How does Monk and Dragoon compare in difficulty and playstyle ?

I am having trouble deciding on one of them at this point in time and decided that I need more information on them both.

MY current perception of them in comparison :

Monk
+ around 7 skills which make up 2 to 3 rotations
+ has to change positions very often between behind and flank
+ Damage very dependent on self buffs uptime, therefore downtimes problematic
+ needs time to ramp up/ set up
+ plays faster due to greased lightning
+ apparently seen as the hardest dps to play well ? I suspect due to constant positionals


Dragoon
+ seems to have more skills to use when counting all 3 rotations and off GCD skills
+ only has 2 positional skills ?
+ Damage is more frontloaded
+ not as reliant on self buffs for damage but debuffs and dots still part of the rotation
+ seems to be the ''easiest'' melee dps due to linear combos and few positionals + slower pace ?


How do you think these two differ exactly in the way they play ?

Which one is more demanding than the other ?

Any general advice on regarding this comparison ?


thanks for reading

Difficulty is always subjective. For some people, monk is hardee or dragoon is. For most people, the nore you play a job, the easiest it becomes, so it's mostly a question of habits.

But to answer the question, I found Dragoon more fun and harder to optimize than monk due to oGCD management, where monk have only 2 offensive oGCD, and 2 other buff, counting for a total of 4 oGCD not including perfect balance. Dragoon have 8 oGCD, which keeps you pretty occupied as the fight goes on, compensatin the "lack" of positional it has. Please note that good dragoon will still hit their positionals for optimal dps, so even if 2.45 changed the way positional works for drg, it havent really changed anything for experienced players used to it.

As for Monk, people say that it is harder because positionals + GL stacks. It's semi-true, because by leveling monk, you have 50 levels where you practice positional, it should've become something intuitive by then. The worst change is Dragon Kick during the first few moments of acquiering it. As for GL stacks, as it is right now, the content is very melee friendly, so a good monk with good knowledge of a fight will find a way to keep them. Also you can always count on your Perfect Balance to get them back in case of bad situations.

But mostly, its not about what they can do, since all melee are oretty close to each others, but more about what your favorite playstyle is.

Let me put it this way. All jobs are pisspoor easy except for a few exceptions. Monk is one of those exceptions. A tank is literally just 1-2-3. Healing takes no skill whatsoever. I steamroll all primal and coil fights as healer. A bard is pretty much godmode for any primal fight. And for melee dps, its just about learning a rotation.

The difficulty in monk does not lie in learning a rotation. The difficulty for monk lies in its high pressure style gameplay. There is a pressure on you to constantly move around for positionals and to attack. This comes from 2 reasons:

- positional requirement which exists for all monk rotation
- greased lightning countdown

Regarding positionals, unless the fight is a stand still fight with bare minimum movement, you can expect to not fullfill the positional requirements the majority of times which will severely hurt your dps output. It can get from bad to worse as aggro management fails because range dps are trigger happy and dont know how to manage aggro. Or simply because the boss moves around alot or the fight is split in phases as seen in all primal fights. A monk cannot attack a moving boss unlike range dps. You will lose auto attacks while your greased lightning timer keeps ticking away. Even slightly outside the hitbox means you stop attacking completely.

Now the hardest part is keeping the greased lightning. This is where the pain comes from. It sounds easy but for most primal fights you are going to continuously lose greased lightning. Unlike some of the other jobs, a monk is not immune to fight mechanics. Every time a boss does a special attack, you have to move. As said before, you cannot attack when moving but your timer keeps ticking away. And while it sounds simple to keep it up, in most fights, its gonna drop. And dropping greased lightning is the biggest dps drop in the entire game. Now some mechanics can be bypassed and this will let you keep greased lightning running but to do that requires extensive knowledge of the fight and pushing yourself. But for most mechanics, it simply is unavoidable to lose greased lightning.

It takes 20+ seconds to get it back up and all this time, you will be dealing gimped damage while other jobs are almost dealing at max output. This is not counting you screwing up with internal release and b4b. If you activated those buffs and loses greased lightning soon after, you will have to wait for those buffs to reset.

Other people talking shit about monks dont know what they are talking about as they never played under pressure. If they want to know what playing MNK is alike, the next time they go raiding, they should move from flank to back position continously for every cooldown they use. Do this for 2 hours and you get an idea what MNK playstyle is like.

As far as dps goes, a monk used to be rewarded for this high pressure play style by having the highest dps output. But that has since changed. A nin can do as much if not more, without the same pressure as monk and has the ability to do range attacks and has powerfull aoe. A drg dps is still slightly below monk, but is incredibly simplistic to play while having massive burst damage and the second best aoe in the game. Missing drg positional is only a 5% dps lost and in most fights you will not miss the positional more than a few times anyway.

If you want to compare, a SMN is the only other job with high micro management. But the difference between SMN and MNK is that missing a dot, clipping a dot, has minimal dps loss on SMN while SMN is also immune to almost all mechanics while MNK losing greased lightning is like being turned into a crippled from one moment into the other.

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Originally Posted by Spayd

Please note that good dragoon will still hit their positionals for optimal dps, so even if 2.45 changed the way positional works for drg, it havent really changed anything for experienced players used to it.

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aren't the only dragoon positionals chaos thrust and heavy thrust ?

also, what are the off GCD skills a monk has to incorporate into his rotations ?

So far, from only reading the skills, the logical rotation seemed to be :

touch of death, dragon kick, twin snakes, demolish

bootshine, true strike, snap punch

bootshine, true strike, snap punch

etc.

repeat... ?

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Originally Posted by Truedragon

snip

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that was an interesting read, thank you.

I suspected that the sheer amount and dependency on these buffs, the monk has, would create this feeling, I was hoping that in place though, the monk would simply fall back to a more level dps, while maintaining higher dps with the buffs, this doesnt seem to be the case, so i can see why there would be a feeling of pressure.

While I am looking for a rewarding class, I am also maining a scholar. With the DPS, I am looking for a more lax approach, with less responsibility and a approach where i am allowed to mroe focus on my own play instead of the needs of the group.

The monk sounds like a stressful job right now.

I play pretty much DRG and MNK in FCOB on t13, and monk is not as stressful as he said to me. As I said, everything is subjective. Is it stressful for you? Yes? Not for me. Its pretty smooth, considering the melee friendliness of Fcob and the low downtime you have. And lets say here, Raid content is where it matters when you want to enter the competitive dpsing, and know what a job can do. Melee have it extremely easy right now, and old contebt such as primals, while it's true that they give you a little of downtime, is still no more relevant. Also grease lightning is 12 seconds duration total, knowing that a GL3 stack monk can do his combo in 6 seconds, you have plenty of time to reapply your stuff.

As I said, while it's right that MNK have the most positionals, it's something that should be Intuitive as a melee dps, a no-brainer. And honestly, even if you cannot hit a position for X reasons, it's not the end of the world. Yes, it's not optimal, but doesnt keep mnk away from top dps for missing a couple of positional, and best exemple is probably t11. And I think its not exaggerated to say that most people agree: Monk is not RocketScience, it's punch and move. Moving is what you do all the time in this game.

The oGCD of a monk are: Steel peak, Howling fist, b4b and internal release. Rest is GCD, which is up to you to apply as you wish.

The difficulty of DRG comes from managing your oGCD's, which I have shown below:

DRG oGCD Offense Abilities:
Blood for Blood, Internal Release, Mortal Strike, Leg Sweep, Life Surge, Power Surge, Jump, Spineshatter Dive, Dragonfire Dive
MNK oGCD Offense Abilities:
Blood for Blood, Internal Release, Steel Peak, Howling Fist

Learning how to line up your oGCD's for max DPS output is one of the things that makes maxing DRG DPS output so challenging, but the base rotation is very quick to pickup and the positionals are not very demanding. One last aspect of DRG is that all of your jumps have some animation lock, requiring you to have some additional knowledge of boss attacks before using them. There is a reason that DRG are on the floor so much lol.

The difficulty of MNK comes from the combination of positional attacks and having to maintain greased lightning stacks. Almost all MNK attacks require positionals for maximum damage; however, missing a positional has no effect on whether or not you lose your greased lightning stacks as long as your rotation is correct. The rotation of MNK is actually easier than the DRG rotation, requiring less time than the DRG rotation to go through one complete cycle. (A normal DRG cycle is 24 ablities long and a normal MNK cycle is 18 abilities long) The real test of MNK skill is that they have to know a lot about boss phases to be able to maintain their greased lightning stacks, which can be more difficult than people give them credit for.

My Opinion:
I believe that the difficulty level of both MNK and DRG are very even and that they are tied for the 2nd hardest DPS class to play. SMN IMO is the hardest, but that is another discussion. Both are difficult in different ways, but neither is so difficult that anyone should be scared of them. Due to the 2.5 sec GCD that this game uses, all classes are relatively easy to play.

Monk is hell of a lot of fun. It's stressful, maybe, but it's so much AWESOME.

Your first post has pretty anything you have to decide. Choose from hard OGCD management and Position+Uptime management, and way to go. You need to take care with this type of thread cause ppl usualy feels that their Jobs is somehow "better" if its harder to play, so sooner or later this kind of thread becomes something like "My job is harder and better than yours".

I would only add two infos here about my experience as DRG. First, is the Jump management. It's frustrating how you need to use it to max your dps, and sometimes it'll just kill you. Like t11 (specially add phase), t13 (Megaflares), some primals, etc. This is the only thing I actually feels "hard" as Drg, as you need to know each second of the fight to predict mechanics and even those sometimes vary depending of the party DPS and the relation with the boss mechanics triggers. The rest is muscle memory like any Job.

And to your other question:

"Which one is more demanding than the other?"

As the 2 classes DPS is somehow close (won't go in this merit), MNK has the valuable Dragon Kick wich is highly demanded in early contents, while DRG "only" buffs Bard DPS.

From a utility standpoint, Monk is much better than Dragoon. Dragon Kick is so good in FCoB that Monk is usually regarded as the best melee DPS for FCoB . Dragoon really only shines when there is a Bard in the party. Otherwise, groups are better off with a Ninja. Fortunately for Dragoon though, Bards are pretty close to required for FCoB so they still can do well.

My static runs: MNK, DRG, BLM, BRD, which is very common these days. Subbing out the DRG for a NIN is also very common due to NIN being more well rounded on the utility front.

duplicate post

I am REALLY not interested in which one pulls more dps, brings more utility or gets me more bragging rights.

I am trying to find out which, of the two, would be more fun for me to play, before I spend time on leveling both to 50 and probably wasting a ton of time and effort in doing so :P

Was my monk rotation actually correct btw ?

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Originally Posted by Altijacek

Monk is hell of a lot of fun. It's stressful, maybe, but it's so much AWESOME.

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Would you mind elaborating why you feel that way ?

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Originally Posted by Dunncan

Choose from hard OGCD management and Position+Uptime management, and way to go.

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I looked at all the Dragoon OGCD Skills, and they all share 60 to 120 secs cooldowns. (except leg sweep?)

Why is that a challenge to manage, when really, they have such long cooldowns, you could potentially macro alot of them together for when you want to push your burst dps ?

It doesnt sound that hard.


what am i missing here ?

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Originally Posted by Truedragon

Let me put it this way. All jobs are pisspoor easy except for a few exceptions. Monk is one of those exceptions. A tank is literally just 1-2-3. Healing takes no skill whatsoever.

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Main Class
PUGILIST Lv 50

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Originally Posted by Quyn

I am REALLY not interested in which one pulls more dps, brings more utility or gets me more bragging rights.

I am trying to find out which, of the two, would be more fun for me to play, before I spend time on leveling both to 50 and probably wasting a ton of time and effort in doing so :P

Was my monk rotation actually correct btw ?

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Seriously, you are the only person that can answer which job is more fun to play. Nobody else can answer this for you.

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Originally Posted by Quyn

I looked at all the Dragoon OGCD Skills, and they all share 60 to 120 secs cooldowns. (except leg sweep?)

Why is that a challenge to manage, when really, they have such long cooldowns, you could potentially macro alot of them together for when you want to push your burst dps ?

It doesnt sound that hard.


what am i missing here ?

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The problem is not how they align, but the small window you have to use they (and therefor mistake some). For example, on the burst, you have to put 17 buttons in an 20s window. It may look enough time, but when you add latency (DAMN latency), moving to positional, avoiding AoE (otherwise your Jump lock animation kills you), etc, etc, it becomes a bit tricky. Of course that, as of any Job, it gets easier the more you play with the class.

Macro doesn't work well for Dragoons because the CD have some align between them, but won't always come together with some skill. And sometimes, you'll even want to delay it, depending of the encounter mechanics. It's not a hard Job to play with, it's actually fun. But when you try to push every single dps you can, it starts to get dificult to correctly manage your CDs trought the encounter, and it's frustrating when you miss that 1 or 2 OffGCD and notice a large dps loss because of it.

Also, you need to rework all your rotation when you have disconects, in a way to minimize the DPS loss. It's not simple as "start from the begining", it's very situational.

You can take a look HERE and see more of Dragoons, but what I can tell you is that you really should level up both Jobs, at least until the point where you say "Nah, it sux". For me, it was on Pugilist lvl.10 (lol), or Black Mage as soon as I got the job. I knew I could change my mind in the future, but I also knew that Goons looked like more fun since the begining, so I choose my Job.

And just for the record, most Dragoons level up MNK until lv. 46 (?) to get Mantra as cross skill, so it would not be a waste, if you, don't know, start leveling a MNK and decide to go for DRG.

thank you dunncan, i got the monk to 15 so far and was having an okay time with it , ill try the lancer next :)

the rotation reborn op post seemed out of date when i went through it and at the end of the mega thread, people discuss Bis gear or use so many abbrevations that I would need a dragoon dictionary to make sense of it.

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Originally Posted by Quyn

Would you mind elaborating why you feel that way ?

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Monk and warrior are my favorite to play, mainly for the idea of the class than anything else. I can elaborate on warrior some other time. As for monk, well I am a martial artist in real life. And I think the essence of non-stop fast paced fighting is on point. In taekwondo, for example, it's burst burst burst burst breathe and prepare for counter and burst burst burst, etc (same for boxing). I feel like monk is just that. You gain momentum and do your best to maintain it and once you start you can't stop until a mechanic comes into play (breathing time). And even then you're looking for an opening to strike (in this case, a target to hit to keep up greased lightning). Because it's fast paced and you have to sometimes decide what ability to choose (there is NOT A MONK ROTATION) it can be stressful. But hot damn is it a fun and breathtaking experience.

I'd like to talk about dragoon too since you are undecided. I mained dragoon on my first character, and I loved it to death but then I discovered monk and warrior; that said, on the concept of dragoon. I feel like a good dragon or lancer in real life and in game is all about setting up a perfect opportunity to strike. This is why they have so many rotations and cooldowns all meant to prepare their epic full thrust. Alongside that, the idea of jumping high into the air to strike an enemy with crushing force is just ridiculously cool, and always has been in older final fantasies. Using your jumps to close gaps and set up that perfect opportunity to strike is where the fun is. Whichever you choose I hope you have a lot of fun. This game is beautiful, just now realizing that after having played since launch (hint: I'm single now and enjoying the game as an individual not being held back by feeling obligated to do things with my significant other in game lol).

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Quyn

thank you dunncan, i got the monk to 15 so far and was having an okay time with it , ill try the lancer next :)

the rotation reborn op post seemed out of date when i went through it and at the end of the mega thread, people discuss Bis gear or use so many abbrevations that I would need a dragoon dictionary to make sense of it.

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Actually the OP content is surprisingly still relevant. Just a few things changes from the original rotation AND concepts such as AoE, stats weights, etc, so it's still a "must read" for Dragoons. There's another guide out there, called How to Train Your Dragoon/ wich is a bit more up to date and easy to read, since it splits the basics from the heavy theorycraft.

One thing I love in Dragoon is that the base players are extremely active and even now continues to put new theories and tests to imrpove DPS, gear optimization and gameplay. 500 pages of discussion must mean something :P

As I have said before, I didn't played Pugilist so much, but for Dragoon, I recomend you to play at least until you get Disembowel (Lancer 38), so you'll taste most part of the rotation and the feelings of playing as Dragoon.


@Edit:
@Altijacek - Briliant. I loved that feeling of the Jobs and it pretty much match the gameplay.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Quyn

I looked at all the Dragoon OGCD Skills, and they all share 60 to 120 secs cooldowns. (except leg sweep?)

Why is that a challenge to manage, when really, they have such long cooldowns, you could potentially macro alot of them together for when you want to push your burst dps ?

It doesnt sound that hard.


what am i missing here ?

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So I don't think you looked at the CD's too well. Your 2 biggest DPS cooldowns (life surge and blood for blood are on 50 and 80 second CD's respectively)

Blood for Blood - 80 seconds
Internal Release - 60 seconds
Jump - 30 seconds
Power Surge - 60 seconds
Leg Sweep - 20 seconds
Life Surge - 50 seconds
Dragonfire Dive - 120 seconds
Spineshatter Dive - 60 seconds

As far as rotations - I will put them below:
MNK Rotation: (18 moves, 2 basic combos, adding in Touch of Death every 30 sec)
Dragon Kick -> Twin Snakes -> Demolish
Boot Shine -> True Strike -> Snap Punch
Dragon Kick -> Twin Snakes -> Snap Punch
Boot Shine -> True Strike -> Demolish
Dragon Kick -> Twin Snakes -> Snap Punch
Boot Shine -> Twin Snakes -> Snap Punch

DRG Rotation: (24 moves, 2 basic combos)
Heavy Thrust -> Impulse Drive -> Disembowel -> Chaos Thrust
Phlebotomize -> True Thrust -> Vorpal Thrust -> Full Thrust
Heavy Thrust -> True Thrust -> Vorpal Thrust -> Full Thrust
Phlebotomize -> Impulse Drive -> Disembowel -> Chaos Thrust
Heavy Thrust -> True Thrust -> Vorpal Thrust -> Full Thrust
Phlebotomize -> True Thrust -> Vorpal Thrust -> Full Thrust

The rotations are both very easy, with the MNK rotation being a little easier.

As far as DPS, MNK has significantly higher ST DPS than DRG. If that is all you care about, then go MNK

Drg are extremely op

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Originally Posted by Quyn

that was an interesting read, thank you.

I suspected that the sheer amount and dependency on these buffs, the monk has, would create this feeling, I was hoping that in place though, the monk would simply fall back to a more level dps, while maintaining higher dps with the buffs, this doesnt seem to be the case, so i can see why there would be a feeling of pressure.

While I am looking for a rewarding class, I am also maining a scholar. With the DPS, I am looking for a more lax approach, with less responsibility and a approach where i am allowed to mroe focus on my own play instead of the needs of the group.

The monk sounds like a stressful job right now.

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You answered your own question here. If Mnk and the Drg are the only two youre looking at, the drg is for you based off of the criteria you articulated in this statement. Though if the Lax criteria is weighted the highest for you, i'd say consider a third class: blm

Less responsibility and focus on your own play sounds like mnk to me
ignore mechanics if it means keeping gl3 up.
in fights like t8, im usually told to just wail on the boss 24/7

Less responsibility and focus on your own play sounds like mnk to me
ignore mechanics if it means keeping gl3 up.
in fights like t8, im usually told to just wail on the boss 24/7

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Originally Posted by Tex_Mex

snip[/B]

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ah, once you add in the OGCD skills, dragoon seems busier.

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Originally Posted by Quyn

ah, once you add in the OGCD skills, dragoon seems busier.

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Kinda but not really!

Take note of the skill delay on the weapons here and here.

This means that Monks have nearly a half second quicker GCD than Dragoons before any GL stacks or skill speed is taken into account. The only difficult thing to manage with dragoons is the animation lock on jumps. That shit will get you killed.

Don't listen to people that complain about Monk difficulty because of positional requirements. Once you get used to melee hitting positionals is second nature. You'll never have to think about it. If you're standing in the right spot it's literally one step to the left or right.

Honestly, both feel the same to play for me.
Sometimes the things you have to do to keep GL3 up can be a bit tricky and/or risky though. (Unless you're playing with a static and worked solutions into your strategy)

Overall DPS: Adv MNK
Burst DPS: Adv DRG
Required Button Mashing: Slight Adv MNK
Most Interesting Rotation: Slight Adv DRG because of all the OGCooldowns
Utility: Adv MNK
Vanity: Adv DRG
Best Stereotype: Adv LOLDRG
Most Fun: Even

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Originally Posted by Esperacchius

Kinda but not really!

Take note of the skill delay on the weapons here and here.

This means that Monks have nearly a half second quicker GCD than Dragoons before any GL stacks or skill speed is taken into account. The only difficult thing to manage with dragoons is the animation lock on jumps. That shit will get you killed.

Don't listen to people that complain about Monk difficulty because of positional requirements. Once you get used to melee hitting positionals is second nature. You'll never have to think about it. If you're standing in the right spot it's literally one step to the left or right.

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Only thing that changes GCD cooldowns is Skillspeed; the "Delay" on the Weapons is the time between autoattacks, not GCD cooldowns.

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Originally Posted by Mibhas

Only thing that changes GCD cooldowns is Skillspeed; the "Delay" on the Weapons is the time between autoattacks, not GCD cooldowns.

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Mibhas is correct on this one.