Criticism on Stormblood's Monk

[Eisenhower]

Riddle of Fire could have been a reverse Embolden, where it grows in +%dmg every X seconds (through stacks) until you take damage or until the buff runs out. It makes the ability greedy, and requires good timing for it to shine. Pop it at a bad time and you'll drop the damage buff. Use it sometime safe and you'll get a tasty boost.

Riddle of Earth could have been a counter thing, where taking damage makes the monk counterattack with Haymaker or even a ki-strike if you'd want monk to have a ranged counter.

Riddle of Wind could have made Wind Tackle reach longer, and deal damage based on distance travelled. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

[edgefusion]

Riddle of Fire could have been a reverse Embolden, where it grows in +%dmg every X seconds (through stacks) until you take damage or until the buff runs out. It makes the ability greedy, and requires good timing for it to shine. Pop it at a bad time and you'll drop the damage buff. Use it sometime safe and you'll get a tasty boost.

Riddle of Earth could have been a counter thing, where taking damage makes the monk counterattack with Haymaker or even a ki-strike if you'd want monk to have a ranged counter.

Riddle of Wind could have made Wind Tackle reach longer, and deal damage based on distance travelled. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

These all sound like great ideas, but it just makes me sadder to face the reality of what we got.

[Sarutobi_Daritobi]

I would have liked, if tornado kick stayed at 30 seconds cooldown, but was a "requires 5 chakras and 3 greesed lightning stacks to use" without consuming the greesed lightning stacks.

[Brownondorf]

i absolutely hate Riddle of fire, its so contradictory, it feels like losing your GL stacks when you use it.
Riddle of earth is also quite useless. It works on Susanoo for the phase transition but dont work for Lakshmi for exemple...
With the TP reduction for most skills, you can now spam AOE all day during dungeon but other than that, i can't help but feels like monk is BORING to play compared to Heavensward's monk.

I kinda regret leveling monk first this time.

[Guesswhat]

I would have liked, if tornado kick stayed at 30 seconds cooldown, but was a "requires 5 chakras and 3 greesed lightning stacks to use" without consuming the greesed lightning stacks.

Wouldn't you need to change Forbidden Chakra too then, as this would render it useless. Unless you could squeeze in 1 extra during those 30 secs.

[BucklesTrespen]

Seen a lot of suggestions put forward in this thread, some good - some clearly OP. This is my first time ever suggesting anything. Not sure what'll come of it but here it goes:

The new Monk abilities in Stormblood are a step in the right direction but are falling short of where the changes in Heavensward brought us. In Heavensward they saw the weaknesses of the Monk class and applied that to the design of our abilities. Tornado Kick and Form Shift are utterly fantastic additions and really strengthened the core concept of building and maintaining GL - and offering us a dump option for pauses in the fight.

Stormblood has identified lingering weaknesses and tried to address them, but they are either not enough or add caveats for unknown reasons (Riddle of Fire attack speed loss). I feel something along the lines of the following suggestions could help nudge the Monk class forward.

Fists of Fire:

At level 62 make the 5% damage increase a trait and change Fists of Fire to allow Bootshine to an extra 5-15% chance to trigger Deep Meditation. This will help with bad streaks of rng-dependent since Deep Meditation is based on two sets of rng (one for crit, one for chance off the crit).

Riddle of Fire:

Remove or reduce the skill speed loss and lower the damage buff accordingly. Allow for the usage of Tornado Kick without losing Chakra. Increase Tornado Kick cooldown to 20 seconds so it can only be used once.

Monks aren't a class that needs to hit hard. It's what we're told the very first time we speak to Hamon when we apply to join the pugilist guild. A hundred blows for every one of theirs. Giving Monks such a sudden drop in attack speed goes against everything we've played since 2.0.

The skill itself is a great concept though, burst for when we need it / replacement for Blood for Blood that we lost - it just needs tweaking because having the brakes suddenly slammed on is detrimental to the Monk playing style.

Fire Tackle:

Bigger potency - no stun. Choices are needed. A reason to be in one stance over another. Plus we get a Role specific stun.

Fists of Wind:

Movement speed unchanged. It's very niche and nigh useless, but it does offer a choice when mechanics are involved and choice is good.
Additional Effect: Lowers the GCD of Form Shift to that of Meditation.

Riddle of Wind:

Instantly adds 5 seconds to the GL timer and...
Resets cooldown of what is now Wind Tackle...

Wind Tackle

...on use effect: Adds 5 seconds to the GL timer and 3 seconds to our current form (coeurl, raptor, opo-opo...)

Shares a cooldown with Riddle of Earth to avoid exploitation

This will, at most, give 10 seconds of GL, but staggered, unlike Riddle of Earth which gives a bulk amount of GL at once. This offers the MNK a choice between Fists of Wind or Earth.

Giving 3 seconds on our form timer will also save us from moments where we get to an enemy with 1-2 seconds of GL left but the GCD from the shoulder tackle prohibits us from performing Demolish or Snap Punch.

Fists of Earth

Same. It's a solid skill for boss mechanics where we no longer can hit the boss.

Riddle of Earth:
Keep this the same. If Fists of Wind is changes in any way to reflect the suggestions then the relationship between Fists of Wind and Earth becomes more entwined and allows for more adaptive playing style.

Earth Tackle

Increase stun to 4 seconds since Fists of Fire (in this suggestion) lost the stun.

Brotherhood

Love this skill. Not going to offer improvement as I haven't raided yet. But I wanted to close on a positive and this skill is inspired.

[Xau]

You do? That's beyond bad luck. I did susano'o EX or even à dungeon with just another dps physical and tank and I'm usually able to do at least 2 TFC during brotherhood window. Only thing I could say is seek Crit gear maybe? Or it was very very very sick misfortune at lvl 70. To have 180 sec for a TFC

a lot of the lvl 70 striking gear has crit, i still get low amounts of chakra stacks even whit that gear, no matter what is said, rng is a bad mechanic, because some people will get lucky and get tons, and others(like me) gets unlucky and takes a lot of time to get enough stacks to do 1 tfc

[KingFrost]

That feeling when you crit with full chakra. :')

[Waaltar]

Is Steel Peak completely pointless and/or useless now? I can't come up with a reason to put it in a rotation or even keep it on the hotbar. Am I missing something?

As near as I can figure...leaving it there as a form-independent instant 150 atk with 40s cooldown is maybe supposed to be the replacement for haymaker? Haymaker was much better for solo play because it had no cooldown; you could use it whenever you dodged an attack, and you'd get a bunch of dodges with featherfoot or against low level mobs and you could spam it. I mean you still didn't really need to use it, but at least it made sense. This new steel peak with 40s cooldown just seems pointless to me.

[Vermillionwing]

I want to throw my two cents in on this too. I've honestly popped brotherhood a few times and gotten 0 chakra procs from them. Had a 70 run with another monk earlier in the week, they had 200 less critical stat than me but was dropping about three times the forbidden chakras. So it was super frustrating.

Additionally Brotherhood is a "one time" buff, not an aura. I've had several cases where I've had problems catching people in range due to the size of the field/choice in direction they dodge aoes in, especially ranged dps.

Furthermore this is a bit minor, but I REALLY wish there was some self indicator to when brotherhood is going to fall off. There's no indicator except looking at your party members buffs.