Monk needs one thing above all.

Monk actually is pretty damn good where it is but it suffers from a few half-baked ideas or under-utilized skills.

The issue monk has is that it can't fully capitalize on its new bread and butter; the beast chakras and more importantly; Phantom Rush.
See they changed brotherhood and riddle of fire by separating them by 30s on their cooldown in opposite directions, still synced but left apart mostly so that you could use your riddle of fire midway through. They gave perfect balance 40 seconds on its charge's cooldown to sync it with brotherhood. The problem is they didn't really think about how the opener should look like because it leaves your phantom rush in a weak spot that forces nothing but bad habits for the player. This caused balance rotation players to develop the infamous "double phoenix" opener rotation that though gives the optimal damage, downright bastardizes the design of beast chakras. The numbers don't lie however.


Let's think about it though. The main issue is that you can't really even use their phantom rush soon enough so their "opener" takes nearly 110 seconds to finish.
People have suggested to just slap another charge onto perfect balance because it'll let you get the phantom rush out sooner, But once you use all 3 charges, you'll be back to juggling your rotations til you have another charge available again, It only saves the opener and doesn't assist the rest of the fight.

Anatman. It does the same thing in one gcd and a server tick, as you could do in two gcd's while remaining fully mobile. There's no reason to use it under any circumstances, it doesn't even hold leaden fist, perfect balance, or blitz countdown timer. What can it do..?

Honestly it's kinda a surprise they didn't do this from the getgo, but they coulda just made anatman generate the 2 nadi's over time under a punishing requirement so it's optimally used during prepull, whenever monk is too far away to attack for long enough, or whenever there's a long transition.

What this would do is it'd allow you to bring your strongest attack into the party's buff window to smooth out your opener, it'd eliminate double phoenix, and anatman would see universal use without it being too broken. Honestly I don't know why they haven't attempted this already. It'd be the equivalent to Reaper's Soulsow, or Samurai's Meditate. It just seems right. It should be gospel to never go halfsies on a change if you're going for something specific. They better go all-out with it.


So yeah; Make Anatman charge nadi's. Make it punishing to use mid-combat to discourage it being put in rotations, Make it do it one nadi at a time so that if it is used mid-combat it's fair and doesn't take away from the pb charges. Except out of combat, make it almost instant for both nadi's during then so it's got use in dungeons/raids/singleplayer content.


Monk should be kept busy, They lost a lot of their ogcd's and positionals so the most they could do is give them more options.

TLDR: Make anatman do something to polish the disconnected opener.

They just need to change six sided star, anatman, or riddle of wind be a GCD damaging ability that grants a nadi and freshes disciplined fist on a 1 or 2 minute cd. That way you can press this right after your opening perfect balance and move into second PB that results in a TK and use it on future phases where the 3 PB TK system would result in odd buff window timings. Rather than continue to keep these oddly designed or highly situational abilities.

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Originally Posted by KaiSunstrider

They just need to change six sided star, anatman, or riddle of wind be a GCD damaging ability that grants a nadi and freshes disciplined fist on a 1 or 2 minute cd. That way you can press this right after your opening perfect balance and move into second PB that results in a TK and use it on future phases where the 3 PB TK system would result in odd buff window timings. Rather than continue to keep these oddly designed or highly situational abilities.

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This sounds like a fantastic idea honestly. Having six sided start grant a nadi would be perfect and would be easy to implement.

I am not 90 yet, so I can't really recommend anything. However, I was curious about thoughts of SSS being off the GCD, but when you use it, it still places all skills on its CD. This would allow for immediate use following a GCD, but still cost the cooldown.

I am also thinking not needing three charges of perfect balance to execute Phantom Rush, and have it become available as soon as you have both nadi.

I've mentioned my Anatman recommendation many times now and remain steadfast with it.

Anatman:
Increases Chakra gauge, grants one Chakra upon execution
Grants disciplined fist and formless fist and holds their duration.
Nullifies knockback and draw in effects
Reduces all damage by 50%

If you're aware of the dodge phase with the last boss in Vanaspati, MNK would be able to Anatman through the entire thing.

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Originally Posted by GreysonMidori

The issue monk has is that it can't fully capitalize on its new bread and butter; the beast chakras and more importantly; Phantom Rush.

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Monk's throughput has already clearly been tuned around Phantom being placed in a lone-Blitz RoF / not necessarily under all raid buffs, all while still offering faint potency gains in very particular contexts for being more precise and creative with the system by way of the occasional double-Solar opener when the fight length is basically known ahead of time. It hasn't ultimately cost us anything for Phantom Rush and the Nadi system in general to have that level of additional situational play (at least, that wouldn't become a more pervasive cost if that extra level of complexity were removed).

Would you prefer we have fewer options, less available complexity, an even greater performance floor, and be tuned back (or all others tuned up to ours) to make up for it?

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Anatman. It does the same thing in one gcd and a server tick, as you could do in two gcd's while remaining fully mobile. There's no reason to use it under any circumstances, it doesn't even hold leaden fist, perfect balance, or blitz countdown timer. What can it do..?

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It does exactly what it's obviously intended to do: to refresh Disciplined Fist during downtime. And unless DF would not only fade but also drop entirely over said downtime, there's no need to stand in place to channel it. Given that you're going to have about 4s of Twin Snakes to spare if alternating it with True Strike, you need only tap Anatman to refresh DF and you can still move as necessary.

We don't need to lose a downtime tool that helps with our parity across a variety of fights just to add some convoluted step to then reduce the thought that could ever go into our new core mechanic, let alone just because it offends some that they might alternate a 600+700 potency Blitzes with their 1000-potency Blitz rather than their 700-potency Blitz with their 600+1000-potency Blitzes.

Phantom Rush not being in our opener is fine, it's already strong as it is. I'd much rather solve the (in my opinion) bigger issue of MNK having nothing to do in between bursts.

Yeah, monk seems to be balanced around them not being able to open up with Phantom Rush. Even though it's not in their opener, they still do crazy amounts of damage with out it.

The only thing I'd fix on monk is clipping for higher ping players. You need a low-enough recast timer to land 11 hits during Riddle of Fire. How much depends on what your ping is. 1.94s works if your ping is good, but if it's not you need 1.93s or maybe less. Except if you go any lower than this, your casts start clipping all over the place. They need to do away with some of these animations.

That, or make Riddle of Fire last 21 seconds. LMAO

Those are great ideas, but Yoshi has straight up said this is intentional and they don't want MNK burst lining up with the raid buffs. The job is already kind of over performing, so I can't imagine how ridiculous they would be if their burst windows actually lined up with the raid buffs.

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Originally Posted by BluexBird

The only thing I'd fix on monk is clipping for higher ping players. You need a low-enough recast timer to land 11 hits during Riddle of Fire.

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To be fair, that's a need almost every job has in some form. XIV simply needs to stop adding round-trip ping to each animation lock timer (by refreshing the animation lock when the server's confirmation message returns to client).

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Originally Posted by VentVanitas

Phantom Rush not being in our opener is fine, it's already strong as it is. I'd much rather solve the (in my opinion) bigger issue of MNK having nothing to do in between bursts.

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This. I wonder if (an entirely rehauled) Riddle of Wind could do something about it... I'd love to see an oGCD-intense or true super-speed off-burst phase.

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Originally Posted by Ransu

Those are great ideas, but Yoshi has straight up said this is intentional and they don't want MNK burst lining up with the raid buffs. The job is already kind of over performing, so I can't imagine how ridiculous they would be if their burst windows actually lined up with the raid buffs.

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^ To put it another way, we're going to be balanced around conventional 8-man comps in decently serious 8-man content. By also being balanced around not having perfect alignment, we're essentially getting slightly (further) overtuned in every other way and punished faintly less for losing sync. That little bit of extra "just let me at 'em" disregard for perfect alignment (unless it wouldn't cost a Phantom within the fight) fits Monk just fine, imo.

I was thinking the Anatman idea was really good. I had a very similar idea myself. But after reading some of the other thoughts about PR not lining up with burst, and how that's intended, and how monk's throughput isn't affected overly much by de-syncing, maybe it's not as good of an idea as I originally thought.

I like the idea of changing Riddle of Wind to something that gives us a busy moment outside of burst windows. Like a Continuation style oGCD that becomes usable for a short period of time after PR. And/or it could interact with SSS in some way that makes us actually want to use that ability outside of the super-niche moment it has.

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Originally Posted by GreysonMidori

Honestly it's kinda a surprise they didn't do this from the getgo, but they coulda just made anatman generate the 2 nadi's over time under a punishing requirement so it's optimally used during prepull, whenever monk is too far away to attack for long enough, or whenever there's a long transition.

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I sort of doubt they would want to do this, unless they fundamentally rethink the purpose of beast chakra. Because right now, monk is very clearly designed around these 2 minute rotations, and generating more than 3 nadi every 120 seconds would violate that philosophy. I personally think this is where the bad gameplay feel is coming from for monk, and I think it's something they need to do away with. If Yoshi P's vision of monk is truly that phantom rush shouldn't fit neatly with raid buffs, then Perfect Balance should on a 30 second cooldown or something along those lines. If its damage was reduced proportionally to compensate, then that would just make sense. I think Monk should be an uptime class, not a CD burst window class.

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Originally Posted by KaiSunstrider

They just need to change six sided star, anatman, or riddle of wind be a GCD damaging ability that grants a nadi and freshes disciplined fist on a 1 or 2 minute cd. That way you can press this right after your opening perfect balance and move into second PB that results in a TK and use it on future phases where the 3 PB TK system would result in odd buff window timings. Rather than continue to keep these oddly designed or highly situational abilities.

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I'd rather they kept Six Sided Star as it is personally. Having the movement speed boost is a nice niche, and I use it somewhat regularly in periods of high mobility when I can run with the boss. Because for some reason every NPC runs 50% faster than players, perfect uptime on them is generally impossible anyway. I also think they should avoid class mechanics that renew disciplined fist where they can. The maintenance aspect of monk is one of the few things that makes using Perfect Balance engaging. If anything, Six Sided Star should grant formless fist.

I am definitely appreciating the various points of view for this thread to be honest. It's definitely giving me some insight on a lot of details I would not had thought of otherwise.

I hate to say it I think I preferred late shadowbringer's monk playstyle because of extreme 26 button input combo burst. But after the burst it's just a minute long wait til the next burst.
I also enjoyed the high skill ceiling, fast demanded reflexes. If yoshi-p wants anatman to stay the way it is though. They might as well just delete it and give its function to some other abilities any monk already uses in its stead; Its purpose wasn't for form and buff alone, It was entirely designed for greased lightning; which no longer is a factor.

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Originally Posted by Gemina

I've mentioned my Anatman recommendation many times now and remain steadfast with it.

Anatman:
Increases Chakra gauge, grants one Chakra upon execution
Grants disciplined fist and formless fist and holds their duration.
Nullifies knockback and draw in effects
Reduces all damage by 50%

If you're aware of the dodge phase with the last boss in Vanaspati, MNK would be able to Anatman through the entire thing.

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Giving a single chakra is defeated by the fact meditate and crits exist, it makes sense for the disciplined fist and formless fist however; frankly that should had been a given and it wouldn't be too unbalanced due to the 90s cooldown, the knockback nullification is too complex and unnecessary. Monk has 3 gap-closers that can be used on but friend and enemy, and gapclosers cancel knockback and draw-in effects when timed right, and arms length does exist.
the 50% damage reduction is unecessary so long as riddle of earth exists with its 20% per stack, up to roughly 60% (I care not to add them up in their weird math, I'll just state it literally instead)

Genuinely. I kinda want monk to be a bit faster, I enjoyed how busy it used to be, But I know exactly what they want monk to be now and if they really want to go all out with it, wouldn't it just make more sense if they just made it some linear trainride..? Frankly Even I'd prefer something more open-ended than what I suggested. But I do not, don't like, and get bored of kits that suffer from what feels like tripping mid-combo even though I'm being told I'm doing it perfectly in my group. Something about it just feels...wrong. It really feels like everything that monk deserved mechanically was given to reaper instead so we have to change who we are so reaper can sit in our chair from now on.

It's whatever. I can't control what the devs do with this job. I can only play and pray that they aren't going to be lazy with it.

And regardless what happens to monk. I'm a diehard monk main. I'll play it even if it becomes the worst job. I'll play it regardless of what's changed. It's just what I do. Let's see what happens in the future patches.

I wouldn't mind if Anatman would do nothing else than just put our hairs in Yellow glow.

After all, the MNK have the best DPS overall for this extension actually (and also have raid tools).

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Originally Posted by Nexxus

I wouldn't mind if Anatman would do nothing else than just put our hairs in Yellow glow.

After all, the MNK have the best DPS overall for this extension actually (and also have raid tools).

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Yeah monk's perfectly fine dps wise. Anatman's just a funky lil skill that can be used to maintain, but I never see any monk ever actually use it even in savage grinds for its intended purpose because in most cases they either don't need to, or they just formshift instead anyway. Only ever seen people use it to be flashy or idle in limsa or something.
I would just like the clumsiness of specific details to be ironed out a little if you catch-A my drift. But hey, If ninja has all-fours and fleet footed traits, I guess monk can have the funny ki-charge pose whatever right? Atleast it's not whm's old fluid aura that gradually became basically nothing at all.

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Originally Posted by GreysonMidori

It's whatever. I can't control what the devs do with this job. I can only play and pray that they aren't going to be lazy with it.

And regardless what happens to monk. I'm a diehard monk main. I'll play it even if it becomes the worst job. I'll play it regardless of what's changed. It's just what I do. Let's see what happens in the future patches.

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It's hard to see where Monk will go from here. I truly believe the Dev team were spread incredibly thin this expansion when fully fleshing some of the jobs. WHM, MCH, MNK, NIN, DRK to name a few suffered the most due to possibly incredibly tight deadlines.

While the obvious winner here is RPR. Yoshi P said so himself that RPR was built from the ground up and designed with Endwalker in mind, and it cost quite a bit of capital to complete it also. His words (ver bateum)

Not to mention SMN. I'm sure THAT cost a pretty penny to make, overhaul.

And MNK. That has had a bloated development cost since late stormblood riddle of wind reworking onwards. Which I'm in the camp of believing "We'll work on it when we can" mentality. And also leads me to believe why from 5.0 - 5.4 was literally given to MNK's peacemeal and with each subsequent patch in ShB was something getting removed/reworked/ or down right handing a crutch to MNK's until further notice. I can only picture Yoshi P's face during the morning meetings when they go to start working on projects or action items for the day to be completed.....and they get to the letters "MNK" on the meeting agenda. *closes his eyes, puts his thumb and middle finger to his eyelids, and just rubs* *quietly under his breath "f$*#(# mnk!"*

But out of all of this....I have really noticed the original 2.0 jobs have had the bumpiest road so far. MNK, NIN, SMN, PLD, WAR, SCH, BRD. BLM and DRG have seen pretty much the least amount of changes, but still prove to be troublesome.

I'm just under the assumption that the reworks we saw with: WAR, PLD, SMN, MNK, MCH, and possibly soon to be DRK. Are all due to forward thinking to shed some dead weight from a by gone time of 2.0 haunting there past, and being a huge determent to this obsessive nature of EVERY JOB must be balanced....but not every job can play the same. And they shouldn't play the same.

IDK...MNK is fun though. I agree they need to do something with SSS and anatman...otherwise they are still used in "certain" situations for me. Other then that they are widely never used.

Phantom Rush potency is as high as it is because it already takes into account not being available during opener. That said, Yoshi P said he doesn't want every job to have their entire kit in opening burst because then they feel copy pasted, hence the disparity. DRG too doesn't get their LotD until 30-60s after opener.

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Originally Posted by Jonnycbad

Phantom Rush potency is as high as it is because it already takes into account not being available during opener. That said, Yoshi P said he doesn't want every job to have their entire kit in opening burst because then they feel copy pasted, hence the disparity. DRG too doesn't get their LotD until 30-60s after opener.

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I've completely come around on this whole concept and now kinda just dislike the original idea I had when it came to anatman being repurposed just to justify its existence.

Something else that would be nice however is adding two more chakras that serve no other purpose than being an overflow to save you from habitually clipping your gcd. (plus cmon, 7 chakras matches the lore) If only to be for convenience.

And Riddle of wind does a lot of damage, but because it only affects your auto speed (basically triples it, I tested the speed in real time and it's nearly 3x rather than 2x like I thought from reading the description). You don't get to see yourself doing autoattack animations so only a tiny number rising up is your indication of it working. And that's an invisible dot basically. Atleast give the monk a consistent aura to show it's in use.

Or have a new resource that builds off auto's to use a weak ogcd every so often to break up the pace between bursts.

Six sided star is meh. Cool animation, decent damage, okay disengage. Kinda niche compared to a good ol, dragon kick double meditate formshift, attack nothing can really be done to make it any better besides a miniscule reduction to the shared recast timer and that'd be unnecessary.

And I think we could all enjoy if leaden fist affected the animation of bootshine in some way.
Other than that; yeah. There's some more down to earth polish concepts.