Monk Needs a Complete Rework

[3ureka]

I'm not going to contribute much to this discussion other than I agree with most of the gripes about Monk.

I've been playing all Melee jobs in ShB. Really enjoy all of them... except Monk which I am currently leveling (75). The job has been a slog to level and feels super clunky. Rotation is confusing until you look up guides (the other jobs I found super intuitive in comparison).

Also spamming form shift between pulls/phases feels like some kind of archaic system from 90's PC gaming. Who thinks that's fun? And apparently this was a quality of life change RECENTLY... I also look like a total goof stomping the ground constantly. Is my character's foot asleep??

I'm totally in favour of a Monk rework. If this was the first job I decided to play as a new player I'd have unsubbed.

Thankfully, I haven't had to relive leveling monk from scratch, but I can imagine what a nightmare it'd be in its current state what with all the ogcds that were removed.

And yeah, Form Shifting to keep up your gl stacks is definitely a pain in the ass, but it's the only way to maintain them in most situations; it's the only fix we've got for an incoherent design.

[Sora_Oathkeeper]

I don’t think Sora meant TK being a “proc” as something random; it would be a reward for keeping max gl stacks for X amount of seconds (30 or 45 sound good).

Exactly what I meant, I was going to reply with many of the other things you stated like the chakras being 7 (14) in the job quest and they should stick to the lore rather than outside references. But I just gave up in my response after seeing Val still wants chakra procs to be RNG albeit at a higher rate, which is still stupid to me, just remove it and have positionals give chakras on certain weaponskills. Then it can be consistent and we don't need to fear drifting EF outside of raid buffs due to TFC taking priority in BH windows.

I don't disagree with everything Val said, I was preaching Axe Kick's inclusion into PvE back in HW days along with others but that feedback went ignored (as does all MNK feedback, even the JP players are tired of being ignored and neglected).

Honestly though PB being a set 6 weapon skills would be such a nice QoL. Because that's what every MNK is striving for and it's only cucking those with high latency. I understand the optimizations Val is talking about with FoF to realign Demo with RoF as I've done it, but it's against MNK staying fast so you intentionally slowdown, I honestly can't stand that 6SS, TK, Anatman and FoF optimizations force slowdown on MNK or to stand still it frustrates me that MNK feels like the only melee where the abilities actively fight you to go fast.

A form shift animation change would be nice, check out early HW footage of form shift it literally sounded like you were breaking vases underneath your feet when you stomped lmao. It had such a ridiculous sound effect in its first iteration.

[ValStormbreaker]

Response part 1 (ugh character limits XD)

Not sure...

The problem with the "higher ping players" argument is you're looking at something very situational and then asking for changes to the entirety of the player base to cater to a portion. That very line of thinking is what got MNK into its 5.x incarnation in the first place.

There are good reasons for why online games tend not to make concessions for people with high pings or bad internet connections. YOUR latency is YOUR problem, and YOUR responsibility. It is within your power to upgrade your net connection, or move to an area that supports a better net connection if online gaming is important to you (I did this myself when I first moved from the East Coast to the West Coast). If it's not within your power to do so right this very moment, it may be in the future if life circumstances permit or even require you to do so.

To impose game design decisions onto the entirety of the player base because some people have more latency than others is reckless and irresponsible. This goes doubly for players - many of whom I know on my own server - who are connecting to the game via a VPN from places like the Philippines to a North American data center. That's a choice they choose to make, and players who are actually IN North America shouldn't have to suffer consequences because someone chooses to subject themselves to latency issues. If I were visiting family in New Zealand and I'd be connecting to an NA data center with a bad ping, I would understand that I don't have a gun to my head forcing me to play a high-speed job like MNK or MCH, and can switch jobs at any time, unlike many other MMORPGs out there, and use something else my ping would be able to handle for endgame content. I would never, ever in a million years demand that the game change to cater to my situation, and would instead exercise personal accountability because the former is incredibly entitled. Japanese players are also extremely close to their data centers and it punishes them when they don't have latency issues. So, consider the broader consequences of catering to pings.

The argument that we should make all the things accessible because some people MIGHT want to try it is foolish. Not every job is going to cater to every player, and players who enjoy the job because of its speed and complexity are the ones who get shafted the most. That's not a risk I'm willing to take... again. Why again? What did 5.0 accessibility changes for players with high pings do to MNK in the end? We lost a bunch of oGCDs because double-weaving was hard for players to do, making the job far more boring and simple. Now it's the least played job in the game, and only garnered interest briefly because it was top of the tier list, not because it was more fun to play. I don't want a repeat of that, so let's learn from the mistakes of history, shall we?

[ValStormbreaker]

Part 2

I prefer being able to fit in as many abilities within the PB window as I can based on my skill and what I'm capable of doing at the speeds I'm capable of playing. Suggesting we force PB into a strict 6 GCDs would take that away from players like me, in order to make it accessible for players who aren't good enough to do it on their own, ping or no ping. That devalues actual skill and practice, and neuters the job further. No thank you!

Also, the fact that SE allows MCH’s...

How Machinist is designed is a mutually exclusive topic from how Fists of Fire works. We don't even know that the same people were responsible for the same decisions between both jobs. One thing has nothing to do with the other.

About the chakra gauge...

Wu Xing doesn't mean "five chakras," it means "five elements,". They are conceptually tied to the idea of chakra points on the body, and the system is still used as a reference in some forms of complementary and alternative medicine and martial arts in various Far East Asian cultures since it flourished in the Han Dynasty.

The reason it's not going anywhere is because it's of cultural relevance to the Far East Asian player demographic, and we're talking about a Japanese publisher. The likelihood that this will change because you want an alteration to the chakra system is small.

I don’t think Sora meant TK being...

I understand what she meant. It's still antithetical to the identity of the martial artist job. In fighting games, meter management is a thing you need to handle yourself. Making it a "reward" for keeping GL stacks up for what is pretty much the recast time of a True North is once again taking away a big chunk of agency from the player.

Whether or not you want to accept it, the double tornado kick opener is actually still possible in SHB. People have posted about this on these very forums before, myself included. It's extremely fun to do, too, and it is still viable for content, even if it isn't optimal. The problems with it which make the effort in pulling it off not worth it are only two things, 1) it's not powerful enough to justify dropping stacks, and 2) the 10-second recast time causes GCD clipping in specific situations. The solutions to this are very simple: buff TK and reduce its recast time by two seconds.

Then, those of us who actually ENJOY the opener and WANT to use it again have the option to do so. And pulling it off at high speeds requires skill, finesse and precise timing, so being able to do it feels like a reward for having skill. Suggesting making it a proc for doing something as braindead as not dropping stacks for 45 seconds not only removes the feeling of it being rewarding, it restricts how often it can be used and inhibits variety of gameplay. Again, this hurts the job further and restricts player agency by overly simplifying it.

[ValStormbreaker]

Part 3

Like you said...

MCH wasn't completely revamped mid-expansion into what it is now compared to Stormblood. If you want to have that discussion with MNK, save it for when 6.0 is around the corner, since it's not productive to have it in the here and now when there are more straightforward alternatives you're infinitely more likely to get.

Tying chakra generation to positionals is a taller order from a programming perspective than perhaps you're willing to give credit for. It also isn't a completely thought-out idea, since it means every 5 GCDs I'll have tFC and that not only causes balance problems, it disrupts the rhythm, beat and flow of the job's rotation, especially with how it plays on a controller. All the double-weaving MNK has is in the same sets of pairs, and that is what gives the job its waltz-like 3-beat structure. All of a sudden, what sounds like a simple idea on paper to you winds up opening a can of worms that just makes things more unnecessarily complicated and affects other parts of the job. You can't suggest stuff like that in a vacuum, you have to think of how it affects the package.

What you would like, in essence, is what I've been suggesting since before 5.0 then, and that's the inclusion of Somersault. It's a cool-looking oGCD that deals damage and gives a chakra, allowing for players to offset the sting of RNG with a bit more control. This way you're not stuck at 4 out of 5 chakras and get unlucky with RNG before your burst window runs out with nothing to do.

I can't stress this enough... I think if we could only ask for two major changes, and what we got was 5.1 Axe Kick from PvP and Somersault (with adjusted potencies, of course), rotations will be affected such that 90% of the problems people obsess over would minimize into non-issues and hair-splitting gripes. We'd get two oGCDs, have the GL stack issue solved, and have a bit more control over chakra, all while looking cool doing it. And the icons are already done and the animations are already made so there's very little time or cost needed to implement them. The only other thing I'd do is to buff TK and shave 2 seconds off its recast time and MNK is pretty much back in good shape and fun to play.

Couldn't ask for a simpler or more elegant solution if you tried.

But asking for things like trying to reinvent how chakra gain works and making TK into a skill that procs, and all that... that's just getting into "reinventing the wheel" territory and makes things more complex than it needs to be. If this is the nature of the suggestions that MNK mains have been giving over the past few years, then it's no wonder these suggestions aren't being implemented, because compared to "buff TK and slap two seconds off its recast time, and move these two pre-existing PvP moves into PvE," we're getting a bit lofty and leaping into "easier said than done" territory. Keep it simple, and you're more likely to get what you want sooner rather than later.

[ValStormbreaker]

snip

That's not actually what I was saying. I use a high speed opener which is viable, albeit not AS powerful, and is a variation on the Anatman opener that reduces the Anatman problems to a minor annoyance more than anything. No third-party tool use or anything, and I never switch back to FoF mid-rotation or do any of that. Imagine if the Anatman opener was buttery smoothe and had zero jankiness to it, was actually straightforward and didn't require any double inputs, with the only slight annoyance being from a possible and relatively minor pause for Anatman, which half the time is a non-issue. It feels so good to use, and it's not only viable in Savage content, and seems to magically line up with all the fight mechanics of every raid, but it also works really well for TEA without having to remeld or alter my rotation and I can keep consistent uptime.

What I was saying with regard to FoF is that players who have higher pings, as well as players who may have lower pings but just don't like to go fast, have the option to keep the damage output at a lower speed. You have to remember, the overall population of raiders in this game is small, so you will have players who want to dip their feet into a job but aren't necessarily going to be raiders. This is an accessibility option for those players.

My biggest suggestion 6.0-wise would be to separate MNK and SAM gear so they can be balanced separately. Right now, since they're shackled by gear, and are the ONLY melee jobs to share a gear set, when one is balanced nicely, the other winds up being total garbage, and when they're both balanced equally they both sit in the "mediocre" territory. It's like a see-saw of nightmares for both jobs. I'm willing to bet it's a headache for the devs as well, so it'd just be easiest to give SAM its own gear set and call it a day. Would probably work wonders for the cosmetics, too, since there's very little you can do with a middle ground for SAM and MNK glamour that doesn't just look ill-fitting on both.

I'm still waiting for my Saint Seiya crossover, Yoshi-P! :P

[ValStormbreaker]

I come from the fighting game community, so I like the idea of TK running on a meter management system, and I like how chakra is used for tFC and Enlightenment. What I don't quite like is that dropping GL stacks slows you down, and both GL stacks and chakra are an all-or-nothing sort of thing, so it's not like you can store them up for more powerful versions of the attacks (like EX attacks in Street Fighter). I don't mind SSS, because at my SkS, if you use it to disengage, by the time you re-engage you can use your GCD moves again, so it lines up very perfectly.

It really feels like 90% of the problems most players are experiencing with Anatman, SSS and TK are the result of slowing the job down for more power. And I get it, for clearing DPS checks this gives you better output... but it just feels clumsy and unnatural, so my rule of thumb is, no matter how much DPS it gives you, it if feels wrong, maybe that's not what you're SUPPOSED to be doing, even if you CAN. BUT, most of the talk concerning MNK is an outgrowth of very specific rotations people are doing at very specific skill speeds in accordance with the current meta, so there hasn't been a whole lot of experimentation encouraged as a result of the people who are driving the rhetoric and what they want to popularize. It's not popular to bring up that the double TK opener is still possible under the right conditions, and that its problems are minor and easily fixed in a few minutes with adjusting a potency value here and a recast timer there, so sometimes I feel like I'm the only one bringing this stuff up. At higher speeds, DPS optimization comes from being able to more seamlessly bounce from mechanic to mechanic and greed more comfortably with far less risk, so long as you can handle the speed it requires (which for me is still far too slow). I wish more people would try to spread playing the job like I do, and maybe they'd find a lot more comfort in it compared to what the Balance has been spreading. But hey, I'm not some celebrity in the community so nobody wants to hear what I have to say, even if people would really enjoy giving it a shot...

I actually recently tried out Black Desert Online's "Mystic" job, and OH BOY do I wish MNK in XIV played like that!

[Sora_Oathkeeper]

Val, you talk as if Somersault and Axe Kick weren't already requested to death for SB back in HW. They aren't doing it. What good is gaining a chakra from somersault when you are still at the mercy of chakras from RNG especially during BH windows? You will without a doubt miss out on the chakra multiple times unless they A) increase the chakra cap to allow small overflow or B) rework how chakras are gained so that it can be consistent.

What we're asking for by raising the chakra cap to 5 is to fit the LORE of the game. Not just a reference to far eastern culture. As well to not punish us for gaining extra chakras while already capped since they aren't in our control, especially during BH.

[Mahrze]

Response part 1 (ugh character limits XD)

You can actually edit your post to bypass the character limits. Just save your essay post before and put in something like "placeholder" since to place a reply you need at least 10 characters and "placeholder" is 10 characters.

Just a small QoL suggestion.

It really feels like 90% of the problems most players are experiencing with Anatman, SSS and TK are the result of slowing the job down for more power.

My issues with those skills is how counter-intuitive MNK is, they always try to go one direction but don't seem to know where said direction will take them.

As a Brawler in RPG fashion, the job doesn't flow compared to exmaples we've given before of games like other Main FFs, Legend of Legaia, Xenogears, Star Ocean and even some Tales of games.

Outside of those references my gripe is: Combos don't evolve, they don't extend/branch to anything. Fists would likely create a layer of complexity to branch or change combos but it seems that overall they want to make things as linear as possible and MNKs base design screams "I do what I want". And while I don't mind its versatility, if it loses some of it for the sake of some semblance of evolution and enhancement of gameplay then I am ok with that.

But I am convinced at this point I'll be pressing 3 buttons in 6.0.

[Yneko]

This is going to be long, so:

TL/DR: Brainstorms and arguments are good for us as comunity. but the problem is much deeper than that.

Now to the point:

I do not konw how to react to Val's posts as he:

1) on one hand wants everyone to get a good IP and VPN (which is not possible on PS4) and

2) wants different playstyles to be possible (they are talking about TK openers but those are a huge damage loss right now not only comparing to other monks but other melee too).

But their post have some point: They are promoting the CHOICE, while the reality is, there is no choice. Back in 4.2+ you could ignore TK rotation and still be viable (or only do TK at last second or RoF and nobody would notice), now, pretty much, you have one viable rotation and, depending on your ping+skill+party comp+add ons, 3 openers, with anatman being the best "all round" one (even the best choice for PS4 players). If we do not count "delaying buffs" to line them up, we are the only job whose performance relies on decisions made 10s pre-pull.

For me, the question RIGHT NOW is not what we want, but what DEVELOPERS WANT. It is clear, that we are abusing the job's design to either:

1) get the best performance or
2) get the best experience

and since those two are so different I think we should just ast the devs one question:

WHAT DO YOU WANT US TO DO?

and from the answer we can get giong.

We thought they want us to TK.
They made it more difficult.

We thoght they want us to hit positionals correctly.
They gave RoE a new trait.

And the list goes on...

I agreee with Val in many things, in many I do not.
I agree with many players posting in these forums, in many I do not.
The only thing I am 100% sure is - I do not know what devs want us to do and if we are doing it.
I even do not know if the PB burst isn't another Ninja "players found out a better rotation, so we changed potencies" which happened TWICE during HW.

EXAMPLE: double-true rotation I think they do not want to. It makes no sense to drop a buff and it looks like oversight from miles away.

Just tell us so we can give you a relevant response.
Shoha on SAM. SAMs were unhappy and they got one change in 5.1 (a big one) and another in 5.2 (getting freaking gauge!!!)
Why we can get this, please?

Just tell us what you want so we can tell you why it is not fun...