvement right now, shows me a lot about their game-knowledge. I would bet that the most players actually will die, because FoW is gone and that they don´t know "when to use SSS", otherwise they´re going to lose a lot of damage.
The 5.3 monk gave you more time to keep your off gcd´s rolling in the opener, you were much faster in movement ALWAYS and RoE let you easily play certain boss mechanics. All this is gone.

Considering you get Fists of Earth at level 15, I'm pretty sure it's mainly for solo progression and FATEs and the like.

Its not a bad start but I feel this current iteration is only a base. It still needs another mechanic fleshed out next expac to its rotation. I’d like to see perfect balance falling off leaving you in formless stance, chakra rework, twin snake duration extended by 1-2 seconds, six sided star made into another ogcd, and a real disengage like Sam/drg/nin have. Chakra I’d rather when filled grant a small buff window, ie having 7 chakras to open up and after 5 is filled your next leaden bootshine does two hits. Or after 5 is filled it allows six sided star to be used without the gcd penalty. Current chakra system is clunky at best and ruins the more natural flow of the current rotation.

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Originally Posted by VentVanitas

Speaking of, I'm 100% certain there's a way Blitz can be introduced into the game without working as a copy of Mudras or forcing a pause in damage/rotation.

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There was discussion on that in the 70 page "Monk needs a Rework" thread.

Essentially it would lean into Monk's Form based combos since there's still a ton of design potential there. Perfect Balance can be changed so it has the additional effect of allowing the use of a finisher should the proper sequence of three Weaponskills be used (which you still execute), with the sequence corresponding to the Form you'd normally need to be in to use the skill. So if a theoretical input was Coeurl>Raptor> Opo Opo to finish with a suplex, you'd use Snap Punch>Twin Snakes>Dragon Kick.

Even if they make major changes to Chakra so it's no longer RNG based as well as its other whole host of issues, which is still necessary considering Chakra is pretty much the worst designed mechanic on a DPS at the moment, they'll still need to add something else. Any gauge that just passively builds needs to have something complementing it in order to not be boring, it's why Kenki/Ninki aren't all that Samurai or Ninja have as far as mechanics go.

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Originally Posted by SpeckledBurd

There was discussion on that in the 70 page "Monk needs a Rework" thread.

Essentially it would lean into Monk's Form based combos since there's still a ton of design potential there. Perfect Balance can be changed so it has the additional effect of allowing the use of a finisher should the proper sequence of three Weaponskills be used (which you still execute), with the sequence corresponding to the Form you'd normally need to be in to use the skill. So if a theoretical input was Coeurl>Raptor> Opo Opo to finish with a suplex, you'd use Snap Punch>Twin Snakes>Dragon Kick.

Even if they make major changes to Chakra so it's no longer RNG based as well as its other whole host of issues, which is still necessary considering Chakra is pretty much the worst designed mechanic on a DPS at the moment, they'll still need to add something else. Any gauge that just passively builds needs to have something complementing it in order to not be boring, it's why Kenki/Ninki aren't all that Samurai or Ninja have as far as mechanics go.

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Funny you mention this, because ever since I made that message I've been scouring the forums for ideas and suggestions on Blitz myself. And you're right, most discussions on it seem to boil down to making Perfect Balance the catalyst for Blitz and I can very easily see why. Being able to execute any form skill in any order, as well as the forms themselves being the way they are, it almost makes too much sense. Although I of course realise it is also because that players wish to see PB become something more involving and Blitz is an answer to that. My only minor nitpick about something like that is that it seems more like another effect of PB rather than a job unique mechanic. (Unless PB was made a shorter cooldown to be more frequent. Perhaps 2 charges of PB with 3 stacks, rather than having 1 PB and 6 stacks? Just spitballing) I have made my own sheet detailing on another possible route for Blitz as a rough concept but it is far too undeveloped to be worth sharing nor do I have confidence that it'd work better than the current popular idea of Blitz anyway.

That is if SE will even consider Blitz as it is for 6.0, seeing as how MNK has never had anything resembling its franchise counterpart in its kit. (unless you really want to count a handful of things that only share names with stuff from past games or Somersault, which has been removed from the game) They were barely able to think of a way to get Dualcast in the game, let alone other class-famous gimmicks.