Quote Originally Posted by Sora_Oathkeeper View Post
If we look at this log, Bootshine accounts for 1.7m worth of damage, while Demo (including the upfront damage) and Snap are 1.2m and 1.06m worth of damage respectively. That's a huge 500k worth of damage over Demo and over 700k worth of damage over Snap punch.
Just going by Total damage dealt by each doesn't actually tell the whole truth. You need to also look at the number of hits with each ability and the average damage of each form's gcds.

Bootshine dealt 39.5k per hit on average with 45 hits, Dragonkick dealt 20.3k per hit on average with 48 hits, Demolish dealt 45.2k per hit on average with 30 hits and Snap Punch dealt 21.3k per hit on average with 50 hits. On average the Opo-Opo gcds dealt about 29.6k per hit with 93 hits and the Coeurl gcds dealt 30.26 with 80 hits. For additional comparison, Twin Snakes dealt an average of 15.8k per hit with 39 hits and True Strike dealt 23.9k per hit with 38 giving Raptor form an average of 19.79k per hit with 77 hits.

Please note: I originally attempted to do the math to support you premise that Bootshine was doing to much damage even though I saw a flaw in your argument (You were comparing Bootshine to Demolish and Snap Punch individually rather than comparing the average form damage of Dragon->Boot and Demo->Snap->Snap) but it turned out to favor the idea that both forms are actually dealing fairly balanced damage. Heck the math even shows that the new rotation is more evenly distributed on average than the StB rotation which heavily favored Coeurl form moves.

Looking at other jobs in the party, no other job has this huge discrepancy of damage between its skills.
Paladin has a bigger discrepancy if you look at Atonement alone being one of the dominant sources of damage followed by Goring Blade and forget that Atonement needs the Royal Authority combo. In the end The 5 gcd Holy Spirit+Confietor string ends up having the highest average damage once you factor in that Atonementx3 is actual a 6 gcd string.

The Leadened Fist buff actually ends up evening out the monks damage distribution even if Bootshine does become a spike.

It just seems like the devs had no intuitive way to make DK relevant, so instead gave a huge buff to Bootshine through DK. This then makes Bootshine the worst skill to miss a positional on as it's 150 potency gone (the equivalent of missing 7~ positionals).
Missing the positional on Bootshine isn't as bad as you make it out to be because a Crit still has a chance to occur even without a positional. In theory you could miss every Bootshine positional and still do the same damage as someone who hit every positional. It is still bad but closer to missing 4 other positionals rather than 7.

I just fail to find the rationality behind frontloading an ability like that instead of spreading that potency elsewhere and making DK more interesting or at least have relevance with the MNK aesthetic, such as why is a kicking move giving us a fist buff? Do we scrape our hands along to ground to harden them up while performing dragon kick or something? It feels like MNK is still actually just a PGL with some minor MNK-esque skills, most of which are relatively niche or locked behind RNG.
I think their intent was to maintain the single target benefit when converting Dragonkick's single target blunt resist down debuff into a damage buff while maintaining the alternating between Dragonkick and Bootshine portion of the rotation. In the grand scheme of things Bootshine and Dragonkick end up averaging into a 250 potency attack with about a 66% crit rate if all positionals are hit.