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

[ValStormbreaker]

Ok grandma. See u in 2 years maybe, knowing the pace I'm going I doubt I'll get to ~relevant~ content til then lol :P

At the pace you're currently going at, having started this month, you could hit current content in a week or two. It's not difficult. Then again, being an obnoxious little snot in an MMO to people trying to give you some helpful advice is not a great way to make friends or influence people, so good luck finding people to play with who are willing to help you with that kind of attitude. Have fun!

[pinkbubblegum]

I didn't start this month though. I started like... half??? a year ago...? There are so many sidequests and achievements and crafting and gathering to do. Why rush it xD

You do you. My only advice is that, she does have a point that most jobs really don't feel/play like themselves until cap. Being that you're working on all of them I'm sure you'll find the ones most fun for you. Have fun!

Aw thanks! Super nice of you u w u

[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)

[Anhra]

I think the Monk rework turned out really good, it might have still some minor issues but overall, i think that Job is heading into a good direction.

[ValStormbreaker]

(continued from a previous post) I had no issue with SB MNK. The rotations were fluid and great, though the internet appeared to be garbage at explaining it simply, making it seem more complex than it really was. I will concede the only issue it had for me was the inclusion of several layers of RNG for a job that shouldn't have had any to begin with. That was a big problem. Otherwise I think SB MNK was probably in its best form during Alphascape, and the main issue was the jargon-heavy explanations with graphs and flow charts which are not the best way to communicate this info to another human being.

Speaking of SB MNK, it was hard for them to find statics because it couldn't compete with the Piercing Resistance Down combo of DRG and BRD, and NIN buffing damage, even though technically MNK was more powerful than either of the three. I can't help but feel that if they updated the Blunt Resistance Down to still assist with healer MP regen instead of allowing it to be a vestigial feature that no longer served its intended purpose. healers would want to have a MNK in the party just in case, and it would still have a place.

Speaking of, prior to the potency changes, my stance on Leaden Fist Bootshine is that putting all your eggs in one basket was leading to the abuse of LF BS spam, and bizarre rotations around exploiting it. Instead, what they should have done is split that 150 potency 6 ways between your main weaponskills, so Leaden Fist would just be a 25-potency increase to all your main skills.

As for GL, even if they did what they did, I think they could've kept the meter and treated it like BLM's Enochian, where you still need to race the clock to keep your stacks up to access certain powerful moves. That would still make it more engaging. I think that the combo enders giving GL stacks could have and should have been replaced by giving chakra, instead of doubling down on the RNG mechanics which MNK really shouldn't have, making rotations plan around chakra gain instead of relying on luck from critical hits, resulting in a more reliable DPS output rather than random variance.

(continued again in another post due to the character limit)

[ValStormbreaker]

Seeing as Brotherhood is now double-woven with RoF in place of Internal Release, instead of used a GCD later, it doesn't make sense to have a 15-second duration instead of sharing RoF's window. That being said, I don't get why PB has the 15-second duration AND a cap. If you kept your GCDs rolling, hitting 6 moves inside a 10-second PB is easy. If you can't keep your GCDs rolling... you're failing at basic gameplay, and probably don't deserve to hit all 6 GCDs. To me, this encourages GCD clipping and a safety net for sloppy gameplay. Ping is not a factor when you can auto-queue the next GCD in sequence (this is built into the hotbar, so you don't have to spam the button). The only reason MNKs wanted to get 6 moves inside PB is that was the most we could get, and the idea wasn't about 6 so much as just making the most of our short windows. If we had the full 15 seconds, we'd be able to make the most of our BH/RoF burst window, and that would lend to greater rotational flexibility. Caps make sense for NIN's Ten-Chi-Jin because you can't move until you commit to three moves, but MNK's PB window is a very different animal from NIN's Mudra system, which excuses GCD clipping (something unacceptable to MNK uptime), so it seems like a lot of lip-service for a change that affects nothing for people who know how to keep their GCDs rolling, but enables sloppiness for people who struggle with basic law-of-the-land gameplay. To me, that enables poor gameplay, not helping to lower the skill floor appropriately. Most of all, it ruins the potential of a 15-second window and how creative we might've been able to get with it.

Mr. Happy is at fault for ardently promoting this one, believing that "Monks want 6" instead of "Monks want to make the most of whatever they can get inside this window," which, fun fact... at the right speeds, could be 7. Now that's impossible for the folks who figured that out.

[ValStormbreaker]

I think the Monk rework turned out really good, it might have still some minor issues but overall, i think that Job is heading into a good direction.

These aren't "minor" issues. RoE's rework makes it impossible to do any of the fights in the previous two raid tiers without suffering a 30% DPS loss, which is catastrophic. The job is now slower due to the "always be in Fists of Fire" requirement, with the other two elemental fists being now outright useless in combat, since it also reduces our movement speed, making it more difficult to disengage for certain mechanics. Also, it is more boring because there is now less to do, when the major complaint of 5.0 MNK was that they removed too much and needed to put stuff back as the job felt slow and clunky. Baking GL into the job as a trait didn't actually change any of the rotations, either. The clumsy rotations are still the same, even without Anatman there, because Anatman wasn't the only thing that made the rotations clunky or clumsy. There were other issues, too. SSS is still not going to be used by 99% of people as a disengage tool because the recast time is still too slow, resulting in a DPS loss over just re-engaging with your regular GCD moves. The movement speed addition doesn't change that. Anatman is still in the game, it still clogs hotbar space instead of something better, and it's now even more useless than it was before.

All of these things actually make Monk fit the battle content WORSE than before. Even if you were to argue that the GL change itself was good... the other changes were not.

See, I'm not just making an empty statement like "it might have some minor issues overall, I think that the job is headed in a good direction,". I'm actually breaking down what the changes are, and how they affect gameplay, and assessing the impact of the changes. I can back up what I'm saying there. You'd have to address all of these points and explain to me how you think this constitutes moving in a "good" direction when the job now no longer fits the battle content. I won't deny that some of the adjustments were good, such as not having to spam Form Shift in dungeons anymore... but the drawbacks now grossly outweigh the positives. I can't call this a "good direction" with a straight face when a lot of the changes don't actually change anything, like in the case of SSS, while others make the job no longer fit the battle content, like in the case of RoE.

[Anhra]

I don't see a problem with that dps loss, more Jobs other than Monk should also get a similar treatment so we can actually withness Mechanics outside of endgame Raids. And from the way i see it, Monk currently holds the fastest in-combat movement speed which feels really good to play with. I think its a good trade.

[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.

[ssunny2008]

snip

I respect any opinion here, no matter if it´s low level or whatever. But i´ve to come and ask again, what´s the point to rework a class for players who won´t main or 2nd main this class anyway? There are a lot of classes with different playstyles and difficulties. Making the monk a " slow no brain - button smasher" is no fun.

And you talk about dungeons. Dungeons are actually too easy anyway. It doesn´t matter which class you play. I know players which aren´t even able to read any skill of their class and just press some lightning buttons here and there, they die like 5 times on any dungeon boss but still manage to do it after 1 hour. This is nothing you can judge about, especially when it comes to leveling. The most classes haven´t even more than 2 useful skills until level 30. Then you´ve classes like the BLM where the rotation is completely different with each new skill-setup (addon).
So yeah, the only thing i want to judge and do care about are the endgame-raids. For everything else, you don´t even need the most of the skills and i won´t even care about GL stacks for trashmobs or not. The damage loss is like "1minute longer in the instance", wow...