Greased Lightning and Huton

Since Greased Lightning got turned into an always active trait and did basically the same thing as Huton, do you think they should turn Huton into a similar trait and make way for a new Ninjutsu and/or remove/change Armor Crush?

Depends on what the new jutsu is IMO.
I mean... you'll also be removing the timer element from the UI, so removing huton gives you a lot of creative space.

i personally prefer if Huton was kept. Having the alternative to armor crush vs. to always Aeolian Edge is a nice change of pace from just using the basic 1-2-3 rotation every 60 seconds.

I rather they upgraded Huton with a secondary skill, similar to how Black Mages get Enochian within their Astral Fire/ Umbral Ice Phase to make sure they don't drop it during combat while giving a charged resource for a big damage skill. That'll give us an extra charge in the UI to work with for future ninjutsu which wouldn't have to directly compete with Kassatsu since it already has a Single Target attack and an AoE attack. Even Hide can get another skill buff where using it will refresh the charges outside of combat.

Unless they plan on allowing us to use Assassination outside of Dream within a Dream, I think they can make room for another skill by chaining Dream within a Dream and Assassination into one skill slot instead of 2 slots since they can only be used one after the other.

I don't really see the point Huton is already so easy to keep up.
You basically have nothing else to juggle during the downtime either, getting rid of it would just make it 1 2 3 with nothing else to pay attention to.

Greased Lightning was a skill that was holding monk back as a job, Huton isn't doing the same. They seem similar on the surface, but operated very differently when it came to upkeep. Ninjas just had to make sure to include armor crush every 30-ish seconds in their rotation, and the buff lasts 70 seconds giving the ninja a lot of time to disengage and do mechanics of a fight that requires it. Monks only had a 16 second window, and while the buff kept itself up automatically as the monk moved through its rotation, the monk also had less opportunity to disengage for any length of time without losing its buff. Add onto that the cooldown on perfect balance, while it did change over the years, was up to 2 minutes between uses, so if for any reason the monk did drop greased lightning, they had a 2 minute cooldown before they could use a skill to help recover, otherwise they were doing 10-12 GCDs before recovering it, while the ninja would have to wait, at most, 20 seconds to reapply huton, while missing out on one damage dealing ninjutsu.

Also as evidence of this, while monk continued to get more and more skills over the past 6 years specifically aimed at trying to make it easier to maintain greased lightning, ninja only had to have armor crush added and the job has been able to evolve since that point. So no, I don't see any reason at this point to change huton into a passive trait the same as greased lightning.

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Originally Posted by wereotter

Greased Lightning was a skill that was holding monk back as a job, Huton isn't doing the same. They seem similar on the surface, but operated very differently when it came to upkeep. Ninjas just had to make sure to include armor crush every 30-ish seconds in their rotation, and the buff lasts 70 seconds giving the ninja a lot of time to disengage and do mechanics of a fight that requires it. Monks only had a 16 second window, and while the buff kept itself up automatically as the monk moved through its rotation, the monk also had less opportunity to disengage for any length of time without losing its buff. Add onto that the cooldown on perfect balance, while it did change over the years, was up to 2 minutes between uses, so if for any reason the monk did drop greased lightning, they had a 2 minute cooldown before they could use a skill to help recover, otherwise they were doing 10-12 GCDs before recovering it, while the ninja would have to wait, at most, 20 seconds to reapply huton, while missing out on one damage dealing ninjutsu.

Also as evidence of this, while monk continued to get more and more skills over the past 6 years specifically aimed at trying to make it easier to maintain greased lightning, ninja only had to have armor crush added and the job has been able to evolve since that point. So no, I don't see any reason at this point to change huton into a passive trait the same as greased lightning.

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Just to add to this, it helps also that Huton isn't on an especially busy class overall. Monk is basically a ceaseless barrage of mechanics that make the job utterly overwhelming without actually making it better, which is why the job has been in the gutter basically forever.

Monk had positionals, a rotation that got out of sync with itself (which made positionals 'harder'), an entire phase that alters your core rotation, an RPG proc system for Meditate stacks, team utility for defense AND offense, a buff to be maintained, a debuff to be maintained, a burst window buff, buffs that suddenly make positonals NOT matter, and 4 oGCDs you would regularly use in rotation, on top of greased lightning. And most of these mechanics have a lot of passive interplay that made messing one of them up make all the rest fall apart.

Ninja has a lot going on too, but comparatively less: Your positionals keep you in the back most of the time, you don't have random stuff popping up in rotation, your rotation is fairly fixed, and if you say... mess up your ninjutsu that isn't going to muck about with your Ninki that much. Its also easier to recover from mucking up on ninja. Its still a big DPS loss but getting back into the flow is pretty seamless. So there is still complexity in the job and a good ninja is going to do better than a bad one, but unlike monk messing up as a ninja doesn't feel like the game just punched you in the face: The mistake is visible but the role doesn't grind to a screeching halt as your muscle memory works against you and it takes you 3 full 1-2-3 rotations to get back where you were.

Hands on my huton!

Greased Lightning was removed because they failed at fixing its problems. Huton doesn't have those problems. It gives you a reason to alternate your rotations to keep it up. Removing it would remove a dynamic of the job and it would be unnecessary to.

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Originally Posted by Kolsykol

I don't really see the point Huton is already so easy to keep up.
You basically have nothing else to juggle during the downtime either, getting rid of it would just make it 1 2 3 with nothing else to pay attention to.

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Greased lightning was already easy to keep up, no MNK is essentially what you described. And now here we have people calling for more homogenization. I’d laugh if it wasn’t so sad.

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Originally Posted by dezzmont

Just to add to this, it helps also that Huton isn't on an especially busy class overall. Monk is basically a ceaseless barrage of mechanics that make the job utterly overwhelming without actually making it better, which is why the job has been in the gutter basically forever.

Monk had positionals, a rotation that got out of sync with itself (which made positionals 'harder'), an entire phase that alters your core rotation, an RPG proc system for Meditate stacks, team utility for defense AND offense, a buff to be maintained, a debuff to be maintained, a burst window buff, buffs that suddenly make positonals NOT matter, and 4 oGCDs you would regularly use in rotation, on top of greased lightning. And most of these mechanics have a lot of passive interplay that made messing one of them up make all the rest fall apart.

Ninja has a lot going on too, but comparatively less: Your positionals keep you in the back most of the time, you don't have random stuff popping up in rotation, your rotation is fairly fixed, and if you say... mess up your ninjutsu that isn't going to muck about with your Ninki that much. Its also easier to recover from mucking up on ninja. Its still a big DPS loss but getting back into the flow is pretty seamless. So there is still complexity in the job and a good ninja is going to do better than a bad one, but unlike monk messing up as a ninja doesn't feel like the game just punched you in the face: The mistake is visible but the role doesn't grind to a screeching halt as your muscle memory works against you and it takes you 3 full 1-2-3 rotations to get back where you were.

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You must have had some strange MM on MNK, because it was just as effortless to restart your rotation if GL fell if as you are describing it for NIN.

NIN is the far more complex/busy job of the two, especially after MNK being gutted.

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Originally Posted by Ariel_Valmont

You must have had some strange MM on MNK, because it was just as effortless to restart your rotation if GL fell if as you are describing it for NIN.

NIN is the far more complex/busy job of the two, especially after MNK being gutted.

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Disputable. They're basically the same in terms of speed and APM. NIN is terribly trivial outside of its TA + ninjutsu window and ninki management is pretty straightforward. MNk has a very streamlined rotation, but it has the added challenge of more positionals and an alternative rotation after the PB window. At the end of the day, they're very comparable. Personally, I find NIN easier to play.

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Originally Posted by Ariel_Valmont

You must have had some strange MM on MNK, because it was just as effortless to restart your rotation if GL fell if as you are describing it for NIN.

NIN is the far more complex/busy job of the two, especially after MNK being gutted.

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The rotation, if you lost greased lighting, and especially if you already popped perfect balance as a DPS increasing move, was a stumbling block very similar to how the slow down on riddle of fire last expansion was. You'd lose your flow because you were suddenly going a lot slower, and unlike ninja who only had to wait at most 20 seconds to reapply their speed increase, monk also had a slow buildup needing to go through 3-4 full rotations in order to not only be back up to the normal speed, but also to be back to normal damage. It messed with muscle memory for the job.

As it is now, though. I also don't agree that ninja is more complex or busy. As stated, monk still has to dance around the boss more because of positional requirements, whereas ninja only has to move to hit armor crush and otherwise just stays in one spot behind the boss. And doing your bursts are comprably complex between monk needing to do its perfect balance, riddle of fire, brotherhood, unpredicable triggers for forbidden chakra phase and ninja needing cram as many of its moves into the trick attack window as possible. Neither is more complex, unless you can count on the predicability of ninja making it less so.

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Originally Posted by Saefinn

Greased Lightning was removed because they failed at fixing its problems. Huton doesn't have those problems. It gives you a reason to alternate your rotations to keep it up. Removing it would remove a dynamic of the job and it would be unnecessary to.

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Greased lightning was removed due to a vocal group of the player base who found it too hard to maintain greased lightning (just as easy to keep up as huton) doing your rotation kept it up (valid excuse for huton apparently)
Removing it, removed a dynamic of the job, and it was unnecessary.

As far as which was harder to play, it’s a matter of opinion, I personally find the MNK positionals easier to keep track of because you always need to be positioned, where the NIN positionals seem to be a mere after thought and are easy to lose track of.

Ya, losing GL sucked, that was kind of the point not to, it was still more rewarding to play than it is now.

The thing that I would say that possibly makes nin easier is the movement speed increase, which was addressed this go round with gl4 and fists of wind, and sadly that’s a memory.

But as was said, it’s disputable/subjective/opinion.

Both Monk and Ninja got the difficulty in their rotations mostly gutted in SHB. For Ninja, now that they've moved Mudras onto the GCD, its rotation is wildly simpler. It has a lot less to maintain now, Huton is the only thing it maintains now. Everything else is just do it in the TA window if it aligns nicely, and if not, do it when it's off cooldown.

The strength of Ninja's Huton and its ease vs. Greased Lightning, before GL's removal was the fact that Ninja can put it up outside of combat with no penalty. This means there's no build up for it, at all, ever, unless the tank pulls the second the instance entry barrier drops. Then you only have to use the Armor Crush combo once, 70 seconds into the fight, and then 30 seconds after that, though a higher buffer may make you more comfortable if you haven't memorized when and how long fight transitions are.

Greased Lightning was far harder to maintain, particularly in the past when it used to only be 12 seconds vs. Huton's constant 70. It's true that every combo ender for Monk ended in the Coeurl Stance, refreshing GL, but the other truth is that there are tons of fights where you have to disengage for a long enough time, that if you delayed those ending hits in the combo by just a sec, you lose the full GL buff and have to rebuild it from scratch. In the past, the reason to delay said combo finishers was to apply DOTs from Fracture and Touch of Death(if TP was no concern depending on fight length).

Even with PB, it took 3 Coeurl Stance moves to do this. Monk's rotation overall, even with the burst phases, brotherhood, and chakra in the mix is worlds simpler and easier to execute, especially Pre-SHB, but perfecting it was madness because there's so many little ways to lose DPS.

Monk's main game has always been keep uptime and do positionals, it has no ranged attacks. Chakra barely felt like an addition to the job, because outside of a Brotherhood friendly comp, you knew the gains on it would always be slow, needing 5 procs to do one oGCD. Riddle of Fire was just a replacement for Blood for Blood with a slightly better downside.

NIN's main game has changed with each expansion. It used to have no positionals other than TA. It gained Enmity control for two expansions. Lost DOTs, gained Ninki. The only constant has been Huton, and maintaining Huton is a joke.

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Originally Posted by Ariel_Valmont

You must have had some strange MM on MNK, because it was just as effortless to restart your rotation if GL fell if as you are describing it for NIN.

NIN is the far more complex/busy job of the two, especially after MNK being gutted.

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NIN is a deeper job, but it is not more complex/busy.

Part of why MNK was in a design gutter that made it a consistent loser in the Job Satisfaction polls (including among hardcore players, so it isn't just 'mad because its a hard job' problem) is because GL just causes a lot of problems for the job in both terms of downtime and how fun it is to actually play. It actively detracts from the job, rather than adding to it. NIN flows through different abilities, and gets big rewards for doing it well, but missing anything doesn't trash the job in a similar way that monk does. GL all punishments for not getting it right, or for getting downtime.

As for why Huton is better, Vyrerus put it best: Huton is passively gained and re-applied if dropped, GL is very active and took a lot more 'effort' to get back.

Losing huton makes you miss one Ninjutsu. That isn't great but it isn't crushing. Losing GL means you lose an optimal PB window to get it up, or you lose out on the fast pace of monk attacks that the job uses to make up for how visually unimpactful monk attacks are as a general rule (and yes, this matters a lot to how a job feels, there is a reason getting 2 bloodletters in a row on BRD makes you feel like a god despite that only being 300 potency, less than say... a rear strike Bootshine buffed by leaden fist, which doesn't feel much like anything, bloodletter is flashy with lots of clear feedback something good just happened, and hopefully 6.0 will come with a visual update to monk giving it some more 'impact' to good play, like positional correct attack animations), meaning losing GL basically means your not playing your job for 3 rotations, or losing out on the only real 'flash' your job gets.

I get the desire to retain the deep parts of monk, it should maintain its identity as a fast hitting class with heavy positional requirements and a free-flowing combo system, but GL doesn't really support its job fantasy at all besides creating a big emotional penalty for making a mistake (and one that is harder for new players to notice, mind) or hitting downtime in a fight, because 'loses DPS for failing to maintain GCD combo' is a feature of every job in the game. Only BLM has a mechanic that interacts with that on a deeper level than the 'basic' way it costs you DPS, and that works because the entire job has a different relationship with uptime and isn't expected to maintain 100% uptime like physical jobs are.

So it wasn't 'special' that Monk had GL which made it extra bad to lose your GCD, it was a superfluous extra penalty that existed for no real reason besides to overload player's brains and make mistakes or downtime feel truly awful, as well as necessitating a truly absurd amount of mechanics to negate this supposed 'depth' of the job. More than half of the Shadowbringers actives were some variation on 'Handle downtime better.' Heck, if you consider meditate a downtime ability despite you technically getting Chakras mid fight, all 3 of their actives in some way related to Monk's 'downtime' problem, which is a direct result of its GL focused design.

There was just no reality the XIV designers were keeping GL in as a key part of monk. It wasn't a vocal minority of the players, it just... was an anchor weighing down the entire job that very consistently was not popular and who's mains were not happy with it. When your forced to design abilities to make the job's 'unique mechanic' not matter every expansion because when it matters the job really stinks to play, kinda is a big sign that the mechanic just isn't fun.

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Originally Posted by dezzmont

Losing huton makes you miss one Ninjutsu. That isn't great but it isn't crushing. Losing GL means you lose an optimal PB window to get it up, or you lose out on the fast pace of monk attacks that the job uses to make up for how visually unimpactful monk attacks are as a general rule (and yes, this matters a lot to how a job feels, there is a reason getting 2 bloodletters in a row on BRD makes you feel like a god despite that only being 300 potency, less than say... a rear strike Bootshine buffed by leaden fist, which doesn't feel much like anything, bloodletter is flashy with lots of clear feedback something good just happened, and hopefully 6.0 will come with a visual update to monk giving it some more 'impact' to good play, like positional correct attack animations), meaning losing GL basically means your not playing your job for 3 rotations, or losing out on the only real 'flash' your job gets.

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This. MNK has no real relationship with the player when it comes to visual feedback for skills outside of like maybe SSS. Your strongest attack is the skill you get at level 1. If you told anybody that when they wanted to get into the job they'd probably lose interest at that statement alone. To make a comparison to emphasize just how egregious Leaden Bootshine is, let's imagine if for DRG, instead of getting Raiden Thrust- it only made your True Thrust's potency stronger, that's it. No extra or special animation. I guarantee you that if that actually happened to Dragoon, a lot of people would be trashing on how useless of an addition it would be.

Of course I'm not saying the solution to this should be to make Leaden Bootshine a uniquely animated skill because it shouldn't exist altogether in favour of making Dragon Kick more unique and giving more power to MNK's other weaponskills. It's as you said, MNK should have an overall visual tweak to have more "oomph" or distinction because it is sorely lacking in that regard, especially in terms of job fantasy.

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Originally Posted by Vyrerus

Monk's main game has always been keep uptime and do positionals, it has no ranged attacks. Chakra barely felt like an addition to the job, because outside of a Brotherhood friendly comp, you knew the gains on it would always be slow, needing 5 procs to do one oGCD. Riddle of Fire was just a replacement for Blood for Blood with a slightly better downside.

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Slightly worse you mean, while Blood for Blood was more dangerous to use, Riddle of Fire negatively impacted how Monk actually felt to play to the point where Monk players in Stormblood immediately, viscerally, despised it. Even if the purpose was to allow for double weaving, it didn't actually feel good to players and it was the number one thing people complained about regarding Monk in Stormblood from the get go. Them keeping the slow is pretty much the ultimate example of how the devs completely failed to respond to feedback regarding Monk going into Shadowbringers.

Ok, but is Superman faster than The Flash?

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Originally Posted by Equitable_Remedy

Ok, but is Superman faster than The Flash?

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Literally depends on the author.
They've raced a few times and both have canonically been proven "faster."
Why do you ask?

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Originally Posted by ItMe

Why do you ask?

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Because that internet "debate" shares a number of similarities with the complexity "debate" in this thread.

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Originally Posted by Ariel_Valmont

Greased lightning was removed due to a vocal group of the player base who found it too hard to maintain greased lightning

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I'm not sure I've seen anyone complain about GL being difficult to keep up since maybe Heavensward at the latest. It's the opposite really, it was so easy to keep up due to every expansion adding GL upkeep moves that it became completely irrelevant outside your opener.

So... Since we are getting a new move that instantly applies Huton... Why not just make it a trait like they did Blood and Enochian?

I hate changes like that, personally. All that it accomplishes is to make the game-play a little more boring and simple... that they made the decision to do that to Greased Lightning, Blood of The Dragon, and Enochian, and now even to debate to do the same thing to Huton, makes me quite mad.

I guess that it is a okay excuse.. to delete these sorts of things, in order to replace it with some other action, but I still hate it... To me, it feels bad, looks bad, and is less fun, to delete a part of any subclass's game-play, to make it more simple and/or as boring and dull as a bloody permanent passive trait.

In the case of Blood of The Dragon and Enochian, the plan to delete them seems to be only because their upkeep and maintenance is so simple that it is almost not possible to fail, which makes me question why Warrior and Dark Knight will still have Storm's Eye and DarkSide, if the plan is to trait-defile all easy upkeep buffs, which I hate, but I guess makes sense as a thing to do, so Huton would also be a viable victim candidate...

But with that said.. just in my opinion, to delete Greased Lightning into a trait was the worst mistake that the Dev Team has ever made with Greased Lightning... To delete the cause of a problem, is not the same as to fix the cause of a problem. They at least did attempt, albeit fail, since they did it the wrong way, to fix the Greased Lightning problem, but then they just gave up and chose to delete it, instead...

I think that there was a very simple and very easy way to solve the problem, and it makes no sense at all that it was never done...
Similar to Huton, the duration of Greased Lightning stacks should have just been a long duration. If Greased Lightning stacks, from the start, had just been given a duration of 45 or 60 seconds, instead of 16 seconds, then the issue of to lose the Greased Lightning stacks when ever the Monk could not attack a enemy, would have never even been a problem; and there would have been no need to create actions that only serve the purpose of to help maintain the Greased Lightning stacks, so long as the Monk upkeeps the maximum duration of 45 or 60 seconds...

hieh.. But now we have a trait, and opinions and ideas like mine, about Greased Lightning and its stacks, or even the concept that I had built up, to fix Greased Lightning stacks' main issue, while also to make it not a braindead easy and boring upkeep; before 5.4 did happen, are irrelevant now, any way...

And my apologies for the rant.

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Originally Posted by Burningskull

So... Since we are getting a new move that instantly applies Huton... Why not just make it a trait like they did Blood and Enochian?

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Because they said there's going to be a combo action with Huton.

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Originally Posted by AnotherPerson

Because they said there's going to be a combo action with Huton.

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Wait, so Huton is not going to be applied via Mudra anymore, but with this new action?

If so, that's actually interesting, since Huton (via Mudra) is something you just need to press once before combat, so it's not like a huge loss to attach Huton to an actual attack... thinking like with the live toolkit, if Armor Crush applied Huton instead of just extending it.

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Originally Posted by Raikai

Wait, so Huton is not going to be applied via Mudra anymore, but with this new action?

If so, that's actually interesting, since Huton (via Mudra) is something you just need to press once before combat, so it's not like a huge loss to attach Huton to an actual attack... thinking like with the live toolkit, if Armor Crush applied Huton instead of just extending it.

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I'm pretty sure you'll still need to use a mudra charge to activate it since everything elemental in a ninjas kit is tied to ninjutsu's , I mean there wouldn't be a point for hide anymore outside of AOE and even then you wouldn't need both charges before using hide pre combat . It could be something that can be done out of combat only like how previously monk had to press meditation 5 times to get Forbidden Chakra to only needing to use press it once out of combat to charge it .

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Originally Posted by Ariel_Valmont

Greased lightning was already easy to keep up, no MNK is essentially what you described. And now here we have people calling for more homogenization. I’d laugh if it wasn’t so sad.

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I don't think that GL was hard to keep up either, but it wasn't as easy as Huiton.
I have mixed thoughts on the removal of GL, my main issue with it was that nothing replaced it really.

With the rework to MNK in Endwalker I probably won't mind it as much.

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Originally Posted by Kolsykol

I don't think that GL was hard to keep up either, but it wasn't as easy as Huiton

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That was the thing... GL upkeep lost its relevance completely as expansions went through, with "improvements", and it became quite pointless and more of a nuisance itself. I wasn't a fan of it when it was actually challenging to keep it up, or even Enochian for this matter, but at least the latter was able to stay interesting for the people that enjoy this stressful playstyle.

Said that, after GL was gone, of course the job became naked and bland, but looking at what Monks are getting to make up for it, the job might finally be interesting for me to play with.

The current Huton is the worst thing about NIN in my opinion. Having to do a noisy 4-key sequence before every fight is a major pain. I'd accept a single key refresh, with no timeout while out of combat.

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Originally Posted by AnotherPerson

Having the alternative to armor crush vs. to always Aeolian Edge is a nice change of pace from just using the basic 1-2-3 rotation every 60 seconds.

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I know this post is from more than half a year ago, but I'd like to point out here that it's very easily possible to still vary the rotation into Armor Crush on the regular even without the buff extension aspect. The most common method of doing that is by attaching a DoT to it (ex. Chaos Thrust, Demolish, Goring Blade, etc). Since they're removed the DoT via Shadow Fang, they could easily attach a DoT to Armor Crush instead. Setting the DoT at 30s would cause Armor Crush to be used as often as it currently is. They could easily tune the damage so it's worth using in ST but not in AoE, or attach a non-stackable bleed to one of the AoE abilities (or a new ability, like an alternative combo off Blossom).

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Originally Posted by wereotter

Greased Lightning was a skill that was holding monk back as a job. Monks only had a 16 second window, and while the buff kept itself up automatically as the monk moved through its rotation, the monk also had less opportunity to disengage for any length of time without losing its buff. Add onto that the cooldown on perfect balance, while it did change over the years, was up to 2 minutes between uses, so if for any reason the monk did drop greased lightning, they had a 2 minute cooldown before they could use a skill to help recover, otherwise they were doing 10-12 GCDs before recovering it

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To be precise, it would take 7 GCDs to get three stacks of GL back if you form shifted into coeurl form and did demo followed by two sets of your rotation (6 GCDs).

GL didn't hold the job back as much as SE didn't know what to do with an otherwise decent level 50 job, and this idea was shown to be the case in 3.0, 4.0, and 5.0.

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Originally Posted by Raikai

Said that, after GL was gone, of course the job became naked and bland, but looking at what Monks are getting to make up for it, the job might finally be interesting for me to play with.

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Bland is a good way of putting it. I didn't like BLM which is why I stopped leveling it after a while of my dissatisfaction with Enochain. Still, it wasn't as easy as keeping GL and telling the dissatisfied players to play another job like I do. Monk had far more issues to trifle with that the devs were bandaiding over the years.

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Originally Posted by Morzy

To be precise, it would take 7 GCDs to get three stacks of GL back if you form shifted into coeurl form and did demo followed by two sets of your rotation (6 GCDs).

GL didn't hold the job back as much as SE didn't know what to do with an otherwise decent level 50 job, and this idea was shown to be the case in 3.0, 4.0, and 5.0.

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In the scenario you describe, no. It wasn't seven GCDs, it would have been eleven.

I suspect you forgot to count that form shift is on the global cooldown, which ups that count by one. Additionally before its removal, greased lightning had four stacks, not three. So you were looking at ten weapon skills before you got back up to dealing full damage, plus you had a speed penalty while in that situation making the time to recover longer. And when comparing it to Huton, if a ninja dropped huton right after using their only charge of ninjutsu, it would take them 20 seconds to be able to reapply it, but the monk would need more time than that to reapply, you were looking at 22-28 seconds to build back up all four stacks.

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Originally Posted by wereotter

And when comparing it to Huton, if a ninja dropped huton right after using their only charge of ninjutsu, it would take them 20 seconds to be able to reapply it, but the monk would need more time than that to reapply, you were looking at 22-28 seconds to build back up all four stacks.

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To be fair, though, Greased Lightning didn't require you to sacrifice damage to gain the stacks. Using a Mudra charge on Huton is a minimum of 650 potency lost, using EW's potency numbers, due to what could otherwise have been a Raiton. And that rises to 1500 potency with the new combo chain off Raiton. And it could conceivably be either a much larger damage loss, or a much longer time to reapply, if your next Mudra charge was due to be used on Suiton to set up a Trick Attack window (which 1 in 3 Mudra charges is used on in typical usage)

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Originally Posted by Kaedys

To be fair, though, Greased Lightning didn't require you to sacrifice damage to gain the stacks. Using a Mudra charge on Huton is a minimum of 650 potency lost, using EW's potency numbers, due to what could otherwise have been a Raiton. And that rises to 1500 potency with the new combo chain off Raiton. And it could conceivably be either a much larger damage loss, or a much longer time to reapply, if your next Mudra charge was due to be used on Suiton to set up a Trick Attack window (which 1 in 3 Mudra charges is used on in typical usage)

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Except it did. You forget that dropping greased lightning was a 30% damage reduction penalty on all your skills in addition to a reduction to your auto attacks (which were more powerful on monk than any other job) AND the slowdown on your global cooldown (a punishment it shared with ninja)

Doing the math on just the loss until you get to GL3 (becuase 3 to 4 ultimately only raised speed and auto attack damage) you lose 429 potency. That loss was amplified if you considered using a perfect balance to regain your greased lighting instead of doing the dragon kick - bootshine spam. This also doesn't count the damage lost for any chakra stacks you might have over capped while rebuilding or the damage lost on using it without full stacks. Same with holding onto an Elixir Field use while rebuilding.

And I refuse to acknowledge the Endwalker scenario since with GL not being a thing it's no longer something you can fairly compare. Monk likely would have also lot more potency in the next expansion for dropping GL than it did before the skill was removed.

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Originally Posted by wereotter

Except it did. You forget that dropping greased lightning was a 30% damage reduction penalty on all your skills in addition to a reduction to your auto attacks (which were more powerful on monk than any other job) AND the slowdown on your global cooldown (a punishment it shared with ninja)

Doing the math on just the loss until you get to GL3 (becuase 3 to 4 ultimately only raised speed and auto attack damage) you lose 429 potency. That loss was amplified if you considered using a perfect balance to regain your greased lighting instead of doing the dragon kick - bootshine spam. This also doesn't count the damage lost for any chakra stacks you might have over capped while rebuilding or the damage lost on using it without full stacks. Same with holding onto an Elixir Field use while rebuilding.

And I refuse to acknowledge the Endwalker scenario since with GL not being a thing it's no longer something you can fairly compare. Monk likely would have also lot more potency in the next expansion for dropping GL than it did before the skill was removed.

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That's all a really fancy way to say the devs should consider just removing self-insistent maintenance buffs like BotD (removed/permanent trait) GL (removed/permanent trait), Huton (still present/punished heavily), AF/UI (Present/hyper-punished) Storm's Eye (Present/eased a bit) and so forth. There's actually a good reason to remove this mechanic from Samurai, as it wouldn't affect their desired rotation too much provided it was balanced correctly, as you still want to do all 3 melee combos, so having the additional punishment on top is meaningless.

In some cases there's an argument to keep it (E.G. Storm's Eye) because it's the only thing that exists to provide texture to a rotation, but in other cases (Huton) it exists to the arguable detriment of the rotation as a whole. You're still only using Armor Crush twice a minute so it's not really impacting the rotation all too much, and with the shift towards a naruto-esque theme and rotation, the removal of Huton means they can free up an otherwise unused mudra slot and redesign the rotation around something more interesting for the ninja fantasy, anchored with a standard positionless 1-2-3 combo during downtime. Where would their positionals be then? Well, TA, they could consider bhava having a flank requirement, and other such oGCDs to give the class its unique texture in the direction they want to take the class. That's just my thought on it.

Also do remember in the old Monk design, while ramping up GL they were getting a lot of their damage bac each cyclek, so the penalty was reduced over time. For Ninja, they were ground to a halt until they could huton again, which came at the loss of a significant amount of potency on top of the already painful skill speed loss.

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Originally Posted by Taranok

Also do remember in the old Monk design, while ramping up GL they were getting a lot of their damage bac each cyclek, so the penalty was reduced over time. For Ninja, they were ground to a halt until they could huton again, which came at the loss of a significant amount of potency on top of the already painful skill speed loss.

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I factored this in when doing the math regarding how much potency the monk lost while building back up to full greased lightning. Addiitonally I assumed the monk player would form shift and start with demolish, having one stack from that point on, and compared the damage potencies to to if the monk had full GL while performing the exact same skills. That number might have been even higher, however, if the GL4 monk was able to get in more GCDs. That I didn't bother figuring out.