Monk Needs a Complete Rework

[wereotter]

I'd actually point at Warrior's ARR/HW Wrath/Abandon Stacks as the prototype for most gauges rather than Chakra. Pretty much the entire baseline was there, they actively built in combat and you could spend them on a Single Target or AOE potency dump. It's much more similar to the gauges we see on many jobs.

The point of Chakra in Heavensward was fairly clear. It really wasn't a system to begin with, you never hit it in combat because it was always worse to use it over an actual weaponskill, it was just a downtime loss mitigation tool so Monk could have a big hit after losing it's stacks and coming back. It's more of a precursor to Samurai's Meditation or Dancer's Improvisation than it is towards actual job mechanics. The fact that it had Purification attached to it is more an aspect of Purification's terrible design than it is that they conceptualized Chakra as a system IMO. Most of its problems as a gauge now can be laid at it originally being a downtime mitigation skill that was lackadasically hacked into a Gauge while still trying to cling to it's roots as mitigating downtime loss which ultimately made it unsatisfying as a gauge skill and worse for downtime.

I never played Warrior in ARR and wasn't familiar with the job then... but I can see how that was an even earlier start to the system. Though I thought wrath stacks in ARR just provided potency buffs? I feel like I never saw warriors drop it in combat, but maybe I'm remembering incorrectly.

But it does feel like Monk ends up being the testing ground for job mechanics that get polished when moved to other jobs while monk keeps the klunky unrefined version. Greased Lightning and Chakras being the start, the Riddle of Earth being more the precursor to Improvisation and Meditation (although monk also got Anatman for that same type of situation)