Monk - Quality of Life Change

[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...