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

[IruruCece]

I'm also a monk main but I feel bad for what they did to our opener, not only that but buffed all other jobs and changing some other while we have 2 useless skills laying there doing nothing.

This is basically the exact scenario I was worried about when I was raging in the "monks need to be nerfed, change my mind" threads that were cropping up in the weeks before the patch dropped. We got a hilariously dumb nerf that doesn't really change how we play very much, and we're still left with mechanical issues that have existed for years on top of the garbage that was introduced with Shadowbringers. And they did it most likely because the damage we do "looks fine."

SE basically refuses to actually look at how the class is played and how its buttons actually interact with each other beyond the basic rotation, which has pretty much been the way it is from the beginning. They feign concern about button bloat, and do nothing meaningful to solve that issue with monks, because we still have portions of our kit that we flat out ignore or barely use most of the time because there is no mechanical incentive or benefit to do so, or the use cases for them are exceedingly limited. We're a job that has an emphasis on positionals, but now we have the means to completely ignore them for significant portions of time, something I have never once thought to myself was even necessary.

It feels like they've tried to make this job appeal to people who don't even like it to begin with, and all they've managed to do is tick off people who have stuck with it years despite SE's demonstrable neglect of the job beyond touching our potencies.

[Parisotte]

This is basically the exact scenario I was worried about when I was raging in the "monks need to be nerfed, change my mind" threads that were cropping up in the weeks before the patch dropped. We got a hilariously dumb nerf that doesn't really change how we play very much, and we're still left with mechanical issues that have existed for years on top of the garbage that was introduced with Shadowbringers. And they did it most likely because the damage we do "looks fine."

SE basically refuses to actually look at how the class is played and how its buttons actually interact with each other beyond the basic rotation, which has pretty much been the way it is from the beginning. They feign concern about button bloat, and do nothing meaningful to solve that issue with monks, because we still have portions of our kit that we flat out ignore or barely use most of the time because there is no mechanical incentive or benefit to do so, or the use cases for them are exceedingly limited. We're a job that has an emphasis on positionals, but now we have the means to completely ignore them for significant portions of time, something I have never once thought to myself was even necessary.

It feels like they've tried to make this job appeal to people who don't even like it to begin with, and all they've managed to do is tick off people who have stuck with it years despite SE's demonstrable neglect of the job beyond touching our potencies.

I am starting to think a whole new balance dev team is necessary. They keep screwing it up. A team that plays both pro level and casual. This is getting embarrassing. Every patch is a wait to see who got OP and which class got gutted. There's also always 1 class that had their guts shoved back in wrong and sewed up poorly only to never be the same again. Entire classes forgotten for multiple patches because "reasons." They need to do better. They need to actually experience these classes on the pro and casual levels. Not just pro! This balancing performance is very sub-par. If they can't handle it, get someone who can. Stop doing things poorly, and get someone who can do things correctly. Embarrassing, just embarrassing.

I appreciate what they do with music. (very good!) I appreciate they are trying to have some semblance of a story. (not shakespeare, but beggars can't be choosers in this market) But for god's sake, get someone to balance your gameplay for you. SE, you obviously can't handle it.

And I am not even going to touch on that pure molten, raging, absolute dumpster fire that is PVP. (No offense to those who enjoy it. More power to you.)

[ZyrinMisharuji]

I am starting to think a whole new balance dev team is necessary. They keep screwing it up. A team that plays both pro level and casual. This is getting embarrassing. Every patch is a wait to see who got OP and which class got gutted. There's also always 1 class that had their guts shoved back in wrong and sewed up poorly only to never be the same again. Entire classes forgotten for multiple patches because "reasons." They need to do better. They need to actually experience these classes on the pro and casual levels. Not just pro! This balancing performance is very sub-par. If they can't handle it, get someone who can. Stop doing things poorly, and get someone who can do things correctly. Embarrassing, just embarrassing.

I appreciate what they do with music. (very good!) I appreciate they are trying to have some semblance of a story. (not shakespeare, but beggars can't be choosers in this market) But for god's sake, get someone to balance your gameplay for you. SE, you obviously can't handle it.

And I am not even going to touch on that pure molten, raging, absolute dumpster fire that is PVP. (No offense to those who enjoy it. More power to you.)

What probably annoys me most is how MNKs will find a way to use what's in our kit to push our DPS as much as possible and make the job as fun as we can, but then SE brings down the hammer like "We don't want you playing that way. You need to play this way!"

[Gruntler]

What probably annoys me most is how MNKs will find a way to use what's in our kit to push our DPS as much as possible and make the job as fun as we can, but then SE brings down the hammer like "We don't want you playing that way. You need to play this way!"

When said optimization involves running third-party software that was actively used to try to blacklist members of the community, and the monk community decided that this was an acceptable state of affairs, then the level of surprise in the community should be a non-positive number.

Like, let's not sugar-coated, this is the shit that actually happened and monks should not be surprised at the inevitable result.

[IruruCece]

When said optimization involves running third-party software that was actively used to try to blacklist members of the community, and the monk community decided that this was an acceptable state of affairs, then the level of surprise in the community should be a non-positive number.

Like, let's not sugar-coated, this is the shit that actually happened and monks should not be surprised at the inevitable result.

This post is remarkably misinformed, at best.

The monk community didn't decide this was an "acceptable state of affairs", players simply worked with the tool SquareEnix gave us, and when that particular tool turned out to suck harder than a vacuum cleaner, some players, an extreme minority, used a mod to make a crappy tool actually somewhat decent and reliable.

Monks have been upset about Anatman pretty much since Shadowbringers dropped, and SE's response wasn't to actually fix the problem, but to make the problem worse. This is how they've "balanced" monk for the length of the game's existence, so it really shouldn't be a surprise that the people who do give enough of a damn about the job to keep playing it despite the outright neglect are going to be the ones who put a lot of effort into getting everything they can out of the job, or they're going to be players who chose the job because it was 'optimal' as a result of some seriously ill-considered changes we got between SB and ShB.

At the end of the day, no DPS, not a one, should have a button that asks you to stand still for an amount of time you can't gauge with the tools that are naturally built into the game, in order to build up a primary resource or buff, as part of your opener. Whatever BS SE has said about button bloat and QoL in the past is at the very best mistaken when it comes to Monks, and at worst a flat out lie if they're going to give us absolute, utter garbage like Anatman and Six Sided Star, and retain Tornado Kick as is.

[Rockette]

Can confirm, was not happy about the 3rd party software burning hoops to jump through. No one accepted it but what else could we do? Ask Square to rework Monk?


Wait...

[ValStormbreaker]

The 3rd party tool was not actually a requirement, you could use regens to time your countdown for a perfect anatman tick...

Except you sort of miss the point here. The issue is - and has always been - that in order to make appropriate changes to the jobs, the dev team needs to weigh written feedback against the actual telemetry data of what players are doing. Players can say they want whatever changes they like, but it may not work with respect to the balance of the rest of the game, so the data is what needs to be taken most into consideration.

What they did with Anatman is really a sign that they are aware that automation has been a problem. It was written all over the lodestone updates until 5.1 came out, and of all the job guides to come out of THE preeminent theorycrafting community which is the one singular place raiders go to get their info on rotations and openers, the MNK one was the ONLY one to so brazenly and openly advertise and heavily recommend the usage of third-party ToS-violating tools, including ones which were developed and distributed by the MNK mentor Aya Liz herself. I wouldn't underestimate the sheer volume of raiders who use and openly recommend the use of third-party cheating software.

The problem is that this pollutes the data SE has to work with and they cannot weigh the feedback against the data reliably enough to make sensible changes. The Anatman change appears to be targeting specifically the automating tool for inputting a Dragon Kick unnaturally quickly after gaining the second Greased Lightning stack. This prevents that so they can collect the data they need to make reliable changes by 5.2 and see what numbers really have to be adjusted accordingly.

[Lastelli]

When said optimization involves running third-party software that was actively used to try to blacklist members of the community, and the monk community decided that this was an acceptable state of affairs, then the level of surprise in the community should be a non-positive number.

Like, let's not sugar-coated, this is the shit that actually happened and monks should not be surprised at the inevitable result.

Why not use that opportunity to fix anatman and turn it into something MNK could use to effectively manage GL stacks during downtime or during their opener? Or even better...use it to streamline the tornado kick rotation that was popular at the end of stormblood and finally give a little twist to MNK's unchanging rotation? Because right now, MNK really feels like ARR MNK with some minor QoL changes (form shift making GL management non-existent).

[ValStormbreaker]

Why not use that opportunity to fix anatman and turn it into something MNK could use to effectively manage GL stacks during downtime or during their opener? Or even better...use it to streamline the tornado kick rotation that was popular at the end of stormblood and finally give a little twist to MNK's unchanging rotation? Because right now, MNK really feels like ARR MNK with some minor QoL changes (form shift making GL management non-existent).

Actually, the double TK rotation was technically still possible, though it required a GCD speed of 1.86 OR 1.84. It just didn't work at 1.85 because of some weird GCD clipping which would occur due to TK's 10-second recast time, which could easily be fixed by reducing it to 5 seconds. Damage-wise, it was viable for clearing content, but under-performed compared to other openers because of how weak Tornado Kick is and there being little incentive to drop stacks compared to just using Six-Sided Star for disengaging from the spread mechanics SHB introduced for most of its fights around 20 seconds into an encounter, which always shaves an RoF window a bit short and interrupts openers at around the same GCD. If it weren't for those (which I really wish they'd stop doing for future encounter designs), you'd be able to use both a Six-Sided Star AND TK, but either way, TK would need a significant buff and its recast time reduced. That, and Anatman needs to have its recast reduced to 30 seconds, whereby if it gave a GL stack instantly, it could be used during the second TK's recovery rotation to quickly get back up to 4 GL stacks, rather than just up to 3 and then having to wait 3 GCDs to get back to 4.

It's funny you say this, because a big problem I have with a lot of the SHB changes in general (across a variety of jobs) is it feels like they wanted to cater to all the ARR and early HW MNK players who just can't come to terms with the fact that a level 80 job should feel like a level 80 job, and it's not ARR or HW anymore. So, lots of these jobs had their weaving removed. MNK lost a good chunk of oGCDs, and other jobs had stuff put onto the GCD that was previously off of it. It has made the jobs feel more boring across the board, and lowers the skill ceiling rather than lowering the skill floor, in the name of accessibility, which is never a good way to balance these sorts of things.

I'm a bigger fan of using Skill Speed to balance things, but because right now SkS reduces damage output, it isn't viable to do so. I think for players who want to go faster (like me) and find the GCD speed of 1.86-1.84 to reduce much of MNK's current clumsiness (fun fact), and have the pings to handle it, we should be allowed to increase the speed without having to worry about damage reduction. I feel like increasing SkS and SpS past threshold which reduces the GCD speed should grant bonus potency to compensate for the loss of damage-dealing stats. I feel like this would allow for a greater variety of gameplay as well, without punishing players. Those of us who put more effort into executing our rotations should be out-performing slower ones, instead of the speed substat taking away from power. This can also be a way for players who don't like to double-weave to still be viable, without having to remove oGCDs to make a portion of the player base happy at the expense of everyone else's satisfaction.

[Shurrikhan]

Actually, the double TK rotation was technically still possible, though it required a GCD speed of 1.86 OR 1.84.

I can testify to this. Worked fine for me (a SkS-addict) so long as I wasn't lagging much. Each PB allow me to TK, return a stack, PB, return 2 more stacks, fill a global, TK, regenerate 2 stacks again (yes, there are 6 GCDs per PB when not running slow-Monk), and then RoW for the last one. I'd then TK again 30 seconds later, and then twice again 30 seconds after that. The only complication came from RoF timing, which required that I click RoF off one GCD early (at that speed, though, this still allowed for two Demos and a TK in window each time, as PB wasn't yet devoted to DK-LFB spam nor its frequency halved).

It mostly just made me really wish that (1) TK's cooldown would scale with Attack Speed (snapshotted at activation, not after use, ofc), (2) Riddle of Wind a 0-potency skill (and Wind Tackle given its initial potency) available from FoW for 10 seconds after the use of any Tackle, or (3) Wind Tackle gave the full potency and the GL stack instead, as not to require a triple weave.