Monk has too many Positionals

[Garet]

Thanks for the replies.

Yea my bard is only level 50 so it is indeed kinda boring. not much to do except to wait for straight shot proc which rarely procs for me oddly. sometimes it does not even proc once in a boss fight lol. Does it proc more at higher level?

Last I played mch was back in heavensward and I know it has massively changed for the better now. But I think I will stick it out with bard based on your experience. I do love the archer archetype and I think bard is one of the jobs that will get good changes in next xpac along with monk

As for Dancer, the fact I failed so many times during its intro quest clearly shows I am not meant for it lol. But it does have super nice animations and visuals. the dance comboes are nice actually, So I understand why so many like to play it

[Saefinn]

No worries.

Thanks for the replies.

Yea my bard is only level 50 so it is indeed kinda boring. not much to do except to wait for straight shot proc which rarely procs for me oddly. sometimes it does not even proc once in a boss fight lol. Does it proc more at higher level?

Last I played mch was back in heavensward and I know it has massively changed for the better now. But I think I will stick it out with bard based on your experience. I do love the archer archetype and I think bard is one of the jobs that will get good changes in next xpac along with monk

As for Dancer, the fact I failed so many times during its intro quest clearly shows I am not meant for it lol. But it does have super nice animations and visuals. the dance comboes are nice actually, So I understand why so many like to play it

Procs are always 40% on the songs (40% per DoT). So it's better when you have all 3 songs, because there's no downtime where you're not proccing. So technically it doesn't go up. But Burst Shot will give a 35% chance of Straight Shot ready (Burst Shot is an upgrade of Heavy Shot) whereas Heavy Shot is 20%, so it'll mean you'll get more Refulgent Arrow procs, which can also be forced with Barrage. Caustic Bite and Storm Bite also have a 35% chance of triggering Straight Shot Ready.

If I recall Army's Paeon (and maybe somebody will correct me if I am wrong) will increase how frequently DoT's will hit and you get a trait at level 78 that makes the effect of Army's Paeon continue for 10 seconds into the next song, so that could increase chances of proc.

And you'll have a few more actions to play with later, like Soul Voice, which gradually builds up and can be launched into an Apex Arrow. You'll also get Empyreal Arrow, which you can weave, Sidewinder/Shadowbite, which you can weave too but their damage depends on how many DoT's are on the target. So there's some stuff that can break up the monotony more.

As a friend was levelling and was bored too and wanted to see what it's like at 80, I ended up recording me against a training dummy. I'm not going to claim I'm a good bard, so I'm sure anybody who watches in it can probably find flaws in my rotation. But it should give a feel of the pace and variety of skills & their frequency once you've got everything unlocked.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jHUs26VP8QE

[Garet]

Cool thanks for the videos. those visuals are nice.

[ssunny2008]

GL

It´s nothing new that i was a fan of the prepatch MNK. But i really never had such issues with GL especially with the given tools from each expansion. E8s was the latest fight with a cutszene and no safespot. But i never felt like i was behind in damage or something, just because i lost GL. PB was up after that cutszene anyway. I wouldn´t even say that MNK´s kit had so much issues lately. "Useless" or rare used tools for the endgame yes, but overall? The actual button spamming especially with a bad connection i´ve for some reasons imo, is way more cancer and straight up dumb to play.
And i really can´t accept the opinion about that from players, who never used the given tools properly, never improved or just run braindead dungeons 24/7. Those who brought us to the point where "maining a class" isn´t that much fun and unique anymore.

They should bring GL back in favor of fists of wind and a "smoother" opener. Just give us "1 safestack" for the rest of the fight to bring GL instant on 4 stacks. You´ll get this stack for 30s infight or when GL has 4 stacks the first time and you just won´t lose it via cutszene (or death?), so nobody could cry about any circumstances. Revamp Anatman as the active button and things are solved.
Otherwise, just get ride of those annoying cutszenes. They still haven´t learned anything from lvl50 castrum obviously.

I don´t know if we get anything new or old with Endwalker. But i can´t see anything good yet with the obvious healer changes and a new melee class. Tanking got straight up boring and the new tier is a joke too. Why do we even need an OT, for that one tankbuster?
All what i expect are some damage buffs from existing skills or 2 new dumb off gcd´s on any classes. The boss / dungeon qualities seems to go downwards with each expansion too. And if they touch the positionals in any way, well... good bye MNK, was fun while it lasted.

People have been throwing around suggestions on how to change GL for the better for years, and none of it reached SE, ever???

I would actually call, that they just pretty much ignore a lot of forums / posts or just take care about headlines, whatever. They´re not even able to implement a weekend support, why should they care about the stuff here?

[SpeckledBurd]

-Snip Long-

The difference between Enochian and old Greased Lightning is that Enochian actually had a means of recovering it if it fell off, without tradeoffs and on a short cooldown. The only time Monk had something close to that was Stormblood and the devs didn't like that we were Tornado Kicking so they killed Monk's recovery instead of changing Tornado Kick. The solution has always been simple, make GL recovery good and relegated to one action, clean up our upkeep actions so we only had one, change Tornado Kick to something else, and give us some reward for very basic upkeep or something else to strive for.

As for why people would consider nuking GL a good start, I'd say there's a couple of reasons.

The first is that there functionally no difference in removing Greased Lightning and actually giving the job decent recovery. Upkeep was already brainless thanks to the formshift change in 5.05 (further improved in 5.3). That on its own already killed the biggest way that GL required you to play since you no longer had to aggressively chase the boss to keep it up, and it was also a grim necessity because the upkeep tools had wouldn't have been capable of dealing with how they often design untargetable phases in fights these days (or really for most of Stormblood either). The 5.4 changes didn't change how Monk played from moment to moment at all, it just removed a bunch of points of annoyance that would have just as much been fixed if they'd given us a 30 second Greased Lightning recovery button like Enochian or BotD has.

The second reason I'd say it's a good start is that I basically didn't trust the devs to develop Greased Lightning anymore. They have repeatedly proven themselves incapable of doing it properly and repeatedly made the same mistakes. This game has had three expansions and half of the skills we have received have either been designed for edgecases that rarely come up, have been GL upkeep skills that were guaranteed to fail at their job, or have missed obvious developments on core concepts like changing Tornado Kick into a cooldown we'd earn for properly upkeeping GL for X amount of time (something I have advocated for since the beginning of Stormblood). Watching the developers fail repeatedly to expand on these core concepts has left me jaded. I've said it before and I'll say it again: Any potential that jobs have in their mechanics is meaningless if it isn't manifested, and Monk is the story of there being a ton of potential of which none is manifested. I would have loved to see them actually make something good of Greased Lightning, but at least by it not existing they can't create a bunch of worthless skills for the fourth expansion in a row. This is also the reason I want the fist stances to die, there's plenty that could be done with them, but I don't trust them to not remake Tackle Mastery for the third consecutive expansion.

The third is that calling it "a good start" doesn't actually mean that 5.4 is good. I'd almost say it's a really patronizing way of saying "For something you called a rework this is pretty awful actually". I can at least see how this will force job development to focus on different concepts or new concepts in the future and prevent the devs from falling into the same pitfalls they have repeatedly fallen into for the last three expansions. I'd also say the job also can't stay like this because as it is, because playing the job right now is miserable. The burst phase feels terrible. Chakra feels terrible. Chakra is under developed. New Riddle of Earth feels terrible. Six sided Star is lack luster as a capstone and should be at like level 40. The jobs movement kit is easily the worst of the Melee. The fist stances are still terrible and shouldn't exist. Just about every action the job has lacks impact. If Monk stays the same in 6.0 and there aren't more major changes then the devs are going to continue getting essays from me about how awful this job is for a fourth expansion in a row and the essay I already have about why the Monk playerbase doesn't trust them will get a new paragraph or two.

As for Anatman refreshing Twin Snakes being insultingly bad, yeah it is. However the skill was conceptually terrible from the get go and it's been insultingly bad this entire expansion. In the context of it being something the devs had to throw together to placate a furious Monk playerbase at the end of an expansion after screwing up catastrophically for the third expansion in a row while they save any new skill ideas for releasing in the next one for PR purposes? It's about what you can expect.

[wereotter]

Removing GL is like like BLM crying about how it’s too hard to keep enochian up and they constantly lose it to cut scenes.

Any BLM knows it is integral, GL was integral, and was as easy to keep up as enochian.

It's close, but this isn't entirely accurate. Enochian has a duration of 30 seconds, making it closer to Blood of the Dragon than Greased Lightning. Greased Lightning had a duration of only 16 seconds and until a recent patch, prior to its transition to a trait, couldn't be maintained with Form Shift, making Enochian not only much more likely to be maintained through boss transitions or cutscenes, but also has for several years been able to be maintained through Transpose and Umbral Soul.

Additionally the punishment for losing Enochian wasn't as severe as the punishment for losing Greased Lightning. They both dropped you 15% damage, but the monk also lost 20% attack speed, and while Enochian could be reapplied with the press of a single button, the best option a monk had for recovering Greased Lightning was using Perfect Balance, and if that was on cooldown for any reason, it would take 10-12 GCDs in order to get it back up to full again.

[Ariel_Valmont]

It's close, but this isn't entirely accurate. Enochian has a duration of 30 seconds, making it closer to Blood of the Dragon than Greased Lightning. Greased Lightning had a duration of only 16 seconds and until a recent patch, prior to its transition to a trait, couldn't be maintained with Form Shift, making Enochian not only much more likely to be maintained through boss transitions or cutscenes, but also has for several years been able to be maintained through Transpose and Umbral Soul.

Additionally the punishment for losing Enochian wasn't as severe as the punishment for losing Greased Lightning. They both dropped you 15% damage, but the monk also lost 20% attack speed, and while Enochian could be reapplied with the press of a single button, the best option a monk had for recovering Greased Lightning was using Perfect Balance, and if that was on cooldown for any reason, it would take 10-12 GCDs in order to get it back up to full again.

The recast timer on enochian is 30 seconds, it’s duration is tied to astral fire/umbral ice which is not 30 seconds. It’s 15 seconds, hence why you have to refresh it with fire 1 after 3 fire 4s. So if you space the refresh, you have another 15 seconds before you can recast enochian. If you have poor spell speed, maintaining it becomes harder. Also, unless you have umbral ice or astral fire up you cannot cast enochian, so you have to press at least 2 buttons to get it up... and for some reason if you mana starved yourself you better hope you have a mana pot to use (not on cd) or that manafont is off cd.

Enochian does not survive boss transitions or cutscenes. At most youre making it through the platform transition in refulgence, but you could do that on MNK as well if you were smart about it.

Did losing greased lightning result in a more severe punishment, maybe, I don’t have the data to refute or corroborate that claim.

Umbral soul is a level 76 spell and was new to shadowbringers, it hasn’t been around for several years. Transpose isn’t used to refresh enochian, unless your in dire straits. (I’m aware it does, but it’s not ideal nor part of the rotation)

Knowing the fight was key to keeping greased lightning up, you didn’t burn PB when you knew a transition was coming up and you needed it.

[dezzmont]

As someone who mained Black Mage, Enochian is a good example of an upkeep skill, while I think GL was a platonic example of a 'homework' upkeep.

For one, Enochian was on a caster, meaning you can't just keep attacking endlessly mid content, and the way you lose it is tied to how greedy you are in the rotation. You are constantly reminded of how you might lose Enochian that makes keeping it up very instinctive, and your panic moves to maintain it are powerful but minor DPS losses if you fail to maintain it. If you fail to maintain Enochian, you go back to your old rotation and its very visible what went wrong, but you also 'get back into it' very quickly. It is integral to how the job plays and it is integral in a way where it lets you know exactly what the challenge is. It is very well integrated to everything you do with the job.

Monk's GL is just... a lot for an already VERY busy job in terms of information overload: You have positional abilities, a buff and debuff that grow out of sync with each other over their rotation, and thus an ever changing combo that has the order of your positionals slowly 'mutate.' This is REALLY COOL but adding 'oh and if I mess up or stop attacking for a bit I just lose the thing that makes my job do damage and attack fast, the other fun part of the job, goes away.' Combine this with Perfect Balance which has a weird interaction with your buff windows and your already thinking about a LOT to the point where you really don't need a 'big punishment' for dropping your combo. And you really only will fail to maintain GL either from pull to pull or because of fight specific stuff, making it sorta an unpleasant surprise rather than a thing your constantly tracking.

It also just crowds the space of the job. Black Mage has a lot of abilities that can help with maintaining Enochian, but only two really are 'panic maintenance' abilities: Umbral Soul and Transpose. The reset have usage in Black Mage despite being relatively niche, like Tricast. It helps too that Enochian is very 'hooked into' a lot of how black mage plays, while GL is sorta... stapled on? Which is ironic because it was there from the start while Enochian was a late add to black mage. You could remove GL entirely from the job and it would functionally be the same, which is low key exactly what happened, and kinda is a big reason why they probably removed it, GL is just a very abstract benefit to the job that mainly functioned to make it 'fast and flowy' but had severe playability and design issues.

I tried to get into monk but until GL was removed it just was way too overwhelming. Not in the sense it was 'too hard' but it felt like... it didn't 'like' being played, and I literally thought to myself "It really needs exactly one thing to go: Positional, or one of the upkeeps, or the fact the rotation 'desyncs.'" And Greased Lightning was easily the least interesting part of the job of those 4. I do appreciate monk mains don't feel good about how the job is right now, but I would love for Monks to be more about 'how do I skillfully use my flowing abilities' as a demonstration of skill. Jobs should generally be about how you can excel, squeeze a bit more power and performance out of them, than how bad you will be punished for messing up. The later is homework, the former is what Black Mage's Enochian upkeep is: squeezing in that one extra cast despite having to move in a fight, knowing when to just bail out, ect.

GL has the skill of knowing when to do mantinence, but its both unforgiving and its not really 'rewarding' so much as an 'avoid being punished' sorta skill, which isn't very fun. Hopefully 6.0 gives you something new to think about that is more a reward of mastery to be chased, than a downside to be fled.

[wereotter]

Umbral soul is a level 76 spell and was new to shadowbringers, it hasn’t been around for several years. Transpose isn’t used to refresh enochian, unless your in dire straits. (I’m aware it does, but it’s not ideal nor part of the rotation)

Point here is that for years before monk got its ability to refresh GL with Form Shift, black mage had the option, at the very least, to keep up the enochian buff 100% of the time with the hit of a single button, meaning that if a boss became untargetable for too long a period, the black mage could maintain their job-specific buff while the monk could not. And there was a point in time that the black mage could reapply that buff with the press of a single button on a 30 second cooldown while the monk equivalent of perfect balance had a 120 second cooldown.

This is why I say that while there are similarities between the two, in my experience playing both jobs, monk was far more punishing during down time than black mage.

[Ariel_Valmont]

Point here is that for years before monk got its ability to refresh GL with Form Shift, black mage had the option, at the very least, to keep up the enochian buff 100% of the time with the hit of a single button, meaning that if a boss became untargetable for too long a period, the black mage could maintain their job-specific buff while the monk could not. And there was a point in time that the black mage could reapply that buff with the press of a single button on a 30 second cooldown while the monk equivalent of perfect balance had a 120 second cooldown.

This is why I say that while there are similarities between the two, in my experience playing both jobs, monk was far more punishing during down time than black mage.

Having played both for years myself, I’d disagree, if you mess up enochian, you have to completely shift gears and do a different rotation, if gl drops off, and you had wasted perfect balance somewhere it didn’t need to be used, all you have to do is your rotation, albeit with a slower gcd that steadily increased in pace until you were back at it.

As previously stated, you can’t just press enochian and have it work, you need to cast something to give umbral ice/astral fire first.

You cannot maintain enochian through cutscenes, just like you couldn’t maintain GL, and any player worth their salt would have PB ready after.

As far as transitions go, SE has an uncanny knack to have the timing right in many of the fights where if you played optimally, GL wouldn’t fall off. (I’m aware that wasn’t always the case)


I stand by my original statement Gl is like
(corresponding or agreeing in general or in some noticeable respect; similar; analogous Enochian. You seem to keep agreeing with me, but then go on about how they are different, I never said they were the same.

The fact that one was “easier” to reapply is outside of the point of my statement.