Monks, what do you think of Riddle of Fire?

Just unlocked it and tested it out for quite a while.
I'm not level 70 yet, so perhaps it works better later, but right now...This feels like a nerf.

I play Monk because I like the speed of it, yet this skill rips all of it away from us, it actually feels slower than a DRG with this "buff" on.

The damage doesn't really make up for how much slower we're attacking either. We're attacking less, generating less Chakra, and our rotation has suddenly become this clunky mess filled with Dot drop offs and buff misalignment.

I feel like this is another case like with Lightspeed, where the buff felt more like a debuff and using it just makes things needlessly clunky. I'm not sure why Monks need to be punished so much for this damage increase, to the point where the core of Monk is dropped off in favor of a slight damage increase.

What do you level 70 Monk's think?

It feels better when you can double it up with Brotherhood during your opener when you've got enough cool downs to make it busy, but outside of it I'm not a fan. Monk's signature thing from the get go is the haste on Greased Lightning, removing that is like giving Dragoons an action that prevents them from jumping or Ninja an ability that prevents them from using Mudras.

I would think that for every single ability that gets designed the developers must be asking themselves "does this feel good to use?", an important point of making a class fun to play is that it's abilities have a nice feel to them. They make you feel more powerful, more useful, more vital, etc. The problem with Riddle of Fire is that not only does the increased recast feel bad, it feels like the worst thing that can happen to a Monk; losing Greased Lightning. It feels so bad to the point of feeling like you've lost your buffs. Decreased skill speed is anathema to Monk, and in my opinion this skill has absolutely no place in our kit and is a fundamental misstep in design.

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Originally Posted by SpeckledBurd

It feels better when you can double it up with Brotherhood during your opener when you've got enough cool downs to make it busy, but outside of it I'm not a fan. Monk's signature thing from the get go is the haste on Greased Lightning, removing that is like giving Dragoons an action that prevents them from jumping or Ninja an ability that prevents them from using Mudras.

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Or Giving Scholars that prevents the use of Fairies or fairy skills then makes you pay to get them back. :p

Not a fan tbh. Whenever I put it on it takes me out of my groove. I'm so used to pressing buttons at a certain speed and it just kills it dead.

I think, it's a decent trade off from B4B. if you have all your ogcd up at the time, you don't really feel it.
You're too busy double weaving many buttons.
You can pop it at any time and no need to fear some bad punishment.
And the numbers get so huge

I don't mind it personally. Even besides just losing B4B, all my attacks in general just felt weaker in 4.0. Getting Riddle of Fire adds, in my opinion, some much-needed (Forgive the pun...) punch back to the Job. The increased damage output for its duration feels like a worthwhile trade-off for the temporary nullifying of GLs speed boost. It just feels good to use imo.

Certainly more-so than all my friends complaining about 4.0 MCH (Haven't had a chance to get into it myself though, so maybe when I do I'll similarly not mind it as much :P)

Skill is terrible and it should feel terrible.
It goes in the exact opposite direction that MNK was built in. It effectively cancels out Grease Lightning while also working against the Deep Mediation passive by allowing less GCDs being used during its duration and since TFC has become MNK's unfortunate crutch to hold us up as DPS, using RoF is a slap to the face as a skill.

Brotherhood or not, RoF is a god awful skill that needs a complete rework IMO. I'd settle for just a 15% damage buff without the drawback of killing our chef mechanics.

It's the best new skill we have, and it makes you feel off when using it. Sluggish, dissociated from your rotation, makes me feel like a punchy dragoon, and it, like most of our changes, runs anathema to some core, important skill(s), in RoF's case, Deep Meditation and GL speed.

In summation, it's meh. I miss my speed, but a direct crit TFC feels nice. Relative to the Monk and it's kit, it's counter intuitive.

It feels like just a substitute for B4B, while not being that great anyways. I still question the point of Riddle of Wind though

"Uh you can do 2 shoulder tackles"
"and together they're still weaker than a single fire tackle"

New skils are suppose to be more fun.
They should have added two 4th combo skills (Rear/Flank) for us to compensate for losing ToD and fracture.
Riddle of Earth/Fire ain't needed in my opinion.I can live without them.

Back to the topic : Riddle of Fire
While damage increased is not bad but forcing us to lower our speed is centainly not the answer.

It is absolutely awful to use and they need to patch it and get rid of the speed reduction.

It feels a bit awkward unless you have a ton of Skill Speed on you, at which point it doesn't feel as bad. It feels more like it was created simply to force MNKs to stack Skill Speed, which most MNKs ignored back in ARR and HW simply because GL3 provided all the Skill Speed we could ever need (plus the TP strain and lack of any TP heal outside of Invigorate made it REALLY counter intuitive back in ARR).

I think the best way to put it is the speed drop bothers me, a lot. I like going fast. I don't want to lose that. Riddle of Fire /almost/ feels like you're losing stacks.
... But, the damage buff is pretty big. So I guess I don't like how the ability functions, but I like the damage?

People need to stop being so dramatic about Riddle of Fire. It's a 20% damage increase over Blood for Blood for a total of 30% for a 20second period every 90seconds. We're not losing Greased Lightning, it's still there. Riddle of Fire is has the capacity to be utilized quite well. Brotherhood on the other hand is a different story.

Brotherhood buffs everyone else except the MNK using it. That means that while playing solo at Lv70, Brotherhood is effectively useless. Meanwhile, Embolden hits the casting RDM, although it doesn't do much to boost their damage, Battle Litany hits the casting DRG, so why can't MNK, who has dropped damn near to the bottom of the DPS jobs, get that measly 5% buff? Frankly, either the proc rates on Deep Meditation/Brotherhood need to be adjusted higher or the Forbidden Chakra nerf need to be undone.

We also don't have Riddle of Wind. :l

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Originally Posted by Zohnax

People need to stop being so dramatic about Riddle of Fire. It's a 20% damage increase over Blood for Blood for a total of 30% for a 20second period every 90seconds. We're not losing Greased Lightning, it's still there. Riddle of Fire is has the capacity to be utilized quite well. Brotherhood on the other hand is a different story.

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It's not though, the loss of GCDs during the time frame during the 20 second duration makes it more like a 3% gain over Blood for Blood at the cost of the feeling of the Job's characteristic buff. I'm not playing Monk because I want to see huge numbers appear on screen, I'm playing it because I enjoy the feeling of attacking quickly and Riddle of Fire takes that away.

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Originally Posted by SpeckledBurd

It's not though, the loss of GCDs during the time frame during the 20 second duration makes it more like a 3% gain over Blood for Blood at the cost of the feeling of the Job's characteristic buff. I'm not playing Monk because I want to see huge numbers appear on screen, I'm playing it because I enjoy the feeling of attacking quickly and Riddle of Fire takes that away.

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Except you're wrong. At GL3 without Riddle of Fire, I can fit 10 GCDs within 20seconds and with Riddle of Fire, I can fit 9 GCDs. You're also forgetting the 20% boost over Blood for Blood for off-GCDs as well, so no, it's not only a 3% gain.

EDIT: Let's add some numbers:

At Lv70, with Skill Speed of 1113 and a weapon Delay of 2.56
Recast with no Greased Lightning is 2.39
With GL1: 2.27
With GL2: 2.15
With GL3: 2.03
Now incorporating Riddle of Fire w/ GL3: 2.33
We basically hit at the speed of other DPS jobs for 20seconds, and then go back to our speed, which is still dealing with less than a third of a second.

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Originally Posted by Zohnax

People need to stop being so dramatic about Riddle of Fire. It's a 20% damage increase over Blood for Blood for a total of 30% for a 20second period every 90seconds. We're not losing Greased Lightning, it's still there. Riddle of Fire is has the capacity to be utilized quite well. Brotherhood on the other hand is a different story.

Brotherhood buffs everyone else except the MNK using it. That means that while playing solo at Lv70, Brotherhood is effectively useless. Meanwhile, Embolden hits the casting RDM, although it doesn't do much to boost their damage, Battle Litany hits the casting DRG, so why can't MNK, who has dropped damn near to the bottom of the DPS jobs, get that measly 5% buff? Frankly, either the proc rates on Deep Meditation/Brotherhood need to be adjusted higher or the Forbidden Chakra nerf need to be undone.

We also don't have Riddle of Wind. :l

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You do have riddle of wind lol, the 2nd tackle is riddle of wind even if it isn't the same as the other riddles.

Idk where you got your info from, but MNK is still up there. It's the 2nd strongest melee dps and its like 4/5th overall (5/6th if you go off of the stone sea sky and solo parses which doesn't factor in the chakras gained from brotherhood). I agree the BH should buff MNK since its only like 5% but BH does have pretty good uptime (16.7% similar to trick attack).

The issue with Riddle of Fire isn't with the fact that it is a weak ability, it's the fact that it goes against MNKs core mechanic and not everyone plays the game for the parser numbers, some people play classes because the like the FEEL of the class.

Now you could argue that they should just not use Riddle of Fire but the point is that most people are ok with the extra damage it provides, but they don't like the way it was done.

Ah, I never noticed there was an additional Shoulder Tackle icon that said Riddle of Wind, lol.

There was supposedly some parse results posted up on reddit that showed the tier of where all the jobs ranked in terms of damage.

I understand, a reduction of 15% can feel like a lot, but in reality, people should think of it as MNKs putting more focus into their attacks rather than just flailing wildly. ;3

EDIT:
But yeah, I'm not sure how much I believe that, tbh. I've seen some nice Crits with Tornado Kick for 24k+ and if Crit'ing a Forbidden Chakra a GCD before that for like 10k+? So good.

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Originally Posted by Zohnax

People need to stop being so dramatic about Riddle of Fire.

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I hate riddle of fire for the fact that it slows me down which makes me use less weapon skills in that time, and I need weapon skill crits to have a chance to get a chakra stack. so while this damage increase makes us feel slower it also hurts our ability to get FC off.

also agree with brotherhood that should buff mnks 5% also

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Originally Posted by Zohnax

Ah, I never noticed there was an additional Shoulder Tackle icon that said Riddle of Wind, lol.

There was supposedly some parse results posted up on reddit that showed the tier of where all the jobs ranked in terms of damage.

I understand, a reduction of 15% can feel like a lot, but in reality, people should think of it as MNKs putting more focus into their attacks rather than just flailing wildly. ;3

EDIT:
But yeah, I'm not sure how much I believe that, tbh. I've seen some nice Crits with Tornado Kick for 24k+ and if Crit'ing a Forbidden Chakra a GCD before that for like 10k+? So good.

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While the parses on reddit are a decent guideline, don't forget that there are so many variables that weren't accounted for. Supposedly those were Stone Sea Sky parses so it would have been sub 3 mins which is far too short, dunno if pots or food were included, obviously mnk wouldn't have been able to use their biggest ability in the expansion etc etc So take it with a pile of salt (see what I did there, cause everyone is so damn salty about their classes and samurai being so op including myself haha kill me)

This may be a weird answer but its biggest problem is it lasts too long.

Feelings about Monk becoming a burst class aside, it's very good when you pile on most/all of your oGCD abilities during it, especially during your opener with the extra chakras from Brotherhood. The problem is you burst all of those out in a handful of seconds and then you're left with 10-15 seconds of just... doing your rotation but as if you were covered in molasses.

I get that it's intended to be used with Brotherhood but it needs a shorter duration + shorter cooldown. Drop the length and drop the CD to 60. This also ensures it always lines up with both Elixir Field and Howling Fist.

RoF is a particularly bad skill, no two ways about it. While calling it a nerf I feel is overexaggerating, it being completely against the fundamental idea of a monk isn't. While many considering the balance between the increase per hit and slower GCD acceptable, I don't. It makes monk feel terrible when it's used. The slow down makes the monk feel awkward and clunky like playing a Dragoon but stuck knowing GL and consistency is still the rule of monk not this burst. RoF, RoE, Deep Meditation, Tackle Mastery and Brotherhood all feel poorly designed to me. Maybe it's just me but I flat out just don't have fun playing monk like this

I was on the anti-monk and rework Monk hype train up until launch, especially since on paper Riddle of Fire and such sound pretty bad... But honestly, after having gotten the job to 70, played it in a few EXRs and gotten some Susano EX clears, I am pretty happy to say that I was completely wrong about the job.

Monk right now is actually a monster. It does have a bit of weird and janky stuff to work out with Tackle Mastery, Tornado Kick, and overall being far too reliant on RNG and team comp, but it's most definitely a contender for the top melee slot still. If you know what you're doing, and you use your skills well, you'll beat out just about anybody. Even Riddle of Earth, loathe as I am to admit it, does have a couple of moments to shine in fights like Susano EX, where you can use it to refresh your stacks without relying on PB. It lets you keep PB for the stuff that's absolutely unavoidable, like getting gaol-ed (feelsbadman).

I didn't like Riddle of Fire in concept, but it feels much better once you're able to layer Brotherhood on top of it. You feel pretty slow, but it's easy to forget the slowness when you're busting out 2 or 3 12k Forbidden Chakras during the window of power.

I feel very rewarded for having committed to the job, and even though I do plan to get Samurai to 70, I'll be playing Monk for a long time to come.

Lowering the duration of riddle of fire but increasing it's effect could make it work without having to add a major rework to the skill.

Something like 8s duration, 35% increased damage, -10% speed. Lower CD to 60s.

Basically make the buff be something you unload all your oGCD's on, a couple spike GCD's, then back to regular rotations. The 20s duration just feels way too long.

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Originally Posted by SargentToughie

I was on the anti-monk and rework Monk hype train up until launch, especially since on paper Riddle of Fire and such sound pretty bad... But honestly, after having gotten the job to 70, played it in a few EXRs and gotten some Susano EX clears, I am pretty happy to say that I was completely wrong about the job.

Monk right now is actually a monster. It does have a bit of weird and janky stuff to work out with Tackle Mastery, Tornado Kick, and overall being far too reliant on RNG and team comp, but it's most definitely a contender for the top melee slot still. If you know what you're doing, and you use your skills well, you'll beat out just about anybody. Even Riddle of Earth, loathe as I am to admit it, does have a couple of moments to shine in fights like Susano EX, where you can use it to refresh your stacks without relying on PB. It lets you keep PB for the stuff that's absolutely unavoidable, like getting gaol-ed (feelsbadman).

I didn't like Riddle of Fire in concept, but it feels much better once you're able to layer Brotherhood on top of it. You feel pretty slow, but it's easy to forget the slowness when you're busting out 2 or 3 12k Forbidden Chakras during the window of power.

I feel very rewarded for having committed to the job, and even though I do plan to get Samurai to 70, I'll be playing Monk for a long time to come.

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I agree wholeheartedly. Once you hit lv70, it basically comes together. It takes some time getting used to, but so far DPS seems to be massive, assuming you really know your way around Monk.

Tackle Mastery (including Riddle of Wind) and Tornadokick are very questionable in their existence, but besides that I do enjoy RoF and RoE. The RNG is, as one would expect, a harsh mistress: sometimes very kind and sometimes... well, not.

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Originally Posted by Zohnax

I understand, a reduction of 15% can feel like a lot, but in reality, people should think of it as MNKs putting more focus into their attacks rather than just flailing wildly. ;3

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I like this idea. For a 20 second duration, the Monk focuses all of their power to create harder hitting hits than just fast ones. Everyone knows that you can't be both 100% fast AND strong. Think of it as normally it being 50/50, with RoF it shifts more towards 35/80 (yes, going over 100%) to pump massive damage, and then getting back into your groove.

Also, once you hit 70 and get gear of ilvl300+, you'll have enough speed. I'm currently at 1.99 sec GCD in GL3, and around 2.28 with RoF iirc.

I wonder when to use riddle of fire.... Is it when all of your oGCD is up? Should we hold up our oGCD just for RoF?

The skill name should be Ridiculous of Fire though.

I hated it when I first got it. As time went on I got used to the lower action speed, and using it in 8-man content alongside Brotherhood felt a lot better due to how often I was using Forbidden Chakra.

I still think it could be adjusted to make it more fun to use. Maybe a cooldown that puts you in Greased Lightning 4 for 20 seconds.

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Originally Posted by Zohnax

People need to stop being so dramatic about Riddle of Fire. It's a 20% damage increase over Blood for Blood for a total of 30% for a 20second period every 90seconds. We're not losing Greased Lightning

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Greased Lightning is, to many Monks, the speed of our attacks. The damag of course is important, but most Monks enjoy them because they go fast.
Riddle of Fire completely negates that damage, and for what? Our attacks aren't even that much stronger. 30% may sound nice, but it's at the trade-off of all our speed. That damage increase is nearly negated because of that.

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Originally Posted by Stomoman

I hated it when I first got it. As time went on I got used to the lower action speed, and using it in 8-man content alongside Brotherhood felt a lot better due to how often I was using Forbidden Chakra.

I still think it could be adjusted to make it more fun to use. Maybe a cooldown that puts you in Greased Lightning 4 for 20 seconds.

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that sounds so much cooler than what it is right now, like an overclock ability even without a damage increase and exactly like Exiled_Tonberry mention, when I play monk I do because of the speed and flow of the class, not because I see thousand on numbers on the screen, its not like you can check the party dps without ad-dons and not all on PS4 anyways to know and understand if your numbers mean something good or bad.

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Originally Posted by Exiled_Tonberry

Greased Lightning is, to many Monks, the speed of our attacks. The damag of course is important, but most Monks enjoy them because they go fast.
Riddle of Fire completely negates that damage, and for what? Our attacks aren't even that much stronger. 30% may sound nice, but it's at the trade-off of all our speed. That damage increase is nearly negated because of that.

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That is mathematically incorrect due to how % multipliers work. 30% and 30% multiplier isnt 60% extra damage (RoF with GL3) its actually 69% and also the speed of GL3 doesn't affect oGCDs which are now a larger % of your damage due to FC.

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Originally Posted by Exiled_Tonberry

Greased Lightning is, to many Monks, the speed of our attacks. The damag of course is important, but most Monks enjoy them because they go fast.
Riddle of Fire completely negates that damage, and for what? Our attacks aren't even that much stronger. 30% may sound nice, but it's at the trade-off of all our speed. That damage increase is nearly negated because of that.

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1. You can stack skill speed to help lessen the blow.
2. In the course of those seconds it's up we're doing MORE damage than we would have been with all the normal speed. I'll take that damage over the speed in most non-mechanic moments.

Thinking back on Alexander Savage, as a monk there were many times it was difficult to maintain greased lightning, sometimes to the point that I told my group that I was just going to run ninja for the fight instead of monk. A11s is an example of this where there was just too much down time.

If trends like that continue, the reduced skill speed for increased damage, at least so far to me, seems like it will only make the job harder to play. Obviously you won't just use this on cooldown, but it definitely will have the chance to come back and bite you hard, especially while you're trying to learn a fight. To that end, this feels more like a swing and a miss. Also, like others have stated, I like to play monk for the speed of the job. I like the feeling of constantly doing something, and if my skill speed is penalized for using the ability, then that's something that even if more powerful, simply feels bad to use.

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Originally Posted by wereotter

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There were ways to maintain GL3 in A11S, though difficult. Riddle of Earth alone would make a lot of those transitions easier. And again, when talking about the "speed" of MNK, we're talking about less than a third of a second difference that GL3 provides.

Sigh.. As someone who hasn't gotten SB yet, this is very disheartening. I absolutely love the speed monk has at level 60 and I don't want to lose that. We got our second TP move recently, why then do we get reduced speed, therefore removing the need for TP restore..

Sigh. I really hope they fix monk because I may not play this crap.

Despite being a buff. It still feels horrible for this specific class because it doesn't fit the aesthetic whatsoever. Much rather they just took away the haste penalty and gave us the damage % up albeit at a lower number to make up for us getting the speed back. Also not only that it completely messes up demolish timings. drop it for 2s or clip it at 5s. Yes clipping it at 5s is a dps gain if you get 2 within RoF however it's still crap to have to clip something so early just because they were too lazy to give us a decent buff that didn't screw with our only dot timer and our speed. I'm not a fan of any 'Riddles' Monk got. The real riddle is why do we have all these double edged buffs?

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Originally Posted by wereotter

Thinking back on Alexander Savage, as a monk there were many times it was difficult to maintain greased lightning, sometimes to the point that I told my group that I was just going to run ninja for the fight instead of monk. A11s is an example of this where there was just too much down time

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There was only really downtime in A11s and A12s. However you could go all of A12 only dropping it once at the phase interval when he does his ultimate. A11 had 2 forced drops though. And those phases had 30s+ waits so RoE would still have been useless. The main problem with A11 though was Perfect Balance's CD time. If you had fast DPS you wouldn't have it up for coming back off the ship. Still wondering why it's 180s :thinking:

No, they affect the damage of the auto attacks and the time of recast which is important because with the reduction of demolish. you need the recast to be to at the very least 2.00 sec to avoid clipping.
Lower recast time for GCD > More blow given > more chance to crit > more chance to fill the chakra.
it could explain the potency loss in all our attacks and tp reduction in all of them if not the potency, the TP reduction cost itself at least