Making MNK slightly better.

First time posting here. Not an expert on pvp, just wanted to say that right off the bat. My only real experience comes from having climbed up to Platinum 1 (dropped to 2, sadly) on MNK. In other words, half decent at best. Anyway, on to the list of changes I wish we could get for MNK in the near future.

1. Remove knockback from Enlightenment and simply apply Pressure Point to target. That's it for this one. As it is now, Enlightenment is your only AoE weaponskill that is not locked behind any conditions such as combos or a secondary ability, and yet it has no synergy with anything else. There's a big trade-off between losing out in AoE damage or losing 8K potency from Enlightenment. There's no reason for our own attacks to possibly spare targets from receiving damage.

2. Change Six-Sided Star into a weaponskill (no change to current cooldown - basically make it work like Anatman does.) Remove the stun and give it knockback. Give us control over when to push enemies away and when to keep them close for bursts. Being a gcd would allow us to weave off it as well for Thunderclap follow-up or to switch targets.

3. Make Earth's Reply activate automatically when you reach 20% HP and make it stun all targets hit by the compiled damage. On a 30s cooldown it would, at the very least, force enemies to burn their Purify. The stun would also allow the healing portion of the ability to trigger in relative safety.

4. Snap Punch should lead into another Blitz. Having your heavy hitting AoE locked behind a 7 part combo is crippling when most everyone has at least one high-damage/high-utility button available very soon into the match and with immediate effects.

That's it. Sorry if it's a long post and/or typos. I'd like to believe these changes aren't too extreme, since it's just basically trading the effects that already exist in the toolkit and putting them where they would be more useful in general. In any case, thanks for reading! Don't forget to take breaks when climbing the rankings of pain.

I agree with the riddle earth suggestion (at least for the earths reply part, not the stun idea), but outside of that, the only thing that really needs to change imo is that Blitz needs to be on its own button/CD. Being tied behind a 6 part combo is really limiting to their ability to burst a target. Other than that, I think MNK is in a pretty good spot.

The knockback is good as it lets you isolate one person. What Mnk really needs is to trim down its 7 hit coombo or have the other ws do things. Currently they're there solely to increase the combo length which is a bad design. Further as their role as a rushdown high aggression dps they need more ways to not be able to be stopped. I'd recommend giving them Mantra, and aoe purify/immunity. Also their LB should do more damage. 32k at max buff against a single target is pretty pathetic compared to other jobs.

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Originally Posted by wandereyre

1. Remove knockback from Enlightenment and simply apply Pressure Point to target. That's it for this one. As it is now, Enlightenment is your only AoE weaponskill that is not locked behind any conditions such as combos or a secondary ability, and yet it has no synergy with anything else. There's a big trade-off between losing out in AoE damage or losing 8K potency from Enlightenment. There's no reason for our own attacks to possibly spare targets from receiving damage.

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Would make Enlightenment too strong as it will be an easy 16k/20k(empowered) GCD with no counterplay (SAMs need to cast)

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Originally Posted by wandereyre

2. Change Six-Sided Star into a weaponskill (no change to current cooldown - basically make it work like Anatman does.) Remove the stun and give it knockback. Give us control over when to push enemies away and when to keep them close for bursts. Being a gcd would allow us to weave off it as well for Thunderclap follow-up or to switch targets.

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I think its fine at where it is, it being a skill allows it to be weaved easier and a personal favorite combo of mine is Rising Phoenix > Enlightenment > Six Sided Star (Before they fly away) > Thunder clap > GCD (Hopefully Phantom Rush). This combo alone does 37k damage within 2 GCDs with enemy unable to react after the first GCD.

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Originally Posted by wandereyre

3. Make Earth's Reply activate automatically when you reach 20% HP and make it stun all targets hit by the compiled damage. On a 30s cooldown it would, at the very least, force enemies to burn their Purify. The stun would also allow the healing portion of the ability to trigger in relative safety.

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Just give Earth's reply more defensives, maybe some damage mitigation or a purify upon usage along with the present effects.

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Originally Posted by wandereyre

4. Snap Punch should lead into another Blitz. Having your heavy hitting AoE locked behind a 7 part combo is crippling when most everyone has at least one high-damage/high-utility button available very soon into the match and with immediate effects.

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Too OP, note that you have Blitz at an ideal state within 11 secs. I'd rather they keep Blitz on a seperate button and upon hitting 6 combos, so that Monks will be allowed to use the ability whenever they need it rather than letting the GCD drop or let it cycle again.

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Originally Posted by wandereyre

2. Change Six-Sided Star into a weaponskill (no change to current cooldown - basically make it work like Anatman does.) Remove the stun and give it knockback. Give us control over when to push enemies away and when to keep them close for bursts. Being a gcd would allow us to weave off it as well for Thunderclap follow-up or to switch targets.

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Please, no. I love getting to use this skill in PvP more than I do in raid environments. It flows so well as an oGCD than it does as a GCD.
Also, setting up with it feels so good with the stun. I think the stun is fine. Simple skill with a simple ability.

Adding my feedback here.

Right now, at the higher levels it seems monk is regarded as one of the weaker jobs. But, you know? I think it feels "good". It feels like for the most part the reward for the effort is close, and just needs a little boosting. I think MNK is a good bar for how to balance jobs, and I think some of the egregious jobs need to be toned down, more than I think MNK needs serious improvement. That said, I do have some issues.

Consider having like 1k damage on our dashes or something when we use it on enemies. Not enough to be a DPS contribution, but like it would be great to interrupt elixirs or mounting in FL. Right now if someone is mounted and running away, you got to mash to limp them or blow Enlightenment which is not cool.

Next, please make Riddle of Earth either automatically cash out when time is up, or do what the OP suggested. Right now, yeah, there is some execution component to using it, but with the way the game is playing, especially for a job with a short GCD, we kind of have a lot of weaving, including but not limited to our 3 other main defensives. I am fine with MNK as this job that is meant to take a lot of punishment-- we have a big sexy 60k HP score-- but a little more freedom would be nice. Maaaaybe 10% mitigation could be nice, too, but IMO just the auto cashout would be the more important thing.

I kind of have mixed feelings on Enlightenment KB. I rather it not knock people away, especially with the game's netcode, but I saw someone mention it would be OP if it didn't have that and I think that actually makes a lot of sense.

Edit - Oh, and yeah, big no to changing Six-sided Star. It is perfect as an ability.

I've climbed into Crystal with Monk, I think it's fine numbers-wise outside of it's primary rotation so I'll address each point real quick with my very subjective and bloated opinion.

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Originally Posted by wandereyre

1. Remove knockback from Enlightenment and simply apply Pressure Point to target.

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Actually no, the KB is very good in teamfights as you can push someone out of position which is VERY useful and slept on. You have three charges of Thunderclap for a reason, always follow up on Enlightment with Thunderclap and start harassing, it works just fine right now, no real changes needed. You can also use the KB to knock people off of high places and potentially kill them.

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Originally Posted by wandereyre

2. Change Six-Sided Star into a weaponskill (no change to current cooldown - basically make it work like Anatman does.) Remove the stun and give it knockback.

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It's fine as it is, it's a stun that comes up every 15s which is really strong and if it was changed from a stun to a KB, that'd be a major nerf, we already have Enlightenment for the KB + Extra damage, you can Enlightenment into Meteodrive or Thunderclap into a combo if you want to KB and single someone out.

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Originally Posted by wandereyre

3. Make Earth's Reply activate automatically when you reach 20% HP and make it stun all targets hit by the compiled damage. On a 30s cooldown it would, at the very least, force enemies to burn their Purify. The stun would also allow the healing portion of the ability to trigger in relative safety.

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I think it should just pop automatically at the end of it's CD. It should probably function more like Paladin's Holy Sheltron and apply Heavy to those around the Monk instead of a stun since Monk isn't about AoE stuns and that'd make it way too good and a must-have when it already has a lot of heavy AoE Damage in it's kit. It should probably provide 10% to 20% damage resistance whilst RoE is active to actually allow Monk to function as a hybrid dps-tank as intended.

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Originally Posted by wandereyre

4. Snap Punch should lead into another Blitz.

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That sounds reasonable but the main issue with Monk's 7 part combo is that it does the following:

3000 > 4000 > 5000 > 3000 > 4000 > 5000 > 10000 (aoe)

It goes up and then down and then back up damage-wise which is very odd because EVERY other PVP class' rotation does not do this, personally they should just change it to.

3000 > 4000 > 5000 > 6000 >10000 (aoe)

Since right now a lot of people try to save their boosts for Phantom Rush exclusively and in reality Rising Phoenix is actually very spammable due to it's low CD, same goes for Enlightenment. As a Monk you constantly want to apply pressure and harass which your current kit allows you to do pretty effortlessly, part in parcel with it's fast charging LB.

I think if they made it so Snap Punch applied Heavy or was an AoE like Phantom Rush like you said, it'd probably make Monk a lot better than it currently is.

I think an alternative "fix" to MNK's slow ramp-up would be to allow them to progress their combo string without actually hitting people using Meditate or Form Shift as a new skill.

Right now, the way it tends to feel when I encounter one is "Oh, he's not going to be at risk of killing me for the next 14 seconds" because I know they can't really burst until they have a Phantom Rush ready.

Do not change Six-Sided Star nor Enlightenment. Having the ability to Thunderclap to an enemy, stun them, and send them flying into your team for them to catch and dunk on them is too much fun.