Help With Low Monk DPS Please?

[Veila]

Long replies incoming

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Yes! I actually forgot to mention that. I use brotherhood at about 2 seconds before start, fire tackle to get to the mob, then the chakra I had from before the fight started so I can gain another quickly from brotherhood. Makes sense to start in coeurl for a quicker buildup, though, and the double snap punches to fill GL. I'll practice that!

Another noob question that I forgot to add in. What exactly IS an opener? Obviously from the name it's the skill rotation you start the fight with, but beyond that, I'm not sure I understand. When is the opener "done/over" and become just normal skill rotation? For MNKs I assume, as you said, our opener goal would be to gain GL asap, then it becomes normal rotation? Are openers just a rotation to get us set up for the rest of the fight?

Everything you suggested is a great help! I try to use True North when possible, but in OS3's case, I try to save it for mech moments I know I won't be able to position myself (beginning of dragon panels and stuff). OS3 is definitely where I'm struggling since it's very demanding on where to stand xP

As for gear, I did feel a little sluggish without my SKS, but maybe once I get into my "end game" set things will be different. I realize now that I might not need as much as I have melded atm. Do you mean even if it's a +35 to Crit or DH, I should just go Det? Or take any +35 that's available as well? I just hate seeing all the red when I meld those xD

I was sure the dummy was around 1%. It was definitely very low, but I was using a pot as well. Maybe because it was stationary? I wish they would fight back/move for better practice...

Thank you so so much for the help!! Logging right now to try it out <3

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Same question to you as well. Could you explain a bit of what an opener involves? I'll try yours out as well!

Also, what do you mean by "intentionally" clipping demolish? Do you mean cutting its animation? I know the whole weaving thing from past mmos, but what do you gain from clipping just demolish? Unless I'm not reading it right. I tend to hit my skills just before the icon fills back up for cd, and they still go off. Is it possible I'm using them TOO quick and some dps is not counting? When I'm doing positionals, I hit a skill, and slide/move to my next spot while the animation is going (if it's a long one), but I'm sure to stay in place long enough for it to have been "activated" in the right spot before I move, if that makes sense. Should I be letting the animation finish before moving?

I had no idea you could see all that ^^;; hahahaha...embarrassing, but I guess very helpful you brought it up. I'll work on keeping GL up. I knew that had to be one problem. TBH, while I know Riddle of Fire is great for damage, I sometimes don't feel confident using it because I feel I become too slow, which is why I'm worried about removing some SKS melds. Are MNKS ok to be a bit on the "slower" side?

By combo, you just mean Boot->True Strike->Snap and such right? Wasn't aware those weren't comboing. I usually hit those pretty quick :O I do know positionals, at least with my current rotation. Maybe the lack of crit for Bootshine has something to do with what I mentioned earlier about how I GET to my positions, or hitting the skills before the icon indicator is done?

Edit: Forgot to ask. I don't do it, but just to be sure, it's not a good idea to overlap Riddle of Fire and Internal Release, right? I should keep those separate?

I really really appreciate the in depth reply!! Excited to try out some new rotations >

[Legion88]

snip

First Things first:
Opener
You start with your preperation while the pull timer counts down and have all ready to start the fight. For MNK this includes to charge up the first load of Chakra and reaching Courl Form.
Next is your Opener. The Opener is your start into the fight themself. In the Opener you race to get all your basic job mechanics runnung and time your buffs, pots and abilities to get a very high damage burst early in the fight.
For MNK the goal of the Opener is to get Greased Lightning III as fast as possible and use all your damage abilities (Forbidden Chakra, Elexier Field, Howling Fist and Steel Peaks) while they are influenced with all of your buffs (Blunt Resistence down, Inner Release, Riddle of Fire, Brotherhood).

Riddle of Fire
While it lengthens your weapon skill recast time it also grants huge damage up.
The damage up outweights the higher recast but comes into full advantage when combined with your damageing abilities, because abilities are going on cooldown and don't have a recast.
Nice siede effect of Riddle of Fire is its passive TP regen. While under the effect of Riddle of Fire you are using less or equal TP then you regen.

SkS and melding
Your main recast reducer is Greased Lightning. SkS has so less effect on this it's a shame and the bit you can attack more often mostly doesn't give you a benefit if you don't get to threshold you can fit in 1 more weapon skill within a specific buff duration.
Your main goal is to get as much Crit as you can, for even faster recharging of your Chakra outside of Brotherhood. The reason for this ist not the damage amplifier from the crits themselfs but from the more possible Forbidden Chakras.
If you have as much Crit as you can, even just +35 is better then +0, settle for Direct Hit. Direct Hit is at the moment the highest damage providing stat, for 160 points in Direct Hit you will get 1% more damage in average.
After Direct Hit the main contriibutor to Damage is Determination with 1% more damage for every 180 points.
Crit is the weakest at the moment but will raise over the expansion with higher item levels also it is your mechanic stat which boosts it to your focused secondary.
SkS is not really that great unless you get to specific threshold like 1 more weapon skill within your Riddle of Fire duration. But this damage gain is mostly underwhelming.

Clipping Damage over Time effects (DoTs)
This means you are reapplying your DoT (to) early. DoTs are counted in ticks every 3 seconds and every tick they damage for their DoT potency.
If you are reapplying your Dot to early you can miss some DoT ticks, which lowers the damage the DoT applying skill would do over the DoT duration.
Your goal for DoTs is to reapply them as late as possible while not letting them fall off to get to the max of its potencial damage.

Overlapping cooldowns
You should try to have as many of your cooldowns active simultaneously as possible to get your highest damage peaks.
Always use your cooldowns when they are comming off cooldown, except you know the boss will get untargetable or unreachable for you within a good bunch of the duration.

MNK Combos
MNK has another kind of Combo System then most other jobs.
They are not comboing skills, they are comboing their Forms: Opo-Opo to Raptor to Courl to Opo-Opo.
This makes it easy to adjust your combo depending on your needs.
The moment you hit the key for the skill and the skills comes off of cooldown the server processes your input and does the calculation for your damage including a snapshot of your positionals at that moment.
What you do while the animation goes off is irrelevant for the system.

[Powercow]

Another noob question that I forgot to add in. What exactly IS an opener? Obviously from the name it's the skill rotation you start the fight with, but beyond that, I'm not sure I understand. When is the opener "done/over" and become just normal skill rotation? For MNKs I assume, as you said, our opener goal would be to gain GL asap, then it becomes normal rotation? Are openers just a rotation to get us set up for the rest of the fight?

An opener is over when you finish using all of your skills and you transition into the normal combo rotation. For some jobs the opener is short, for some it's extremely long, and where the "opener" ends can be a bit nebulous for some people. To me, a monk's "opener" is over when the first Riddle of Fire has worn off -- by then every single oGCD skill and damage cooldown will have been used and you have nothing else to do but just do your punchy combo until everything is back up.

As for gear, I did feel a little sluggish without my SKS, but maybe once I get into my "end game" set things will be different. I realize now that I might not need as much as I have melded atm. Do you mean even if it's a +35 to Crit or DH, I should just go Det? Or take any +35 that's available as well? I just hate seeing all the red when I meld those xD

Just go with the +40. While the general order of crit > direct hit > det > skillspeed is true, the differences are so small that it's more or less never worth sacrificing sheer item level (since that's where strength, or weapon damage and strength, come from) or secondary stat quantity (40 det is better than 35 crit or dh). Due to the nature of how stats work off each other, there's value in some diversity. It's a very long winded thing to explain but... think about it like this:
What's better, four 10% damage bonuses from stats, or 40% damage from a single stat?
100% * 1.1 * 1.1 * 1.1 * 1.1 = 146.41%
100% * 1.4 = 140%
146.41% / 140% = 1.0457~

This means the 10% from 4 different stats is about 4.6% better than 40% damage from one stat.

This doesn't mean "make a perfectly equal balance of stats" but it means more of a "just get as much as you can while generally prioritizing crit>dh>det>ss." Really people put way too much emphasis on it -- as long as you have usable stats (i.e. not Dexterity or something stupid) in your materia slots, you'll be fine.

Also, what do you mean by "intentionally" clipping demolish?

"Clipping" a DoT or debuff means overriding it early in this context. For Demolish, that means to recast it even if you have a few seconds left -- you're effectively losing the DPS that you're overriding. The reason some builds do this in the opener is because that first Demolish is cast with no buffs up, whereas the one you cast right after Riddle of Fire will have: 30% from GL3, 30% from RoF, 30% crit from Internal Release, 10% from Twin Snakes, resulting in ~215% the damage they would otherwise have (more if you have an The Balance buff, or more crit from a Dragoon or Scholar). For the record, Dragon Kick has no effect on DoT damage. It *does* boost the initial hit from Demolish, but not the DoT ticks. Demolish can then also be recast just at the end of Riddle of Fire, again clipping it by about 5 seconds or so, so that the new cast gets the 30% from Riddle of Fire too. So by wasting about 2 ticks worth of damage at the start (100 potency), and 2 more with all the buffs up (about 215 potency), you get 4 ticks with all buffs up (430 potency) that you otherwise wouldn't have had. It's a bit complex and I'm really too lazy to do the fine math to determine if doing this is worth it, but I do find it lines up better as the fight goes on (18 second Demolish duration, 90s recast on RoF, means I can do 5 Demolishes cleanly per RoF cast.)

Regardless, it's a tiny gain or loss, probably about 0.1% overall DPS to do that or a more traditional opener.

Should I be letting the animation finish before moving?

Nah, as soon as you hit the skill and the GCD activates, the game "locks in" where you were and what buffs you had, even if the damage numbers don't pop up immediately. You can hit Demolish then move to the flank of an enemy before the animation is finished and the game will still register it as a "rear" hit and do 70 potency, even if the damage isn't applied until after you've moved to the flank area. Likewise, if you use Bootshine on the flank but move behind the enemy before the animation finishes, the game will register it as a "flank" hit and you will not get the guaranteed crit.

I knew that had to be one problem. TBH, while I know Riddle of Fire is great for damage, I sometimes don't feel confident using it because I feel I become too slow, which is why I'm worried about removing some SKS melds. Are MNKS ok to be a bit on the "slower" side?

Some people (a lot actually) have a problem with the idea of monk being slow during Riddle of Fire. Well whether they like it or not, being slow for 20 seconds every 90 seconds is how you do the most damage you can. Do keep in mind it's only a slow to your GCD. Autoattacks (which make up ~28% of your DPS) and off-GCD skills aren't penalized by the slow. RoF is an incredibly cracktastically strong damage cooldown. If being slow (well, normal speed) for 2/9 of the fight is a make-or-break thing, perhaps Ninja would be a better option. Or Samurai, they have a 10% haste thing too.

By combo, you just mean Boot->True Strike->Snap and such right? Wasn't aware those weren't comboing.

Monk combos are slightly different from other combos, but the same idea is there -- we have a 1-2-3 combo system, but we have slightly more flexibility than the others. This is why we can use Demolish every 3 rotations instead of every other rotation, like a Dragoon has to with their DoT.

Edit: Forgot to ask. I don't do it, but just to be sure, it's not a good idea to overlap Riddle of Fire and Internal Release, right? I should keep those separate?

Oh no, use them together as often as you can. They multiply off of each other to make for higher DPS. For example, just for autoattacks:
RoF is 30% more damage. If you do 1000 DPS with autoattacks, RoF will make it 1300 (1000 * 1.3) for 20 seconds, resulting in 6000 more damage.
IR is about 15% more damage (the amount varies based on how much crit rating you have, but 15% is about right for average gear) for 15 seconds. 1000 DPS from autoattacks, with IR it's 1150 (1000 * 1.15) for 15s, so IR adds 2250 more damage.
These two used seperately add 8250 damage total.
RoF + IR is the best though. With 1000 DPS on autoattacks you'd get 1495 for 15 seconds and 1300 for 5 seconds, resulting in 8925 damage total.

Don't postpone either one much to force them to line up, though. The only time you should postpone one is if a fight mechanic is gonna mess with you (like -100gs on Catastrophe, or the zoo phase on Halicarnassus, etc) where you would end up wasting a lot of the buff.

In addition, if Internal Release is about to come off cooldown but your next on-GCD skill is gonna be a guaranteed crit Bootshine, hold off on IR until after you use Bootshine so you squeeze out one more GCD from that buff. It's a tiny optimization, but it adds up.

[Veila]

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Wow, this is some amazing help from everyone, thank you!! Most stuff explained makes total sense now, so to keep my replies from being an essay, I figured I would just focus on things that I'm still not 100% on.

First thing was, I was able to try each opener last night, and I definitely saw an improvement already. Yay! Only thing is, for the openers that had Perfect Balance, I kept hitting a snag where PB would run out, and my form would drop mid combo, messing up the rest of the opener. I tried many times to see if it was a timing issue, but I couldn't manage to get around that block. Even just standing in one spot and hitting skills just before cd to try and get through them wasn't reliably quick enough (very annoying to have to wait for PB's cd every time. Don't suppose there's a way around this for practicing? lol). Some of the openers had oGCD skills sprinkled in between the combos, but even when I took those out to test, something's just not working right, lol. Now I'm even more worried about having less SKS.

For example, the opener would be going smoothly, then I would get to RoF (tried with IR and without), DK, TS, and just about after hitting TS, PB would drop and I couldn't use Dem or Snap. I did a little frankenstein-ing of the openers to try and shift the combo just beyond PB's drop so I could do it, but still working on it. I'm liking the RoF/and or IR just before DK and TS, and then getting a second Dem in there so they all get the buff, as suggested. Speed isn't a make or break for MNK, I just assumed I wasn't the speed I was supposed to be. Hard to explain all this in just text, sorry. Basically, my concern is getting around PB dropping my form. I guess I never realized it overrides whatever forms the actual skills give me while active. What am I doing wrong?

My only other question (that I can remember) was, are openers more just reserved for bosses? I would assume going through an opener for every little dungeon mob/add might be a bit overkill, not entirely possible, so how exactly are those treated? Just normal rotation? I know it can depend on which mob/add, but just curious.

To NintenPyjak64: I plan on watching that video! Haven't had a chance to today xD

Thanks again to you all taking the time to help me out :P It was fun to see how well the openers boosted me.

[Legion88]

My only other question (that I can remember) was, are openers more just reserved for bosses? I would assume going through an opener for every little dungeon mob/add might be a bit overkill, not entirely possible, so how exactly are those treated? Just normal rotation? I know it can depend on which mob/add, but just curious.

The full Openers ar mostly reserved to Raid bosses, because you can make shure all CDs ar up for this. For Dungeon bosses use what you have on CDs, but always start in Courl Form.

For your PB problem. In my Opinion you are using your RoF to early. You use RoF after PB falls off to make shure you get GL III refreshed before PB falls off.
In the Opener I don't want to have the lengthened recast from RoF while PB at all, but I'm a 0 SkS MNK and focusing more on the other secondaries.

[Meui]

Don't suppose there's a way around this for practicing?

What I like to do is hop into SSS (Stone, Sky, Sea) and use that to practice openers/rotations. So, if I (undoubtedly) mess up - all you have to do is step out (talk to the NPC to leave the area) and come back in. All CDs are refreshed upon entering SSS to my knowledge.

It's great you've been practicing and asking questions/for advice! Being open-minded and practicing is a wonderful attitude to have, and I'm confident it'll pay off for you!

[Veila]

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Gotcha! I'll be referring to this page often til I get everything down.

Haha...well that makes sense, and is most likely the problem. Maybe I was too sleepy and didn't realize; must be it. Logging in now to test that out. Thank you!!

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Hadn't even thought of that. Genius! Off to test that right now too.

Thank you so much for the kind words <3 <3 I'm going to become beast!