Complex Monk Problems, Discussion of Job Gauges

A hard look at the Two Gauges

Greased Lightning:
There is no reason to not have max stacks, I get that it's like an engine that is slowly revving up to big damage. But it's like a lightswitch, there's no reason not to have max unless you a) died, or b) messed up. This makes GL much like protect, it's a lightswitch, you have it or you don't.

Greased Lightning has always been sort of a thing since ARR which has made the job a blessing and a curse. It feels awful when you make a mistake, because you're worried you might lose this, or have to burn other things like perfect balance to maintain it. On one hand it can be satisfying to build these stacks up and keep them up, there are no more barriers to retaining stacks (heck there are 3 abilities to maintain it, including RoE).

I don't think there is very much inherent rewards that aren't passive with MNK built in with GL. They obviously don't feel the need to add in many moves that use it (with the exception of Tornado Kick). There's no big reward for dumping your stacks, nor having max. I admit it does feel fun to run around your target and hit it with faster skill speeds from GL4 (but this is partially mitigated due to limitations of gear and skill speed due to stealth nerfs because of TP removal). It may be in the future they could implement some sort of system where they change greased lightning intentionally so you have to balance stacks or use skills to drop individual stacks of GL. Maybe they could design TK in such a way that it only removes like 1 stack of GL but has some cost? or make bigger dmg abilities that drop GL stacks but make it fun to build again?

Chakra Gauge:
-Chakra is luck based (get a crit to get a 70% chance to get a stack), Monks traded damaging oGCD's in favor of luck based damage.
-The only control you have over chakra generation is manually using them, which outside of the opener or short downtimes, while rolling GCD's during uptime on a target is not a managable resource.
-It suffers from the problem of, once you get 5, use it.
-They added in another AoE skill which admittedly is flashy, but I think this was in lieu of knowing what to actually do with another gauge for MNK.

The Chakra gauge when added into HW, always felt like it was tacked on. It gives a damaging oGCD skill yes, but it never added much to the core gameplay of MNK. It did give you something to do outside of combat, or during untargettable boss phases, but it largely has never been something that has anything that evolved the MNK as a job as a whole. Also with the removal of oGCD's you're not making a conscious decision in when to use your skills.

There's a lot more I could write, but I think 2 gauges is enough.

One of the core issues is Monk is the fast class. They're supposed to make you feel like you're hitting hard and hitting fast. They're supposed to be the combo master. To resemble fighting games. The issued being...

• The combo synergy is kind of lacking. There is essentially two combos. Adding a way to expand the combos could go a long way. Saw an idea about emulating Blitz with combos that could work. There are a dozen ways to add more combo feel.

• Speed. When 2.0 started it was all about speeding Mnk up. Everything since Stormblood has been about slowing them down. This doesn't feel good as a class designed about going as fast as you can.


There are reason for the slowdown. Speed is by far the strongest stat in most things, and incredibly hard to balance. It's why attack speed up, double hits ect are so strong in games. Being able to deal out your damage faster, leads to such a massive ramp up it can quickly snowball to making Mnk OP. If you do only 70% damage hits of other DPS, but do it twice as fast, that's a significant boost over other classes. They try to make sure the classes are fairly balanced as to not require a demand for one class. Further, high speed classes tend to be harder to play as they require more perfect timing to squeeze out every DPS full efficiency. So this creates an issue, do you make Mnk complex, high speed high technical and alienate a large number of people who want a casual punchy class? Or keep it simple so anyone can enjoy it with relative easy. If you do make it high tech/speed, do you make it stronger at higher efficiencies? Why Play Mnk if I can do Drg or Sam for same damage without the high punishment for error?

It's not an easy thing to balance. I'm not entirely sure how they can fix it. That said I would enjoy being faster a bit more, that's a big part of why I like Mnk. I would enjoy it if there was more to do. As it stands we have two combos and we throw in some buffs when off cooldown. I wouldn't mind having six+ finishers and depending on the order of WS you do gives different finishers with different effects/power. I also would like it if half our skills didn't feel clunky. Chakra is just there. You charge it outside of battle, you have to hit the button for each chakra, and having less than full is pointless. It barely charges in battle unless under certain buffs and is not worth dropping ws to charge. Meaning in longer fights it's a use once and ignore unless it fills through buffs. Tornado Kick being an attack that goes against the foundation of Mnk, and has never really gotten better should just be removed or changed in it's entirety.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by silverdragontyr

One of the core issues is Monk is the fast class. They're supposed to make you feel like you're hitting hard and hitting fast. They're supposed to be the combo master. To resemble fighting games. The issued being...

• The combo synergy is kind of lacking. There is essentially two combos. Adding a way to expand the combos could go a long way. Saw an idea about emulating Blitz with combos that could work. There are a dozen ways to add more combo feel.

• Speed. When 2.0 started it was all about speeding Mnk up. Everything since Stormblood has been about slowing them down. This doesn't feel good as a class designed about going as fast as you can.


There are reason for the slowdown. Speed is by far the strongest stat in most things, and incredibly hard to balance. It's why attack speed up, double hits ect are so strong in games. Being able to deal out your damage faster, leads to such a massive ramp up it can quickly snowball to making Mnk OP. If you do only 70% damage hits of other DPS, but do it twice as fast, that's a significant boost over other classes. They try to make sure the classes are fairly balanced as to not require a demand for one class. Further, high speed classes tend to be harder to play as they require more perfect timing to squeeze out every DPS full efficiency. So this creates an issue, do you make Mnk complex, high speed high technical and alienate a large number of people who want a casual punchy class? Or keep it simple so anyone can enjoy it with relative easy. If you do make it high tech/speed, do you make it stronger at higher efficiencies? Why Play Mnk if I can do Drg or Sam for same damage without the high punishment for error?

It's not an easy thing to balance. I'm not entirely sure how they can fix it. That said I would enjoy being faster a bit more, that's a big part of why I like Mnk. I would enjoy it if there was more to do. As it stands we have two combos and we throw in some buffs when off cooldown. I wouldn't mind having six+ finishers and depending on the order of WS you do gives different finishers with different effects/power. I also would like it if half our skills didn't feel clunky. Chakra is just there. You charge it outside of battle, you have to hit the button for each chakra, and having less than full is pointless. It barely charges in battle unless under certain buffs and is not worth dropping ws to charge. Meaning in longer fights it's a use once and ignore unless it fills through buffs. Tornado Kick being an attack that goes against the foundation of Mnk, and has never really gotten better should just be removed or changed in it's entirety.

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speed isnt that hard to balance unless you have a lot of on hit mechanics, i think they don't like the idea of fast global cooldowns. if you go 10% faster, you do 10% more damage, with some drop off for clipped actions.

the goal wasn't to slow monk down, the goal was to try to create more incentive/interactions with Greased lightning, and at one time to create the feeling of having combos.

people may not like TK or riddle ogcd combos, but once you take them away, the class has no highs and no lows, one pace, and thus becomes a really monotonous job.

the only mechanics left are maintaining gl stacks, but the methods of doing that are not engaging, and mostly designed for bosses running.


If that's supposed to be the whole point of the class, they need higher reward for max speed status, and make it more interactive to maintain, or build up. Basically if monk design is basically supposed to be like race car driving, the max speed needs to feel faster, and you need more turns so it's gratifying to maintain high speeds.

in the race car analogy monk currently feels like a 65 mph max speed car that goes 0-60 in 40 seconds, on a track that is basically a square.

Personally though, i wouldn't make maintaining gl the whole monk mechanic. Combos and creating/finding/exploiting openings of the enemy feel like more of the main concept of a martial arts class. gl only seems to represent the athleticism aspect of monk.

I agree with the no reward of GL except just the damage gain you get from it, I made a thread about the issues I have with current MNK and changes I suggested, one of which is removing the GL loss from using Tornado Kick and instead having it function like BLM's Foul. This would give MNK more consistent access to its most potent attack and give a payoff from maintaining GL for x amount of time. Another suggested change is making Six-sided Star an oGCD that when used triggers the GCD for however long the CD for Six-sided Star.

Another change I'd like to see, because it'd make the buff alignment less annoying on MNK considering the loss of IR is to make RoF a 60 second CD that gives a 15-20% damage boost and doesn't slow you down and to balance out Brotherhood, increase its CD to 120 seconds and increase the % chance of others generating a Chakra for you from 30% to 50%.

Would also like to get another oGCD to weave with our rotation. My suggestion was to bring back One Ilm Punch, make it a 300 potency ability on a 60 second CD or a 150 potency on a 30 second CD or something like that. Just a powerful, single target oGCD that we can consistently weave that doesn't rely on procs lol.

I was thinking a lot about how other classes interact with their systems. Particularly gunbreaker with it's cartridge use and how it handles combos. I also thought about bard's songs and how they always change how it plays slightly. I also think it's funny that bard gets instant abilities but ours are still credited to a gauge where we need 5 stacks.
I always thought it would be interesting if MNK had different fighting "styles" maybe similar to how a bard uses a different song and gets different abilities or effects pending which song they're using. Or maybe instead of just having GL and balancing that, GL could be expended in smaller increments for unique combos, and maybe additional moves.


There's a lot of issues I have with how leaden fist works, I think they made it so powerful and refused to remove the crit on top of it, but it makes the gameplay really stale because it forces people to save and have uptime for PB windows. I also think they used it as a generic excuse to blanket remove oGCD's because of it's guaranteed rear crit (even though that doesn't mean it guarantees you a chakra stack).

The Chakra gauge to me needs more of a rework than GL, and yes enlightenment does a ton of DMG with no 2nd target dropoff, but I don't know if AoE dmg is something I desperately want, though this may pend on new savage fights including ads.