Make Monk great again! 5.4 Monk doesn´t feel like Monk anymore...

[ValStormbreaker]

new monk aint perfect but its a good base to improve upon for next expansion.

People have been saying this every single expansion thus far, and every single expansion we get two baby steps forward and two giant leaps backward, with job fixes being largely band-aid updates and needed reworks taking a backseat to Gold Saucer updates and fishing content. Monk mains have never, in the history of the game, had a decently-playable job throughout the story, and we only tend to get the mother of all band-aid patches after all the primary story is all said and done.

So, you can think that all you want, but as the saying goes, "fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice, shame on me,"... except for those of us keeping count, it's more like five or six times now already, so the trust that "next time they'll get it right for sure" is dismally low. This isn't our first rodeo, after all.

I've also come to learn that lots of people who claim to have been MNKs back in 2.0 or 2.1 are full of it, since I've asked them what MNK was like back then, and their answer seems to just be like level-synced MNK in Labyrinth. They don't seem to remember the god-awful primitive and slow combat in 2.x, horrible moves nobody liked such as Featherfoot and Haymaker, how PB was on a 3-minute cooldown in a time when a party wipe wouldn't reset your cooldowns so you had to sit and wait for a few minutes before attempting the next pull, or how you were a White Mage's babysitter because Blunt Resistance Down helped the healers regen MP off of their auto-attacks back when they didn't have better MP management tools and auto-attacks were a more major part of the combat loop as things were that slow and lacking back then. It's just something people claim to bandwagon onto popular sentiments and demand the simplification of MNK since they don't like weaving oGCDs and would rather the job be dumbed down than endure a learning curve.

What's more offensive to me than the state of MNK is a lot of the stuff SURROUNDING the MNK updates and the live letter. From how abruptly the MNK demonstration was cut off to spend absurd amounts of time on Triple Triad, to Yoshi-P admitting he doesn't really know how to play the job, to none of the changes not brought up in the LL being anything of note in spite of us being told there was more, to even the elemental fists being noticeably absent from the patch notes, etc... it feels like they didn't even start working on it until the night before the live letter and then went "screw it" for the remaining stuff they didn't cover. So much for being told that it would be so expensive and take two more months to do, and that they worked hard to maintain the busy feeling of the job, when it feels like it was rushed out in an afternoon at the 11th hour and it's actually LESS busy because we have even fewer buttons to push now.

[ValStormbreaker]

Meanwhile, Blue Mage gets the Suzaku kick (DRG gets to have Stardiver, but MNKs can't have nice things) and the raid gear doesn't even resemble Eden's features. I think the art director has some kind of complex about pirates, because we keep getting pirate attire and eyepatches when it's not remotely appropriate. I think they know it looks stupid on MNK because they use SAM in all the marketing images. *sigh* my kingdom for a Saint Seiya crossover... Alphascape had significantly more visually appropriate raid and tome gear IMHO.

As for Tornado Kick being useful... I think that's the biggest bait-and-switch ever. You could swap it out for Steel Peak or any other random oGCD and you wouldn't know the difference mid-rotation. TK used to be something you had to work for, and following one up with a recovery rotation to wind up a second volley was a maneuver which felt rewarding to pull off. As much as people didn't want to hear it, I have said elsewhere on the forums that in 5.0, before Anatman was forced onto the GCD as an anti-automation method, you could actually still do this if you cranked the speed high enough, and the adjustments needed to make it worth dropping your stacks to pull off were as simple as a minor buff to TK and shaving two seconds off its recast time. Now, it can be any [insert skill name here] ability with a 45-second cooldown timer, so it's not special anymore.

[Guesswhat]

...horrible moves nobody liked such as Featherfoot and Haymaker, how PB was on a 3-minute cooldown...

Those moves were good for solo play, but next to useless in parties. I liked them; not every skill have to revolve around party play. One ilm punch could have been useful outside PvP too, but SE rarely made it relevant in party-PvE, "the real way to play", so, of course, peeps complain.
Perfect balance on 3 min CD was overkill, yes.

As you mention later, Axe kick, imo, it could solve many "problems" with Monk's GL maintenance. In fact PB and AK could be everything Monks need to keep GL up on a rotation that could include Tornado kick. Form Shift could maintain it during long pause in fights. But SE decided to separate PvP and PvE from the beginning, thus not making this an option.

Imo, the removal of GL is another dumbing down to the lowest common denominator. Everything seemingly have to revolve around the holy trinity, and if not, peeps can't stop complaining and SE will eventually give in.

Keeping GL up was never that big of a deal, but apparently I'm in the minority on here. I agree with most that Stormblood, the "Monk expansion", made the Job much worse and that "fixes" they applied just messed things up further.

But it does not take away from my experience that I find doing dungeons to level as a Monk is more of a chore than the other classes, and this change to GL totally removes this negative feeling for me. If anything, it has made it one of the jobs I enjoy leveling now haha...

LOL, so since I like GL, should I expect SE to add similar mechanics to classes I don't like to level. Please, SE, add GL to Bard, else it's a chore to level it.
It's OK to not like every job and not have every job leveled. In fact, that there are jobs that don't cater to everyone, should make the game more interesting.
SE, of course, goes by majority vote. Understandable from a business perspective, yet disappointing as hell. Can't upset muh holy trinity!

[ValStormbreaker]

Those moves were good for solo play...

Being someone who plays a lot of Guild Wars 2 lately, I can appreciate the idea behind wanting Featherfoot as a dodge and Haymaker as a follow-up. It sounds great on paper. I don't think it worked out terribly well in its implementation and in practice, though, and that's regardless of whether we're talking about solo or group PvE. I don't think the game engine at its state at the time was really equipped to make the most of the idea.

I get that SE wanted to keep PvE and PvP separate, but it's not like there aren't PvE moves also present in PvP. They just work differently in PvP. My concern is the PvP-exclusivity of certain moves that would actually fix issues in PvE quicker and in a more cost-effective manner than waiting so long on allegedly expensive job changes due to schedule and budget reasons. Migrating a skill over to PvE is simple when the animation and icon are already in game, so there's no additional cost to make a brand new skill involved.

Speaking of Axe Kick, imagine if Anatman (which puts you into the Anatman "state" in your status enhancements) used pre-pull did what form shift does now (which is essentially only there to be like Meditation, where instead of having to push the button many times it just gives you all your chakra at once, so if the tank is a Leeroy Jenkins who doesn't give you a countdown, you can just start the fight without having to lose 3 GCDs waiting to go into Opo-Opo form), and maxed out your chakra stacks like meditation. Now imagine if it also changed Shoulder Tackle to SB-style Wind-Tackle. Here's what the opener would start out with:

Wind Tackle > Demolish > Riddle of Wind double-woven with Axe Kick

Congratulations, you're not even at the second GCD yet and you're now at max 3 stacks of GL in FoF. Do your vanilla ABC rotation and swap to FoW to get to 4 stacks.

I'll raise you another version. Instead of Wind Tackle, it's PvP Riddle of Wind, where each shoulder tackle gives you a stack of GL. You'd max your GL stacks before reaching the second GCD.

If you could get up that quickly, nobody would have an issue with GL. The problem is that they gave us an extra GL stack to go faster, but instead of keeping the ways of getting our stacks up that we had, they took it away, forcing us to take longer to wind up. That's kind of counter-intuitive to the idea to giving us an extra stack of GL, which is where the whole problem was. One step forward, two steps back. Not sure what the thinking was there, unless they were concerned MNK would be too powerful and they tried to shackle it back. In that case, I think the smarter thing to do would be to just make MNK play fluidly, and then deal with potency adjustments later as needed. Nobody cares how powerful the job is if it plays like garbage.

(continued in another post due to the character limit)

[Guesswhat]

I can appreciate the idea behind wanting Featherfoot as a dodge and Haymaker as a follow-up. It sounds great on paper. I don't think it worked out terribly well in its implementation and in practice, though, and that's regardless of whether we're talking about solo or group PvE. I don't think the game engine at its state at the time was really equipped to make the most of the idea.

Iirc it worked quite well when, lets say you solo a FATE boss. Combined with Keen Flurry the boss could stay slowed a lot. It certainly helped. Featherfoot guaranteed you get a proc on heymaker.
I agree that it doesn't have much application besides these kind of niche situations, but, imo, having niche actions gives the game more flavor. But, of course, maintaining these kinds of things isn't really practical with the philosophy SE have had towards the game since the beginning of FF14.

I find myself agreeing with pretty much everything else you say, however, the problem I had with SB expansion was mainly the slowdown of RoF, physical only buff on brotherhood and tackle mastery being too situational aka useless. I know I kinda sound like a hypocrite since I just defended Haymaker for niechness, but at the time SB came out, it was way too obvious SE weren't going to cater to anything else than mainstream appeal; the tackle mastery and physical damage buff thing were a really odd design choices with that in mind. SB was also the time they completely separated PvP and PvE which really left a sour taste in my case. Some of the ideas SE had on PvP Monk could absolutely "fix" the GL "problem" as you mentioned.
The worst part SB added though, imo, was random procs to Monk. I hate random procs; can't stand them. A personal thing I guess.

Imo, when it comes to monk, SE has always taken more steps backwards than forward, at least since HW.