Monk Needs a Complete Rework

[Maffis]

I'm guessing they might just remove the manual meditate in combat and add chakra-regen to Anatman.

[Macleod]

It also looks like the GL lightning effect on your character is now gone as well.

GOOD! Finally! Been hoping for this for so long, it's so annoying.

...sorry for those who liked it, I don't understand you, but sorry still lol...

[Recon1o6]

Why can't they just have auras as a toggle instead of constantly removing them! I want my darkside aura back, now they take away my wind punches...
As a monk who just hit level 52, picking up the job first time since my ARR alt, from what I see these look promising but time will tell.

GL now a trait, about time. Will it be 3 or 4 stacks though? if 3 what will wind stance change to? Or will we just lose the boost and go back to having earth and wind being useless again.

Tornado kick has turned into steel peak. Now we have two single target ogcds, we are back to where we were years ago. TFC, TK and EF, instead of Mercy stroke, Steel peak and Howling fist.

Anatman interacted with greased lightning so presumably that will be reworked. Hopefully to something useful.

SSS gives a movement speed buff...that looks interesting. Niche though but one I could see.

[VentVanitas]

Some things I noted upon watching footage again:

- Perfect Balance has 6 stacks, which means 6 Opo-opo skills and no GL refreshing to worry about. It also has a longer duration too, enough to comfortably perform 6 weaponskills. (Can't tell the exact number from the vod, could be 15-ish) None of that Riddle of Earth timing optimization nonsense, speaking of -
- Riddle of Earth is not on Yoshi P's bar, but Anatman is? They either axed it and didn't mention that or Yoshi P simply forgot to put it on the bar.
- Tornado Kick looks to have a 45 second cooldown, meaning it can still line up with RoF/BH. It also did 48k as a direct crit under burst, math heads that are smarter than me can probably estimate the potency from that.
- Chakra gen from Anatman isn't a thing, as Meditation is still there. It's new use is still unknown.

[RyuDragnier]

I have a feeling Anatman might have been changed to a party wide buff of some kind.

[ForteNightshade]

I have a feeling Anatman might have been changed to a party wide buff of some kind.

Doubtless since that would infringe on Dragoon's position as the middle ground DPS/rDPS job. If anything, I suspect Anatman just gives you Chakra. Either a guaranteed amount or works similar to Mediate from Samurai.

[RyuDragnier]

Doubtless since that would infringe on Dragoon's position as the middle ground DPS/rDPS job. If anything, I suspect Anatman just gives you Chakra. Either a guaranteed amount or works similar to Mediate from Samurai.

I kinda wish it'd reset the cooldowns of certain oGCDs or lower them a bit, but I understand how insanely crazy that'd be. But if Fists of Earth and Riddle of Earth is gone, I suspect it'll be replacing Earth's Reply as the "ignore positionals for 30s" buff.

[SpeckledBurd]

So on the one hand, the new changes don't look any worse than the current Monk iteration. That isn't exactly a positive but it isn't a negative either. We can finally use Tornado Kick in a developer mandated way instead of abusing their oversight to do it, which is a positive.

For the most part though, as a rework this really doesn't fix many of the problems that people have with the job. It won't get completely screwed by Down for the Count transitions and it's recovery from them and Death will be improved, but otherwise the problems people have with it still seem to be present. IE:

The Fist Stances are still there and unchanged from their base design of set the one with the highest DPS and forget it forever.

RNG Chakras are still there and frankly nobody likes them.

You can still only use Chakra when capped which is at extreme odds with RNG Chakra. Even if they proc on every crit there needs to be some overhead if players don't want to lose Chakra.

Brotherhood in the same vein seems to still be RNG based which, as mentioned, people very much dislike, and which works very poorly with the current Chakra implementation.

6SS is still an extremely lackluster Capstone and more in line with an ability you should get at about level 46. Adding 5 seconds of sprint to it really doesn't fix Monk's major mobility problem.

Speaking of, Monk's mobility is now slightly worse because we're going to be sitting in Fists of Fire near full time again.

As for things we don't know but I'm really not confident in the answer to:

What does Anatman even do at this point? It's current implementation is truly worhtless and it won't work with out Greased Lightning. If they keep it as it was and it just prolongs your current stance then it's utterly worthless (which might be the case since it's still on the GCD). Otherwise I have no idea what else it might be unless they've turned it into a Riddle of Earth that no longer requires a hit to proc (since RoE wasn't on Yoshi's Bar), and at that point they may as well just remove all of the positionals from Monk.

Does Brotherhood still only proc on Weaponskills? Much of the problem with this skill is that it's party comp dependency is a double whammy of disappointment. It doesn't just only benefit physical party members but also makes Monk feel bad outside of a Full 8-man party with a single caster.

Overall for something called a "rework" it's really pretty lackluster and it seems more like they're wiping the table clean so they can make the actual changes in 6.0. That isn't a problem in and of itself, but messaging it as being a Rework when it's more like a pre-rework cleanup that they're letting us use is pretty disappointing.

[Controller]

Yeah form what we were shown they seemed to not fixed anything. The fact anatman is still there along with the fist stances makes me worried. They atleast made TK useful tho so there is still hope. The fact that TK doesn't steal stacks anymore and is now a normal OGCD makes me happy. We can now TK to the best of them and be tougher then leather, unlike ninjas we don't chuckle.. we rather flex our TKs.

[Ramura_Sono]

So that LL huh? My thoughts on the changes:

Tornado Kick - pretty much turned into Steel Peak.

Form Shift - gives "Formless Fist" which allows you to use any move without having to cycle forms, cool QoL I guess, no more screwed up openers in casual content because the tank is impatient and pulls immediately.

Six Sided Star - The same, except it now gives a speed boost. ...OK? I'm not sure why they did this, but if I had to guess it's probably because we're defaulting back to Fists of Fire now so we don't have the passive speed boost from Fists of Wind. It apparently has a "very high potency" but I'll wager it's still worth 2 weaponskills like it is now. We'll see how this changes once we have the potencies.

Perfect Balance - I really enjoy this change, no more skill speed melding hell.

Anatman probably just exists to freeze the timer for Formless Fist if I had to guess. It'll probably still be useless no matter what change they give it though to be honest. At least we no longer have that disgusting opener to worry about.

I need time to mull over these changes but I'm disappointed that this was apparently worth waiting until 5.4 for? Was figuring out the potency changes really that hard?

The worst part is they wanted us to wait until 6.0 for this.