Controversioal Changes to Monk

[IruruCece]

The overall issue with Monk is that too many of its elements were punishing. Not CHALLENGING. Punishing, the job is all stick, no carrot.

No.

The math has repeatedly showed that missing all positionals EXCEPT for Bootshine resulted in a negligible DPS loss. So, ignoring the vast majority of your positionals wasn't punishing for the vast majority of players. And with True North and Riddle of Earth, especially earlier in Shadowbringers' patch cycle, you could completely ignore ALL positionals without ANY penalty whatsoever for a shocking amount of time.

If, for whatever reason, you're missing BOOTSHINE's positional requirement, especially on current patch Monk, the problem here is decidedly not with the existence of positionals.

Chakra RNG has been a problem for the job since 2.0, and that still didn't stop Monk from being one of the top DPS jobs in Shadowbringers. It parses extremely well, arguably it has since late Heavensward. So having bad chakra rng is hardly a punishment, the best Monk players in endgame content today still outperform most other DPS jobs despite that factor being outside their control.

GL loss was the closest thing to "punishment" the job threw at players, and to be frank, if you were dropping GL at any point before a cutscene completely robbed control of the encounter away from you, you were either dead, or actually bad at the job. Straight up. GL maintenance was made practically braindead, to the point where if you were willing to keep tapping a button, you could preserve the buff through entire dungeons, to say nothing about proper raids. We had a STUPID amount of our kit dedicated to preserving that buff in just about any circumstance so long as we had active control of our characters. The problem with GL was that SE has regularly sought to place spectacle before everything else, and never considered that aspect one bit when "fixing" Monk for Shadowbringers.

We should have gotten something that rewarded aggressive Monks for maintaining GL over a set period of time, even if that something was as simple as "press this, get max GL again and do some ogcd damage." Instead, we got Anatman, which SE's own encounter design actively made worthless, and when we tried to squeeze blood from that worthless stone, they nerfed it in response. If there was anything "punishing" about Monk, it was SE's insistence that we shouldn't be allowed to quickly "build up" to full speed, and that we had to "build up" to full speed after every bloody mid-fight cutscene they hamhandedly inserted into the game. There were better solutions, and they failed to try a single one of them.