Monk Needs a Complete Rework

[SpeckledBurd]

For a quick rework that could be done mid expansion I'd say you could probably do something like this and keep most of the job animations as is:

Delete the Fist Stances or turn them into traits. Add a backstep/Teleport at 40 to replace Fists of Fire, a ranged poke at 34 to replace Fists of Wind, and move Formshift down to level 15 where Fists of Earth was so the first 37 levels of dungeons are never a miserable game of losing your stacks again.

Howling Fist is returned at level 46. It is now a Weaponskill and no longer on a 60 second cooldown, you now build a meter as you maintain Greased Lightning over a certain period of time which allows you to execute this once its full. This provides further incentive for Greased Lightning upkeep and rewards doing so.

Enlightenment at level 74 is now a straight upgrade to Howling Fist in potency and animation.

Dragon Kick is changed to a 14 second self buff towards something. Let's say crit. This eliminates using Perfect Balance as a means of spamming leaden Bootshines which opens it up to be a recovery tool.

Tornado Kick is now our AOE Chakra skill. This provides Tornado Kick a function that doesn't hold our recovery hostage and gives us an AOE use of our gauge at a reasonable level.

Perfect Balance can now have a 60 second cooldown now that there's less incentive to use it for huge potency gains.

The Chakra Gauge now builds to 10, with you being able to build to 5 out of combat via meditate. Forbidden Chakra and Tornado Kick both cost five stacks. This eliminates overflow.

Chakra now builds by one stack every time you refresh Greased Lightning, eliminating annoying double Crit RNG and party composition dependence for good RNG and allows us to hold gauge for buff windows so we can take advantage of them.

Greased Lightning 4 is now independent of stances as they no longer exist.

Brotherhood no longer provides Chakra. Using it grants you a stack of an effect which grants you a certain number of free Tornado Kicks or Forbidden Chakras. This eliminates party composition dependence for Chakra during Brotherhood windows, overflow of gauge when you have good RNG, and not getting any chakras when RNG is bad.

Anatman now refreshes current form duration, Greased Lightning, and builds a Chakra Stack. This fundamentally just makes the skill as good as Umbral Soul, it refreshes your buff and builds resources all in one.

Six Sided Star is the higher potency, single target version of Enlightenment and Howling fist.

The Potency for basically everything would need to be tweaked because there's enough new sources of potency that its sure to be out of wack but I'm not going to spitball numbers. The point of this is to add certain things that are missing from the kit, eliminate the RNG layers that people hate, the Comp dependency people also hate, and ensure that we're using the majority of our kit and not just 60% plurality of it at any given point. Some of the changes are similar to what other jobs have but frankly, I don't care? Other jobs have copied mechanics from Monk near whole cloth and improved on them (and I’ll admit that the Howling Fist/Enlightenment/Six Sided Star change is inspired by Foul/Xenoglossy), if it improves Monk then they should be copied back to the OG.


I also don't think it's a bad thing to copy those elements onto Monk if they're functional. Other jobs have copied mechanics from Monk near whole cloth because they worked well and then improved on them, if it improves Monk then they should be copied back to the OG. Monk will still play fundamentally differently to Black Mage even if it has something similar to it’s nukes. Monk’s an agile Melee, Black Mage is a turret. Two resources building similarly isn’t going to suddenly turn one into the other.