MNK and DRG: How are they?

Haven't seen any threads about these two jobs; seen plenty for SAM, RPR, and NIN, but none for MNK and DRG. So, I'll bite.

How are these jobs doing this patch? What problems do they have? What should be changed?

I do not main them. But, they are still solid picks overall.

Monk is probably in the best spot it's been for years, both in terms of gameplay and performance (so much so that I almost think the design was an accident on SE's part), and dragoon is doing really well too, probably why every dragoon is dreading the supposed rework in 7.0

MNK is currently 1st in rDPS and 3rd in aDPS, making it the second best job in the game currently (the best being SAM, which SAM beats MNK in 50th percentile rDPS). It's a lot more accessible and easier to play now, which for the hardcore mains isn't so much a good thing in their opinion. I find it a lot more fun than its ever been, but it's true that its skill cap has been lowered significantly since HW.

DRG is 4th in rDPS and 6th in aDPS. It's still pretty solid. I don't have any outstanding complaints about the job, but I never really found it that fun to play. SE is planning to completely rework it (and AST) in 7.0, while PLD is getting a rework next patch.

Play what you want and play it well. That's the meta now that P8s was nerfed.

It's my first savage tier playing a melee DPS and I chose DRG as it has my favorite job aesthetic.

I feel it's smooth to play until you get to your 2 min burst window. Having to press 5 "jump" oGCDs that each immobilize you for at least 1s feels very clunky. (High Jump, 2x Spineshatter Dive, Dragonfire Dive, Star Diver).

Outright, they should replace Spineshatter Dive with another, move fun, OGCD. Elusive Jump is already a better movement tool anyway.

I don't raid, so I can't address performance, but I obsess over class design and feel in FFXIV and many other MMOs.

but monk is probably one of the best designed dps jobs. It's not perfect (could use more oGCDs perhaps, a way to pool chakra, and for the love of Eorzea a single ranged ability just for solo play if not dungeons/raiding). Great flow through the stances, decision making that matters, ability to burst during burst windows without feeling bored the rest of the time. It reminds me of Black Mage a bit in how the kit flows through its loop and allows for seamless transition from single target to AOE. Thunderclap is my favorite gap closer or movement ability in the game. It's perfect (gap closers also should not have potency bc this game is 1000% obsessed with damage, making them just another oGCD damage ability to cram into burst windows).

Dragoon... let's just say I am looking forward to the rework. It's the job I want to play (lore, ascetic, weapon), but the rigid combo system combined with jarring < 1 second jumps and no truly hard hitting abilities just doesn't do it for me. And that's fine; I know most dragoon mains seem happy with the claas and I hope they get to keep it. Frankly, dragoon taking over monk's rotation (roughly) - with jumps being big GCD abilities that are built up to - would fit the class fantasy so much better. Jumps were iconic, and having them be piddling small hits with little animation weight (due to weaving/clipping concerns) feels like an utter waste of a great concept. Jumps should be on the GCD.

The monk rework surgically removed everything I liked about shadowbringers monk and didn't really fill the void with anything I can appreciate - although the ability to swap between st and aoe mid rotation is still there which is good. I can see why people like the rework so it's got that over summoner at least. It would have been nice if they'd incorporated fists of wind/fire/earth into the rework, or just prevented GL from deteriorating while afflicted by whatever watching a cutscene debuff the fight gives. The addition of finishers to the burst is interesting at the least.

Dragoon is hands down the best designed job in endwalker which can be taken in a positive or a negative way. For lack of a better descriptor it's the oGCD dps, with a figure-of-eight rotation lacking any extremely hard singular hits, but keeping up a constant stream of damage. I'm fairly sure the lancer guy introduced lancer the same way, so it seems a pretty established niche for it. GCD jumps would be a terrible move for a job as busy as DRG, assuming things like chaotic spring and other attacks where the character jumps during the animation aren't counted. Primal rend is essentially a GCD jump, and it has every issue that DRG's oGCD jumps have had fixed (long animation lock, better used for damage not utility, hits like a wet noodle and so on).

I'd say monk is in a good spot. the only problem i have with monk is that (and SMN has the same problem) the dev team forgot that the lvl cap in endwalker is 90 and not 60

Monk has never really had a problem with viability unless you're talking about ARR or HW MNK. Purely in terms of numbers or damage, it has never been something the job has really lacked the past few years. When it comes to its design however, I cannot call EW MNK "the best it has ever been" in this regard. Every version of MNK has had their own batch of problems, it's simply part of the job at this point to have some strange jank- but similar to the case of ShB MNK, I feel like there are too many little issues steeped into the job's design that I don't think it is better than the sum of its parts. EW MNK especially has disappointed me because it's almost good, it's very close to doing something special but so many strange decisions on behalf of SE's whimsy makes it fall short.

I lack the energy to rant about the specifics, but if you don't care about the nitty gritty of the job then Monk is fine.

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Originally Posted by VentVanitas

Monk has never really had a problem with viability unless you're talking about ARR or HW MNK.

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ARR monk was basically required because of dragon kick and running double monk was common. Monk was completely viable throughout all of HW, it just wasn't optimal.

Anyway, I think EW monk is horrible (gameplay wise) and it really has nothing in common with the old monk gameplay that I loved (monk being a fast paced sustained DPS with an emphasis on positionals, OCGDs and keeping up GL. Also the dots before they got taken away in SB) so oh well I guess. To me, monk got deleted from the game and replaced with something completely different but it happens to have weaponskills that share the same name. How unfortunate.

Monk to me feels solid just not...to out of the norm. Its like Missionary sex, sure its great and always a go to but you want to spice things up. Which they could by probably adding another OGCD or two. Other than that the class feels flashy and stong. Pheonix Dive or w/e its called is super satisfying to pull then obviosly the lvl 90 full Cowling move.

Dragoon is busy enough for me to be entertained but everytime i played it (lately) the button bloat doesnt feel rewarding in how much DPS you pour out, with other classes outright beating me. Also its lvl 90 skill that you get where you get a charge (you need 2 to pull off the move) after every 4 or 5 main button rotation felt VERY UNDERWHELMING. i already am sometimes disappointed by the 3-5 monotounous button push cycle at times and to do that to get a 480? ( i could be wrong) potency attack feels meh. When almost all your other good skills do the same potency or around it except the super dive attack. It just feels meh in feeling awesome and strong as a DRG.

DRG has no button bloat.

Mnks are awesome, the only issue i see is the useless Anatman skill.

I find myself a bit nervous about the upcoming DRG rework as well. I find the base rotation to be oddly comforting (I think it's because of the circular pattern it has), but find the OGCs to be a bit jarring. I only hope the rework doesn't mess with the base rotation and instead focuses more on the OGC skills.

Monk is the one that needs a rework if you ask me, their combo's start out fine, but become a giant mess and just tedious to maintain later on, it's just a badly designed samurai honestly at this point.

Dragoon doesn't need a rework at all, which is what is just baffling.
With the changes in endwalker, dragoon is fine, its combos make sense and are satisfying to use.

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Originally Posted by Absurdity

Monk is probably in the best spot it's been for years, both in terms of gameplay and performance (so much so that I almost think the design was an accident on SE's part), and dragoon is doing really well too, probably why every dragoon is dreading the supposed rework in 7.0

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They fixed some things with monk, but the masterful blitz mechanic its now built around throws the entire rotation into chaos, so people generally do not stick with it. There are statistics backing what I'm saying as well.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wciTbFt0U6M&t=215s

Dragoon is... playable. It's not bad, but not great either. It has some goofy stuff like eye of the dragon that requires the DPS to target someone during OGCD which is janky. It also runs into the problem of being cooldown heavy in a 2 min burst meta. However, Drg is simple enough that cooldown drifting doesn't adversely effect it too much. It's just that damn eye of the dragon. Like if we could just designate our eye of the dragon partner ahead of time it would be way less annoying.

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Originally Posted by Foinhas

I'd say monk is in a good spot. the only problem i have with monk is that (and SMN has the same problem) the dev team forgot that the lvl cap in endwalker is 90 and not 60

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I know you're exaggerating... but summoner doesn't have exactly this same problem since it doesn't get its full kit of skills till level 86, when you get the weave attacks for Titan, Slipstream, and the Ifrit dash. Though monk does have this issue with the core rotation of the job being complete at 60, and the only add on being buffs (riddle of fire and brotherhood) between 61-70

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Originally Posted by ZiraZ

DRG has no button bloat.

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Hard disagree. It's the only job I play where just the damage dealing skills I need to track for single target rotations won't fit on a single cross hotbar. The incredibly long basic rotation and so many weave skills make it indeed have a button bloat problem on par with astrologian.

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Originally Posted by wereotter

I know you're exaggerating... but summoner doesn't have exactly this same problem since it doesn't get its full kit of skills till level 86, when you get the weave attacks for Titan, Slipstream, and the Ifrit dash. Though monk does have this issue with the core rotation of the job being complete at 60, and the only add on being buffs (riddle of fire and brotherhood) between 61-70



Hard disagree. It's the only job I play where just the damage dealing skills I need to track for single target rotations won't fit on a single cross hotbar. The incredibly long basic rotation and so many weave skills make it indeed have a button bloat problem on par with astrologian.

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Good thing theres more than 1 cross hotbar

DRG is solid right now, and I'm worried that they want to "rework" the job given how dumbed down Summoner is. If people want to play an easier maiming job, Reaper exists. If they want easier jobs in other areas, we have aforementioned Summoner, or Warrior, or Dancer, or whatever healer you like the flavour of.

Still kind of sad they stripped out all of Monk's positionals though, felt like a defining part of the job was that it was focused on that.

I love everything about Dragoon except the raidbuffs and self-buff.
I would be fine with just one 2 minute raidbuff to be honest.

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Originally Posted by ZiraZ

Good thing theres more than 1 cross hotbar

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It's the only DPS job I have to do this on, which implies on its own that the job has too many buttons. Flipping through that many hotbars just isn't something that I want to do, since I also set up a hotbar on every job for AOE rotation skills.

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Originally Posted by wereotter

It's the only DPS job I have to do this on, which implies on its own that the job has too many buttons. Flipping through that many hotbars just isn't something that I want to do, since I also set up a hotbar on every job for AOE rotation skills.

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and not for NIN or MNK?
where do you hide all the mudras and raijus

My main complain about dragoon is it's like they got two differents rotation with no interaction between them :
- the GCD rotation of 10 weaponskills, 3 in aoe with Wyrmwind thrust addition in EW
- The Jump/Geirgoskul one with Life of the dragon

Also Life of the Dragon feel boring now compared to Reaper's Enshroud, and without copycat it, I think to have a shorter Life of Dragon which change our GCD would be nice (and would be a nice opportunity to have some iconic weapons skills like Ala Morn)

What i would think to be nice :
- Keep the gcd rotation as it is.
- Tide together Spine and Dragon Dive, on 60s cd. Keep jump as it is, maybe put Mirage Dive as a weaker and earlier Wyrmwind thrust
- Keep lance charge, but fuse Battle Litany and Dragon Sight to a more generic party boost -> Something like +10% dommage/crit for self and +5% dommage/crit for party, last 20s (to mimic Lance charge duration), to prevent macro use.
- Having Geirgoskul tide with F&C and Wheeling Thrust -> Like +10 on a bar with Geirgoskul cost 50. Using Geirgoskul would give eyes for Life of the dragon.
- Life of the dragon is now a buff which will let you use specific abilities :
-> A combo : Empowered true/vorpal/full thrust, Drachenlance and Ala Morn as F&C and Wheeling thrust replacement
-> 2 uses of nastrond
-> Stardiver as a finishing weaponskill.
- A tool to have access to Life of the dragon on the opener, like a trait on DragonSight.

This is something i would like to see.

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Originally Posted by ZiraZ

and not for NIN or MNK?
where do you hide all the mudras and raijus

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Monk's core single target rotation needs 14 hotbar slots, cross hotbar is 16 so you have room for all your skills you will be using on a regular basis plus two more. Situational skills I put on the extended crossbar since I don't need to monitor the cooldown on them. Ninja's core rotation is 17 skills, and I get around this by including Meisui on the extended hotbar since it's always used in conjunction with the two minute burst window you can track the timer on with Mug/Ten-Chi-Jin. Plus you don't need to put both forked and fleeting raiju on your main group of skills since you're pretty much always using fleeting raiju. There's rarely a time you're in the middle of your burst phase and need to disengage then use the gap closing aspect of forked raiju to get back into range, but I just have it sitting on the extended cross hotbar for the never times I've needed to do this.

Dragoon on the other hand has its weave skills you have to monitor, damage increasing cooldowns, and core rotation of skills at 18 moves. I've yet to find a hotbar setup for the job that lets me easily access all the job's moveset and track the cooldowns I need to use all on one cross hotbar. The job doesn't need a huge skill purge, but could use 2 or 3 skills either trimmed out or merged into the same button, or even some of the skills changed from damage dealing to pure movement, like if Spineshatter Dive had it's damage moved onto other skills and was purely a gap closing skill.

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Originally Posted by wereotter

Monk's core single target rotation needs 14 hotbar slots, cross hotbar is 16 so you have room for all your skills you will be using on a regular basis plus two more. Situational skills I put on the extended crossbar since I don't need to monitor the cooldown on them. Ninja's core rotation is 17 skills, and I get around this by including Meisui on the extended hotbar since it's always used in conjunction with the two minute burst window you can track the timer on with Mug/Ten-Chi-Jin. Plus you don't need to put both forked and fleeting raiju on your main group of skills since you're pretty much always using fleeting raiju. There's rarely a time you're in the middle of your burst phase and need to disengage then use the gap closing aspect of forked raiju to get back into range, but I just have it sitting on the extended cross hotbar for the never times I've needed to do this.

Dragoon on the other hand has its weave skills you have to monitor, damage increasing cooldowns, and core rotation of skills at 18 moves. I've yet to find a hotbar setup for the job that lets me easily access all the job's moveset and track the cooldowns I need to use all on one cross hotbar. The job doesn't need a huge skill purge, but could use 2 or 3 skills either trimmed out or merged into the same button, or even some of the skills changed from damage dealing to pure movement, like if Spineshatter Dive had it's damage moved onto other skills and was purely a gap closing skill.

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So make a separate bar just to track cooldows, can controllers not do that? although you don't really need to, you always know when stuff is coming back just by monitoring a single 30, 60 and 120 second ability, I never look at my SSD, Sight or DFD cooldown, I know I'm getting both SSD and DFD for every 2mins burst which always happens when Litany comes up, and Litany means Sight too and a Life Surge at least. Really the only cooldowns I'm staring at are GsK and HJ.

I don't see how cooldown tracking has anything to do with button bloat, for me button bloat is extra abilities that need to be pressed for no reason, like when Minor Arcana was a separate button, HJ and MD being separate has a very important purpose, all the other jumps have a purpose for a job that has a oGCD heavy playstyle, if anything I think drg currently has the perfect amount of keys for a dps job.
If you made SSD a movement only ability the 2 min timers would feel very boring and not much would be gained, since you already don't really need to track it's cooldown.

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Originally Posted by ZiraZ

So make a separate bar just to track cooldows, can controllers not do that?

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If we can, I've never seen the option. I'm not going to say 100% it doesn't exist as sometimes they add things in or they're there but burried... but I've been playing since 2013 on console and this is an option I've never found. You use the R1 button to cycle through the hotbars you've set, and you can double tap R2 and L2 to get the extended ones. Using cross hotbar, that's really it. There's no separate hotbar that just sits there to tell you when your skills are off cooldown. But even then, you're saying to do this because literally one DPS job needs it. And even then, you still have to fiddle with more hotbars to make the job work for its normal rotation than any other DPS job needs to do. That's the very definition of having too many buttons on the job

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Originally Posted by ZiraZ

If you made SSD a movement only ability the 2 min timers would feel very boring and not much would be gained, since you already don't really need to track it's cooldown.

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It's no different in this case than when they deleted shoulder tackle as a damage dealing skill on monk and made it into a skill with no damage explicitly for movement. Monk lost one of it's weavable damage skills, and the change is largely considered a massive positive. Giving melee jobs access to movement skills that don't have to be used for damage is, in my opinion, a good thing.

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Originally Posted by Fendred

They fixed some things with monk, but the masterful blitz mechanic its now built around throws the entire rotation into chaos, so people generally do not stick with it. There are statistics backing what I'm saying as well.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wciTbFt0U6M&t=215s

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If we go by that statistic in a vacuum then BLM is also a terribly designed job that desperately needs a rework.

As Xeno himself said in that video you use to prove your point, Monk is a well designed job and it performs well too. It just isn't very popular, it never has been, because it is not as flashy as other jobs and very punishing, just like Black Mage.


By that same statistic warrior would be one of the best designed jobs in the game and while I would absolutely disagree with that assessment as someone who has mained warrior for 6 years, my opinion is completely irrelevant in this case. The statistic isn't about how well designed a job is, it's a popularity chart.

Warrior is easy to pick up, easy to do well on, barely punishes you for mistakes and completely trivializes lower end content, so obviously it's going to be a popular pick for the average player.

There are many things about MNK that I do not consider designed well and I don't think it is helpful for anyone to dismiss potential discussion. Yes, the popularity of a job does not represent its quality- but there is merit in understanding why MNK is played so little compared to its DPS brothers and it's not as simple as chalking it up to Monk being punishing (which is not true anymore) or being "hard to play" (a subjective metric). Do not get me wrong though, I do not share Fendred's rather surface level and unhelpful opinion of "no one plays Monk therefore rework it."

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Originally Posted by VentVanitas

There are many things about MNK that I do not consider designed well and I don't think it is helpful for anyone to dismiss potential discussion. Yes, the popularity of a job does not represent its quality- but there is merit in understanding why MNK is played so little compared to its DPS brothers and it's not as simple as chalking it up to Monk being punishing (which is not true anymore) or being "hard to play" (a subjective metric). Do not get me wrong though, I do not share Fendred's rather surface level and unhelpful opinion of "no one plays Monk therefore rework it."

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For a start, it would be nice if the job was actually playable without third party mods. It's the job I find the most fun, but I've all but given up on raiding with it due to the fact that it forces double weaves on you despite being literally incapable of accommodating them when playing on console.

I've tried everything I can think of to make it work, but you just can't get around the windows where you need to hit both RoF and PB without clipping, drifting RoF, or rearranging your entire rotation to avoid these windows.

edit: actually, I guess delaying your PB until after your Raptor works okay. You still have time to fit everything into RoF. It just feels kind of bad.