Monk Needs a Complete Rework

[SpeckledBurd]

All specialized options punish players for using them outside of their intended situation. Xenoglossy/Senei/Bhavacakra when 2+ targets are present? That's a DPS loss. Even during forced melee downtime, using Piercing Talon in any but 1 GCD in 5 or Throwing Daggers in any but 1 GCD in 3? That's a DPS loss. Apart from punishing faltering awareness or physical handicaps, optimization exists primarily through those exact kinds of compromises, albeit in many more shades.

Monk just runs the odd line between "This is so crap otherwise that you obviously shouldn't use this..." and "This looks cool; surely I can use this more often than I seem to be able to?" atop perhaps the worst obfuscation of core elements among any job.

AOE options and Single Target options like Foul and Xenoglossy aren't necessarily a good comparison to things like Tornado Kick and Six Sided Star. The use cases for AOE skills is trash elimination in dungeon content which is like 85% of a dungeons duration, the uses for single target skills are bosses of dungeons, and 8-man content. Between those two types of content there's very obvious uses to those skills and ample opportunity for them. Tornado Kick's use case is "Execute at the end of a fight or dungeon because keeping my stacks is more valuable, unless there's a transition that takes forever mid fight where you also don't have to move at all so Anatman can be used" which is basically never, coupled with a cool animation and a high enough potency that it frequently serves as a trap for new players, and Six Sided Star's "Slightly longer but not quite so long disconnects" also with a cool animation and a high potency.

[Renkei]

I'm not sure what numbers you're looking at, but a lot of your MNK parses are wrong. Unless you can give a source to where you got those numbers.

Here's the current rDPS standings in FFLOGS as of today:

MONK

E5S - 19,827.67
E6S - 18,223.72
E7S - 18,430.14
E8S - 16,067.73

DRAGOON

E5S - 19,721.15
E6S - 18,899.32
E7S - 18,323.13
E8S - 15,791.82

NINJA

E5S - 19,655.62
E6S - 18,669.65
E7S - 18,215.48
E8S - 15,989.42

Sources:
E5S
E6S
E7S
E8S

At 99th percentile Ninja is ahead of both, DRG and MNK in fights that have more frequent disengages (E6S, E8S and is practically tied with it on E5S). Samurai just blows them all out the water though unfortunately.

This raid tier overall has been pretty diabolical for Melee with buffs, SAM's been pretty lucky in the sense that it doesn't have oGCD buffs such as: Lance Charge, BL, RoF, Brotherhood, TA windows etc. all of which can contribute to its higher DPS because these fights have multiple phase changes during buff windows which either get forced out of alignment. Needless to say SAM is naturally OP anyway, but this raid tier has really shown its strengths and brought to light just how far behind the others are. I'd say the balance between MNK, DRG and NIN is for the most part really good. So while yes, at max percentile MNK, with perfect RNG on crits, chakras etc MNK is ahead. It becomes a lot more even at the 99th percentile when you don't get the God runs, though still slightly ahead.

Still hoping for some changes to play for MNK in 5.3 considering they said there would be more job adjustments. Will our feedback fall on deaf ears or will they finally change some of the more immediate problems to at least make us fun to play again?

I used the same thing as you but didn't use a 2 week metric as i feel as its inaccurate. SAM has the least positional and loses the least potency from missing them, they also have a 880 Potency a minute AOE Catching Counter attack. I am hoping all 3 Melees in this area get slight buffs or changes. They never fixed DRG's 10 second timers either. :[ I don't think the jobs are balanced enough, Playing Samurai myself i feel as if Samurai has all these tools baked into their kit that gives them rewards but hardly anything to punish them, 1.2 seconds of casting isn't very much for how high their mobility is and their lack of chunkiness.

[Ultimatecalibur]

Or... Hear me out. What if they just changed GL from being the most unresourse like resource to exist in this game into not being something else. I don't understand people's obsession with trying to change the main rotation of the job by introducing new GCDs into the mix. When the single best course of action is reworking how GL interacts with the kit or just simply remove it entirely and just make it a passive trait.

Fixing GL will not fix all the problems the Monk has. There is also:

• a Calcified (nearly Fossilized) core gcd rotation that lacks the flexiblity that the original Form based Combo system implied when compared to the 1-2-3/4 system of every other melee class/job
• 3 Elemental Fist stances that tend to end up having 1 useful stance and 2 stances with limited use even in optimization.
• secondary resource that the monk has no direct control over generating unless they are not currently engaging a target (they are then unable to utilize the resource until they reengage with a target),
• (as you point out) a bunch of niche abilities with overlapping purposes of which their usefulness is more determined by fight timing than by how they interact with the job's rotation.

A rework needs to fix all 5 problems and removing GL/turning it into a passive trait just won't do that.

These 6 abilities interact/manipulate GL in some capacity in extremely niche ways that could just be solved with 1 button press. We lose out on so many awesome potential abilities cause, SE keeps trying to give us tools to mitigate downtime that we have nothing outside our standard 6 GCDS and a handful of oGCDs during uptime.

Perfect Balance was the original quick GL generator cooldown with additional open access to the Monk's two utility abilities (Rockbreaker for AoE silence and One-Ilm Punch for buff stripping). Reducing it from a 4 minutes cooldown, to a 3 and later 2 minute cooldown made it vastly more usable but the fact it makes all weaponskills usable no matter form requirements ends up forcing button bloat when adding new weaponskills.

Form Shift has been probably one of the most cheered Monk additions even when its primary purpose was to let the Monk start fights/phases with DK->TwS->Demolish. The StB additional ability to maintain GL made it even more useful. Only real problem with it now is that it requires 3 gcds to refresh GL.

Tornado Kick had a very niche position from the start. In some fights it never needed to be used while other fights you needed to use it regularly and you needed to know the exact times and hp%s to properly use it. It has a 10s cooldown and little reason to use it that often.

Riddle of Earth's original implementation is perhaps one of the best examples of why stance locking abilities is a bad idea. It required pushing 3 ogcd buttons to extend GL and sacrificing damage dealt to reduce damage received isn't a trade most players will happily make. ShB's addition of the ability to ignore positionals for 30s every minute might be overkill for making the ability useful.

Anatman is a flavorful ability (standstill and charge up) that fits the job fantasy but suffers from FFXIV's fight design that either wants you moving when not hitting a target or is doing a cinematic cutscene. High end fights don't really want you sitting still doing nothing for the 12s to 14s needed to charge up. Anatman was also made a gcd action because SE didn't want to require player to use a server tick tracker to play the job optimally/near-optimally.

Six-sided Star is a good example of an unintuitive and seemingly unnecessary ability that doesn't really fit. How is this even a capstone ability?

It would also help tremendously if SE would let MNK evolve and change from expac to expac instead of living in ARR but with fewer oGCDs and 5% faster.

The rotation isn't even really living in ARR. In ARR you could intermix Touch of Death and Fracture to realign your rotation if it was desyncing.

[Shurrikhan]

AOE options and Single Target options like Foul and Xenoglossy aren't necessarily a good comparison to things like Tornado Kick and Six Sided Star. The use cases for AOE skills is trash elimination in dungeon content which is like 85% of a dungeons duration, the uses for single target skills are bosses of dungeons, and 8-man content. Between those two types of content there's very obvious uses to those skills and ample opportunity for them. Tornado Kick's use case is "Execute at the end of a fight or dungeon because keeping my stacks is more valuable, unless there's a transition that takes forever mid fight where you also don't have to move at all so Anatman can be used" which is basically never, coupled with a cool animation and a high enough potency that it frequently serves as a trap for new players, and Six Sided Star's "Slightly longer but not quite so long disconnects" also with a cool animation and a high potency.

And I'm not saying that's okay, but it is disingenuous to pretend Monk is unique in having priority conflicts or situational skills or that those concepts are inherently flawed. They're not. It's a matter of their presentation.

I used the same thing as you but didn't use a 2 week metric as i feel as its inaccurate. SAM has the least positional and loses the least potency from missing them, they also have a 880 Potency a minute AOE Catching Counter attack. I am hoping all 3 Melees in this area get slight buffs or changes. They never fixed DRG's 10 second timers either. :[ I don't think the jobs are balanced enough, Playing Samurai myself i feel as if Samurai has all these tools baked into their kit that gives them rewards but hardly anything to punish them, 1.2 seconds of casting isn't very much for how high their mobility is and their lack of chunkiness.

The potency of their counter attack is only the difference between its efficiency and that of the most efficient consistently available shared resource spender, Shinten. It's therefore a bonus of 60 potency, less than a positional, per use, not 220, or at most 240 ppm.

And Midare is plenty chunky. (I kid; I realize you meant clunky.)

[Mikey_R]

Dragoon Reporting in, Right now it's mostly Samurai, Monk and Dragoon are doing poorly along with Ninja, Though Ninja has the most powerful disengage option. Monk Out Performs Both classes and the majority of the fights with the exception of the second fight of course.


E5S > E8S.

MONK
21,641.7
18,633.2
21,072
17,682.5

DRAGOON
19,845.2
19,153.2
19,408.2
15,591.6

NINJA
19,706.8
18,470.1
17,543.0
15,431.8

Except the original point made by Noctisnine had nothing to do with DPS and everything to do with how the job plays, which is a common misunderstanding that people who maybe don't play monk frequently have.

[Ruiknao]

Looking to throw out an idea I’ve been having with Greased Lightning recently. I was playing FF7R and I remember how Tifa can use an ability to build up her Chi level, increasing her damage dealt. Then at the cost of a Chi level can use a strong attack. I’ve been wondering if Monk can do something similar with Greased Lightning.

For example, they could increase the duration of Greased Lightning to 45 seconds, and when that runs out, only one stack fades and the duration resets. However, instead of Snap Punch, Demolish, or Rockbreaker building GL stacks, they could possibly use Form Shift or Anatman. Anatman can grant a GL stack upon use and Form Shift can do the same. Meanwhile, Snap Punch, Demolish and Rockbreaker can reduce the recast timer of Anatman by 5 seconds, quite like WAR’s Infuriate. With that in place, they could add a new attack that costs one GL stack with the damage it deals based on the current duration left on GL, with a lower duration dealing more damage.

While I don’t know how well this idea can work, I think it would make GL feel more like a resource to keep track of, and help MNKs recover from deaths a bit more easily.

[Mikey_R]

Looking to throw out an idea I’ve been having with Greased Lightning recently. I was playing FF7R and I remember how Tifa can use an ability to build up her Chi level, increasing her damage dealt. Then at the cost of a Chi level can use a strong attack. I’ve been wondering if Monk can do something similar with Greased Lightning.

For example, they could increase the duration of Greased Lightning to 45 seconds, and when that runs out, only one stack fades and the duration resets. However, instead of Snap Punch, Demolish, or Rockbreaker building GL stacks, they could possibly use Form Shift or Anatman. Anatman can grant a GL stack upon use and Form Shift can do the same. Meanwhile, Snap Punch, Demolish and Rockbreaker can reduce the recast timer of Anatman by 5 seconds, quite like WAR’s Infuriate. With that in place, they could add a new attack that costs one GL stack with the damage it deals based on the current duration left on GL, with a lower duration dealing more damage.

While I don’t know how well this idea can work, I think it would make GL feel more like a resource to keep track of, and help MNKs recover from deaths a bit more easily.

Some things wrong with this;

1. You want Monks to slow themselves down by losing a GL stack to use a strong attack and then use a GCD to get the stack back, making that rotation; Strong attack -> No Attack -> back to normal, remembering you get a slowdown after your strong attack, which people generally do not like (look at old RoF), add to that any oGCD in that is used after that strong attack would do less damage, if this happens to be something like Elixir Field, it can start to drift away from landing in RoF.

2. Going with how that would feel to use. You use a strong attack, you spend a GCD doing basically nothing, and then you get back to what you are doing. That would just completely destroy the flow of Monk and also how it would feel to use it. It would feel like you were being punished for being right.

3. Assume Anatman went back to an oGCD so you don't have the situation described in point 2. Then I would personally feel that it is extra button bloat for no reason. Just have this strong attack be a GCD on a 45 second cooldown like Gnashing Fang on GNB or Drill on MCH. They are basically the same things and from my personal opinion, I would prefer the cooldown GCD.

4. Your change to GL mechanics, I assume every time you refresh, you gain a stack and it resets the timer, however, why have an attack based on a knife edge like that. People will want to push that attack right to the last second, but what if they miss, the lose a GL stack just before the attack goes off, they are now 2 stacks down. No other job punishes this harsh, the closest i can think of is BLM, even then though, they have plenty of time to get everything they need in (and their damage isn't based on how low the enochian timer is).

---

As a general comment, for the most part, when I see suggestions to Monk, they always seem overly complicated and with the fact SE want to make the jobs simple, that seems counter intuitive. Don't keep something and try and find a weird obscure mechanic just to keep it relevant. If it doesn't provide something, get rid of it (fist stances), for things to add, why not look at what we lost and maybe change them a bit (ToD, but tie it to a cooldown, again like MCH Drill), of which you can then go every tick, or every other tick, gain a Chakra, there you go, a guaranteed way to generate Chakra and it brings back an old ability.

For Tornado Kick Change GL slightly so that when you use a Coeurl ability at max stacks, you gain additional stacks that do nothing for damage/speed, but at 3, you can spend them for a free Tornado Kick, when GL4 becomes a thing, you can store 4, but TK still only uses 3, giving a bit more flexibility in how you use it. You could potentially add the ability for these extra stacks to be a GL lifeline, if you have an extra stack, when your GL runs out, it consumes one to keep you at max GL.

I've just been giving basic ideas here, feel free to comment. Good, bad, hmm, interesting etc. Personally, My idea of monk would be to go back to what I thought ARR monk was, and that is a fast, high crit job. We have the fast, but the high crit is lacking. Bring back Internal Release, change Dragon Kick to a Crit buff, or even a Direct Hit buff, solves the leaden fist issue of making bootshine such a high damage skill and has that feel of a crit machine. Again, you might not like that idea, so feel free to comment.

[Crownshorts]

What are everyone’s feelings about monks reliance on positionals?

Monks definitely seems to be the class with the biggest focus on positionals, with almost every ability having a bonus based on position. I am not a big fan of positionals, but I will admit I am a very casual player and still learning.

Do you think monks should have their positional abilities toned down a bit, or are they good where they are?

[Seto_Mimyho]

snip

1. Gonna disagree here, While it's true the GCD rotation is archaic it's not as bad as you might think it is.
Rotation wise we have 2 branches of skills; Damage + Buffs/Debuffs.
Damage: Bootshine, True Strikes, Snap Punch
Buff / Debuff: Dragon Kick, Twin Snakes, Demolish

We have 2 rotations in use at current; Standard of Alternate Twin + True & Double True Strike.
So a rotation could look like this: (assuming mid-fight with all stacks of GL) DK ->Twin->Demo ->BS ->True ->Snap ->DK ->Twin ->Snap ->BS ->True ->Demo
or
DK ->Twin ->Demo ->BS ->True ->Snap->DK ->True ->Snap ->BS ->Twin -> Demo
Looking at other classes

• NIN follows your 1-2-3/4 rotation
• SAM goes by 1-2-1-3-4-1-5-6
• DRG is 1-2-3-4-5-1-6-7-5-4 and can not deviate in the slightest without breaking combo.
• meanwhile MNK could follow 1-2-3-4-5-6-1-2-6-4-5-3 or 1-2-3-4-5-6-1-5-6-4-2-3

2. Agreeance here, but it's not that bad just bloats buttons that could be fixed by making them traits or just combine all into one
3. I do wish that Chakras weren't as RNG as they are, but they're not detrimentally holding the class back
4. As said, They interact with Greased Lightning, if they didn't have that caveat they could be fleshed out and used more freely (Mainly TK + SSS)

I do appreciate you reiterating the abilities I listed, but you got some things wrong with them. Mainly:

• PB's CDs were 4 minutes to 3min to 1min up to the current 2min. And optimally speaking while it may open all your buttons, you're only going to be using it to spam Dragon Kick and Bootshine with 1 Coeurl move / RoE to refresh GL.
• Form shift didn't get the GL refresh until Shadowbringers, not Stormblood. (assuming StB is Stormblood).
• TK is a weird one, while necessary in some places, it never got its chance to shine as it did during patches 4.25 to 4.55. The Tornado Kick Rotation was one of the single most accidentally amazing things to come from Stormblood MNK thanks to Wind Tackle + 1m PB.
• RoE never needed 3 oGCDs to activate you'd just hit it and it'd shift you into FoE and then only needing 1 press to go back to FoF. But back in SB, this was one of the only ways to keep GL during long disconnects if you didn't use TK cause you knew you can keep your stacks and PB was on CD.
• Anatman is just bad even if thematically it would make sense. Why does it have the caveat of needing to stand still to maintain GL when every other class has ONE button they push to maintain their class buff. it being on the GCD doesn't help either since it just makes it clunky to use.
• SSS is a, "I fucked up Perfect Balance and need to quickly fix my stacks." Button or a Finisher button along with TK

And MNK is stuck in ARR, with or without ToD / Fracture. Your core rotation doesn't change at all from Level 50 and you don't have the oGCDs to fill up space like other classes do or the intuitive gauges as they do.

[Dyvid]

Though I've only recently starting leveling MNK, it seems to be a job of contradictions. You build up Grease Light to improve DPS then spend it for a Tornado Kick. You stop DPS to push Mediate only to do a meh DPS attack. Just a weird way to do business.

The two key features that standout for me are GCD speed and abundant requirement of Positionals. That is what really makes Monk unique and that is what should be built on.