How should Monk 4.0 have been done?

[silentwindfr]

If I may, I have one more question for you guys: How could we make Fists stances satisfying for you?

that the trouble Shurrikhan, first of fire, fist of earth and fist of wind are garbage left of the v1... when do we use fist of the earth, for reduce the damage of one attack. why not make it like a skill with a short cooldown like 15-20 second for block one attack and give us a small buff rewarding people that did react and place them block. a survival cd.

fist of the wind offer a 3% of move speed increase... seriously?? can't it be 10% like ninja? i means at least it will give a reason to exist. because 3% is barely enough since sprint don't cost tp anymore... we don't need fist of the wind anymore!

and the tackle mastery was created in this goal to justify the existance of the this three stance that only one is really wanted and used.

for me the monk core mechanic, what define it is:
- Greese lightning, more longer the fight, faster and stronger we hit.
- free form combo system, we are able to adapt to the situation depending of where we are, what we need we can change our combo for fit our need.

this two point are what define monk, strangely they are the part the less touched in every expansion... chakra system is a garbage. in my eyes it have 0 redeem value. purification? why we do have invigorate and if you are a good player... it's far more than enough. the attack? we need to charge in GCD? seriously? same for the stance change, we need to use a GCD

for the combo system and greese lightning, i will have added a fourth hit to our 3 hit combo, since yes we do use 3 hit combo actually, moving from side to back. anyway i digress, since our goal is to maintain greese lightning, why not make that new skill we can use after the third hit is only usable if you are under the three stack of GL.
and they can go farer, each time you use a 4th hit combo, you gain a stack and after 3 stack you can use a 5th hit combo, rewarding people that keep going, making the monk more and more devastiting as the time pass...

same tornado kick... this skill is nice and seriously bad at the same time. use our GL stack... yes, we have a few time we can't keep going... we need to drop it. and instead to finally give us a ranged skill that will use this stack, we can a melee skill. yes because we still don't have any ranged capacity (and howling fist is a ranged skill) even the enemy of the 60th quest do have one... we still don't have one.

because how many time you are forced to move far and you notice that will loose your gl and can't use tornado kick, loosing anyway your stack, because you was too far or the boss is about disappear. Tornado kick need to be moved into a 4th hit combo, and another attack must take it place, a ranged attack. allowing us to blow our energy to the face of the enemy from far. we do loose GL we need to have a good skill for it.

ohhh by the way, for the people saying, yes, but for add new combo they need to create new skill for this:
- Tornado kick
- simian strike ( for the one wondering here a small video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N7UvaSpaMSM )

by example, they are skill that fit the bill to be the skill we use in 4th hit. skill that need to be at top power for be used.

ps: one point that i want to add, yoshi p think every jobs must be as difficult to be played... i feel it's ok to have one to two jobs that will recquire a higher skill for be played. since it will force the player to become better. yes, if the person don't try to become better the other will suffer, but that irevelant... the goal of a mmo (out of meet people and share story with them) is too... to progress and become better.
soo far the change of the monk show only that they are scared to make monk harder to play since they really think the monk is hard to play.... what is actually the inverse than be true... the truth is the way we get our skill make it hard to understand... instead to make use get skill all over the place i will have make the monk get skill from side and back in row...
making more simple to understand that actually monk is a jobs that move from two position. side and back... nothing difficult into that... when you understand this... it's actually extremely simple, it's more muscle memory than real skill... and that why we are all extremely angry that because for the one that do play this game for long all of this is already learned we are hoping for change and evolution... because the jobs is... too simple to play for us. add new skill please... evolve our core feature, instead to try to add mechanic that barely work and can't develop with 5 skill... monk have already all it need for become amazing, all it need it's to develop the combo system and gl. nothing more, nothing less.

we don't need buff that will increase our dps, we want to make our dps... stop give us buff... give us attack and combo!

[Shurrikhan]

snip

Thank you for the feedback. There are just a few things I wonder if you could clarify for me, and a few things I think I might be able to clarify for you:

Personally, I use and have seen other Monks use Fists of Wind in quite a few different raids, namely T1, 5, 7, 9*, 10, 11, and 13, and A3*, 4, 5, 6, 7, 10, and 12, often to significant effect. It's still a good 30% movement speed increase, after all, even if less than Ninja's 35% or Bard's 40% via Swiftsong, iirc.
*Only necessary when group isn't compensating by baiting Jump towards melee or saving last Slime for your Coeurl hit.

While I personally have survived by less than 50 HP thanks to Fists of Earth when I otherwise would have died at least 20 times, I think we can safely write that off as anecdotal or just a fact of playing a shitton of Monk and farming DF trials a bit too often.

Admittedly, however, the balancing damage loss could have as easily been written into Fists of Earth or Wind; Fire itself provides nothing. It remains because that's they only way they could progress skill acquisition without the awkward addition of a trait at x level that is then conditionally removed as part of an extended tooltip on Fists of Earth and Wind after said level.

Otherwise, whereas Fists of Earth at least had value versus Earth-vulnerable enemies and Fists of Wind had an attached Spear effect in 1.x, they're purely situational here.

But, is the problem itself that they're stances, or just that they don't have significant enough effect to feel worthwhile in most cases?

For instance, if by taking damage when in Fists of Earth some portion a shared resource was consumed in order to, if your resource is sufficient, provide mitigation or shielding enough to guarantee your survival, would that make it significant enough? Or would the issue still be that it's a stance rather than an active skill?

I suppose a similar question is technically applicable to Purification, The Forbidden Chakra, Meditation, and Tornado Kick as well.

In my experience, Purification becomes highly useful in dungeons, any fight of at least 15 seconds' downtime that is still at least 15 seconds short of being able to refill your TP at the normal rate, or any extended fight with heightened AoE opportunity. Unlike Invigorate, in periods of downtime, it's basically free. My only regret is the length of its cooldown.

Tornado Kick already keeps very nearly the output of continued GL duration if used at the tail of a CD window. At the end of a stacked Balance, Blood for Blood, and Internal Release, it is actually a faint DPS gain to blow Tornado Kick even during uptime. That said, for it to be general choice it would need to be wholly viable, for TP efficiency if nothing else, even at the tail of just one CD's window (optimal at 25%+ effective damage increase).

I'm not sure what you mean by Tornado Kick needing to be replaced for a ranged attack, however. The only times you'd need a ranged attack are after losing melee range, which in the case of a melee class would mean upon initiation or temporary retreat. But in the first's case you wouldn't yet have any stacks and the second you wouldn't yet want to consume them. Apart from that it's just a matter of making something out of what you'd otherwise lose during downtime; whether it's melee or ranged should have no effect. Do you mean something completely different, rather than as a GL-consuming skill?

Similarly, although we do not have a ranged attack itself, we do generate more potency per GCD where melee uptime is lost than any other melee class, and at no TP cost. While any other melee job can ranged attack for 120 potency (relative potency of 144) over 2.5 seconds, we can generate 126 base potency which at the time of actual consumption (under IR, DK, Twin, and GL3) would have a relative potency of almost 210. It also doesn't break our combos, unlike Throwing Daggers or Piercing Talon. Even if it's indirect, we're technically overpowered in terms of ranged DPS among melee.

Additionally, we effectively have less downtime than any other job in the game because we're still able to produce potency- or TP-generating resources for up to 15 seconds per downtime period, and advance our combos by 2 GCDs (or, making use of up to 20 seconds of downtime in total that no other job can make use of). Though our ramp-up is longest and downtime can therefore be punishing, if no more frequent than Perfect Balance, we technically benefit from downtime in ways that no other job can (well, except the upcoming Samurai, in its own version of "Meditation").

What is specifically that bothers you with these areas? Is it just that their effects are big enough or are too situational, much like the Fists of Wind/Earth? They each feel very strong to me, but that's coming from a specific raid- and speedrun-related perspective.

Also, what do you mean by a "4th hit to our 3-hit combo"? Am I correct in understanding that you want there to be multiple layers alike to the 3 stacks of GL, and each time you complete all three another Form opens up, increasing the interval of skills? While I understand the goal of visible progression over uptime, I don't understand why it would require so much as this. Would these new Forms also have 3 choices each? Would these new Forms' choices be stronger than each previous set of 3, then 4, such that damage is increasing? How would this handle loss of stacks, and how would we balance Monk over the varying downtime durations over different fights?

Sorry if I come off as interrogative at all here. I'd just like for us to be able to refine our ideas, even if that means poking holes where one may. I encourage you to do the same time mine. Gameplay, especially, that I find meaningful might not yet be significant enough for you, whereas performance issues that may not seem significant to you may repel players like me. Different eyes, different angles, or whatever likenesses of an adage might apply here.

[Blanchimont]

1) For me, Monks are a class that should have their damage gradually ramp up as battle goes on, eventually peaking in single target damage. That is at least what I feel Greased Lightning is meant to do. It increases damage and attack speed the more of it you have.


2) The part I liked the most about Monks are their three form and combo system. Unlike many other damage classes that only trigger it by chance, Monks can do it consistently and have a chain of three (I really wish there was more though).

3) Monks got a few skills to address their weaknesses. For example, Purification granted 300 TP. In long fights, you would run out of TP. You also got Form Shift, which made it easier to get that first stack of Greased Lightning and combined with Perfect Balance, it made it easier to get three stacks.

I felt that in 4.0, they should have taken this one step further by making it easier to restack Greased Lightning. Why? It is the core of the Monk's damage and with long transition phases between a lot of bosses, most of those stacks are immediately lost between boss phases. The other option is to extend the duration of Greased Lightning, but I feel that the changes with the other stances in Stormblood makes it even harder to keep the Greased Lightning stacks up.

4) If I had to sum it up, the Monk class felt impractical and contradictory. The chakras were impractical to set up most of the time, except for transitions during boss battles because they shared cooldowns with everything else and you basically needed to charge up five times in like 10 seconds. This makes it even harder to keep up Greased Lightning if it was not already. The same goes for Tornado Kick, which takes away all your Greased Lightning stacks, which might be useful for a last hit before the boss goes invulnerable since you'll lose the stacks anyways. I felt like this remained a fundamental problem in Heavensward and sucked out a lot of fun for the Monk class. I had more fun playing White Mage than Monk in Heavensward.

5 and 6) My focus is on turning the chakras into an ammunition type resource that charges on its own rather than requiring you to charge it up.

Option A: Basically, Stormblood needed a way to keep Greased Lightning up much longer and to get it up much easier. If Form Shift and Perfect Balance did not share cooldowns with the other skills, you could it to 2 stacks quite easy. What Monks need is one more skill to boost you up to that third stack and for skills like Tornado Kick and Forbidden Chakra to be only usable while on that third stack, but have a long cooldown to make up for the increased damage. Over time, expansions could introduce more "conditional" skills that might actually be usable.

Option B: Chakra is a secondary resource that charges up per attack and upon reaching certain numbers of chakras, you gain access to different skills. Upon reaching six stacks, Forbidden Chakra becomes usable, but you will lose those five stacks upon using it and will have to wait for the chakras to charge up again before you can use those skills. Tornado Kick would be powered the same way and would not take away your Greased Lightning stacks upon use.