Criticism on Stormblood's Monk

[Shurrikhan]

I ran max SKS MNK in creator. There was no special "bootshine twice before doing DK again" rotation or anything like that. With max SKS you could rotate fracture and TOD with literally every DK/snakes cycle. You'd also run out of TP in literally 2 minutes without goad or purification (rip TFC). You could modify the opener to use fracture before TOD during perfect balance (IIRC I needed at least 950+ SKS to do this). Depending on the fight you could also do less or no form shifts to refresh GL3 (the transition from phase 1 to 2 in Zurvan EX and inception in A12S being examples).

But if you cared about doing as much DPS as possible then the best SKS tier for MNK in HW was as little SKS as possible. If the whole "lol no TP" thing wasn't a problem back in HW then running a high SKS build could have actually been somewhat viable.

Yes, TP was Monk's Achilles Heel in HW, without a doubt. I, too, built for max SKS, but frequently had to swap a benchmark lower to be even remotely sustainable, and had I been running with more serious statics, even that would not have been permitted.

But... there absolutely was a bootshine twice before DK rotation, so long as you let DK drop for Demolish and the following Dragon Kick. And that didn't even require max SKS. It just made it applicable in 1 additional rotational string per BFB period as opposed to the benchmark lower, and allowed DK-drops on DK alone (+/- ToD), thus allowing SP during the usual Demo drop stage with a slightly delayed ToD if a jump split your Demo from your DK and ToD timings, making it just beautifully lenient while still decisive, imo. Which is why it's just so great and horrible. The most perfect gameplay I'd ever seen in XIV, was a trap.

Oddly enough, though, it was also the one time that Purification almost made sense, if its recast time had just been massively reduced. And yet, what happened with its design once we entered the realm of infinite TP...?


To me -- though Tornado Kick, Meditation, and Purification all felt poorly tuned or lacked a finishing sensible retouch -- the only ability in HW not to augment Monk's tactical toolkit was Elixir Field, as there's nothing about it Howling Fist didn't do before and couldn't have been worked into potencies elsewhere -- not that I didn't love it. And then Stormblood design just went in the absolute direction. Rather than augmenting our ability for decisions, it's like they figured that complexity was somehow a matter of least control possible baseline while giving the most buttons possible in ability kits, no matter disfunctional or contradictory they were.