DT Job Reworks - Unconfident Developers and Poor Communication

[SpeckledBurd]

Stormblood Monk is often lauded as being peak of the Monk experience. In fact it's often seen as the peak of job design, and for very good reasons.

Back then we had more potisionals, management dots, execution skills. Jobs which had gauges to manage had multiple skills to spend said gauge on. Basic combos had more branches (for tanks as well). Enmity management was still a thing leading to skills specifically designed for that purpose. There was just so much more to consider during a combat encounter outside of the boss pattern. That era in job design is often held is such high regard for a reason.

I mean on some level some of that is also rose tinted glasses requiring you to ignore entire jobs or aspects of those jobs.

Like again with Monk, Stormblood Monk being regarded so well is also really only in retrospect, and it really only considers 4.2 Monk and onwards without considering Stormblood Launch Monk (IE, the first half of the expansion).

Monk from 4.0 up until 4.2 in terms of gameplay was bad. Perfect Balance was on a 3 Minute Cooldown and Wind Tackle stacks didn't exist yet so GL recovery was still terrible compared to equivalent buff recovery of other jobs (BoTD, Enochian, etc). Riddle of Earth was poor as a GL refresh even though it was brand new because we were already in the thick of cinematically designed fights where boss's would take their time between going invulnerable and actually dealing damage (plus it could be blocked by shields). Worse yet, we'd already lost much of our DoT management (Touch of Death and Fracture were gone) so timer management was a worse experience if you enjoyed it in Heavensward. The newly added burst windows felt agonizingly slow with Riddle of Fire's slow debuff since the job was pretty light on oGCDs to begin with before 4.0 removed Howling Fist and the RNG that was meant to supplement it was structured to be the worst of all worlds. As was the nature of RNG you'd occasionally get bad chakra returns from Brotherhood where you wouldn't get a single full Forbidden Chakra but by design you could never get a frantic, fun weaving window since Forbidden Chakra had a 5 second recast making it so you could only be punished by bad RNG and never truly rewarded.

4.2 Monk played as intended went over pretty well since it made pretty much all content less of a drag to play Monk in. However the TK rotation itself was pretty hotly debated at the time, likely as an extension of the dislike of Riddle of Fire's slow. Some people enjoyed how fast and active the job felt with frantic stance switching and oGCD weaves, others disliked it because they didn't like how their GCD recast was jerked all over the place making it feel slow, others still disliked it because it felt like a bug (which to be fair, it was, TK did like 100 more potency than it should of which is why the entire thing worked). People only consolidated after the fact when Shadowbringers launch Monk was so catastrophically awful that there was no joy to be had in playing it and that having the option for the TK rotation was better than fishing for server ticks with Anatman.