How is monk after the rework?

[Equitable_Remedy]

I really hope their phase of "make everything accesible" is over

Yeah! When will MMO designers learn to stop making games accessible to players!?

[Shurrikhan]

In my case I really hope their phase of "make everything accesible" is over and start adding flavour to the jobs instead of more homogeneization

Yeah! When will MMO designers learn to stop making games accessible to players!?

There's a difference between having a reasonable difficulty curve to make learning a job feel comprehensible and enjoyable, with each step along that journey being accessible from the one before, and there being only a half-hour's worth of engagement in learning said job. For many, the appeal of a given job design comes through the job's learnable idiosyncrasies and interactions and the space and need for experimentation with those.

Your retort here makes no more sense than to say that a traditional mystery novel (not a drama disguised as such) should have its theme and ending fully predictable from its first chapter. What would remain to either, then, with so little to actually engage with at a deeper level, is mere disproportionate length of shallow interaction -- a grind.

[Shurrikhan]

On some level the many half-assed attempts at doing that is what lead to Greased Lightning ultimately being removed when there were clear ways to make it work in content, and more often than not it's what has caused Monk to be a graveyard of pointless traits and skills.

That said, there is also a difference between

• making use of a given mechanic (as 4.3's TK rotations did, and would have better done if they just weren't so damn ping-unfriendly due to the requisite triple-weave, which could easily have been removed by having Wind Tackle itself giving GL and the full attack potency),
• introducing counter-play and pay-off (as a better tuned version of HW's TK may have, especially if usable at any stack count at proportionate pay-off), and
• simply devaluing or otherwise defecating all over said mechanic (as per Anatman in place of the shorter Perfect Balance CD and Riddle of Wind, or even just extending GL from an actually pressing 10 seconds to what could only fall off between phases at 16 instead of having it fall off a stack at a time).

While we can give up on a mechanic as if it were fated all along for doom despite being the most iconic piece of a job's pacing and presence in combat, if it worked, then worked better, then worked better still, only to be killed off because the latest additions decided to go opposite of everything that worked before it, is that really the mechanic's fault?

[Powercow]

Yeah! When will MMO designers learn to stop making games accessible to players!?

Accessible as in reasonable PC requirements? Sure!
Accessible as in "won't cause a seizure in epileptics"? Sure!
Accessible as in "has an easy download and installation process"? Sure! (pls square get on that though the mog station is a mess)

You're misunderstanding the type of accessibility issues people have with it.

[Bhearil]

People have issues with jobs become more and more "slam you head against the keyboard and perform decently". Might be useful for people with very heavy motor issues, but the rest will get bored to death.

One thing is to lower the skill floor or simply fix the convoluted mess some jobs have as rotation so players dont get overwhelmed at the start and another to make it so braindead that you can still play at a decent level with one hand while watching netflix on the other screen and eating with the other. Plus the skill celing was lowered as hell and the skill expression has been severily reduced. People like their efforts to be rewarded and being noticeable if you play a job to a high level compared to the average player.

Not mentioning jobs becoming too similar between each other almost becoming skins instead of jobs (for now affects healers and tanks mostly, fingers crossed that they fix it for Endwalker)

[Shurrikhan]

People have issues with jobs become more and more "slam you head against the keyboard and perform decently". Might be useful for people with very heavy motor issues, but the rest will get bored to death

Not mentioning jobs becoming too similar between each other almost becoming skins instead of jobs

Tbf, if accessibility were built more around motor issues, we'd get less button-bloat that amount to non-decisions (see DRG combos) and a more cohesive kit that requires less hand-splaying across 28+ keys to reach even mediocre depth.

XIV's accessibility, in that vein/degree, has been increasingly built towards less physical impairments, and sadly only from the top down (relative difficulty decreases and trimmed mechanics) rather than from the bottom up (in-game learning systems, including even just a reasonable difficult curve in place of our current short plateau of ill-defined edges).

[Bhearil]

Tbf, if accessibility were built more around motor issues, we'd get less button-bloat that amount to non-decisions (see DRG combos) and a more cohesive kit that requires less hand-splaying across 28+ keys to reach even mediocre depth.

XIV's accessibility, in that vein/degree, has been increasingly built towards less physical impairments, and sadly only from the top down (relative difficulty decreases and trimmed mechanics) rather than from the bottom up (in-game learning systems, including even just a reasonable difficult curve in place of our current short plateau of ill-defined edges).

Blame on that the obsession that Yoshi-P has that pressing a combo in the correct order adds "depth" and shows "skill"

Is kinda blatant on characters that literally have one combo yet they have free bloat for that nonsense like RDM melee combo or DRK, or most if not all of Aoe combos.

In any case we have reached the point where you can spam a single targer/aoe combo while ignoring the rest of your kit and still perform at a decent level as long as you press the glowing keys

[Big-Isaac]

I feel like an overarching problem with the game's job design is that most of them run on rotations rather than a priority system. As in the sequence of buttons you press is largely set in stone, and any deviation from the optimal sequence will cause you to lose DPS.
That's why jobs can start to feel boring - not because they lack interesting mechanics, but because the way you have to interact with said mechanics is so static.

IMO the game needs more procs across the board. Not every job has to be as RNG-heavy as Dancer, say, but having a degree of unpredictability in your job's kit can help your brain stay engaged a lot more than just rattling off a strict minute-long rotation.

[Shurrikhan]

Blame on that the obsession that Yoshi-P has that pressing a combo in the correct order adds "depth" and shows "skill"

And yet he'd never force that trash on his own job...

Though, admittedly, he did let BLM be saddled with Xenoglossy in a game where you'd pretty much never take focus damage on a single target over at least 56% greater total damage; until such time as focus damage is actually a meaningful and pervasive mechanic over total, that's just bloat in that the capacity and flair/flavor could have as easily been done by a trait to change Flare's damage and appearance when no other enemies are in range. (Despair, at a mere ~10% damage loss at 2 targets relative to Flare is at least the most understandable of the lot, but still begs the question of why XIV bothers with AoE/ST choice distinction if their content so rarely ever makes it pertinent.)

To be fair, I'd rather the focus damage be made pertinent than lose the choices, but as it stands any difficulty of that sort seems completely out of vision for (or, the design philosophy of) 99+% of XIV's combat.

[Shurrikhan]

I feel like an overarching problem with the game's job design is that most of them run on rotations rather than a priority system. As in the sequence of buttons you press is largely set in stone, and any deviation from the optimal sequence will cause you to lose DPS.
That's why jobs can start to feel boring - not because they lack interesting mechanics, but because the way you have to interact with said mechanics is so static.

IMO the game needs more procs across the board. Not every job has to be as RNG-heavy as Dancer, say, but having a degree of unpredictability in your job's kit can help your brain stay engaged a lot more than just rattling off a strict minute-long rotation.

Even systemically predictable job/class playflow can still have far more depth than we have. XIV's, after all, isn't only predictable, but all too often linear and invariably shallow, and with incredibly little external variance with which to interact (except, perhaps, in healing a sh*tshow).

With no strategic choices to be made, procs can only force peripheral response to incredibly basic cues; one can be fully zoned out and still manage them just fine. In such a system, no amount of procs will actually generate meaningful decision-making; it just takes you further out of future moments and sense of aligning with CDs, etc., in favor of keeping your status bar or scrolling combat text's buff feed always in view, arguably a loss for what few jobs do have pertinent banking elements, like Samurai's Iaijutsu or DRG's Stardiver. For the unknown to actually create meaningful interaction, there needs to be some sense of stakes or claim, of momentum/synergy and gamble -- an expectation of what's to come, a plan to best meet it, and its hedges for alternate outcomes or a deliberate all-in lack thereof -- that precedes the unknown.

There have to be not only allowance but also payoff for approaching a fight in different ways that would capitalize upon different circumstances, be they internal (such as in procs) or external (a boss using a random skill or randomly starting into one of multiple possible phases).