My god, Square *head in hands* - RE: monk

[SpeckledBurd]

Monk issues are quaint in comparison to the 5 classes that had actual glaring design problems. If anything the devs are out of touch or aren't properly envisioning how abilities fit into the rotation, a problem Ninja had in ARR as well, but the class is perfectly playable and is nowhere close to the "best example of it needing to be mandatory the dev team actually plays it at a semi-decent level before being allowed to claim the job is ready for release." I'd argue Astrologian, Summoner, and Warrior are far better contenders for that title.

I wouldn't dismiss Monk's issues as quaint, because while the design problems on Monk may lack in the severity of some of the other jobs, no other job comes close to having to put up with their respective problems as Monk has. There are problems that exist in Monk's kit that date back to ARR, such as the Fist Stances by design only having one Stance you ever want to be in and the others being something to ignore making their entire existence 3 wasted slots. These are problems that have not only never been fixed, but have been the foundation for 3 Traits over two expansions that never addressed that core problem. This is also true for things like Deep Meditation and Brotherhood's RNG/Composition dependence. Both were things that we hated, but they've never so mechanically broken that the devs have addressed it so it festers.

The end result of that was an absolutely livid player base in 5.0 that was only placated by some emergency changes in 5.05.

As for the devs being out of touch, you've absolutely hit the nail on the head, but that's only part of it, the other part is they are for some incomprehensible reason completely pig headed about taking any feedback about Monk. You only need to look at what the devs said about Stormblood Monk, their beliefs with regard to how Shadowbringers Monk would be received, and the actual player response to it to see this in action. They implemented Riddle of Fire in Stormblood and people hated it. They said that if player demand was high enough they'd do something about the slow, but never actually did. Then they admitted during the media tour that the reason for Riddle of Fire having a Slow was because they had no idea what to do with Monk in Stormblood (which presumably extends to the RNG which everyone hates). However despite correctly identifying the reason why people hated the slow, they were still by all indications intending to keep it through Shadowbringers until the Monk player base started burning down the forums in 5.0. They thought that Greased Lightning 4 and more absolutely garbage GL upkeep skills would be what we wanted out of the job in Shadowbringers to the point where they were saying it was the job they were the most proud of during the media tour, and those statements did not age well to say the least.