Quote Originally Posted by wereotter View Post
It's not the mudras, and I say that as someone who always bounced back and forth between the two jobs. Those are pretty easy to learn, especially if you learn them naturally as you level. It's more things like how many other cooldowns you have to watch, and if you do it wrong, then you've messed up for the next two minutes. Things like watching the rolling timer on trick attack and ninjutsu to make sure you don't use the suiton too soon. You want to use it well before trick attack comes off cooldown so that you have two uses of raiton during trick attack, but not so soon as to lose the suiton buff before you can trick attack. Also there's the ninnki gauge and bunshin to make sure you hold onto the ninki if bunshin is coming off cooldown soon instead of burning it as soon as it's available on bhavacakra. As well as just how much you have to attempt to cram into the trick attack window, which for me was just a chaotic mess.

Monk, on the other hand, just has you hold onto perfect balance to use when you have riddle of fire up. It doesn't have any OCGD damage moves other than forbidden chakra, which you always use as soon as it's available. And you do the same with your damage buffs. So you end up with far fewer parts of your rotation to babysit. The only part to really learn and watch is what combination of moves you want to use in perfect balance to get the right nadi, which if you've played ninja will be really easy, and getting used to the idea that you're in formless fist once you execute a blitz, so you don't have to just pick up your rotation where you left off.
This is very interesting perspective - it really makes me want to try MNK. The points you raise about NIN are interesting - I've mostly treated those things as relatively minimal CD management. Of course, it's hard to know if it's just a matter of being used to it and no longer spending much brain power tracking those CDs. One of the virtues of NIN (though many on the forum seem to disagree) is that it's relatively chill outside of burst windows, so you can devote more attention to setting up burst windows with Suiton, etc.