Melee classes are sad in CC

[Gserpent]

Reaper player here! Reaper has to work HARD for every single kill they get. You really are more of a tank than a DPS because all you do is constant annoying (but not too dangerous) sustained damage. You really have to set up kills with your fear and be a huge backline distraction, otherwise people will just swat you away like a fly. It probably has the least amount of carry potential out of any melee job because you have to pray your teammates make good use of the constant distractions and CC you bring. Also, how annoying is it that your potentially HUGE AoE damage skill is also the one you want to spam off-cooldown to get your LB?

Gserpent, I appreciate you trying to stand up for the underdog, but outside of the uptime on their 2 second fear, they really don't bring anything to the table that another melee couldn't do better. I don't think RPR is terrible, but it definitely isn't the high-skillcap powerhouse you seem to think. It's just a high-skillcap house.

It's a tank with AOE heavy and AOE bind, a flexible teleport, and one of the best playmaking LBs in the game. I agree that you need your team to follow up on openings you create, but it's very good at creating those openings. Most classes that aren't overpowered rely on teammates doing the bare minimum - that's literally how the game is designed. Even AST can't solo carry.

[SirShady]

An AoE Heavy/Bind is nice, but it's really not a huge boon in most teamfights. Silences, stuns, and poly are MUCH more powerful even if they're single target. You're not usually going out of your way to hit multiple people with it either since you're more about harassing the backline anyway. Not to mention the bind isn't available unless you're in LB. The teleport, however, IS great. Makes Reaper one slippery pain in the butt and able to stick to their targets relatively well. Great at helping you waste people's time/resources too if they focus you since it's an easy escape against most jobs.

I'm not too sure what you mean by "one of the best playmaking LBs". It's useful for screwing people up on the wind map, that's for sure, but outside of that and guard breaks in general, the 2 second fear isn't usually that good. Other classes do a much better job of cc'ing targets for their team as it isn't tied to their LB (again, jobs with stuns/silences/poly) and can be followed up instantly be the user. I really would love for the to speed up the LB animation... The difference between Reaper and the other "top tier" DPS jobs, are that they do a much better job at pressuring and bursting a single target. Reaper just beats you down over time with their demonic wiffle bat and hopefully soaks up attention while praying when they get their next LB their teammates will be able to capitalize off it.

[Gserpent]

An AoE Heavy/Bind is nice, but it's really not a huge boon in most teamfights. Silences, stuns, and poly are MUCH more powerful even if they're single target. You're not usually going out of your way to hit multiple people with it either since you're more about harassing the backline anyway. Not to mention the bind isn't available unless you're in LB. The teleport, however, IS great. Makes Reaper one slippery pain in the butt and able to stick to their targets relatively well. Great at helping you waste people's time/resources too if they focus you since it's an easy escape against most jobs.

I'm not too sure what you mean by "one of the best playmaking LBs". It's useful for screwing people up on the wind map, that's for sure, but outside of that and guard breaks in general, the 2 second fear isn't usually that good. Other classes do a much better job of cc'ing targets for their team as it isn't tied to their LB (again, jobs with stuns/silences/poly) and can be followed up instantly be the user. I really would love for the to speed up the LB animation... The difference between Reaper and the other "top tier" DPS jobs, are that they do a much better job at pressuring and bursting a single target. Reaper just beats you down over time with their demonic wiffle bat and hopefully soaks up attention while praying when they get their next LB their teammates will be able to capitalize off it.

You see how many people bitch and whine about Miracle of Nature, demand it be nerfed, etc? Consider that RPR LB is poly, except it's an AOE, it breaks guard, and it forces you to move out of position. And comes at just under twice the cooldown of Miracle of Nature. Being able to break Guard is one of the most powerful and important things in the game, as are any effects which can pierce Guard. That's because Guard is your primary method of avoiding being burst down instantly the second you are in range of the enemy team.

Realistically, RPR LB should result in a kill or at least force out a major cooldown like Guardian every single time you use it. If it doesn't, then either you used it at the wrong time, or your teammates failed to take advantage of the opening you created. In either case, this is not "RPR is too weak and needs buffs," this is either you screwed up or your teammates screwed up. Making RPR do more DPS or whatever won't change that.

Heavy and Bind are also extremely powerful. They generally have longer durations and shorter cooldowns than stun and silence effects and are just as deadly. The primary method of avoiding death is utilizing LOS to prevent enemies from continuing to pour damage into you. Heavy and Bind both deny you that option. They're also very useful for preventing someone from reaching a medpack - which in many cases makes them *better* than silence. It's also very hard for melee to stay on target if they are hit with Heavy or Bind. They either have to blow a cooldown to regain their target or will no longer be able to attack their target.

[SirShady]

Reaper stuff

In a vacuum, it sounds amazing, but the difference is circumstances and uptime of poly versus Reaper LB. The AoE generally doesn't matter too much since in higher ranks players don't stand next to each other if they can help it, especially if they're the one being focused and running low on resources. The entire point of stuns/silences/fears is that they're much more effective on low-health targets since it allows you to burst them before they recuperate. You will rarely see multiple members of the enemy team below 50% since focusing targets is so important. So the main usage of the LB is generally to cc one person (more if you're lucky) for 2 seconds and hopefully not be animation locked for too long so you and your team can finish them off. The guard break however, is really nice, but I'd argue that you can get a lot more easy value out of Monk LB than Reaper... And this is coming from someone who has also played Monk to crystal rank.

Making RPR do more DPS will help it provide value outside of a 2 second CC and some personal survivability. Its consistent damage isn't anywhere near as high as other jobs, and its burst is pretty close to non-existent outside of the occasional stacked Plentiful Harvest. I'm not asking for sweeping buffs or anything, but it doesn't feel like it does its job as a DPS or faux-tank well enough. It honestly kind of feels like a half-baked Paladin with none of the unique utility. Does still have that guard break though.

I definitely would not say heavy and bind are as deadly as a stun or silence. You can still guard and recuperate while affected by them, which is the primary way of avoiding death for all jobs regardless of circumstances like LoS. Sure, the niche use of using them to stop someone from reaching a medkit is nice when it happens, but stuns do that too on top of preventing them from using their buttons. Same applies to LoS. Overall it's nowhere near the value of just completely preventing someone from using their toolkit and killing them with no counterplay outside of having purify up.

Honestly I wish we could just look at winrates of jobs. It's hard to argue either way without any sort of empirical evidence. What I can say though, is that Reaper was used twice in the PVP tournament series I watched with a 50% winrate, while other melee jobs were used throughout.

[Lieri]

SAM 1 hit KO LB is sad indeed.

[MonteCristo]

I agree...also funny thing is (since reaper is perfect according to delusional serpent) there is also a thread on reddit about the new pvp 6.18 changes and low and behold players mention reaper SEVERAL times about being the weakest melee. Here is a bit from elo player i found interesting and completely cosign:

Anonymous Reaper-

Even in high Elo Reaper isn't as useful as you think, I played majority of top 100 all season, and although its fear is fantastic, it has the lowest damage of all classes in pvp. Not only does it have the lowest damage, it's Plentiful harvest takes over 1 minute 30 seconds without dying to full stack it. There are fixes reaper need. It is still considered one of the worst classes in high elo, even with meme fear wins by fearing off the objective with no time left.

Edit: I figure I should add, I climbed from no rank to crystal playing reaper, as well as roughly playing around 100 games within crystal as well. Not only did I play Reaper, but I played dragoon, monk, ninja, smn, and mch all in the top bracket for 2 months.

Reaper is by far the weakest class in all of pvp, not even debatable imo.

There are two major fixes that would help them a lot. Make communio have no cast time, and make plentiful harvest easier to stack, Its reapers only big hit outside of communio, and it takes 2 life times to stack.. it isn't even funny. Alternatively, you could also make it so you don't lose stacks on death. Either or.

[Gserpent]

stuff

It's not really in a vacuum, though. It's in actual play. Reaper LB is literally just "bigger badder polymorph," plus the DPS buff. I think you, like so many others, are grossly underestimating how incredibly powerful guard break is. It's not suppressing Guard, it's *ending* it. 30 sec cooldown wasted. It takes you 45 sec to charge your LB without any modifiers (Plentiful Harvest, Spire, etc.) It's a 30 sec cooldown on Guard - if you forced a Guard early in a fight, you will probably be able to break their next Guard with LB. That's insanely powerful. You also get a teleport skill you can use to precisely target your LB, unlike MNK (who is single target, takes longer to charge, and can only go to where their target is.) Meteodrive is almost never used to break Guard, instead being used for the uninterruptible 36k combo.

RPR already does pretty solid DPS. You're forgetting that you're doing 8k per GCD after LB, plus the Communio at the end. I don't think it needs more DPS. Look at it as a tank, and not a DPS, and you'll see its numbers are fine.

Heavy and Bind are at least as strong as silence and stun. Having longer durations and shorter cooldowns is part of why. If making people unable to LOS your team isn't leading to kills or pressure... well, sorry to say, your team is apparently off licking windows or something. Better luck next game? Doesn't mean those effects are weak.

Winrates don't matter. They're a horrible metric to use for balance changes. I also don't really care what's been going on in recent tournaments, because the sample size is *way* too small to draw anything meaningful from. All of the teams were just doing "solo queue meta," with no real attempts to break that or shake it up. The game is too new, and the complete lack of an actual competitive circuit (Team Ranked when?) makes tournaments of questionable value at best.

It's like looking at TI1 and trying to draw data from that, or something.

[Vermillionwing]

Monk needs buffs in CC, I literally joke that there aren't enough monk players around to verbally push for buffs. All my friends in crystal rank claim they barely see any monks, and usually they just ignore them as nonexistant, not even remotely threats on the priority scale.

Counterargument:
In the threads I see arguments like it has good cc, or it has best sustained damage or it has super fast lb. Just rev up your damage amp into a phantom rush.
The problem is that only happens in a vacuum, in actual fights cc'd and focused, you aren't applying that damage constantly. In execution it is more practical to short burst with your OGCDs and LB to avoid dying. Being a pocket LB is not a good class design

Understanding of the class:
A bulky assassin who can just waltz through enemies, ignoring or soaking most incoming fire and harass priority targets forever until you murder them with LB or they run away from the sight of you.
A sustained brawler who supplements overall team damage in engagements and provides various utilties in terms of shielding, some cc, being able to guard break and being able to soak/finish off targets that might be unreachable by other classes.
A harasser/decoy who can basically take a ton of abuse/cds from the enemy team, and steal all their healing potions and otherwise distracting multiple members of the enemy team, providing your team with tactical and numerical advantages near the objective.

Issues:
Low burst/early damage: A monk's "threat" range from a standstill is about 30-40% of an HP bar with a instant burst (not counting amp'd Phantom Rush), with LB that threat range goes up to around 60-70%. Among the DPS its on the fairly low side, but it is a reasonable exchange for being nearly unkillable (It currently isn't)

Survivability: Monk HAD great survival tools. Shield/healing potency has not increased/scaled with damage potency, and there are no % modifers in monk kit. Potency buffs on other classes render monk kit more and more ineffective, what takes 3 hits to crack through now takes 1 or 2 which is a huge % drop in effectiveness.

You can no longer soak 4 people beating on you without blinking, infact several times you can't even take 2 or 3 people beating on you at the same time, sometimes you can't even win a direct and isolated 1v1 (sounds like ARR, HW, and SB pvp monk no?)

Suggested Adjustments:
Increase Monk damage,retain current survivability: Frontload more potency into earlier moves, and ogcds or reduce the length of the combo string. In a burst heavy environment, monk needs early access damage.

OR

Return Monk survivability(preferred): Upscale monk shielding and healing to match with all the damage potency buffs. If you want to keep monk identity as sustained dps, it needs a way to be able to apply that dps in PVP's high burst and high cc environment. Possibly increase their cc/anti cc kit.

[KickRox]

I can assure you monk isn't in as good of a place as you people say it is. They have the worst defensive capability out of all the melee jobs cause they can get CC'd before you can reactivate it, your damage is below average to the point where anything outside of the LB window is laughable and any focus on them makes them die easily.

You use Earth's Reply
You are healed for 32000 damage.
Enemy 1,2,3 & 4 take 16000 damage
You use Phoenix > Phantom
Enemy 1,2,3 & 4 take 15000 damage
(3-4 seconds of input/animation)

You just basically Sky Shattered enemies 1-4

But what about #5, the BLM at full HP that wasn't in melee range?

You use Phoenix > enlightenment > Meteordrive (2 seconds of input, 2 more in animation lock)
BLM takes 51000 damage.

Shyeaa bro, mnk is sewww trash.

Go ahead. I'll wait while you check the pvp guide and realize you haven't been utilizing MNKs most valuable tool in the kit all this time.

It's okay to be a beginner. We were all there once. But youre better off just asking people how to get better than posting in an attempt to not look like a beginner.

[Petite]

Monk needs buffs in CC

All I think MNK needs is a Form Shift skill that would trigger a 4 seconds GCD with every use (twice as long as one MNK GCD).

That way, they wouldn't be totally reliant on hitting enemies while still making the skill-shuffling process slow enough so they don't reach Phantom Rush too quickly.