Possible Changes to Riddle of Earth for Monk

So, I'm a long time monk on FF14 and while I love the class and feel a sense of accomplishment when I play it well since it's possibly one of the harder classes to play at a high level (what with the positionals, optimal use of Perfect Balance, buff management, etc), I've been bothered by the fact that three of its moves don't seem to have very much use compared to other classes (most of which have a frequent use for all of their moves) in PVE content. Those moves are Arm of the Destroyer, One-Ilm Punch, and Riddle of Earth. Unfortunately, the character count was too long for one post, so I'll be separating it between this post and a reply post soon after. ^^;

Riddle of Earth is a 30 second defensive oGCD with a 60 second recast that switches you to Fists of Earth (which reduces damage by 10%) and grants Earth's Reply when hit, which reduces damage by an extra 10% (20% total) and refreshes GL. (On a side note, you'll lose the buff if you switch to Fists of Wind or Fists of Fire. Also, the refresh only happens once).

To be honest, I've found this move to be half useless ever since the beginning of Stormblood. I say "half useless" because the GL refresh is actually really handy during times when the boss is un-targetable (and there's nothing else to hit) for a short time. That said, this is only useful for a handful fights. The recent changes to Perfect Balance and Riddle of Wind make them better choices for saving GL (which you really shouldn't be in danger of losing so long as you can hit something), but it's still useful nonetheless. The thing that makes it half useless is that you only get the damage reduction after the first hit, which means, in terms of saving you from dying to an attack due to not being at max HP or messing up a mechanic in a fight, it's not much better than FoE (meaning you will most likely die). Now, this may be useful for solo content where you're usually getting auto-attacked by an open world enemy, but once you hit level cap (or do a dungeon for that matter), the defensive boost becomes pretty useless. It almost never saves you when you need it most from a raid attack and in the event that both tanks die (which usually result in a wipe anyway) and aggro switches to monk, you'll last 5-10 seconds at best with adequate healing unless the boss uses a tank buster.

So, how do we make this move better? Honesty, the simple method would be to make it more like its PVP counterpart. For PVP, after using Riddle of Earth, after losing 50% or more HP, it decreases damage taken by 10% and increases damage dealt by 10% (both Riddle of Earth and Earth's Reply buffs last 10 seconds). For PVE content, just switch the "losing 50% or more HP" to "getting hit" part and give it the damage related buffs. Better yet, you can get rid of the damage reduction part entirely and just keep the damage dealt increase, as well as increase the amount by 5% or the duration for 5 seconds (or even both). This would make it similar to SAM's Third Eye, but would definitely give it frequent use. Only downside to doing this is that a player would need to keep track of their buff timer and weave in Fist of Fire in order to not let their damage drop, but that's something a more skilled player would be concerned about and wouldn't really make the class harder to play.

Of course, if making Riddle of Earth a defensive-offensive buff would disrupt the balance of DPS too much and it'd be better to keep it as a defensive buff, then that's what it should actually do when faced with an attack that can one-shot you. So, with that said, if we're going that route, the best course of action would be to give the extra damage reduction, maybe even increase it by 5-10% more, right when the move is used, reduce the buff duration to 10-15 seconds, and to double, maybe even triple, the recast timer. Since there are only a handful of occasions when a high-level player will use RoE for the GL refresh, making it a one-time life saving move would be very useful in that it could save a lot of pulls that result in a wipe due to one death. The only downside I can see to this is for monks to then abuse the move to ignore certain mechanics and purposely get hit in order to keep uptime on a boss (admittedly, even I'd do that as well).

So between the two options that could likely disrupt the DPS balance, the offensive option is probably the better option since the defensive option would probably be more game-breaking, though it'd be useful all the same.

That's it for my opinions on Riddle of Earth. Be sure to check out my thoughts on Arm of the Destroyer and One-Ilm Punch!