The current monk was the result of a series of bad decisions, and 5.1 made it worse

[giwaman]

Trading Anatman+SSS for Internal Release .

[SpeckledBurd]

I think a criticism I'd level at Shadowbringers Monk on top of what others have said is that there are a lot of aspects of the games design that were altered in Stormblood that Monk is only now just catching up to. They gave every job some kind of Gauge so there'd be more dynamic gameplay, and Monks gauge only had one use in single target and a TP regenerator in an expansion that basically invalidated AOE (though they'd later make Monk burn all their Chakras on an aggro cut when no other job had to suffer any inconvenience for it). They altered or removed skills like Jugulate on Ninja,Leg Sweep on Dragoon, or Brutal Swing on Warrior that were all just stuns on a short cooldown and moved their functionality to the Cross Roles, but Steel Peak stuck around on a weird 40 second coold own on a job that ran in 30 seconds making it feel like an odd tumor. Monk only now has some AOE gauge dump, a full expansion after the job gauges were introduced and over 20 levels after it gains access to its gauge.

Monk's gauge itself is another problem. As its conceptualized, it really isn't meant to be a gauge. Chakra was never conceptualized as a subsystem for Monk, it's a downtime damage loss mitigation skill that was really lazily converted into something resembling a gauge by tacking a watered down form of Bard's crit mechanic onto it. Because it was originally just a downtime mitigation skill, it can only be used when its capped and there's absolutely no overflow on it compared to any other gauge except for Pitch Perfect/Wanderer's, and that has the option of at least dumping the gauge early.

I can see where you're coming from. The skills you mentioned are not doing damage though. How do you think SAM would feel if its capstone ability was barely used - oh wait...

Hallowed being used once or twice a fight is nice though it serves its purpose as a capstone ability enabling invincibility. It's OP in every sense. I think i'm partly salty that SAMs cried about Shoha being niche and it was changed by 1 patch cycle. MNKs have been asking for TK to be more useful since its inception and new tools have further devalued TK as an option. Considering the evolution other jobs have had since ARR until now we are the only job that hasn't had a change in its base rotation (excluding the happy accident from 4.2+).

If stardiver could only be used once or twice a fight and resulted in a dps loss unless the boss were to jump do you think DRGs would be happy about their capstone ability? The point is MNK always gets the niche skills damaging or utility wise. Others may get niche utility but generally their damaging skills are used rotationally. Also regarding Tornado Kick, using it on the GCD the boss jumps will usually end in the damage not registering because the damage is tied to animation. This resulted in TK > 6SS being more optimal to ensure TKs damage went out. With the changes to anatman this now forces a 4.89s wait (at BiS) before we can even channel anatman again. Essentially forcing up to 7.89s wait until to get a GL stack. Prior to the change we were guaranteed a stack in the recast of 6SS. People have asked for TK to deal it's damage upfront instead of waiting for the animation to play out for 4 years. But once again, just another problem never addressed.

There's one other classification of ability for what Monk has gotten other than Greased Lightning upkeep, it's "Replacement for a skill we just removed." There's an obnoxious trend for Monk where old skills are pruned at low levels and the 'new' skills that are added to it in the leveling of the new expansion are basically the exact same as what was removed. It's skills like Riddle of Fire, which we got after they removed Blood for Blood, or Enlightenment which we got when they removed Howling Fist. It just makes it feel worse at the beginning of the expansion and instead of ending up feeling powerful at the end because we have some incredible new skill like Xenoglossy or Stardiver, we just end up back where we started but with slightly different animations.

[ZyrinMisharuji]

Trading Anatman+SSS for Internal Release .

Tbh: Freaking Pleeeeeaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaase SE.

The removal of IR was probably the biggest slap in the face to MNKS. SE: "We want to drastically reduce the synergy between jobs so that you aren't required to pair with certain jobs in content (DRG + MCH/BRD)." SE: We're also gonna make MNK the only job that requires crits for part of its kit.... but we're gonna remove their self-applied crit buff so they NEED DRG, SCH, and DNC to augment their crit and push their DPS as much as possible.

[Sora_Oathkeeper]

Snip.

I agree with pretty much everything you said. The whole chakra system is very forced as a gauge mechanic, I'm also not a fan of how the idea of Job gauges was supposed to ease the amount of buffs on screen, really all its done though is taken 1-2 buffs off the bar. Things like leaden fist buff should be indicated on the bar as well, a small fist icon could light up when leaden fist is up similar to how dark arts lights up for DRK. That's just a QoL though because I hate rooting around my buff bar to see how long Twin Snakes has and seeing if I used my leaden fist buff or not during a perfect balance window. Core gameplay elements is where the developers always struggle to make meaningful changes to MNK outside of potency buffs to the main 2 strings of combos we've had since ARR. The loss of Touch of death, internal release, steel peak, howling fist and fracture shows how simple Monk has gotten since its ARR and HW iteration. You had to be creative to maintain GL in ARR and HW, but it felt so rewarding. 6SS would have been an amazing ability in HW because there were many fights where you couldn't end phases on a snap/demo and so you'd end up waiting on the gcd to ensure you didn't lose it. 6SS is 2 expansions too late.
Touch of Death could have been a dot with a long recast time like Sonic Break or Shadowfang and upgrade to 6 Sided Star and the dot effect moved to pure damage instead (this would essentially allow us to push our GCD back by 1 and enable us to RoF > Demo every time. Instead of having to do the Formless Dragon Kick to align everything)

IR was nice synergy with CDs like howling fist and elixir field every minute.
Steel Peak could have given chakra stacks akin to Mug on NIN, which was suggested multiple times throughout the Stormblood expansion.
Howling fist being reskinned as Enlightenment was just the icing on the cake. Howling fist served nice synergy due to it's alignment with IR and EF. I honestly don't understand why they took this ability away and gave it back to us behind the chakra system and thus RNG?? If future fights require AoE during Savage or even Ultimate MNKs will have to stay capped at 5 chakra for however long or pray they get enough chakra back by the time its needed. Enlightenment is nothing but a dungeon skill at the moment and if lucky, maybe get 2 uses from it during E1S and E4S to pad on the Gaols. What a waste. I wanted a chakra AoE spender, but not at the cost of an already useful single target AND multi target ability.
There should be at least 7 chakras to help alleviate overcapping and lost potency, this would also fit the lore of there being 7 chakras of light and dark. As SpeckledBurd said, we're the only job that has an all or nothing gauge, Ninja's were complaining about overcapping their resource and it was changed for the better to avoid such overcapping. Yet MNKs are forgotten about. Again, this has been suggested all throughout Stormblood.

Another thing that is very annoying to see is a trait dedicated to up Fists of Fire's damage % increase from 5 (which was nerfed back from 6 in Stormblood lmao) to 10. 2 levels before getting Greased Lightning 4, talk about a wasted trait... Why not just make it 10% from the start or leave it at 5% since it was going to be outdated 2 levels later anyway and then only used for a handful of GCDs until GL4. The logic just isn't there.

There is a reason why MNK players get annoyed at the developers each expansion, because nothing ever changes unless you want to include the RNG added so we can use TFC as part of our rotation now, we get potency increases, we get some niche skills that either conflict with the kit or end up being used as they're not intended and the developers butcher the skill and send us right back to square one for trying to think outside the box. "No fun for you Monks! how dare you try new things."

Over on the Japanese forums they are very annoyed at the developers, calling them liars because they stated during the liveletter that MNKs firepower would be unchanged, mentioning "no changes to MNK only mantra would be nerfed". Stating that the developers are very out of touch with the MNK community because they nerfed Anatman not realising (Although they should know better) that Anatman was tied to our firepower because it was an optimization tool. Which just goes to show the dev team are very out of touch with the MNK job and the community that plays it.

I don't think the argument was TK is bad because it doesn't see very much use. I think the argument was TK is bad because it clashes with our kit, especially now that we have a plethora of ways to maintain GL no matter how long downtime is (except in cutscenes).

Yes that is my exact problem with TK. The way it's implemented into our kit at the moment means it sees such little use, but also because it does clash with our kit. In fact a few things clash with our kit, we are supposed to be the fast class. before 5.05 however we had RoF slowing us down, waiting on anatman slowing us down (even worse now), 6SS again, slowing us down, Tornado kick removing ALL stacks, slowing us down with no efficient way of rebuilding them. It's like the developers said "The identity of this job is hit hard, hit fast" and then handed the concept off to a sloth.

[Exiled_Tonberry]

You know, it really shows how detached they are to the Monk when you accidentally create rotations and issues from changes.

First it was the TK rotation in SB.
Then it was Anatman with ShB.
And now they tried to address the Anatman opener but failed miserably and only made it feel even worse.

No other job has this problem where rotations and openers are accidentally being made or destroyed, it really shows that the Monk job as a whole is missing a solid structure. The devs want you to use GL4, and that's where they stop caring it feels like. Everything else the Monk has outside if that is either situational or has some massive con attached to it's usage.

[ZyrinMisharuji]

You know, it really shows how detached they are to the Monk when you accidentally create rotations and issues from changes.

First it was the TK rotation in SB.
Then it was Anatman with ShB.
And now they tried to address the Anatman opener but failed miserably and only made it feel even worse.

No other job has this problem where rotations and openers are accidentally being made or destroyed, it really shows that the Monk job as a whole is missing a solid structure. The devs want you to use GL4, and that's where they stop caring it feels like. Everything else the Monk has outside if that is either situational or has some massive con attached to it's usage.

Yeah. I've said it before but it feels like they don't have any interest in having a discussion with the MNK community to find a nice middle ground so we can all be happy with the job. They'd rather just try to force us to play the job in the way they envision. Which, I guess to be fair, they are the developer and that's sort of their right? But this is a paid subscription game, not a pay 1 time and play whenever game (like most RPGs) where you'd just be stuck with the characters that are programmed into the game. They can actively change and improve jobs based on feedback from the players to make the play more enjoyable, but we as players also have to respect that the developers have a desire to make the jobs easy (or not complicated I should say) to learn and also they need to be balanced with one another. All of this requires communication between the developer and the community though. We are currently doing our part by posting on the official forums and providing feedback anywhere we can. Now they must do their part to come up with a compromise that achieves balance within the game/role as well as makes the job more enjoyable.

[Vendalwind]

I agree there has been a lot or bad decisions as far as monk goes. But i also think the monk community is more divided than people think which doesnt help direct se. I wont share which of these are my opinions but

-some monks want more than anything the glory days of TK rotation to come back
-some monks hate tk and eant it gone entirely

-some monks hate the double true rotation and want measures in place to stop incentivizing it
-some monks love the difficulty and skill cieling raising it adds

-some monks want elemental stances to be made into actual inherant use damage phases.
-some monks would rather elemental stances be dropped entirely

-some monks (albeit few) like the rng of chakra and the vitality it adds to randomness of play
-some monks want chakra completely gone

-some monks love six sided star for disconnects
-some monks want it gone so meditate and form shift are less redundant.

-some monks like anatman
-some monks want it gone or altered completely into something different

The class has so many different ways it could go. And i know for a fact a portion of the monk community would be upset with any change leaning towards any of these because there are people leaning one way or the other on so many of the above listed pairs. My point being. I honestly van see why SE doesnt know what to do with mnk. Without a heavy handed rework that just completely freshens things someone will always be unhappy.

[ZyrinMisharuji]

snip

While I agree with the community being divided (such is true of any community), I don't think it's quite that black and white.

I think almost every MNK wants TK to just either be more usable or be gone because as it stands it's pretty worthless, but I don't think anyone wants the exact TK rotation to come back because it was pretty broken, doing like 2 TKs every 30 seconds or so was busted. Most MNKs just want it to be actually useful to our job because as it stands it's just taking up a hotbar space outside of its niche use (even though it does see a fair bit of use in the current raid tier, granted a lot of it is optimization to push into the higher orange percentiles - e1s sees 3 uses no matter what, e2s sees 1 use, e3s sees 1 use unless you try for the Maelstrom TKs which is advanced optimization, and Titan sees 2 uses without the Orogenesis optimization which is incredibly tight right now with current Anatman)

I agree with the 2nd point, I can definitely see that as being pretty black and white, but I haven't seen many people complain about the double true rotation since it's a small optimization that really only pushes you from 95th percentile to as close to 100th as possible.

For the stances I feel like the part of the community that want them removed is because since ARR they've been pretty much useless. From ARR - SB (pre-4.2 iirc) we only used FoF, so why even have FoE and FoW? 4.2 to the end of SB appealed to a large portion of the community because it made the stances more involved (along with TK actually being useful). I feel like if they had been useful at end game from creation most people wouldn't have an issue with them, but that's just pure speculation on my part.

For Chakra, I think most people just don't like that it's sort of a forced gauge. It doesn't have any sort of management to it since it's only used for 2 skills, but one of them requires 2 or more targets to be viable. So they either want it to be more involved as a gauge or for there to just be more ways to guarantee a chakra so that even with the worst possible RNG you'd still get a good amount of uses out of it.

For Six-sided Star, 5.05 made it very redundant, though it's still a good burst damage skill going into downtime, but Chakra is more of a priority iirc. But I think pretty much everyone agrees it needs to be changed in some way to not clash as much with Anatman, Form Shift, and Meditate.

Anatman kinda just follows the same train of thought as SSS. I don't think there is anyone who loves Anatman the way it is. Sure, the people who prefer the Perfect Balance opener aren't as affected by Anatman since it's only used for long transitions like p2 Titan, but they also cannot deny that Anatman being on the GCD clashes with our kit even more now than before.

[Sora_Oathkeeper]

snipped

I agree the MNK playerbase is probably more divided than SMN is with their egi system. The most common complaint I saw in The Balance back in 4.2 and beyond was that the TK rotation forced a lot of double weaving and required some insight to boss jumps incase you needed to save a shoulder tackle for movement, forcing a missed TK opportunity.

Regardless of that however is that the TK needed the player to have moderate ping to perform, only due to double weaving fist stances and tackles. Honestly they should have removed fist stances, enabled GL4 to just unlock at 76 instead of tying it to FoW and Riddle of Wind should have just allowed Greased Lightning Stacks per tackle. 4.2 MNK gave the best stack recovery we have ever had and ShB took it away. Not only that they increased PB cooldown which makes regaining stacks miserable if PB is on CD and you die. From death it takes 12 GCDs to regain GL4. Around 25s to regain GL4 which is pretty large when compared to all other DPS.

I think honestly MNKs just want a kit that flows fluently and synergizes well with itself. I see so many MNKs using TK on CD because the potency looks big and enticing, when in fact it's a trap. I see people stay in FoF all fight because they see +10% damage on FoF. I see people using 6SS at the end of their coeurl form combos because they don't get what the point of it is. I saw a few NINs that complained Meisui was situational and was a trap for newer players and they SE changed it to always be a gain now. MNK has these same trap abilities but have never been changed. It's one rule for the other job and another rule for MNK.

I have mained MNK since 2.1 and I honestly couldn't care what rotation we end up with. I just want a job that makes sense, doesn't fight it's own kit every expansion and just flows well. I wouldn't mind the RNG personally IF the chakra gauge wasn't an all or nothing mechanic or if I had the option to spend chakras early so I could regain them back in downtime. It feels bad to be at 3-4 chakras before a boss jumps, crit your next hit leaving you at 4-5 chakras and twiddling your thumbs in downtime because I couldn't just spend them early, or because for whatever reason MNK isn't allowed to have an overflow of procs.

For what it's worth some of the top liked posts on the JP Mnk forum have been asking for a rework of the job as they are not satisfied with its progression.

[Noctisnine]

I have to agree with some people here, SE does not give a fuck about we monk players want. No matter how many times we complain and theorize, they will never do what we ask, so instead they solve the problems by just giving us damage and speaking of that I would not be surprised if next week we get a small buff during ultimate release that would work as if they throwing sand into our eyes.