How does Monk and Dragoon compare in difficulty and playstyle ?

[Truedragon]

Let me put it this way. All jobs are pisspoor easy except for a few exceptions. Monk is one of those exceptions. A tank is literally just 1-2-3. Healing takes no skill whatsoever. I steamroll all primal and coil fights as healer. A bard is pretty much godmode for any primal fight. And for melee dps, its just about learning a rotation.

The difficulty in monk does not lie in learning a rotation. The difficulty for monk lies in its high pressure style gameplay. There is a pressure on you to constantly move around for positionals and to attack. This comes from 2 reasons:

- positional requirement which exists for all monk rotation
- greased lightning countdown

Regarding positionals, unless the fight is a stand still fight with bare minimum movement, you can expect to not fullfill the positional requirements the majority of times which will severely hurt your dps output. It can get from bad to worse as aggro management fails because range dps are trigger happy and dont know how to manage aggro. Or simply because the boss moves around alot or the fight is split in phases as seen in all primal fights. A monk cannot attack a moving boss unlike range dps. You will lose auto attacks while your greased lightning timer keeps ticking away. Even slightly outside the hitbox means you stop attacking completely.

Now the hardest part is keeping the greased lightning. This is where the pain comes from. It sounds easy but for most primal fights you are going to continuously lose greased lightning. Unlike some of the other jobs, a monk is not immune to fight mechanics. Every time a boss does a special attack, you have to move. As said before, you cannot attack when moving but your timer keeps ticking away. And while it sounds simple to keep it up, in most fights, its gonna drop. And dropping greased lightning is the biggest dps drop in the entire game. Now some mechanics can be bypassed and this will let you keep greased lightning running but to do that requires extensive knowledge of the fight and pushing yourself. But for most mechanics, it simply is unavoidable to lose greased lightning.

It takes 20+ seconds to get it back up and all this time, you will be dealing gimped damage while other jobs are almost dealing at max output. This is not counting you screwing up with internal release and b4b. If you activated those buffs and loses greased lightning soon after, you will have to wait for those buffs to reset.

Other people talking shit about monks dont know what they are talking about as they never played under pressure. If they want to know what playing MNK is alike, the next time they go raiding, they should move from flank to back position continously for every cooldown they use. Do this for 2 hours and you get an idea what MNK playstyle is like.

As far as dps goes, a monk used to be rewarded for this high pressure play style by having the highest dps output. But that has since changed. A nin can do as much if not more, without the same pressure as monk and has the ability to do range attacks and has powerfull aoe. A drg dps is still slightly below monk, but is incredibly simplistic to play while having massive burst damage and the second best aoe in the game. Missing drg positional is only a 5% dps lost and in most fights you will not miss the positional more than a few times anyway.

If you want to compare, a SMN is the only other job with high micro management. But the difference between SMN and MNK is that missing a dot, clipping a dot, has minimal dps loss on SMN while SMN is also immune to almost all mechanics while MNK losing greased lightning is like being turned into a crippled from one moment into the other.

[Quyn]

snip

that was an interesting read, thank you.

I suspected that the sheer amount and dependency on these buffs, the monk has, would create this feeling, I was hoping that in place though, the monk would simply fall back to a more level dps, while maintaining higher dps with the buffs, this doesnt seem to be the case, so i can see why there would be a feeling of pressure.

While I am looking for a rewarding class, I am also maining a scholar. With the DPS, I am looking for a more lax approach, with less responsibility and a approach where i am allowed to mroe focus on my own play instead of the needs of the group.

The monk sounds like a stressful job right now.

[Kuroyasha]

that was an interesting read, thank you.

I suspected that the sheer amount and dependency on these buffs, the monk has, would create this feeling, I was hoping that in place though, the monk would simply fall back to a more level dps, while maintaining higher dps with the buffs, this doesnt seem to be the case, so i can see why there would be a feeling of pressure.

While I am looking for a rewarding class, I am also maining a scholar. With the DPS, I am looking for a more lax approach, with less responsibility and a approach where i am allowed to mroe focus on my own play instead of the needs of the group.

The monk sounds like a stressful job right now.

You answered your own question here. If Mnk and the Drg are the only two youre looking at, the drg is for you based off of the criteria you articulated in this statement. Though if the Lax criteria is weighted the highest for you, i'd say consider a third class: blm

[Tranquil]

Let me put it this way. All jobs are pisspoor easy except for a few exceptions. Monk is one of those exceptions. A tank is literally just 1-2-3. Healing takes no skill whatsoever.

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