RIP MNK 1.x - 5.x

[Kolsykol]

I am sick of square making things easier as if we are a bunch of babies like you and others make us out to be. Do not play the class if you are so fed up with the characteristics that monk has had since 2.x (if not 1.x). If you want monk to be more like DRG and SAM which have less positionals.. then go bloody play your SAM or DRG.

Don't bother with that guy tbh, just look at how he talks in other threads.
He plays the victim and acts like anyone who disagrees with him is like insulting him personally or something.
He at least seems to understand that what he's saying is unpopular amongst MNK mains but he always frames it like '' poor me I am going to get called a moron and be bullied for my hot take '' while at the same time talking shit about the community.

Nothing anyone says or explains to him actually sticks it all goes in one ear and out the other.
Luckily the removal of Raptor form at least comes with some justification on the devs side in that MNK is going to be busier.
Personally I still think it's kinda pointless, POSITIONALS ARE NOT DIFFICULT JUST WAT WHY ARE PEOPLE HAVING SUCH SEVERE ISSUES WITH THEM??????

But... If that's really how the devs feel and it's not going to be done overall later then I can accept it along with the rework.
It still feels totally pointless tho and I might even do them anyway it's just going to feel odd to me especially with how fast it moves.
It's not like DRG where your gcd is slow and it's more methodical.

Edit: Merged posts.

Brotherhood should just be a 60s CD imo, same with Riddle of Fire.
A 120s CD almost feels like a '' waste '' of a button to me, it's like you press it and oh great now that button is just useless for 2 whole minutes.
90s is far worse tho imo it needs to be even with the rest.

[Sooru]

question: why you think those people who are hellbent on keeping 6 positionals keep playing monk? answer: because they find doing a lot of positionals fun, let us have our fun, if you like to play a melee what has little to no positionals, why not play one of those others instead? or better yet, if you aren't playing on high end content, why not simply ignore the need to do positionals?(after all the dmg diference is not that big to be a big factor on casual content outside of clearing content slightly faster)

so me question is, why are you hellbent on positional removal on monk, if you do not like it as much, why not simply move to a job what has fewer?

"If this job does not play how I want to, I'm not going to play another job, I'm going to complain about this one and beg for the developers to make it the way I want to."

[Kahnom]

Nothing wrong if monk loses more positionals. I dont know why some monk players are so hell bent on them keeping the 6 they have. Two is enough.
Always saying it wont be monk if the positionals go etc etc. We all know that is nonsense. Squares main job should have been to remove as many positionals as possible while making the job more engaging, positionals aren't engaging the way they are implemented on monk, and in fact drives a metric ton more players away than it attracts.
What I find HILARIOUS, is that when i said take away DoTs from summoner, i got raged at like i get raged at here for saying take away the positionals, and guess what???? They took away summoner DotS, and not a single blasted complaint. Why? Because they fixed the damn job to make it more engaging to play with good QoL changes. This community is something else sometimes man, like really, unbelievable...

You don’t even play MNK and yet you spouting non-sense how the job should be ?
What a joke.

[Navnav]

No one thinks positionals are hard. I actually LOVE THEM on Dragoon. They are not something that adds a ton of skill, a bit of thought sure, but lets not call it skill. They are NOT hard to land at all, but they are for the most part, pointless.

They are mostly staying for monk, so you can breathe I guess. I would have liked them to go except on bootshine and dragon kick, but oh well. I guess a middle ground was found and it's fine.

[lulunami]

After ARR 2.0 Monk, they just ran out of ideas for Monk gameplay. I am not upset about Square-Enix finally deleting Monk like everyone else wanted in Heavensward (3.0). Keeping up Greased Lightning used to be a challenge in ARR, but eventually Greased Lightning just became a vestigial relic of the past.

Give me Sabin and let me input Shoryuken.

[Cojika]

You don’t even play MNK and yet you spouting non-sense how the job should be ?
What a joke.

This is a huge part of the problem going on right now. Even if SE implemented all the very ill-advised things a lot of these people suggested... a large portion of them still wouldn't main monk, or even play it much at all. People need to stop pushing for homogenization. Each job should have their own identity, and if you don't like a job there are plenty others.

I can't stand playing ranged casters, and feel samurai is brain dead easy and boring. That being said I don't go around demanding whacky ass changes be made to them.

[ssunny2008]

No one thinks positionals are hard. I actually LOVE THEM on Dragoon. They are not something that adds a ton of skill, a bit of thought sure, but lets not call it skill. They are NOT hard to land at all, but they are for the most part, pointless.

They are mostly staying for monk, so you can breathe I guess. I would have liked them to go except on bootshine and dragon kick, but oh well. I guess a middle ground was found and it's fine.

So you "love" positionals on DRG and call them overall easy to play, but you dislike them on MNK and want to get ride of them? Doesn´t make sense to me unless you call "staying behind the boss 24/7" playing positionals on DRG.

And i still higly doubt that you´ve played any serious content to call "positionals on MNK are easy". There are a bunch of melee and positional unfriendly mechanics out there and you get really busy if your burst window alines them. And mistakes from other players are not even included. Maybe you´ve some footage from your MNK performance in the current savages or atleast EX? I´m curious.

For those that play monk only for positionals. Maybe you should play another class?

It was so obvious, that a dumb statement like that coming from you, no matter if it´s just sarcasm or not.
This game only offers ONE positional-heavy class, which is MNK. You don´t like positionals? Feel free to play 1 of the others. We MNK-mains don´t have that choice.

[AndieEldritch]

They seem to be keeping the core rotation - It's just the Leaden Fist Bootshine - Dragon Kick and repeat Perfect Balance window is being replaced with something more complex and flexible with better uptime - The end of Perfect Balance also puts you into Form Shift, which is a great change.
Assuming that first Blitz in the trailer is an AOE Blitz and the second single target - In my opinion it beats just elixir field (which is now one of the smaller Blitz's) and enlightenment on cooldown with the 1,2,3 combo.
The 40s 2 charge PB means we get to use that way more.

The loss of positional requirements on Twin Snakes and True Strike isn't too big of a deal to me, lets you flow from flank-rear more comfortably and mix up when needed and will generally help in fights with lots of boss spinning.

Anatman is still there in the demo they did - Interestingly Tornado kick is gone but they didn't mention it - Also Arm of the Destroyer is gone - replaced with a similar looking ability as Tornado kick so that might mean Tornado is a AotD replacement now and is AOE.

The Fist Stances are also one button now, so maybe we get slightly higher move speed and the damage buff at once?

[dezzmont]

The issue facing monk and why feedback from people who won't main the job matters is that monk is a starter job that had an... amazingly low popularity/player satisfaction rating pretty much every poll coming about.

That is going to cause player retention issues long term, and the fact they nuked the job from orbit mid expansion tells us that they had a sort of crisis.

New monk actually may be harder than old monk in terms of proper execution. GL and positionals, as mentioned, are not really hard to do, but Monk's issue is that pretty much every mechanic it had heavily punished you for doing them poorly, and the monk's rotation didn't work towards any flashy 'reward' effect (ex: Iaijutsu, Xeno/Fire spam, Trick attack).

So it was this trifecta of badly designed: The things that made it 'challenging' were really not, and mostly existed to add to information overload in the job. When you made minor mistakes, monk as a job punished you more than any other job. And to top it off it was hard to tell if you were doing well ("I don't even know if I am doing damage" was a super common monk complaint I heard) so there isn't much of a reason to work towards it.

It seems silly, but it is a critical part of game design to get feedback not just from experts and people already into your systems, but new users, and users who don't like what you have to offer, because they are going to experience it from a very valuable perspective that you otherwise wouldn't get from people who already like how things are.

You then bias your responses based on how the ways different segments of your potential userbase interact with it. Monk's changes probably bias so hard to non-monk opinions because A: Low key I don't think monk mains really understand the design flaws of their own job that well because they mostly affect new players and are invisible if your parsing and learned the mechanics, and most just... refuse to engage with the reality that Monk is one of the few jobs that is actively disliked based on the data we can see from player run polls, and B: Monk probably was causing a disproportionate effect on the new player experience due to being a starter with a cool theme, which considering the extreme nature of doing a job overhaul mid expansion and the sudden surge in the free trial popularity SHB probably was starting to REALLY hurt sub rates of new players.

Of course, how you incorporate uninformed opinions matters to. It is sort of a game design truism to say "Players are great at spotting problems, bad at offering solutions." Stuff like "Remove all positional" is a bad solution, because positional aren't the problem, the problem was monk was a job with overwhelming amounts of information, a rotation so unintuitive with so many redundant buttons that you basically need a guide to figure it out, and which offers no rewards and all punishments in its execution. Blitz pretty clearly is designed to fix all of these problems (because you now have something to work towards in the rotation and better feedback if your doing it right because you get the blitz you want if you do, which also helps the "Am I doing damage?" problem), and removing two already unimportant positionals is just an attempt to clean up the info-clutter that makes even starting out as a monk rough.

Blitz actually paradoxically has the potential to make Monk actually harder to actually execute consistently (because, low key, monk isn't hard, it is just punishing and needlessly obtuse, and those words don't mean the same thing), while also making it easier to learn and play. Difficulty and ease of use are not opposed concepts and are actually usually fairly complementary.

[VentVanitas]

The Fist Stances are also one button now, so maybe we get slightly higher move speed and the damage buff at once?

The mysterious button is no doubt Riddle of Wind. I don't know the exact translation of the tooltip (I think it has something to do with auto-attacks actually, but don't quote me on that), but nothing about it suggests it would be a replacement to fist stances considering it's a 90 second cooldown, unless SpeckledBurd's speculation about the fist stances being turned into low level versions of the riddles is true.



(Tooltip in question)