Monk needs to be nerfed hard. Change my mind.

[Shurrikhan]

Honestly, I feel like most of the support being gutted was in response to how the community treated party buffs last expansion. When you really look at it, most of it was only because people wanted higher rankings on FFLogs. But now that the site has switched to raid DPS display meaning damage increase from party buffs is shifted from other party members to the caster, half the reason for that behavior is gone now.

Heck, it's almost reversed now, since literally any skill-gap you master in making use of others' raid buffs only affects their parse, not yours, to the point that your rDPS can be slightly decreased if you hold onto CDs for raid buff timings despite your kill speed being faster for doing so.

rDPS being the default metric great for looking at job strength, but even the new aDPS measures aren't great for finding an individual's strength at playing a given job in the context of a particular fight and party; one would need instead to look at both DPS and aDPS, and quite likely even check the actual timeline of the fight.

[Sora_Oathkeeper]

Snipped

Looking at the BRD logs. Battle Voice's effectiveness largely depends on player skill and encounter length. Lower skilled players generally won't get the most out of it, whereas well coordinated groups really capitalize on it. In a speedkill, or just a general run with exceptional players BV absolutely adds on from 600-800 depending on the fight (800 in E2S, 600 in E1S) At the lower end of the scale however in pug parties BV can be about the same as Brotherhood, more often than not though it provides more. Because it's raid wide, effecting every player it's effectiveness will always have a larger variance because of healer DPS as opposed to Brotherhood which is limited to physical. However Brotherhood does have variance depending on party comp, such as WAR instead of PLD and having a MCH so that the automaton queen can give extra chakras, but the difference isn't as great.

Now, if SAM is ahead of MNK in aDPS by about 100-200 then that's already a decent spot. It could maybe do with another 100. I think BLM is the real outlier when factoring in the caster role as a whole. It should not be over 1k DPS in front of its competitors. And Ranged just need some buffs. The melee role in general is fairly balanced I'd say, but I'm sure 5.1 will close the gap further.

[Osmond]

......well it looks like your mind won't be changed. The convo got quickly re-railed.

[Shurrikhan]

While I somewhat agree, I think that kind of balance is almost impossible and the devs have proved time and time again that they just can't do it. DRG and NIN at the end of ARR were ahead of MNK by quite a bit due to their utility. The same problems were present in HW; DRG in a double ranged comp was about 300dps ahead of MNK which was a lot. NIN's TA was just ridiculously strong due to how many buffs could stack with it. The same problems were present in SB also, DRG in double ranged was leagues ahead of everyone, the only thing that offset the double meta was because people disliked how MCH played. While NIN was tied with TK MNK, speaking of which, TK MNK was about a 5% increase over non-TK MNK.

In an ideal world, I think DPS should be no further than 100-200dps apart. But i'd happily take the 500dps between melee right now. I'm still eager to see how the potency numbers change in 5.1 however, mostly because I want to see the undertuned DPS group pulled up. at least to DRG/SAM levels.

1. Melee are already more tightly balanced than that. Why should we accept worse? Even if that 500-dps gap were merely some 3% by the end of next tier, that's still fairly significant in Savage.
   
   
2. A team that leaves glaring issues -- be they bugged skills or potencies therein, flagrantly mistaken tooltips, or fundamental issues with how a skill works that are never compensated for -- is not one from which we should infer the objective feasibility of some task.
   
   Had they actually fixed all that obviously needed fixing for each job and consistently applied the chisel over the sledgehammer for their buffs, then you might have a point. But we have yet to see proof of any balance being pursued to any conceptual limit outside of perhaps one brief era (at the end of Stormblood, where MNK-phys, RDM-phys, BLM-SMN-NIN-DRG/SAM, and almost all comps save haphazard SAM comps or ones which wasted BH/Embold rDPS, were neck-and-neck), in which we quite simply did not have the disparities we see today (aside from perhaps an overbuffed MCH).
   
   A failure of quality control does not condemn a patent, and given how much the consistency in our fight designs streamline our potential gameplay, we can't really call such slip-ups unavoidable (nor in most cases even a necessity of efficient implementation).

[Sora_Oathkeeper]

in which we quite simply did not have the disparities we see today

Actually we did. Heavensward comp is probably the biggest offender for this, and was made even more evident when Creator came out.

https://www.fflogs.com/zone/rankings/13

Feel free to look through the rankings and you can see that. Because the DPS numbers were lower however back then it just doesn't seem as much. But the huge disparity was there in HW. There's a few MNK logs at around 2.4-3k depending on the fight, but the DRG and NIN are only 200 behind. Battle Litany back then was already worth about 150-200dps extra, on top of that DRG added another 230-400dps just from having a ranged or 2, putting it ahead of MNK by anywhere from 200-400. MNK was also meant to be the pure selfish job too, but it wasn't really because the raid utility from NIN and DRG destroyed BLM and MNK. It was even there in SB, the difference being, SMN and BLM could be interchanged for the last slot. But BRD was a lock in, therefore DRG was a lock in, if you didn't play TK Monk, NIN was a lock in. MNK could only be useful in a triple melee setting where Brotherhood could really shine.

https://www.fflogs.com/zone/rankings/25

[IruruCece]

The premise for this thread is poor, and you might have a better time convincing a flat-earther they are wrong. Everything that has happened with Shadowbringers in regards to Monks has been triage for years of botched surgeries, and they still got it wrong.

Positionals ARE part of what makes Monk, but they can be hard to perform under duress. To account for this, every melee DPS has a button now that completely removed this requirement for a short period of time, with charges. But then Monks got Riddle of Earth buffed, which not only makes True North redundant, it invalidates one of the core challenges that the job has been ingrained with from the beginning. This is an example of SE scrambling to do something, anything to try and fix a problem that is honestly not at the core of what is wrong with the job. If Riddle of Earth didn't have this buff, good Monks would still be out-performing weaker jobs every day of the week with their current kit.

Greased Lightning (and the combos to build up to maxing it) is THE THING that Monk revolves around. And for years, Monks have complained about how losing this buff, particularly to things that are outside of our control, is extremely frustrating, not to mention harmful to our DPS contribution. So they gave us a button that takes it all away for a unimpressive potency (Tornado Kick), relegating it to a phase shift button that is easily forgotten by most people. When Perfect Balance (another button that lets us ignore core mechanics of the class) was reduced to a minute cooldown in the back half of Stormblood, Tornado Kick suddenly became very viable and useful, because we could justify sacrificing our self buff now that there was a way to quickly regain it.

Shadowbringers launched by taking away some buttons, changing one into an ability (Enlightenment, which now has no place in our boss rotation since it shares resource with another button that is better for single targets) that requires Chakra (which relies on RNG to generate), nerfing PB back to 2 minutes (invalidating an entire set of improvements Monks got in SB, and making Tornado Kick worthless again). We got Six Sided Star (which sucks and has no place in any real rotation, and is more of an "oops I screwed up" button for retaining GL at the cost of ALL our weapons skills going on cooldown), and Anatman to try and help us retain GL through phase shifts. It was dire, and SE buried these issues with the most recent patch by essentially giving us ways to ignore core aspects of the job (which coincidentally lowered the value of some of the new buttons we got). This was also very bad.

A nerf would solve absolutely none of the mechanical issues that are still in play, it would just mean the job does less damage and makes some nerds over the internet happy that other nerds aren't as happy as they are. It would be a bad solution to a problem that exists because of serious mechanical deficiencies across multiple jobs, not just Monk.

[Shurrikhan]

Actually we did. Heavensward comp is probably the biggest offender for this, and was made even more evident when Creator came out.

Since when is Heavensward part of "the end of Stormblood"?

[Vendalwind]

Additonally if you actually do the math even during those times (heavensward) the percentage wise differences were smaller...

Monk needs a nerf from damage perspective,

Monk also needs a rework from the kit perspective and riddle of earth should not function as it does since it nearly breaks the positional identity of the class.

I made a rework as i was thinking. Gonna post it in a new thread.

[Vendalwind]

Additonally if you actually do the math even during those times (heavensward) the percentage wise differences were smaller...

Monk needs a nerf from damage perspective,

Monk also needs a rework from the kit perspective and riddle of earth should not function as it does since it nearly breaks the positional identity of the class.

I made a rework as i was thinking. Gonna post it in a new thread.

[Vendalwind]

Link to my rework idea so i dont hijack the thread entirely.

http://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/f...stthread&f=658