Monk - My Thoughts & Suggestions

Hello, I've only made a few posts on the forums, but this is the first time I'm posting a thread. Please bear with me if I forget anything important.

Monk has been my main job to play since ARR, but after Stormblood and up to now the job is less fun and feels more clunky to play, even a little frustrating in my opinion, which I think is a shame. I love Monk's themes and its core playstyle, but a lot of its abilities either clash with each other or go unused (Tornado Kick, Six-sided Star, Anatman, etc.). In fact, Monk hasn't evolved that much over the years when compared to Dragoon or Black Mage. I agree with a lot of posts suggesting that Monk could benefit from a rework, and after thinking about what could be done, I decided to put together a document that expresses my ideas and suggestions with some visuals. These suggestions are more on the level of a rework, so I doubt these could be implemented in a patch. However, I think they can resolve some of the problems that I think are part of Monk's gameplay, or provide some ideas on what Monk could have. At the very least, I would just like to share my thoughts on the matter and hopefully the document can give other people, or possibly the developers if they happen to see it, some ideas that could make Monk feel more fun and satisfying to play.

I will leave the link for the document here and let it explain my thoughts and suggestions:
https://imgur.com/a/MNKeu1E

Please let me know if the link doesn't work, and I'll sort it out as soon as I can.

EDIT: I didn't realise Google Drive was a bit awkward with image hosting, so I decided to host it on Imgur instead. Thanks for letting me know about that and hopefully it looks better.

I don't know if this is just a mobile thing or what, but when I open that it's so low res it's illegible.

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Originally Posted by ItMe

I don't know if this is just a mobile thing or what, but when I open that it's so low res it's illegible.

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It's a mobile thing. On desktop it's very clear.

Upon actually reading through a fair portion of it so far. I'm really liking the ideas in here, some of which are some I've talked about before too such as taking ideas from Tifa's FF7R gameplay as well as having the speed from GL be a passive.

I really like the ideas you've used for the chakra gauge and it looks quite fresh. Honestly, reading it kinda got me excited for what MNK could be.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Sora_Oathkeeper

It's a mobile thing. On desktop it's very clear.

Upon actually reading through a fair portion of it so far. I'm really liking the ideas in here, some of which are some I've talked about before too such as taking ideas from Tifa's FF7R gameplay as well as having the speed from GL be a passive.

I really like the ideas you've used for the chakra gauge and it looks quite fresh. Honestly, reading it kinda got me excited for what MNK could be.

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Googledrive isn't great for hosting images, it might be worth OPs time to rehost it to imgur or something.

As for the content it looks pretty good. Quite a bit of it is just consolidation of things that were discussed in some of the other Monk threads, I see a few things I've mentioned here and on reddit and the Blitz mechanic was something we talked about a bit in the 40 page thread. But frankly it's valuable in its own right to just be a consolidation of all that feedback into one place considering the other thread is over 40 pages now and there's at least a dozen more Monk feedback threads from Shadowbringers alone.

A lot of though has been put to this and I like your ideas. Though it may seem to be a bit much for it to be implemented, I would love for it to become a reality.

From, a fellow Monk Main since 2.0 release.

While it does look good and you can tell some thought has been put into this, I hope you don't mind some feedback which comes from my initial thoughts when reading this. Personally, I feel it falls short on 2 areas that try and shape jobs. Those are keeping things simple and reducing useless actions.

Personally, I think there is alot going on and granted, you never know until you actually play it, but it seems like there will be alot going on, with all the buff timers, memorising blitz's and chakra etc. This is a minor concern in the grand scheme of things though. The bigger oversight I feel are the useless/niche actions.

To demonstrate this, I am going to use your Chakra system. To (admittedly) massively oversimplify things, you gain chakra, get 100% and open a chakra gate and up to 3 can be gained. The first concern would be the fact it takes longer to open subsequent chakra gates after the first, this is mainly from your meditation 1 and 2 traits. This then adds a dynamic in relation to the abilities you have for each level of chakra. I will just concentrate on the single target as it is basically the same as AoE. The skills are, 1. DoT, 2. DoT damage buff, 3. Pure Damage. The concern here is you put up the DoT, then what. Do you go after the DoT buff, bearing in mind you have to take into consideration that you have to have 2 gates and then be close to another one so you have time to use the DoT buff, or do you just go for pure damage and how does this interact with the fact it takes longer to build up higher levels of gates. Without knowing exactly how it will play out the concern here is it is too complex to figure out what is optimal. However, this is just the icing on the cake. You then mention Star Shower. I understand this is meant to be a gauge dump for end of fight or similar, but it falls into the same trap as current Tornado Kick. You did mention this, however, no other ability actively punishes someone n a negative way because they pushed it at the wrong time.

The bigger one comes with blessing of fire, increasing damage based on open chakra. This then makes the puzzle of do I use 1, 2 or 3 chakra even more complex and if done wrong could lead to, it's better to keep the damage buff than use chakras. But again, it is actively punishing players for using a resource that is intended to be used. I hope I have made it clear that I feel this is just a mess of individual ideas that don't seem to work together well.

A small point on Blitz. You have it so that there are 7 individual blitz abilities, however, most are useless except in levelling when you do not have them all. It is also a window that is > 20 seconds long, which feels like a long time for something that feels like it is meant to be used as a burst window. While I do like the idea of Blitz's, I don't think this implementation quite fits. Bear in mind you will also be dealing with Chakra and the intricacies involved with that during this window as well.

Overall, each individual concept seems like a good place to start building ideas, however, as a whole, I don't think it would flow well either. I have this feeling it would feel like 2 different teams made separate mechanics and they decided to just throw them together and hope they work rather than make the mechanics work together. I'm not going to comment on your enlightenment ideas as I think chakra and perfect balance are enough, however I do like the idea of attaining a state where you are just in tune with yourself which allows quick attacks to occur.

Again, this is just how I feel, others may feel differently and I hope you don't take this as me attacking you or your idea, rather as feedback to potentially change/redesign your ideas based on feedback. I just want Monk to stand out and be great again and not potentially be another concept that falls short of the mark.

I love the ideas you put on paper. Monk can be broken down into 3 linchpins resources.
I like your thoughts and ideas and what SE should do next expansion honestly!

This is what I think needs to be done CURRENTLY to fix monk.

Monk Resources:
-chakra (resource)
-Greased Lightning stacks (resource)
-Critical hit RNG (used to gain chakra) With TP gone I feel this was SE's fix. Use critical hit's to gain chakra. Should have never done this, by forcing players into a crit build. Using critical hits as a resource?!

Fixing current Monk until expansion I think should start with and then move into the ideas you have laid out:
-removing positional's for all skills besides Dragon kick, Bootshine. Earth's reply will help with this.
-remove the RNG aspect of the class attached to crits
-Perfect balance just gives us 3 stacks instantly (find good cooldown)
-anatman changed to 3sec channel skill, and allows you to move after the channel is done. You don't lose your stacks for 8 seconds, prevents stacks falling of with Tornado Kick.
-six-sided star procs off of tornado kick to grant 1 chakra
-tornado kick grants 1 chakra, lowers anatmans cooldown by 15 seconds
-Dragon Kick gives 1 chakra
-Bootshine gives a 1 chakra, with Leaden Fist
-Rockbreaker gives a 1 chakra, with Twin snakes buff
-Demolish gives 1 chakra if the target already has the DOT. (refresh the DOT get a chakra)
-Brotherhood gives a raid wide buff that increases critical chance by 10% for 10 sec.

-Now perfect balance should line up with tornado kick for getting back in the action following tornado kick. (basically like ninja's kasattsuu)
-Six-Sided Star lines up with tornado kick refreshes GL and grants a chakra when procs off of tornado kick.
-Anatman is great if perfect balance is on cooldown, or a boss jump phase, and Tornado Kick now pushes the use of Anatman since it lowers cooldown.
-Form Shift now is a perfect linchpin for resource management, and now keeping stacks is focused on one skill versus 5. Albeit doesn't give you leaden, or twin snakes buff. But it's your go to for keeping your stacks if Perfect or anatman is on cooldown.

This should line up with Monk's burst damage: Anatman>Riddle of Fire>Brotherhood>Forbidden Chakra>Tornado Kick>Six-Sided Star>Tornado Kick>Six-Sided Star>Perfect Balance

So the battles will feel structured for Monk much better. The ability to use forbidden or enlightenment more often off of your normal combos with guaranteed chakra if you use Dragon Kick, Bootshine with positional's.

I want your ideas for Monk, but I think we SE needs to fix monk now versus a COMPLETE overhaul. Great Ideas man, good job!

A lot of ideas I was thinking up to throw into the big thread were covered here. I'd have no idea what the numbers would look like nor how it would play out in practice but it hits on all the points of potential that we all see in the job. Great work!

There are a lot of things that I like and don't think would translate well into gameplay, but that doesn't compare to how impressed I am from the sheer effort that went into making this, well done my good man. Regardless of how much I like it or not, it's clear you understand MNK's problems deeply and have read a large amount of the 40 page thread and I salute that dedication.

Dev team, take notes. If people are willing to make entire hypothetical kits just to fix a job, then there's something wrong with the way you're handling it.

I can tell you did a ton of work in this. Great job! if you can, you should go ahead and add this in the already massive mnk feedback thread as well as the devs said quite a bit of time; Its easier to see feedback in a single thread that said. I really like your idea's and something the devs should keep in mind if they rework mnk next EP.

thoroughly impressed. I'd actually pick up monk again for the first time since 2.0

Making Greased Lightning a buff that doesn't need to worry about reaching 3 stacks to reach its maximum potential is good as well as the Chakra Gauge being more important to the Monk gameplay since Chakra is their main thing. I like Form Shift being a lv 15 skill for that reason - it can be properly maintained under lv 50.

A bit of issues - pugilist skills should get buffed to compensate for the loss of potency or get some more skills being introduced because those pugilist quests are actually pretty brutal even with 2-3 GL stacks and removing 20% extra damage buff will make them very difficult to beat unless you wore the best gear available in those solo instances (and for the most part, people who are starting out the game with pugilist as their first class will run into huge issues when doing their storyline quest).

I do believe having Blessing of the Wind's movement speed buff is better left at lv 34 or whenever you unlock the mobility buff. The blessing of fire however, makes things really tricky to use gates. With a 10% damage up on 2+ gates, then you never want to fall under 2 gates, or otherwise it translates to loss of GCD potency overtime as you rebuild it back up to hit 2 gates. This means using the DoT is discouraged unless the DoT severely overpowers the potency loss that makes it worthwhile to expend all the Chakra Gates up until you reach 2+ gates again. Essentially monks will trade a DoT potency for their 10% upkeep overtime.

I think there should be a bit more focus to GL though - Greased Lightning Gauge should be treated as a resource that can be expended in conjunction to monk specific skills instead of a 30-40% damage buff, and GL buff enables you to gain GL resources over time as long as it's maintained, sorta like Enochian. A big part of the storyline in SB is that monks end up adapting to Pugilist fighting style (aka Greased Lightning usage and pugilist skills) to have an answer for the anti-monk combat techniques. I do think monks should have a bit focus to GL for this reason.

I'm also laughing inside if and when monks get Hundred Fists because Hamon can already use it. Imagining Hamon reaching enlightenment to use Hundred Fists is hilarious in its own way.

I hope SE is reading this thread...

Sad that after all that work, at least part of this is already out of date after yesterday's live letter announcements...

BUT I do really like some of the ideas in here. I love that you implemented blitzes without them just being another copy of mudras/dances. Though I think the system created might be a bit too complicated. People already look at ninja from the outside and see that system as being too complicated and too many options to remember, and I would worry that the system you created might suffer from the same issue. And if the skills you're executing when you do the rotation don't matter since you're just going through your rotation machine gunning skills, then why make 7 if they do little mechanically different?

Either way it's a great start to implementing that into the job.

Late to the party, but just want to say likewise that I love the ideas here and their presentation, and I hope the devs get a look at it. (Though it's likely too late for it to change their minds on much, if they try to blame a mechanics-gutting, oversimplified revision on a lack of player feedback or concrete suggestions, we can at least point them here.)

My own route, which grad school and full time work cut short of completion, went a completely different way, but I'd be just as happy to get this, especially with some further minor tweaks:

Points of possible improvement off the top of my head...

• Why bother with Greased Lightning at all at that point? 2.5 GCD, 2.5 GCD, 2.5 GCD, 2.0 GCD pre Form-Shift seems pretty... stark, and unnecessary. Plus... it'd then make Form Shift still obligatory as pre-fight pseudo-bloat or as dungeon downtime spam. Why have either?
• Can we do anything to improve the button-efficiency of the basic weaponskills? For instance, why not replace Greased Lightning itself with a sort of flow mechanic that prompts the standard rotation over time while still allowing for some flexibility? (For instance, maybe each new form adds a 5% Damage buff, stacking to 3 but allowing for a further 2 or 3 as safety margin; these are consumed based on how recently a form was used, such as a double-Demolish consuming 2 stacks.) And, heck, then we could trim Form Shift with zero loss in depth.
• The suggested Meditate design at present seems... odd, especially under that name.
• Anatman still seems a bit lackluster.
• Elixir Field seems like it should have more or more unique Chakra interaction. It's like you're purging your body of all its excess aether, after all. I get that we'll be losing APM from no longer firing away constant TFCs, but Elixir Field feels a bit misplaced to me as a rotational (now, merely almost) zero-synergy skill. I'd love to see it do something more interesting, especially if you're bringing back Steel Peak. Heck, I'd love to see Steel Peak do something more, too.
• I don't quite get the point of your Elements system here. It doesn't seem to add much of anything overall.
• I'm not sold on the Mantra change. I, too, want to see it do more than just provide bonus healing, but so long as the skills have to be used in sequence, this can be a bit awkward unless the duration is extended.