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

[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.

[Noctisnine]

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.

Honestly they should get a new team to work on monk because of the 4 melee he is the one with the worse kit, sam, ninja and dragoon are all better and more fun jobs to play. We lack a proper rotation and we lack a skill to disengage, STOP GIVING US DAMAGE AND FIX OUR PROBLEMS!! Listen to the people that play and raid with monk, we are not happy with our job.

[Sora_Oathkeeper]

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.

The 3rd party tool was not actually a requirement, you could use regens to time your countdown for a perfect anatman tick. The 3rd party tool just allowed people to stop asking for a regen every pull. Nonetheless, anatman as oGCD felt a lot better to use - it felt bad to clip the GCD waiting for a tick but it also felt really good to just get lucky. The worst problem however, which is STILL a problem is the ticks being server side, Anatman is still better to use in the opener even after the nerf. The ticks not being static forces MNKs to be at different parts of their rotation throughout an encounter. It becomes quickly evident just how annoying that is when missing GCDs in leviathan or having RoF come up during Titan's jumping landslide. The community was surprised with the change because many of us didn't think it could get any worse, but it did. What sort of developer actually wants to punish players instead of giving them a fun new way to use the ability? This is the sentiment over on the JP forums. Instead of fixing anatman to make it engaging and fun, they made it boring and borderline useless. To make things worse, their change didn't even remove anatman from the opener as it's still the better option. It's just not as good as it used to be making a PB slightly better by proxy

[Rosenstrauch]

I can't help but think that making Anatman a normal cooldown would fix some of the issues with it. Just removing these bits:

• "Halt the expiration of Greased Lightning and your present form."
• "Cancels auto-attack upon execution. Effect ends upon using another action or moving (including facing a different direction)."

Then taking this and making it the main effect:

• "Additional Effect: Increases stacks of Greased Lightning and extends duration to maximum while in combat."

You'd be able to continue your rotation as normal, and maybe even use Tornado Kick a lot more during its 30 second duration than you would otherwise. It would definitely have to be balanced out in some other manner, like increasing the cooldown timer to 120 seconds or lowering the potency of Tornado Kick, but this'd still elevate it to something you actually make use of when it's available instead of using it once at the start of the fight and then (almost?) never again.

[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...

[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).

[Carstien]

But they could have just gave the move an instant GL stack and kept the rest of it the same! Would have had the same effect!

Then again, I don't know what the programming is like on their side, so this might have been the only alternative to fix that "need to have several plugins etc" problem. I have an idea of what the new Anatman opener will look like, but man...

No it wouldn't. If they gave it a instant tick, players would wait for the second tick instead. That's how strong it is.

They should probably just change it to a gcd button on a 10 second cooldown that grants a stack/refreshes the timer. That would at least remove waiting for a server tick and the reliance on timers.

[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.

[ValStormbreaker]

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...

Actually, it's your post which is remarkably misinformed. Aya Liz, one of the Balance's MNK mentor and the one who is typically responsible for writing the guides, wrote a rather obnoxious reddit post about all this before SHB even came out. None of us ever had the opportunity to try out Anatman in practice. Nobody knew that Anatman wouldn't give the first stack instantly. We also didn't know how encounter design would be different, how potency math has changed, etc. Aya had mathed out a rotation that was incredibly clumsy, but because it did the most DPS possible, it was dubbed THE optimal opener, and then proceeded to market both her own and her friend's brand-name cheating software like a bad infomercial. She then decided that cheating, her encouragement to do so and her own distribution of third-party tools shouldn't be an ethical issue, and passed the buck rather disrespectfully to SE, blaming them for her not being able to do her opener more optimally without it. She also arrogantly gloated that it was unlikely SE would take action against those who cheat (Lodestone updates from the past few months would dispute this).

It never once occurred to her that SE isn't designing these job rotations by the maximum potency possible. If her opener was THAT clumsy, perhaps the better course of action would be to instead go back to the drawing board and try to discover what it was SE intended with the job, because it's not like they didn't outright say during the Fan Fest live letter that they wanted to make MNK flexible for different play styles and were curious to see what openers people would come up with. I doubt they wanted these jobs to be played with the rigidity of a single pair of openers (low ping and high ping), but this is how the community likes to do things.

Don't underestimate the volume of raiders who happily cheat. They just don't do it here. They can whine all they want that they're not happy with the state of the job, but Gruntler has the right of it, and so long as they continue to be part of the pollution, SE can't get the data it needs to appropriately adjust potency numbers should they change Anatman to give an instant GL stack in order to maintain balance. The more players contribute to and make excuses for unnatural gameplay just for the sake of hitting high numbers, the longer we'll have to wait for appropriate fixes and the harder it will be for SE to make the right adjustments.

5.1 Anatman isn't a good change, but certainly the lesser of two evils, the other being a job-wide nerf which punishes those of us looking into more natural openers. If it helps buy time and clean up some data for SE to make better fixes in 5.2 I'm all for it.