Soooo... Shadowbringers Monk

[Shurrikhan]

I've ranted on the balance discord regarding Monk and agree with everything you've said. It feels as though the devs keep catering to bad monks that can't keep GL up. Which keeps the job in the stale limbo state as opposed to rewarding good play. Then again. SE caused this problem with TK where some players spam it on cooldown, blissfully unaware it is a dps loss to do so. Maybe we'll get decent changes halfway through the expansion; though I wish these problems that have persisted for years now weren't still prevalent.

Perhaps SE should consider making effective potency over time a bit more visible to the average player?

As long as parsers stay don't-ask-don't-tell, they can't very well be depended on for learning tools, even for just PC players. And a huge portion of players have no such access to third-party learning tools, even if such were encouraged.

If the devs want to allow for a tighter range of competency -- as to avoid aggravated conflicts in 'style of play' or perceived difficulty -- without lobotomizing their classes they're going to need greater in-game support tools for learning (likely through real-time and especially analyze-able data by which to measure and learn from their actions experientially, such as but not limited to an official parser).

[Kolsykol]

I don't even care anymore, the Tifa FF7 reveal made me hype as all hell for Monk lol.


.....

BUT PLEASE MAKE TORNADO KICK USEFUL AND MAKE IT NOT EAT OUR GL.

[SpeckledBurd]

I understand they don't want to have MNKs run with GL3 all over the place but they should make it so Form Shift just refreshes GL timer with no stack gain when in battle, and there, no need for Anatman, RoE, SSS and they could rework TK, with that simple change MNK will get rid of skills bloat and then they can finally evolve the job like they did with BLK.

And if they believe that's somehow going to be unbalanced for old content then at least make that a trait for lv 60+

Frankly Monk's potencies are so low and greased lightning's duration is so short that having Form Shift reset the GL timer really doesn't break anything. It just puts Monk's fight flexibility on par with Black Mage, which can do that exact same thing with Enochian/Astral Fire and Transpose. Upkeep for them is more difficult during the fight proper granted, but they aren't absolutely shafted or need 6 niche skills to keep it up. It's even something they have as soon as they get Enochian.

[wereotter]

Frankly Monk's potencies are so low and greased lightning's duration is so short that having Form Shift reset the GL timer really doesn't break anything. It just puts Monk's fight flexibility on par with Black Mage, which can do that exact same thing with Enochian/Astral Fire and Transpose. Upkeep for them is more difficult during the fight proper granted, but they aren't absolutely shafted or need 6 niche skills to keep it up. It's even something they have as soon as they get Enochian.

Monk potency numbers look low... until you factor in that Monk is a job that's all about stacking buffs. So take Bootshine as an example. The tooltip says potency of 140, but then you have to take into consideration that monk has Twin Snakes, Fists of Fire, and three stacks of Greased Lightning all buffing that potency. So once that's all added in, the actual potency of the skill is 220, putting it well above the comparable ninja move, Spinning Edge, which is a potency of 150.

But to the point that the job doesn't seem to evolve, that's something I 100% agree with. I often feel that the developers don't really know what to do with the job. In general monk players get what they ask for, though sometimes the developers don't really know what we mean. So as an example two things we asked for after Heavensward were reasons to use other fist stances and party utility, so in comes Riddle of Earth, Tackle Mastery, and Brotherhood.

I do think that you're right that the best way to help monk evolve and allow us to get more moves and have more meaning (I'm still salty that monk was the only job in Stormblood not to get any new attacks) is to allow Form Shift to refresh Greased Lightning as we cycle through our forms. Treat it the same as Enochian.

[Shurrikhan]

Frankly Monk's potencies are so low and greased lightning's duration is so short that having Form Shift reset the GL timer really doesn't break anything. It just puts Monk's fight flexibility on par with Black Mage, which can do that exact same thing with Enochian/Astral Fire and Transpose. Upkeep for them is more difficult during the fight proper granted, but they aren't absolutely shafted or need 6 niche skills to keep it up. It's even something they have as soon as they get Enochian.

As someone who enjoys both BLM and MNK... I'd honestly prefer neither get such a cheap gimmick solution.

[Shurrikhan]

The changes we got just feel wholly aimed at the lowest denominator, so to speak, of Monk. That or reactionary and equally unpolished bait-and-switch changes to the Stormblood toolkit.

We take the "obvious" thing asked for since HW by... precisely anyone who doesn't understand how ramp-up works or that power will be balanced around having it up basically full-time. And so dies the one bit of interesting gameplay we had surrounding TK in 4.2. Even if RoW had remained, the costs would make it no longer viable for rotation and utterly redundant with Riddle of Earth (now Anatman) as a on-jump mechanic.

Riddle of Earth was bad because shields could prevent it from being triggered, despite forcing the mitigation stance that makes it even more likely for its main effect not to work? Well, we'll replace it with Anatman, which now only half works so long as you're in the highest level of GL, requires that you be stationary, and has no defensive benefits on the offhand chance you wanted them.

Balancing AoE dps around a single core AoE have decent focus target damage and good burst through Perfect Balance? Well, we can't have that; players might be confused if they had to hit a non-AoE ability during AoE fights. Worse still if they had to consider resource efficiency or the like (as casters will continue to do). So, once the fight's begun, you get just one option per form for AoE, hurray!

Aside: I still don't know why people so want to remove RoF's slow-down. I rather enjoy it, since it offers significant burst to my oGCDs without having to squish my base damage as it would if it was a mere HW-era Raging Strikes copy. I notice speed when my speed changes, and I don't notice slow-downs any more than speed-ups so long as the side-effects are equally advantageous.
At present, no-RoF allows me particular rotational breakpoints (Double-Boot), while RoF allows me perfect breakpoints one rotational style slower (Demo-drop, if I care to make use of it) and allows me to double-weave at only very faint uptime cost. They're different, but neither is clunky for me. And thus I enjoy the variance. At most speeds, it's far more interesting than just another Raging Strikes.

But, of course, while it's true that we can't actually remove the speed penalty while supporting GL4 without overpowering Monk, we wouldn't want to leave a foot for such opinions to stand on, so let's just remove all the oGCDs that you otherwise could have double-weaved! There, now everyone will be ready to beg that the job be simplified even further in 6.0! Master plan successful.

We already had an interesting burst CD without penalties, and they took it away, likely to support GL4 and even more RNG-based performance. Internal Release actually synergized well with our Deep Meditation trait. So of course they took it away and gave its carbon copy to Dancer to ensure that one job will likely be basically non-competitive without the other. Out with the Piercing and the Crit-Bards -- in with the Dancer and the superCrit Monk from which to take both or skip both... Hurray?

So, what, ultimately are we getting?
- Greatly simplified macrorotation
- 2 GCDs and 123123123123123123 AoE gameplay.
- Even less choice of stats
- Redundant, rather than varied, jump choices; still unpolished
- Even more dependence on Crit raid buffs. RIP trying to play w/o DNC, DRG, SCH.

[SpeckledBurd]

Monk potency numbers look low... until you factor in that Monk is a job that's all about stacking buffs. So take Bootshine as an example. The tooltip says potency of 140, but then you have to take into consideration that monk has Twin Snakes, Fists of Fire, and three stacks of Greased Lightning all buffing that potency. So once that's all added in, the actual potency of the skill is 220, putting it well above the comparable ninja move, Spinning Edge, which is a potency of 150.

But to the point that the job doesn't seem to evolve, that's something I 100% agree with. I often feel that the developers don't really know what to do with the job. In general monk players get what they ask for, though sometimes the developers don't really know what we mean. So as an example two things we asked for after Heavensward were reasons to use other fist stances and party utility, so in comes Riddle of Earth, Tackle Mastery, and Brotherhood.

I do think that you're right that the best way to help monk evolve and allow us to get more moves and have more meaning (I'm still salty that monk was the only job in Stormblood not to get any new attacks) is to allow Form Shift to refresh Greased Lightning as we cycle through our forms. Treat it the same as Enochian.

I phrased what I typed poorly. Monk has low potencies, but as a buff Greased Lightning it’s one of the most powerful persistent buffs in the game. However even when stacked with other buffs, it’s not overpowering to the point where there needs to be situations where we have to lose it. All it does is bring Monks average combo potency up to a little above the average (where it should be relative Brotherhoods buffing ability).

[Aomine1992]

Honestly as a non MNK main who was trying to pick it up, it just seems like MNKs job mechanics are just to punishing or had skills that just didn't fit like riddle of earth. The slowing down from riddle of fire and the loosing stacks from TK is just too weird to do to a job that literally lives and dies by it's specific speed.

[Shurrikhan]

Honestly as a non MNK main who was trying to pick it up, it just seems like MNKs job mechanics are just to punishing or had skills that just didn't fit like riddle of earth. The slowing down from riddle of fire and the loosing stacks from TK is just too weird to do to a job that literally lives and dies by it's specific speed.

It... doesn't, though. It lives or dies primarily by its damage buffs. We can only get up to 15% additional speed, but up to a constant 50% additional damage (a relative 88+% during CDs, depending on existing Crit pre-IR). And unless running a specific Skill Speed build, there is zero specificity to GL speed either.

Unless you're at a tight rotational breakpoint from heavy speeds, you can use the same rotation in GL0 as GL3. It's just the first 3-4 GCDs and then... you simply play with a lower GCD than others; if not for Tornado Kick being too overtuned to be a balance option at low Skill Speeds the system wouldn't impact the gameplay itself except, again, at specific breakpoints. (That and tools like Riddle of Earth becoming important and in that skills like Tornado Kick and Riddle of Fire can actually hard where they could not if left without compromise (be it in base potencies or those skills themselves).)

Personally, I like playing with and around a mechanic, rather than just treating it as an intro to gameplay to be suffered through. Without RoW-TK, whilst now leaving TK underpowered compared to Anatman (assuming they fix Anatman's current massive design flaw), we don't have a unique and core mechanic in Greased Lightning any more than, say, Shifu or Jinpu are together a "unique and core mechanic". At this point the only time you'd get a sense that GL even really exists -- the only time it would alter what you do -- is when punished for death or stupidity.

If we're going to do so little with the mechanic... why have it? We've been saying the same of Fist Stances for years, so why is GL some strange exception, especially when we've already gutted any alternative use for PB by squishing ppgcd deviation, across ST and AoE combat both, between different forms' weapon skills. It now exists only, and only sort of, in Anatman. Why? Why isn't it being expanded upon instead of further trimmed away?

[hijifa]

Sorry but the suggestions here are very bad.

Its an easy fix tbh, put back in the 2 oGCD skills, PB back to 60s and tackles in wind will grant GL.

So like this TK rotation still exists, big burst with RoF is gonna be really good with SSS, and there is a new burst phase with GL4