Quote Originally Posted by VentVanitas View Post
I'm gonna play devil's advocate and say that Bootshine's positional is really the only one that matters at this point anyway, most of our damage hinges on getting as many Leaden Bootshines out as possible. Not only that, but we have so much positional mitigation that I don't think much would change if some positionals were removed or not. Not that I'm saying that I want them gone, preferably I want all of them to stay and I am very confident that they're going to.

Can't remove identity from a job that doesn't have any in the first place as I like to say.
See, I disagree strongly with the idea that Monk doesn't have an identity, because it absolutely does as the game's fastest melee attacker. Unfortunately, it also currently has the single most punishing self-buff to lose in the game right now that is also one of, if not the most demanding to maintain. Positionals were absolutely part of that identity, especially as we entered Shadowbringers with more positional requirements than other melee jobs.

Monks. Have. Six.

All six of our primary weaponskills come with a positional requirement. Nobody else has to deal with that. SAMs could argue that missing their positionals is worse for them due to the lost Kenki. Dragoons can complain about their THREE positional requirement buttons. Ninjas have their three. I don't care. Monks have six.

Yes, SE did put most of the potency increase for landing a positional on Bootshine, while making it so that missing our positionals on our other buttons could be considered "negligible" if you're not interested in getting the absolute most of of the job. Yes, SE did provide us with two extremely potent ways to ignore them entirely, allowing for absurd amounts of uptime even under the nastiest swaths of AoE markers surrounding a boss. Both of those decisions were huge mistakes. This, in addition to much of our new kit focused on helping maintain Greased Lightning to the exclusion of nearly everything else, ultimately contributed to the job's currently underplayed state.

Yes, Monks can and do bring the damage to this day. But the job now revolves around Hittin' Them Bootshines to the exclusion of making the rest of our kit actually interesting to play with, and that sucks a bag of rocks. I would love to hear an explanation from the devs on why they have consistently left the job to rot between expansions and only now have finally gotten around to addressing a core design flaw with the job dating back to 2.0, but I feel like the answer would be incredibly disillusioning at best.