MNK Rework is a great start

[Fast_Iain]

Agree with this 100%. I've been really enjoying the MNK rework and I'm really excited what they can do with it in 6.0. There were definitely some things that either needed a little change (PB and SSS specifically) or just didn't needed to be there *cough* Anatman *cough*

But yeah again really excited what they can do with our punching job. :]

[Osteichthyes]

Let's face it, you were just happy to no longer be losing your stacks. But in all honesty, getting rid of GL maintenance might actually be a boon for fight design as well since now they can focus on mechanics that might have been impossible to implement without basically making MNK non-viable. What I would like to see is Anatman becoming an ability that when you activate it will begin charging passively, and when it's ready you can fire it off for big boi damage, but lose it if held too long. That way you would actually have to think about timing it out. Just a random thought that I haven't given much deep thought on.

[SsCookie]

I wholeheartedly agree with the current changes to MNK as of 5.4. For me personally it was difficult to keep track of positionals, stacks, and chakras all at the same time and while an overhaul of my hotbar was sorely needed to adjust to the changes prepatch it was never a perfect fit.

I think a good direction for them to start reworking chakra is to look towards maybe designing the system similarly to NIN's Ninki gauge. I think this would make chakra more versatile depending if you're fighting a boss or multiple enemies.

for example if your gauge is full you can launch either the single or line AoE skills twice and possibly get a buff that clears positional requirements for 5 seconds per use of those skills (up to 10 seconds.) Thus perhaps also cleaning up the awkward usage of Riddle of Earth if they were to remove it. I would fancy to call this temporary buff "Chakra Flare" and maybe place that trait somewhere in the level 60-70s range to keep the job consistently 'growing' IF the decision was to remove the Riddles entirely.

I think this way it paves the way to ,like NIN's Ninki Gauge, see more skills for MNK to be a more consistent DPS instead of relying on burst so often with little time to dump all it like how the class was before 5.4.

On a more jokingly, wilder theory take the same concept I stated above and just have the choice of granting skills like 'Snap Punch' extra abilities like bleed or restore HP while taking only 20% of the overall gauge.

[MercuryD]

Total agreement here. MNK main since 2.0 and this is honestly the most fun I've had with monk in years.

GL being gone does raise the skill floor--which isn't a bad thing--but, honestly, GL as it was was a headache more often than not. Too many fights have Down For The Count or unskippable animations/cutscenes which lasted exactly as long or longer than GL duration. Not to mention form shift spam in between pulls. I would have liked the damage to have been retained in the trait but that's a nitpick at most.

Chakra is so much more rewarding now it feels. Guaranteed chakra on every crit: god yes. Chakra from BH spells: god yes. In a RoF window before I would average 1-2 TFC and now I'm seeing guaranteed no less than 2-4 which feels great. Plus, BH on trash makes Enlightenment spam feel great!

TK being a new steel peak is just fine with me. I miss the animation for howling fist but it served the same purpose as enlightenment does now so I don't think we need it back.

As for fist stances, i guess I'll be in the minority and say I'm fine with them as they are. They each have a purpose, situational or otherwise, and then existing is taking nothing away from gameplay and viability whatsoever from the job.

Anatman still suuuuuuper situational but meh. Overall this patch was a large step in the right direction and I look forward to seeing what's coming in the future.

[A_moth_called_rose]

Even though I don't really main monk, the overall changes to the class have made playing it a lot less of a headache.

[ssunny2008]

If i read everything here, i highly doubt that anyone of you guys is a decent savage player or have even played monk the last half year. Monk has changed and not for the best when we talk about raids. Everything else is not even worth to talk about since dungeons or other stuff are pretty much "no brainer" anyway.

So what is so good actually?

- Less movement speed since you´ve to stuck on fists of fire, which makes mechanics and positionals harder and that on the only melee class without a descent escape / backjump, which needs the highest boss uptime with less than 2s GCD?
- To spam RoE every 6s to have even a chance to do positional - damage in a lot of mechanics especially in the new raids? Meanwhile the 10% dmg.red. becomes pretty much useless?
- To have a pretty much overfilled opener with all the off gcd´s and random proccs?

I guess that´s NOT good.

All you care about is, that GL is gone. What was the issue with it? A cutszene? Improvisation and it was up pretty fast again. And if you died... well... you died. It´s not the games fault that you died obviously.
Maintaining GL was a completely standard function if you played your rotation and used button X in moment X aka anatman or seven sided star. What was so hard? Yet we have a button spamming class without a soul, which is pretty horrible to play in the new raids and i don´t even want to try E8s with its mechanics where 30s RoE was pretty much needed. Slower movement + boss dancing + RoE spamming + rotation, yeah thx square enix, well played....
All what you see is: "Yey no more form shift in dungeons or losing stacks when i die.", but that´s definately not all.

Imagine SE would´ve implemented a stack-safe-option for cutszenes instead of doing some horrible changes, we would still have a smooth class instead of that a clunky buttonspammer. And calling it a "decent ground for 6.0" or whatever, yeah... a patch which comes in 8 or 9 months, maybe even later? Good to reveal this unfinished "rework" for the last tier of shadowbringers. Brainless button smashing is sooo muuuuch fuuuun.

[MercuryD]

If i read everything here, i highly doubt that anyone of you guys is a decent savage player or have even played monk the last half year. Monk has changed and not for the best when we talk about raids. Everything else is not even worth to talk about since dungeons or other stuff are pretty much "no brainer" anyway.

So what is so good actually?

- Less movement speed since you´ve to stuck on fists of fire, which makes mechanics and positionals harder and that on the only melee class without a descent escape / backjump, which needs the highest boss uptime with less than 2s GCD?
- To spam RoE every 6s to have even a chance to do positional - damage in a lot of mechanics especially in the new raids? Meanwhile the 10% dmg.red. becomes pretty much useless?
- To have a pretty much overfilled opener with all the off gcd´s and random proccs?

I guess that´s NOT good.

All you care about is, that GL is gone. What was the issue with it? A cutszene? Improvisation and it was up pretty fast again. And if you died... well... you died. It´s not the games fault that you died obviously.
Maintaining GL was a completely standard function if you played your rotation and used button X in moment X aka anatman or seven sided star. What was so hard? Yet we have a button spamming class without a soul, which is pretty horrible to play in the new raids and i don´t even want to try E8s with its mechanics where 30s RoE was pretty much needed. Slower movement + boss dancing + RoE spamming + rotation, yeah thx square enix, well played....
All what you see is: "Yey no more form shift in dungeons or losing stacks when i die.", but that´s definately not all.

Imagine SE would´ve implemented a stack-safe-option for cutszenes instead of doing some horrible changes, we would still have a smooth class instead of that a clunky buttonspammer. And calling it a "decent ground for 6.0" or whatever, yeah... a patch which comes in 8 or 9 months, maybe even later? Good to reveal this unfinished "rework" for the last tier of shadowbringers. Brainless button smashing is sooo muuuuch fuuuun.

Before going off on a rant you should actually read the responses that people have had. All you are saying to me is that you're a new player who learned to play at the 5.X play style and don't want it to change. Not liking change, fine, but don't try to belittle those who have experience with the jobs who can see and understand the improvements that were made thanks to this patch.

Again: this is a tweak, not a rework. Please use the correct term to avoid misinformation.

[IruruCece]

If i read everything here, i highly doubt that anyone of you guys is a decent savage player or have even played monk the last half year.

Look, I'm not a huge fan of the GL change, but uh, the OP themselves is far from an incompetent raider or a bad player of the job based on their youtube, and doubtless there are plenty of players here who feel the same.

It's a divisive change, and there are folks like me who don't like it, but there are also folks who do like it. There are plenty of legitimate arguments for both. At the end of the day, it's happened, and players will have to figure it out and deal with whatever comes next.

[Tracewood]

Will throw my hat into the "agreement pile".

I've been able to focus much more on boss mechanics, while figuring out an optimal rotation and it's far less stressful. Moreso than my Samurai. Also like feeling helpful in content by using Brotherhood and Mantra.
What I'd like to see 6.0 onward:
--Another Chakra ability, but not as potent... a Chi Blast that consumes ONE chakra stack. It'll be our long range ability to use if we have to make distance but want to add a little uptime.
--On the subject of Chakra, maybe have an ongoing fiery effect when you have all five currently. It's cosmetic, but would look cool.

Other than that, this new MNK is much more fun than I've imagined.

[SpeckledBurd]

It was nice to see this thread after a near week of nothing but vitriol for the rework. Even if they still don't know what to do with the job, they're going to have to force themselves to finally think of something substantial in 6.0 since they can no longer churn out boring GL skills. A lot of people want to see Tifa inspiration, but in my opinion I think they should look to the OGs, I want to see Sabin skills personally and no, not just because of a suplex. It would be nice to get some actual iconic, traditional Final Fantasy Monk attacks like Aura Bolt, Rising Pheonix or Bum Rush.

Speaking of, I'm 100% certain there's a way Blitz can be introduced into the game without working as a copy of Mudras or forcing a pause in damage/rotation.

While I agree that this is a good start, I can sorta get why people would be disappointed or concerned for the future.

The mere fact that it was called a rework at all comes with quite a few expectations as to how extensive it will actually be in terms of fixing issues. I'm certain the amount of effort and manpower that went into this was extensive due to how many parts of the kit had to change, however Monk had and still has a ton of issues and the number of those issues this addressed was relatively few. Just to name a few, chakra overcapping is still an issue, Chakra being RNG at all is itself an issue, Monk's mobility is still arguably the worst of the melee, Six Sided Star having a sprint didn't fix that and nor did the sprint make it any less lackluster as a capstone skill, Perfect Balance being used to spam Leaden Bootshine doesn't feel good and works poorly with how short Twin Snakes' timer is, and the Fists they're still wasted design space that may as well be a series of traits or eliminated. The rework actually exacerbated some of these problems, particularly Chakra overcapping and our Riddle of Fire window now having even more required weaving in it for how little slots we have to weave oGCDS even before Forbidden Chakra procs.

The other thing is that when they announced the 5.4 changes, they said that Monk was going to be reworked because it couldn't wait until 6.0. Now that the rework has been implemented, I think the best most anyone has to say about it is that it's a good foundation for rebuilding the job in 6.0. While some improvements were made, we're still essentially in the same position where we were before the rework happened: hoping that they'll fix a huge number of problems at a future date. And for a lot of Monk players, this is the second or third time they've been in that position. I think there's a very real fear that a 6.0 rework will just be them rereleasing 5.4 Monk without addressing the remaining longstanding issues because the developers have just... done that twice now with Monk. Once bitten, twice shy and all.

Not to say this isn't a small improvement on where it was and it's got more potential than it did before. There's more room for them to expand on the job in the future since at least some of the chuff has been cleaned up and there isn't a chance for them to make another two skills to upkeep Greased Lightning provided you jump through a given hoop. But this can't be where the devs leave it for another expansion like they've done with Monk in the past.