Monk Needs a Complete Rework

[Sora_Oathkeeper]

It's the least played job in the game currently by a fair margin if we use fflogs as an indicator. Granted it's not 100% accurate naturally but it gives an accurate enough metric. The only place it's not bottom is in the current Ultimate. Outside of that it's bottom, and for a good reason, the job has barely evolved and become stale. I had high hopes for MNK going from SB to ShB, especially when Yoshida said the job he was impressed with during development for ShB was MNK. Really? Reflecting back on that statement I can only imagine Yoshi never touched MNK before then because it plays exactly the same just with different niches /shrug.

The job really does need some love. The only engaging part about the job is positionals imo. Outside of that it's very lackluster. Hoping it gets brought up in the live letter in a couple weeks.

[SpeckledBurd]

It's the least played job in the game currently by a fair margin if we use fflogs as an indicator. Granted it's not 100% accurate naturally but it gives an accurate enough metric. The only place it's not bottom is in the current Ultimate. Outside of that it's bottom, and for a good reason, the job has barely evolved and become stale. I had high hopes for MNK going from SB to ShB, especially when Yoshida said the job he was impressed with during development for ShB was MNK. Really? Reflecting back on that statement I can only imagine Yoshi never touched MNK before then because it plays exactly the same just with different niches /shrug.

The job really does need some love. The only engaging part about the job is positionals imo. Outside of that it's very lackluster. Hoping it gets brought up in the live letter in a couple weeks.

Yeah, it's actually less played now than it was when I noticed that trend a couple of weeks ago. Then Monk was still behind but relatively close to some of the other jobs in a few fights, now it's behind by a thousand plays or more in basically every tier. You could attribute it to it being the end of the patch cycle, but the ratio widening doesn't suggest that people are enjoying it.

I'd also say it isn't just that the job has become stale, though that's a contributor, it's also that the devs left many of the complaints from Stormblood unaddressed or doubled down on them. People hated how Monk was Physical comp dependent and nothing changed on that front, it plays poorly with Casters or Ninja and it's mudras due to neither party benefitting from Brotherhood for example. People hated double RNG gating for Deep Meditation, and we've still got that albeit at a higher percentage, but without the ability to boost the RNG in our favor through Internal Release so we have to rely on Scholar, Dragoon, and Dancer. Tackle Mastery was memed on for most of Stormblood because even at its most useful you still largely wanted to be in Fire stance because it offered the most DPS, and even with Tackle Stacks from wind stance you still spent most of a fight in fire, now we're in Wind stance all the time to the point where the other stances may as well not exist.

It'll be a shame if we don't get mentioned in the Live letter, because beyond 5.2 its pretty much hopeless that we'll see any change. They'll officially have left the job in a place the players dislike for four years.