Monk Needs a Complete Rework

[SpeckledBurd]

Clearly not all. I saw "doubles recast time" and thought "Oh, primarily a disengage; could be pretty useful." My disappointment was only that it was too lowly tuned to ever be anything more than a disengage.

What's especially frustrating about Six Sided Star being just a disengage, beyond the obvious problem of Monk's kit already being a graveyard of overly situational skills, is that this expansion has seen multiple capstone abilities that are simultaneously the powerful satisfying big hit you want your capstone skill to be while also being skills that provide other utility. Just to name a few examples Star Diver is both a powerful oGCD that's satisfying to use and an additional gap closer every 60 seconds, Xenoglossy and Scorch are powerful finishers without cast times allowing for free movement (and in Xenoglossy's case you can stack them to use three consecutively with proper timing), and Shoha is both a free shinten every 40ish seconds and an additional source of potency from meditating in downtime.

If Six Sided Star had that kind of smart design and there were situations where you could use Six Sided Star without the extended recast while it still had the recast as a disengage tool, such as getting a free cast during Riddle of Fire or from Proccing Earth's Reply, then it wouldn't be nearly as controversial of a skill as it ended up being.

[Shurrikhan]

What's especially frustrating about Six Sided Star being just a disengage, beyond the obvious problem of Monk's kit already being a graveyard of overly situational skills, is that this expansion has seen multiple capstone abilities that are simultaneously the powerful satisfying big hit you want your capstone skill to be while also being skills that provide other utility. Just to name a few examples Star Diver is both a powerful oGCD that's satisfying to use and an additional gap closer every 60 seconds, Xenoglossy and Scorch are powerful finishers without cast times allowing for free movement (and in Xenoglossy's case you can stack them to use three consecutively with proper timing), and Shoha is both a free shinten every 40ish seconds and an additional source of potency from meditating in downtime.

If Six Sided Star had that kind of smart design and there were situations where you could use Six Sided Star without the extended recast while it still had the recast as a disengage tool, such as getting a free cast during Riddle of Fire or from Proccing Earth's Reply, then it wouldn't be nearly as controversial of a skill as it ended up being.

While I completely agree as to how SsS failed compared to the wonderful likes of Star Diver*, especially, I don't think it even needs special circumstances or like. It just needs decent potency.

With, say, a 20% Crit Chance (2855 Crit), our average PPGCD at speeds capable of sustaining Twin Snakes until just short of Twin Snakes itself via a typical Double-True rotation (which then means clipping a tick of Demolish per Demolish), is roughly 6260 effective weaponskill-potency over 18 GCDs, or roughly 348 weaponskill effective ppgcd (prior to GL, since that'd be constant anyways).

For SsS to run equal that with that, it'd need 561.5 potency (which is twice the above effective eppgcd minus the value of the chance of generating a 5th of a TFC, divided by the Twin Snakes multiplier and base Crit effective damage multiplier [crit-chance times crit-damage multiplier]).

If we didn't want it to be used constantly, but did want it to see use for rotational sync and multiplicative burst, we'd just set it to, say, 540 potency, a positional short of standard rotation as if to compensate for the fact that it has no positional and can be used at any time. And I could have sworn that was much nearer the originally advertised potency than what we ended up with, too...

Much like TK, SsS's failure seems a case of the devs not trusting players to be able to do the math and thus squishing a skill down entirely to niche use through potency adjustments, such that all but one of its originally intended uses are obviously disallowed, rather than trying to provide sufficient in-game tools to deal with the game's complexity. That, more than anything, seems to be what really holds Monk back, especially when devs are so satisfied by their own intentional gutting of an ability that they assume it could never come back beyond its adjusted (overly limited) capacity -- see RoW-TK Monk and the lack of fluidity adjustments introduced with that skill despite making a very different playstyle optimal. We have a lot of tools that easily could have made sense and played synergetic parts with each other, but instead they get squandered because the devs only want to deal with the symptoms of skill-gap rather than its roots (i.e. by making the actual complexities of the game more accessible).

* I pointed out Star Diver in particular because it fits perfectly with Dragoon's playflow and how its optimization as a whole tends to work and feel. It's a skill that can be used at any time within a 30 second period, banked for mobility or damage, while also hitting plenty hard. Xenoglossy, on the other hand, is nice but is effectively bloat -- what could have been just a trait, an upgrade to Foul itself to cause it to change animation and deal higher damage when only the initial could be hit. Shoha, while now fitting cohesively with Iajutsu (albeit with certain new issues caused), was originally even more controversial than SsS just because it tried only to supply one purpose -- to effectively double the potency-per-tick value of Meditate -- much like the downtuned SsS and got in the way of SAM's incredibly fixed, incredibly tight rotation.

[wereotter]

Shoha is both a free shinten every 40ish seconds and an additional source of potency from meditating in downtime.

Funny you should mention Shoha....

Remember when Shadowbringers launched and samurai got it's first niche disengage/boss jump skill as a capstone skill and the samurai community lost their collective minds and burned down the forums to the point that the developers completely reworked the skill into being part of their rotation?

Yeah, I do too... <stares directly at Tornado Kick and Six Sided Star>