On the Nature of Monk

[Mahrze]

Hello! I'd like to start by asking to please focus on the goal and not arguing over who did what wrong. We can all learn and go forward to reaching what we all want: a job that is fun to play and builds upon its flaws to make it better. One thing we all agree on is that MNK has flaws, many many flaws. And it's not a small minority that thinks this.

• http://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/t...82%B9%E3%83%AC
• http://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/t...gnored-for-4.1
• http://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/s...rchid=60280284

This MNK thread on the Japanese forums has almost 400k views and around 1k posts. And while I know nothing regarding Japanese language, google translate does give me a general idea that they aren't exactly satisfied. I also link a thread where I have seen and been participant of proposals regarding MNK being ignored in x.1 and I dread but realistically believe the ignoring will continue if things don't get properly exposed.

MNK's status seems as confusing as its current design philosophy: It performs nominally like a DPS. And that is exactly all you can say about MNKs right now. Yes there are outliers and yes there are amazing players out there but MNK is still just MNK. players both rookies and veterans of the class notice immediately the polarizing choices you have regarding the jobs skills.

Veterans themselves have pointed out many issues only to see updates not happening. Now, like I said, I am not opening this topic to witch hunt the development team, but to communally brainstorm things that need work, change, update or flat out replace/remove to improve MNK as a job.

We all play the job and we all like this job and play it because its what we like, but we are all aware that these changes and the lack of reasoning behind them is something we need to address in a civilized manner. I posted a link regarding MNK threads and many are of the same nature since this expansion launched. So I tried to pull a quick list of the things I can generally see are the topic regarding it:


Laundry List of Issues: Yes, there are that many.

1. Greased Lightning:
   1. Clunky.
   2. Has a lot of ways to "manage" it but low effectiveness of each.
   3. Risk vs Reward is very uneven.
2. Fist Stances:
   1. "there is literally no reason to not be in Fire, ever" - MNK Community.
   2. Tackle Mastery (more on Useless Abilities) makes no sense.
3. Forms:
   1. Hamstrung x Infinity.
   2. Limits utility of skills locked behind a form.
4. Riddles:
   1. Riddle of Earth vs Tornado Kick <<< Zero Synergy.
   2. Riddle of Wind + Shoulder tackle = Shoulder tackle in Fist of Fire.
   3. Riddle of Fire Power increase and gimping speed causes knee jerk reaction every time.
5. Chakras:
   1. RNG behind it is quite the layered cake.
   2. Deep Meditation has very low proc to make TFC worthwhile at times.
   3. Brotherhood is not as rewarding as it should be.
6. Perfect balance:
   1. Cool down on it is too damn high.
7. Mobility:
   1. Shoulder tackle is our only venue and with stun and damage attached to it, limits mobility usage.
8. Useless Actions:
   1. MNK still has way too many abilities and weapon-skills that need rework.
   2. Here's a sub-list:
      1. Fist of Earth
      2. Fist of Wind
      3. Arm of the Destroyer
      4. Purification
      5. Riddle of Earth
      6. Riddle of Wind (This attempts to fix mobility but still limited)
      7. Tornado Kick (Still an issue since 3.0)
      8. One Ilm Punch (Oldest issue, In-game joke)
      9. Tackle Mastery

Assorted solutions: these will follow a clean up to better suit the general opinion.

Greased Lightning:

• Resource is a depleting gauge with tier levels (Credit to Shurrikhan on this idea)
• Inherits GL scaling + Movement Speed + Defense Buff from FoW and FoE
• Unlocks usage of skills relating to the gauge as a resource (skills that use a unit rather then use the whole resource)
• Better forms of sustainability or faster reach of max output.

Fist Stances:

• Stances could Customize Combos
• Develop own Resource
• Could make use of GL as addtl resource
• Could make use of Chakra as addtl resource
• Fist of Wind increases Movement Speed and Skill Speed

Forms:

• Scrap gimmick and match animal to element. Each form+"element" maps 1 unique combo
  • Opo = Earth / Raptor = Wind / Coeurl = Fire
• One standard pure damage combo that is consistent through the forms

Riddles:

• Fist Stance Finishers, linked to unique resource of said fist.
• Each finisher can be something that boosts MNKs DPS, Raid Utility or Defensive
• Riddle of Wind - Grant Double Auto attacks for 10s / 120s CD - Sora_Oathkeeper
• Riddle of Earth - Raid Wide shield for 6s / 120s CD - Sora_Oathkeeper
• Riddle of Fire - Raid wide damage buff (5%) for 10s / 60s CD - Sora_Oathkeeper

Chakras:

• Increased resource to 7
• Have defensive and offensive skills tied to them

Mobility:

• We could be using this a speed opening strike like Widargelt does
• Example: https://imgur.com/WLbnP2z

Laundry List

• Perfect Balance: Cooldown reduced to 60s to 80s- Sora_Oathkeeper, Wintersandman, Silver-Strider
• Form Shift: Going from Coeurl(III) to Opo-opo(I) can refresh GL3 - Wintersandman, Silver-Strider
• One Ilm Punch: Taken off GCD and forms. Grants 5 Chakras / 120s CD - Sora_Oathkeeper
• One Ilm Punch: Remove stun, change to Line AoE with 100 potency - Silver-Strider
• Brotherhood: Removed - Sora_Oathkeeper
• Deep Meditation: changed to 'Enhanced Bootshine' > Grants a Chakra every Bootshine crit. - Sora_Oathkeeper, Silver-Strider
• Steel Peak: Gains a silence effect.
• Riddle of Earth: Altered to provide a 8% damage mitigation to the group. - Silver-Strider, KanameYuuki
• Riddle of Wind: weak party refresh MP or and TP that just like Tactitian and Refresh would reduce enmity by half if not added on disengage skill. - KanameYuuki
• Purification: Removed from Chakra system. Changed to reduce enmity and restore TP.
• Tackle Mastery: Grants an extra tackle at 0 potency after using shoulder tackle. 15-20s duration buff. (would help with mobility) - Sora_Oathkeeper, Silver-Strider
• Arm of the Destroyer: Potency buffed to 100. TP reduced to 100. Silence Removed. - Sora_Oathkeeper, Silver-Strider
• Tornado Kick: No longer removes GL3. Instead uses 5 chakras to deal AoE damage in a frontal cone. Potency reduced to 250 - Sora_Oathkeeper, Silver-Strider.

Potential Quality of Life Items

• Greased Lightning and Form timers. Increased to 30s - Sora_Oathkeeper
• All Potency nerfs going into SB reverted back. Including the Forbidden Chakra - Sora_Oathkeeper
• Disengage skill: Something to help reduce aggro to MNK and adds to mobility. - KanameYuuki
• Greased Lightning loss is gradual: 3, 2, 1... - KanameYuuki
• One Fist Button that does all the three effects as a toggle-able skill. - RisaStoleMyHeart
• Greased Lightning gets refreshed even if the attack lands on an invulnerable target.

Overall, we can see that there can be much to be worked on that could push MNK to something that the community would appreciate since it comes to be form a community viewpoint, I could be wrong and many of these things don't need an update, or I could be missing other points that others can point out and we can build upon. Hopefully this can remain civil.

P.S: items in the list of example are a summary of things I noticed and credit is owed and due to those who mentioned them in the past.

Edit: Updated to make the laundry list more specific along with suggestions or proposals from different corners.

[SpeckledBurd]

The thing I've noticed about Monk is that if there's ever a complaint about it, it doesn't really get addressed until the expansion. For example, in 3.0 both Monk and Ninja had pretty hefty TP issues. Ninja's were almost immediately addressed with TP cost reductions, Monks had no TP costs reduced until 4.0 when everyone else got it. One Ilm Punch has been useless forever, when the devs utterly failed to improve it with 4.0 and we've since complained about it, nothing happened, meanwhile Warrior had a similarly useless action in Shake it Off that was buffed into one of the most powerful group defensive CDs in the game. Monks complained about Arm of the Destroyer having too high a TP cost and doing too little damage; nothing, Ninja's mention their AOE is kinda low, they get Death Blossom's TP cost reduced and damage increased and Katon and Doton both get buffed by like 33%.

It's kinda evident that the devs don't give a shit about Monk as far as responding to feedback goes.

That said, here's some Monk feedback. Monk has a lot of problems, and many of them have existed forever. Useless abilities and abilities that are so hyper situational that they may as well be useless have been Monk's schtick since ARR and that sure hasn't changed at all despite Stormblood having the goal of alleviating those complaints.

To name a few of the problems Monk has.

1. A lack of Mobility. Monk has a single movement ability, Shoulder Tackle, however unlike other melee jobs we're the only one who has to use it on cooldown for max DPS. Dragoon is similar with Spineshatter Dive and Dragonfire Dive, but even it has Elusive Jump for free movement. Monk's options for mobility is losing out DPS by holding its Tackle. That bites. The fix for this is easy, remove the damage from Shoulder Tackle and place it elsewhere while reducing Shoulder Tackle's cooldown. Let Monk actually have mobility.

2. Greased Lightning Management. Yes this is still a problem, why? Who knows. Despite Monk having the most actions to deal with this of any Job (hey I thought the devs were reducing button bloat?), Monk is still the worst at this by far. Form Shift is Great, but Perfect Balance's cooldown is significantly longer than it has any right to be. Equivalent actions (Blood of the Dragon and Enochian) are each on 1/6th the cooldown of PB. Further, Monk has two actions competing for the same role of 'what to do if the boss will jump' in Tornado Kick and Riddle of Earth. Tornado Kick hardly makes up the damage loss, while Riddle of Earth is somewhat unreliable (only can completely count on it in O4S Exddeath) and it's just flat out worse than what Black Mage and Dragoon can do. Black Mage can maintain Enochian indefinitely with Transpose, Dragoon can instantly add 20 seconds to its timer. This leaves Monk with significantly more buff management buttons than similar jobs, but incomprehensibly worse at it than them in spite of it. Solution: allow GL3 to be refreshed like Enochian by letting GL3 refresh when formshifting from Coeurl to Opo-opo, reduce Perfect Balance's cooldown to something more reasonable like 90 seconds so Monk.

3. Useless actions or actions that are so highly situational they may as well be useless. The Fist Stances (and Tackle Mastery by extension), Arm of the Destroyer, Purification, Riddle of Earth, Tornado Kick, and still One Ilm Punch. As far as outstanding complaints go, this one has existed the longest. The Fist Stances can literally be described as "there is literally no reason to not be in Fire, ever" and Tackle Mastery just compounds that. Arm of the Destroyer, as previously mentioned, costs too much TP for how little damage it does (it costs almost 3 bootshines worth of damage to edge it out by 40 potency at 5 targets). It's silence is also unreliable due to being form locked, as is One Ilm Punch's stun. Tornado Kick for all the use it sees may as well be an execute that can only be used at .5%, which is a shame considering how cool it is. Purification was a non-solution to Monk's TP issues in Heavensward that is now a non-solution to a problem that doesn't exist anymore. Even in super long AOE pulls you won't need this if your co-DPS is competent.

4. Overall Job feel. Monk feels bad to play now. Riddle of Fire's slow is jarring and the number of Chakras we get from Brotherhood even with a full physical party doesn't begin to justify it. Brotherhood flubbing anytime the party isn't an 8-man full physical party feels terrible. Not having a chakra AOE spender feels terrible. The loss of Touch of Death and Fracture on Monk feels terrible. This is probably the biggest problem with Monk that people like to wave off the most by saying 'oh that's how the devs want it to play' and 'Monk's DPS is fine'. I want to go fast, that was the appeal of the Job. I enjoyed having Touch of Death and Fracture to delay my rotation to hit positionals and maximize Demolish's dot ticks. Now I just have a job that feels stale and slow. Brotherhood is a similar problem. Monk is designed around building Chakras from party members at this point for max damage, but it just doesn't work in 4-mans even when you're lucky enough to get another physical party member. Proposed fix: Remove the slow from Riddle of Fire, return Touch of Death and re-elongate Demolish to 21 seconds, turn Tornado Kick into an AOE chakra move, and make Brotherhood just remove the chakra limitation on Forbidden Chakra so our output isn't throttled by our party composition.

[wereotter]

The biggest issue monks have is that fights are no longer designed with them in consideration. I really became aware of this when going through the Stormblood story and getting to the Susano fight. I had just gotten Riddle of Earth, and had logically concluded that if I used it during his jump phase, around when he drops his swords, that I would be able to maintain my greased lightning. Problem is he takes so long to drop is sword that you lose it even before it drops, and the time between him dropping the second sword and him dealing party-wide damage is so long that Riddle of Earth can't be used to keep up Greased Lightning. It felt like a slap in the face to have gotten new skills to maintain my buffs only to have fights be set up to have these phases be so long as to negate their existence.

I think the main complaint monks have is that Greased Lightning management is much more demanding than it is for comparable jobs, and that our tools for doing so are inadequate for the task. I like the idea of Greased Lightning fading over time rather than all falling off at once (going from 3 stacks to 2 after 16 seconds, then to 1) And while the devs don't want to give us Greased Lightning 4 outright, if it fell off over time, a 4th stack might be able to be kept in reserve. That way longer jump cycles might still end you at 3 stacks rather than all 4, so no loss in DPS.

As far as other useless skills, people have touched on One Ilm Punch a lot, and I will say that this still is likely to never go away and never be usable considering that it's the butt of a joke in the level 52 (I think) monk quest, and changing the skill means they have to rewrite the script, something they probably don't want to put the effort into. So I've resigned myself to having that skill in my repertoire but never on my hotbar. Purification was a niche skill in Heavensward for fights like A9s that had a lot of up-time and you needed the extra TP, but now are completely useless. My thoughts there, personally, is to make the skill reflect it's name. Remove it's chakra requirement and have it mimic Selene's AOE esuna. Considering how many healers don't take esuna nowadays, this would be a pretty valuable upgrade to the skill.

Another issue is that this job is locked behind entirely too many layers of RNG. Consider the Deep Meditation trait. Apart from Bootshine, there's the RNG at play of "will this weaponskill crit?" and if that's a yes, then there's still only a 50/50 chance that you'll generate a chakra stack from it. Compare this to BRD and this is absolutely ridiculous. They get a 100% proc on their crit dots, of which they always have two up, but we only get a 50% proc rate on ours? Also as mentioned above, Brotherhood is too lackluster for any real effect. It's only physical, so if you're running a PLD who happens to be using Holy Spirit when it goes off, you're screwed, and if you have other casters, you're screwed. Also they got nothing out of it since it's only physical, and the proc rate for chakras is too low. I've been in 8-man parties with all physical DPS and still had multiple occurrences of not getting enough chakras to proc one Forbidden Chakra from the use of the skill. This needs to change. Deep Meditation needs to be 100% proc on critical weaponskills, and Brotherhood needs to be buffed to a higher proc rate (I'm not sure what's correct) as well as effect spells. As well as we need to be able to bank maybe 2 additional chakras to accommodate this.

Fists of Wind is one of the skills that I can say I only ever used when learning Sophia EX to help me get to the sides of the platforms I needed to be on. Outside of that, it's another one of those useless skills, especially as it's the weakest movement buff in the game. It's slower than Peloton, it's slower than Sprint, and it's even slower than a ninja's passive movement speed increase trait. If this is going to be a useful skill at all, I would say it should operate similar to sprint. Make it a movement speed buff on a cooldown, and maybe have it reset your shoulder tackle upon use (and combine that with the above suggestion to remove the damage from shoulder tackle to reinforce this as a movement skill)

[Phireblast]

Monk has so many things wrong with it that I don't see it getting a proper look at until 5.0.

[Wintersandman]

I personally enjoy the fist stances. But if I were to make changes I would do the following.

Fist of Wind - Increase movement speed bonus and increase skill speed.
Fist of Fire - Leave alone

Riddle of Fire - eliminate the skill speed reduction

Riddle of Earth - Refresh GL3 for the duration.

Perfect Balance - Decrease to 60 seconds

Form Shift - going from III to I refreshes present GL3 stacks (so if you have one stack it refreshes the one stack)

Make the PvP skills match PvE skills to allow for One Ilm Punch and Arm of the Destroyer be worth something. Otherwise remove or reduce TP costs.

Honestly I miss the stun on Steel Peak.

[SwarleyMcSwarls]

I would HARDLY list greased lightning and the forms for GCDs as major issues with the job. Those are definitive parts of the mnk kit and ones that define the playstyle and appeal of the job. They are also one of the few things that the community has largely agreed upon as being great about monk.

With that, I feel that mnk does need some QoL of life changes and has failed to be updated multiple times to keep up with changes to other jobs. So I am hopeful that changes will come to the job that improve the overall experience of playing it. But please, let's not ask for them to just hand us a brainless, cookie cutter job with easy damage. One great thing about monk is its playstyle and, if executed well, the kit is dynamic and unlike any other job in the game.

[Sora_Oathkeeper]

I would HARDLY list greased lightning and the forms for GCDs as major issues with the job. Those are definitive parts of the mnk kit and ones that define the playstyle and appeal of the job. They are also one of the few things that the community has largely agreed upon as being great about monk.

They made Monk unique. But that uniqueness in SB is more of a hindrance now due to just how short the form timers are and that then has an impact on refreshing your GL. Because the GL timer is also the shortest outside of enochian, but let's face it, you can just hit transpose and never have it fall off. and if it does fall off, well just hit that enochian CD again. Not really the same case for Monk due to PB long timer. Also with ToD and Fracture being removed everything we do now is locked behind a form. the One Ilm punch stun and AotD silence. Locked behind forms. Not only are they a potency loss to use, you have a 1/3 chance to use them when needed. They become unreliable and also an actual hindrance on dps due to, again, our buffs and debuffs being so short. 15s for Dragon Kick and Twin Snakes means you either miss refreshing those, OR you miss out on your 2 strongest attacks GCD attacks (not counting the Demo DoT), bootshine crit and true strike. This is why forms are a mess. I think previously it was just easier in HW to just accept that OIP and AotD(except for aoe) were useless. But we also got new DPS abilities to hit so it didn't feel like too much of the same thing.

But now that we've had ToD and Fracture taken away we're stuck with an even more boring rotation than we did in ARR. As someone above said the devs don't really design fights with Monk in mind. If a drg and nin can go into a long phase change and come out with their buff resource still in tact. A monk should be able to as well. Afterall a monk doesn't even bring the level of dps a drg and nin bring to the raid, nor are we the kings of dps anymore so why are we still punished as if we are? I don't see sam getting punished at all and their downtime is by far the easiest to handle, sure they can drop their 30s buffs and debuff. But if the downtime is long enough they can just meditate and hagakure so they don't need to overwrite any sen when the boss comes back. Sam actually does extremely well from a phase transition. Monk can meditate and... form shift for 1 instant GL. Not exactly much compensated compared to what they just lost. Anyway I rambled, sorry :P

My changes:

Perfect Balance: CD reduced to 60s
Riddle of Wind - Grant Double Auto attacks for 10s / 120s CD
Riddle of Earth - Raid Wide shield for 6s / 120s CD
Riddle of Fire - Raid wide damage buff (5%) for 10s / 60s CD
Brotherhood - Removed
One Ilm Punch - Taken off GCD and forms. Grants 5 Chakras / 120s CD
Deep Meditation - changed to 'Enhanced Bootshine' - Grants a Chakra every Bootshine crit.
Tackle Mastery - Grants an extra tackle at 0 potency after using shoulder tackle. 20s duration buff. (would help with mobility)
AotD - Potency buffed to 100. TP reduced to 100. Silence Removed.
Tornado Kick - No longer removes GL3. Instead uses 5 chakras to deal AoE damage in a frontal cone. Potency reduced to 250

Additional Changes~

Greased Lightning and Form timers. Increased to 30s
All Potency nerfs going into SB reverted back. Including the Forbidden Chakra

This puts our CD alignment the same as every other job that has burst and also synergizes us with NIN. While not being equal to Nin, we at least offer consistent 60s damage utility and would not be such a hindrance if there was no nin and also to jobs that work in 60/120s burst windows (which is the majority)

Numbers can be tweaked but I think the job would feel at least a little more playable, less punishing and more fun and also cut out the RNG gimmick. But that's just my opinion

[Xau]

me only suggestion for improving purification is what instead of heal tp, it could extend gl duration, and not only that, what it does not requires 5 chakra to be used, but depending on how many chakras you have opened = how much it extend the duration

[Tracewood]

Is it me or does Riddle of Earth not extend GL duration at times? That bugged me because sometimes I'd see the timer reset, and sometimes it doesn't. Do I need to be targetting the enemy for it to trigger the reset or am I doing this wrong?

[Mahrze]

Is it me or does Riddle of Earth not extend GL duration at times? That bugged me because sometimes I'd see the timer reset, and sometimes it doesn't. Do I need to be targetting the enemy for it to trigger the reset or am I doing this wrong?

You have to take a hit for the effect to trigger.