Monk Needs a Complete Rework

[Sora_Oathkeeper]

snip.

To add on to this; if one ilm punched was needed for certain content where a chain stun or stun resisted enemy existed and forced One Ilm Punch into being needed then it would force a MNK spot for that fight. Which is poor design. I've noticed that Shurrikhan likes to play devil's advocate a lot on these forums even when there's really no grounds to stand on like this One Ilm Punch arguement for example. The skill was bad, it was always bad. The only time it wasn't bad was in PvP because it could remove aetherflow from SMN and SCH and shut them down then it got nerf. Then it was reworked during the pruning era, which is ironic into something still completely useless in 99.99% of encounters, even in the 00.01% of encounters where it 'could' be useful, it still felt bad to use as you either drop twin or lose a true strike. The better option would always be to use leg sweep. There really isn't an arguement to be had here. OIP is and has always been useless in PvE content because it filled a niche role which cannot be made viable as it would then become mandatory, and even then it would still feel like crap to use for the reasons I mentioned.

[SpeckledBurd]

Fun strawman. Fun hyperbole.

It may be hyperbolic but it's not a Strawman, you're just trying to shift goalposts from your original position which was:

You know what else prunes situational utility you find useless without demanding that no one else have access to it?

Taking it off your bar.

With regard to One Ilm Punch and it not being removed in Stormblood. Your argument was not that we should keep situational skills in favor of things that might or might not be an improvement, you actually just argued that One Ilm Punch was Situational Utility and should have remained in the game when it never was that.

My point was that One Ilm Punch could never be considered situational utility, it was always useless. As a Dispel there were no worthwhile enemies to use it on that also had effects that the Dispel would remove, presumably because if it did Monk would be essential in every party. So yes, keeping it was an absolute failure on the devs part when their philosophies for job design were removing and reassessing useless actions and giving every job a Gauge UI element. They failed in removing it, and they failed in reassessing and reworking it because it's new effect was equally worthless compared to its Heavensward effect. As a stun you couldn't reliably use it because it was both on the GCD and locked to Raptor form, and the undiminishing effect never came into play presumably because it would also make Monk essential for any party doing that content.

[Malmstrom]

Today I learned that One Ilm Punch supposedly had situational utility and we should have kept it.

JUST LIKE TORNADO KICK AND ANATMAN, RIGHT.

[Shurrikhan]

...

Stoneskin and Damage stacks in Wanderer's Palace; King's Might, Lightning Shield, Stoneskin in Amdapor Keep; certain bot buffs in T2; Stoneskin in T4; snake damage stacks in T5... As with any and all CC, OiP had plenty of things it could have been used on when launched, and yet only the T4 Stoneskin skip would have in any way made Monk obligatory; the rest were merely compensation for Monk's long wind-up (albeit far less punishing back then, as it started at only a 5% damage bonus per stack, not its later 7% or 10%) alongside its host of other situationals.

But, also like CC, it left two options: (1) continue to make things the mechanic could interact with and then not make enemies arbitrarily immune to it, (2) render the utility defunct and then remove it by not bothering with any of those mechanics or going out of the way to kill the ability.

Since HW launched, or arguably even since AK was nerfed (since it removed the ability to apply no-direct-potency DoTs to incapacitated targets without breaking the incapacitation, removed the accidental safety period in which incapacitation couldn't be broken, and nerfed CC across the board), the game has only gone in the second direction.

OiP was killed. --> CC was killed. --> All but two defensives on each non-tank job were killed. --> Tanking having to actually face enemy targets to block, parry, and auto-attack? Better remove that dross. --> Wait, there's still more than one defensive on non-tanks? Trim it! --> So on and so forth.

And why? Because something was specifically reduced to being situational enough to be called "useless", and rather than fixing the problem behind that uselessness (surrounding designs either inadvertently or specifically rendering it unusable), players insisted that we just amputate it entirely.

The question then becomes... what's next?

Stances are presently useless, so let's remove them rather than fixing them. GL's basically a non-mechanic, so let's remove it rather than making it interesting. We don't need so many DoTs, right, so let's trim Monk's ability to manage its GL timing through stanceless skills them. Positionals are basically irrelevant, so let's remove them while purposely ignoring how they were rendered far less manipulable by the last three things we removed.

It may be hyperbolic but it's not a Strawman, you're just trying to shift goalposts from your original position which was:

If I call it X and thereby argue Y on the first post, call it X and thereby argue Y in the second, and call it X and thereby argue Y in the third post, how am I shifting the goal here?

Yes, I've called OiP a situational utility. Because it was. It was undertuned and all forms of generally shat upon through the consequences of poor design decisions elsewhere, but it was a situational utility.

Anything situational has varying relative cost and benefit. Anything with benefit and zero cost that you nonetheless don't bother to use -- such as Mantra, Diversion, Shadewalker, and the like -- are not situational. They're non-essential, to a varying degree, but there is no real excuse for not using them. Not using them is not a matter of "the payoff wasn't enough to make it optimal", it's just you being lazy. The closest we've seen to OiP in terms of situational use have been Merciful Eyes or Purification when they provided massive enmity drops, to use or avoid based on how much tank rDPS could be gained for not having to keep up with you, or caster Raise or Manashift, although all but Purification more often came near to obligatory due to their low relative costs, while Purification was undertuned for any Monk in an already more or less ideal comp (as they would already have access to Tactician).

Now, is OiP the "hill I want to die on"? Not remotely. Its removal is just another symptom of people requesting ambutation over correction even when the thing they wish to remove has zero obligatory or negative impact on them (i.e. unlike Fire II in leveling roulettes, you could just remove it from your hotbar and never look back). It should be clear by now which I'm more peeved about.

So, for the last time, since you've so far accused me of giving undue praise to the devs in reply to quotes where I have only shown criticism and mourning the loss of OiP in particular where I've only used it as an example of, just as I've voiced several times prior in this thread, actually fixing things instead of just scrapping them and throwing in new BS in a haphazard hope to fill the void:

I do not care about OiP in particular. I care about not ignoring growing design issues that render unusable skills that should be useful. I care about fixing, rather than nonchalantly removing, core job components that still have significant potential, wherever possible.

[IruruCece]

The only "situational utility" OiP had was occasionally letting me see a pretty neat animation.

Basically nobody asked to lose the buttons we lost between Stormblood and Shadowbringers. Maybe the mythical "on the fence maybe I'll try monk some time" player that doesn't actually exist but somehow is always around to say Monk has always been too hard to play, maybe they asked for it. Maybe THAT is why the job has been consistently underplayed even when it's been at it's best, maybe that's why SE has consistently failed to make Tornado Kick worth the space in our character sheet, maybe that's why stances are essentially worthless.

The job has been dealing with mechanical issues surrounding the same set of buttons for years. SE clearly doesn't know what the heck it's doing with Monk, beyond keeping some buttons in there because of sheer intertia at this point, and overcompensating for other issues to the severe detriment to the rest of our kit. I would rather they rebuild the job from scratch or just delete it from the game at this point.

[Tigerlilley]

Today I learned that One Ilm Punch supposedly had situational utility and we should have kept it.

JUST LIKE TORNADO KICK AND ANATMAN, RIGHT.

God. When Anatman was first theorized about by the Monk community as being the potential crapstorm it turned out to 100% be, I was thinking, surely not. Let's trust this one time maybe that SE have not done that thing we all worried about.

I swear, who ever developed Monk in the first place left the building and -never- came back.

[Shurrikhan]

I swear, who ever developed Monk in the first place left the building and -never- came back.

If such is the case, many here seem not to have even seen their work before their departure.

[3ureka]

Not sure if this needs its own thread or not, but I'll just post it here to begin with.

Has the idea of getting rid of the timer tied with GL stacks ever been considered? Several jobs have resources that don’t expire: MCH’s Heat and Battery; SAM’s Kenki, Sen, and Meditation Stacks; Ninja’s Ninki and Mudra; DRK’s Blackblood and proc from breaking TBN; GNB’s Cartridges; WAR’s Beast Gauge; etc. Admittedly, the latter mentions are tanks, but I have a point that I’ll get to shortly.

In the case of SAM, I think it’d be hard to argue that buff expiration is an issue for them, seeing how once you apply Jinpu and Shifu in an engagement, they will likely be refreshed without any worry (that’s a little subjective, but what’s *ob*jective about it is that both of those buffs are 40 seconds… more than double the duration of GL). Best case scenario you can get both of these buffs up in 2 GCDs (via an inefficient use of Meikyo); worst case, you have to go through 6.

If you Form Shift (we’ll come back to this in a second) to Coeurl form before an engagement, best case scenario: you use PB and can hit GL4 in 4 GCDs; in the absolute worst case… (and this is considering you didn’t pre Form Shift or use PB) 12 GCDs to GL4. Also, reverting PB’s CD back to 120s was a mistake (at the very least make it 90 to line up with RoF and BH).

On the topic of Form Shift, it’s only useful now because of how incoherent MNK’s design is. If we got rid of the timer on GL, there’d be no need to constantly be stomping to refresh the timer; yes, we’d lose the ability to enter Coeurl form pre-pull, but I think replacing Form Shift with some other weapon skill or oGCD would be worth the trade. Form Shift is also only ever useful during downtime or pre-pull. You wouldn’t ever use FS when you could instead use a damaging weapon skill. So many other jobs (like the ones mentioned above) have skills to instantly generate resource at the press of a button with the only caveat that they be in combat (this is where I wanted to reference the tanks, esp GNB and WAR with Bloodfest and Infuriate respectively). Instead MNKs have a way to expend our most precious resource. Tornado Kick is an awesome skill and I love how often I get to use it! (:

Out of the classes I’ve played, I think DRG shares the most pain points with MNK in that they have no way to rapidly get into Life of the Dragon and are strictly gated by the cool down of High Jump. I don’t know how SE handles how they approach each job’s design, but you would think that for DoW/M jobs, they’d keep the combat experience first and foremost in their minds. Maybe they’re balancing around Dungeon/raid content, in which case keeping up buffs is a little easier because you’re in combat; but for overworld stuff, it’s almost painful to attempt anything as MNK or DRG.

[SpeckledBurd]

-Snip characters-

The problem with that is that all of the jobs you mention, who have longer duration buffs that basically don't fall off due to their duration, have other systems in place that give them engaging gameplay rather than just upkeeping a buff or two. The Sen/Iaijutsu and Kenki on Samurai are the primary parts that inform Samurai's gameplay, while Shifu and Jinpu contribute toward the Sens in particular (and also provide speed and round out the flow of its skills). Ninja is the same way, it has Huton as a buff to maintain, but its actual gameplay is informed by it's Mudras, Ninki, and the rest of its oGCDs.

Dragoon is a decent comparison to Monk in terms of gameplay but I don't think they share a lot of pains, rather I'd say that Dragoon is an example of how a buff similar to Greased Lightning was built upon in an intelligent and satisfying manner. It's Blood of the Dragon, not Life of the Dragon that's the equivalent to Greased Lightning, while Life of the Dragon is something that Monk lacks that it could sorely use. Both Blood of the Dragon and Greased Lightning are similar in that they're buffs you are incentivized to keep up at all times to do decent damage, Monk through buffing all actions, Dragoon through extended Combos and buffed Jumps. Life of the Dragon however is a reward for proper upkeep of that buff (it's most direct equivalent is actually Foul/Xenoglossy to that end), but that's something Monk just doesn't have at all. So while it is a slower build, it's a slower build for a good reason and it neatly punctuates it's buff and ties into the jobs identity (Spear Knights that Jump on things).

Monk has neither of these things. Other than Greased Lightning, it has forms which only allows its combos to flow differently which after you learn it isn't much more engaging than the standard combo progression of others jobs. It doesn't have an adjacent system you have to work Greased Lightning around in the way that Ninja and Samurai have on top of their own buffs. Nor does it have some reward for upkeeping its buff, in Monks case the buff is the end rather than a means to a greater end like Enochian and BoTD have evolved into. And on top of that they've trimmed so much out of the job from expansion to expansion with the vast majority of additions being either Greased Lightning upkeep (that was bad and we no longer need now that we have a skill that just works) or worse replacements to what we lost, that there's nothing satisfying to us at the moment.

A while ago there was a suggestion I saw to the effect of giving Monk something similar to Sabin's Blitz's from FFVI which would be cool, but probably wouldn't happen outside of an expansion dropping so it's unlikely to happen any time soon when there's need for change right now. At the moment however the job is pretty much primed for the latter, when have Six Sided Star and Tornado Kick both of which are woefully underutilized in our kit (seeing 1 use total in a fight pretty frequently, which is the exact reason they changed Shoha on Samurai). It doesn't solve the problem of Anatman existing when it literally never should have to begin with, or the Fist stances never having the problem they've had since 2.0 fixed while they continue to soak up trait slots making them utterly worthless at the same time, but like the 5.05 changes it would be a step towards something better.

But without Greased Lightning, Monk loses it's identity in this game. That is what defines Monk for better or worse, and I think without it Monk would be even more boring than it is now.

[Noctisnine]

Live letter soon maybe they will talk about monk even if briefly, fingers crossed <3