Greased Lightning and Huton

[dezzmont]

Greased Lightning was a skill that was holding monk back as a job, Huton isn't doing the same. They seem similar on the surface, but operated very differently when it came to upkeep. Ninjas just had to make sure to include armor crush every 30-ish seconds in their rotation, and the buff lasts 70 seconds giving the ninja a lot of time to disengage and do mechanics of a fight that requires it. Monks only had a 16 second window, and while the buff kept itself up automatically as the monk moved through its rotation, the monk also had less opportunity to disengage for any length of time without losing its buff. Add onto that the cooldown on perfect balance, while it did change over the years, was up to 2 minutes between uses, so if for any reason the monk did drop greased lightning, they had a 2 minute cooldown before they could use a skill to help recover, otherwise they were doing 10-12 GCDs before recovering it, while the ninja would have to wait, at most, 20 seconds to reapply huton, while missing out on one damage dealing ninjutsu.

Also as evidence of this, while monk continued to get more and more skills over the past 6 years specifically aimed at trying to make it easier to maintain greased lightning, ninja only had to have armor crush added and the job has been able to evolve since that point. So no, I don't see any reason at this point to change huton into a passive trait the same as greased lightning.

Just to add to this, it helps also that Huton isn't on an especially busy class overall. Monk is basically a ceaseless barrage of mechanics that make the job utterly overwhelming without actually making it better, which is why the job has been in the gutter basically forever.

Monk had positionals, a rotation that got out of sync with itself (which made positionals 'harder'), an entire phase that alters your core rotation, an RPG proc system for Meditate stacks, team utility for defense AND offense, a buff to be maintained, a debuff to be maintained, a burst window buff, buffs that suddenly make positonals NOT matter, and 4 oGCDs you would regularly use in rotation, on top of greased lightning. And most of these mechanics have a lot of passive interplay that made messing one of them up make all the rest fall apart.

Ninja has a lot going on too, but comparatively less: Your positionals keep you in the back most of the time, you don't have random stuff popping up in rotation, your rotation is fairly fixed, and if you say... mess up your ninjutsu that isn't going to muck about with your Ninki that much. Its also easier to recover from mucking up on ninja. Its still a big DPS loss but getting back into the flow is pretty seamless. So there is still complexity in the job and a good ninja is going to do better than a bad one, but unlike monk messing up as a ninja doesn't feel like the game just punched you in the face: The mistake is visible but the role doesn't grind to a screeching halt as your muscle memory works against you and it takes you 3 full 1-2-3 rotations to get back where you were.