Tornado Kick and Riddle of Fire

Let me preface by saying I'm not a Monk main, just an observer with a general idea of how Monk functions.

I know that during 4.x, it is/was a slight DPS increase to use Tornado Kick at the end of Riddle of Fire, then Perfect Balance to regain the lost GL. If Perfect Balance is indeed being increased to 120s with the release of Shadowbringers, then TK will see even less use outside of SE's intention for it: to burn GL stacks for damage when downtime is inevitable. This is assuming that Anatman is fixed to not require at least one GL stack to use (which would further cripple TK if unchanged).

Perhaps SE should embrace using RoF and TK together and actually build it into RoF itself via one of the following options:

• Option 1: Tornado Kick's cooldown is increased to be slightly longer than Riddle of Fire's duration. Tornado Kick gains an additional trait that removes its GL consumption during Riddle of Fire.
• Option 2: Riddle of Fire grants an additional buff with the same duration as Riddle of Fire (let's call it "Lightning Focus"). Lightning Focus is consumed when using Tornado Kick in lieu of GL stacks (making that Tornado Kick "free").

Either of these options would make Tornado Kick safe and free to use during every Riddle of Fire window, giving it more utility than just being a pre-downtime tool. Monk also lost a few oGCD abilties, so this could fill the gap a bit (at least during the damage buff window).

I personally prefer option 2, as it doesn't affect TK's cooldown and can also be expanded upon (e.g., granting more than one "stack" of Lightning Focus when activating Riddle of Fire).

Why not just make tornado kick only work under riddle of fire, and if you use tornado kick, it ends riddle of fire. This way it’s literally only used at the end of a RoF window

TK is very dead as of the media build that we've seen. Feels bad going from tornado kick finally being a staple of optimizing the job to going back to being a glorified execute.

Considering TK was first implemented to compensate monks for losing their GL stacks when the boss disappear it would've made sense to make it work a different way since monk can now keep their stacks even with no target.

Given Anatman, Six-sided Star, and Riddle of Earth, I can't think of any fights we have right now where we wouldn't be able to maintain GL across breaks. About the only thing that could do it in would be a 16s+ no-target period without raid damage after a forced move/push that would probably break Anatman. And without that, we should be able to maintain GL4 for at least 45s.

For TK, I feel like putting it on a longer cooldown and only eating one stack of GL would work better at this point. There would still be the option to save it until a burst phase, or use it just before you were going to refresh your GL stacks anyways. It wouldn't be quite in line with the original intention, but with the number of GL-maintaining abilities we have now, we don't really need something to dump GL when downtime is coming, since we should be able to maintain it.

I would still prefer the RoF slowdown went away, but it's far from the end of the world that it's not.

With the two together in the OP, I like both options, though I feel like the same synergies could be given to anything on a 60-120s cooldown not necessarily just RoF.

There's quite literally no reason to use TK anymore. Not even before Downtime, because Six Sided Star is stronger and keeps GL.
The skill is redundant now anyway. In it's creation, TK was meant to kick off our GL so it doesn't go to waste. Since then, we've been given tools to keep GL during downtime instead. There's really no point to TK anymore, and it's hard to believe the devs missed something this obvious.

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Originally Posted by Exiled_Tonberry

There's quite literally no reason to use TK anymore. Not even before Downtime, because Six Sided Star is stronger and keeps GL.
The skill is redundant now anyway. In it's creation, TK was meant to kick off our GL so it doesn't go to waste. Since then, we've been given tools to keep GL during downtime instead. There's really no point to TK anymore, and it's hard to believe the devs missed something this obvious.

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Can you not us Anantman when at 0 GL? I know it doesn't build out of combat, but it seems to me it should still build from 0 in combat.

You would Six-Sided + TK and then Anantman to rebuild.

Anatman does absolutely nothing at 0 GL. At max GL it simply pauses the timer. Anything else and it grants a stack and freezes the timer at 16 seconds.