Monk Changes

[SpeckledBurd]

Okay so it's not perfect, but that doesn't mean it needs anything, really. Monk has gotten enough attention and at this point the devs should not spare it a single second of thought. Other classes have problems, too. Heck, my favorite class got literally nothing from levels 70 - 80 except a couple situational skills (one of which you'd actually prefer not to use at all unless necessary, and the other of questionable value when the RDM is skilled). It's not until lvl80 that we got an actual useful skill and that's just something they tacked onto the end of verflare/holy. We even lost impact which is a big deal and makes us slaves to RNG.

The point is that no job is perfect except maybe black mage, almost every job has flaws or issues with their rotations, and Monk should be right down at the bottom of the priority list while square goes about the business of correcting this game's terrible job balance.

Saying that one job should be at the bottom of the totem pole in terms of having its problems addressed is unnecessarily spiteful and depending on how wide you set the window for "attention" Monk has basically seen the least, and by your other criteria Monk would be one of the jobs most in need of quality of life.

Monk may have seen a bit of attention in 5.05, but player complaints on how its skills worked and played were largely ignored since Heavensward in favor of complaints people had for Summoner/Ninja/other jobs. This was when Monk was the absolute worst job in the game mind you, with comparable damage to Ninja and less than Dragoon at the beginning of the expansion that only became marginally better than Dragoon by the end, on top of being the only job without any aggro control, the strictest job mechanic to work around for Mechanics, the worst TP burn (a problem Ninja had fixed immediately mind), and no means of buffing the party at all. Stormblood's complaints were similarly, acknowledged on streams at the beginning of the expansion, and then ignored. When they actually did change Monk at all, the devs accidentally created a new rotation that was divisive among the community and absolutely not what they intended to. And they went about fixing it in Shadowbringers by undoing the best quality of life the job had ever seen (PB at 60 seconds) instead of changing Tornado Kick to be something other than overly situational. If you set the window for "attention" wide enough, it becomes obvious that the condition Monk is in now, both in how its overperforming and the state of its kit is a direct result of developer inattention more than anything.

Situational skills? You're talking to the job that is the undisputed champ of them and has been since Heavensward. Forbidden Chakra was a situational disengage skill and because the design of it wasn't changed when it became a Gauge system, it's currently the only gauge that has absolutely no overhead between being useable and capping your resource. Our capstone skill in Heavensward Tornado Kick, was only ever useful in a rotation because of developer oversight. Riddle of Earth was so situational that making Form Shift work the way it always should have required it to gain an entirely new effect (and it's activation requirement is still stupid and gets blocked by shields). Anatman's janky secondary purpose is now it's only purpose, and Six Sided Star, another ultimate ability, while not quite as useless as Tornado Kick, is still something who's use we want to minimize during a fight.

And as for skills Monk has lost the job is a veritable graveyard of skills that we once used rotationally that we don't have anymore. Touch of Death, Howling Fist, Fracture, Internal Release, and Steel Peak are all gone and Monk hasn't seen anything to replace them because we've gotten nothing but situational nonsense.

What's "unique" about Monk's problems and flaws is that many of them have existed for multiple expansions, and they've never been addressed because the "attention" you say Monk has been lavished with is something that literally never happens with the job. Instead they've been allowed to fester and created a paradoxical interplay where the Jobs' currently managing to perform very highly despite having the single worst put together kit in the game, and funnily enough, because of its kit being so poorly put together, if the devs nerf it in the wrong manner then it'll be possible to pull off some other Jank to partially make up the damage elsewhere.