Monk - Quality of Life Change

[FoxCh40s]

Hi, first post here.

Ever since I started playing, I always found Monk to be very clunky and disappointing (why can't I use tornado kick more often???). I wholeheartedly agree with other posts on this forum asking for complete rework, but I don't expect a huge change until at least next expansion. So I thought about what could be tweaked to current Monk abilities to make it less dissatisfying and less clunky to play. I think small changes can be implemented mid-expansion so I put together some ideas and put it into an image.

https://imgur.com/gallery/pkAyBnM

These don't change the fundamental gameplay but do address some of the core issues (or at least what I think are the most dissatisfying things about the job), such as constant positional change, chakra overflow, tornado kick and six-sided star that barely get used, clunky opener with anatman, and perfect balance.

Please let me know if the link doesn't work. I just wanted to include some visuals instead of just walls of texts.

See, this is the kind of stuff I'm talking about! A singular person can come up with such amazing and excellent ideas that actually fit, not only the lore, but abilities of the class, but a WHOLE TEAM of employees cant?

I LOVE the ideas, and cannot fathom how the Dev team didnt think of this first.

[Seraphor]

See, this is the kind of stuff I'm talking about! A singular person can come up with such amazing and excellent ideas that actually fit, not only the lore, but abilities of the class, but a WHOLE TEAM of employees cant?

I LOVE the ideas, and cannot fathom how the Dev team didnt think of this first.

It's not that they can't think of it, as much as they can't make up their minds, because they're an entire team and not one person.
They also have to play test it all to make sure it all works as intended, and is still balanced, and they have more people to find flaws in these ideas where one person acting on their own can easily overlook them.

For example, the 10 Chakra's would mean you can get two Forbidden/Enlightenments out at once.
It wouldn't really serve as a crit-proc buffer as much as necessitate the use of two of these within a RoF window in place of one. (three with the RNG-less Brotherhood changes)
This would mean the potencies of both of these skills would need to be reduced.
And you're still hitting them when you cap at 10 Chakra, bringing you back down to 5, so as not to waste crit procs.
You're then just hitting buttons more often for no significant QoL gain.

This, combined with the Tornado Kick/Six-Sided Star changes TC proposes, along with Anatman working its way into the rotation, would basically mean you're increasing your APM considerably, on a job that already has high APM, with potential for forced double or even triple-weaving to hit burst windows, and potencies would be reduced for balance.

[Carstien]

These are well thought out changes, can't dispute that but for me they would mostly be uninteresting. Sss and tk have niche uses right now but removing those uses so you can have an extra button solves nothing. I like the chakra change but not the brotherhood one, I like being the theme and feel of the skill and for every time I get very little chakra there is another time where I get lots.

Likewise why take the tight timing requirement from pb and replace it? Gearing correctly so you can hit 6 actions and timing your cast so you don't press too early and waste time is a part of optimisation that your change would remove. While monk has problems it's at least in a place where optimisation feels satisfying due to the difficulty of some parts, I wouldn't want to go back to easy street.

[VentVanitas]

These are well thought out changes, can't dispute that but for me they would mostly be uninteresting. Sss and tk have niche uses right now but removing those uses so you can have an extra button solves nothing. I like the chakra change but not the brotherhood one, I like being the theme and feel of the skill and for every time I get very little chakra there is another time where I get lots.

Likewise why take the tight timing requirement from pb and replace it? Gearing correctly so you can hit 6 actions and timing your cast so you don't press too early and waste time is a part of optimisation that your change would remove. While monk has problems it's at least in a place where optimisation feels satisfying due to the difficulty of some parts, I wouldn't want to go back to easy street.

Yes, SSS and TK have uses, but they aren't even good at their own niches because of how specific and overall meaningless they are to the kit. They are capstone skills, they should be apart of the main rotation like a lot of others are and especially because MNK is so visually boring without being able to use them. There is no point to having them interact with GL anymore because all we need is Form Shift. I seriously have no idea why anyone would bother with keeping those ridiculous caveats and restrictions to skills when NO OTHER class has them for their own. It's a stupid idea and it needs to die.

It may be just a quick band-aid fix that won't solve anything in the long run (which is the intention of the OP as they're supposed to be minor changes to tide us over until a proper rework), but it's leagues better than what we have to put up with now with it's 6 weaponskill monotony every 2 minutes or so. Having independent GCDs on cooldowns gives us a buffer to move into positionals. It's why many MNK players are still sore about the removal of Touch of Death/Fracture.

I am aware that current Brotherhood is one of the few skills that actually adheres to Monk lore/canon in how it functions. But there are better ways to achieve that than by making MNK so dependent on specific team comps and RNG. By all means, I would like a skill that has both lore consistency and good play feel. But being at a disadvantage by default when other party members aren't is bad game design, especially when other jobs don't deal with this problem as much as MNK does. I hate not having full capability of the job just because of both luck and not having DNC, or DRG, or SCH in the party. Those are things outside of most players control. It's why SE has taken efforts to tone down synergy between jobs.

[SpeckledBurd]

Yes, SSS and TK have uses, but they aren't even good at their own niches because of how specific and overall meaningless they are to the kit. They are capstone skills, they should be apart of the main rotation like a lot of others are and especially because MNK is so visually boring without being able to use them. There is no point to having them interact with GL anymore because all we need is Form Shift. I seriously have no idea why anyone would bother with keeping those ridiculous caveats and restrictions to skills when NO OTHER class has them for their own. It's a stupid idea and it needs to die.

It may be just a quick band-aid fix that won't solve anything in the long run (which is the intention of the OP as they're supposed to be minor changes to tide us over until a proper rework), but it's leagues better than what we have to put up with now with it's 6 weaponskill monotony every 2 minutes or so. Having independent GCDs on cooldowns gives us a buffer to move into positionals. It's why many MNK players are still sore about the removal of Touch of Death/Fracture.

I am aware that current Brotherhood is one of the few skills that actually adheres to Monk lore/canon in how it functions. But there are better ways to achieve that than by making MNK so dependent on specific team comps and RNG. By all means, I would like a skill that has both lore consistency and good play feel. But being at a disadvantage by default when other party members aren't is bad game design, especially when other jobs don't deal with this problem as much as MNK does. I hate not having full capability of the job just because of both luck and not having DNC, or DRG, or SCH in the party. Those are things outside of most players control. It's why SE has taken efforts to tone down synergy between jobs.

On Tornado Kick, it's not just that Form Shift makes the skill irrelevant either, it's that by every indication the devs don't want us to use it with its current effect. On top of Form Shift we have Riddle of Earth and Anatman which were both means of upkeeping it, plus they nerfed Perfect Balance knocking our recovery back to near Heavensward levels of bad because we... were using Tornado Kick. By all rights they've gone to more effort to keep us from using Tornado Kick to dump our stacks than it probably would have taken to give it a different effect.

Six Sided Star meanwhile is also just totally redundant. We already had a skill for making up the damage on short disengages, it was called Meditation. There didn't need to be a second one, especially when the rest of the kit was so lacking.

[Sora_Oathkeeper]

On Tornado Kick, it's not just that Form Shift makes the skill irrelevant either, it's that by every indication the devs don't want us to use it with its current effect. On top of Form Shift we have Form Shift and Anatman which are both means of upkeeping it, they nerfed Perfect Balance so our recovery would be worse because people were... using Tornado Kick.

Six Sided Star meanwhile is also just totally redundant. We already had a skill for making up the damage on short disengages, it was called Meditation. There didn't need to be a second one, especially when the rest of the kit was so lacking.

Six Sided Star literally has one niche that COULD have been useful in Pre-ShB, but with the QoL improvements in ShB, it's intended use was dead on arrival (at least I assume it was intended...). The use being: There used to be fights where you couldn't control what form GCD you ended on (unless you waited in Coeurl for example) and short phase transitions lasting 10s+ could result in GL3 dropping off, however this could be nullified by ending on a Coeurl hit, often it was better to wait 1-2GCDs just to ensure you could keep GL3 up. Six Sided Star nullified that one tiny niche MNK suffered from pre-ShB. And as you said, downtime mitigation was from meditate.

Six Sided Star is just such a weird ability. Anatman already made 6SS's GL extension aspect useless, and meditate was already a thing. So I don't know why the devs felt it was necessary to include this kind of niche skill when the niche it was created for was already filled by anatman and meditate...

[Ramura_Sono]

It's not that they can't think of it, as much as they can't make up their minds, because they're an entire team and not one person.
They also have to play test it all to make sure it all works as intended, and is still balanced, and they have more people to find flaws in these ideas where one person acting on their own can easily overlook them.

Except they've literally said that they don't know what to do with monk. It's never been a case of them being unable to make up their minds because they have a plethora of ideas for the job.
Also "play test it all"? They arguably don't play test monk at all. Skill canceling in ARR, TFC clipping with GL3 in HW, TK Rotation in SB, Combos not receiving the timer increase because of forms. If they have an entire team testing, they sure do a piss poor job of it.