Thread: How should Monk 4.0 have been done?

Of the millions of things that could be done, I'll be at least considering the stated goals by the devs (simplification of jobs to close the dps gap, button consolidation, and rework of cross-class/role skills) and my personal feel of monk. I will also assume total potency/damage numbers are expected to increase with the increase of the level cap.

I like most of what monk has been since 2.0, speed, a large number of buffs for otherwise weak attacks, constant movement for positionals, and high sustained damage over burst. To my knowledge monk primarily faced one problem in 3.0, that other job's raid dps buffs generally outshined the high sustain monk brings (and they weren't keen on losing out on LB gains by bringing 4 monks for a ~2% damage buff on 3 of them).

They could fix this in basically one of two ways: increase the individual dps disparity or add raid damage buffs. Since 8-man content is what "matters," which makes raid buffs have more relative effect than in 4-man content. So despite being new to what it is to be a monk, raid buffs would make more sense balance wise than further solo dps buffs. This in mind, I think the buff from Brotherhood is pretty solid, flat damage bonus to the party. Easy. Becasue I would prefer something more "interesting" to at least differentiate monk from others, I may have opted for a speed bonus, a buff based on the monk's current damage buff, or something like a party-wide Wildfire that monk executes (spirit bomb lol). But in results oriented design, a simple buff to damage is just as good as any of these and is easier to balance, so that's what we have.

TP is something I remember monk having trouble with in 2.0, but really haven't had much trouble with in 3.0 content. Most of the time if you knew you would have trouble, then save the initial meditate for a Purification and that'd basically be it. If the reduced TP costs in the media tour stay, then unless we get insanely fast in 4.0, then I doubt we'll ever even need Goad outside of a stray AotD filled AoE pull.

On AotD though, while we don't need more AoE after getting Elixer Field, AotD is just sad. Still a combo-locked silence, still has a huge TP cost, and still has a super low potency, even for monk. I probably would've removed the silence and either upped the potency to ~90 or reduced the TP cost to ~100. I do find it fun to use when fighting 3+ sprites, it's mostly just sad.

The changes to role/cross-class skills are basically what I was expecting, and (I feel) mostly benefited monk. The loss of fracture entirely fits what they were billing with simplification and consolidation. I'm basically ok with the loss of B4B, since a flat damage increasing skill in role skills is a given, in what possible situation would it not be a chosen option?

The choices on consolidation and skill reduction only partially match what I was expecting. Haymaker's effect kinda moved to role skills in Arm's length, which is fine for solo duties and fates. But Haymaker and Fracture are the only skills that match what I was expecting to lose. Despite moving Steel Peak's stun to a role skill, they put a stun on One-Ilm Punch, kept the AotD as is, and left the stun on Shoulder Tackle (and spinshatter dive for DRG). I've only ever used One-Ilm Punch as a joke outside of PVP, and with PVP now being totally separate, and a similarly unique ability on OIP, I don't understand the change.

Put simply, I would've removed OIP. At length, I'm not aware of a single genuinely useful instance to use OIP in PvE, which is probably due to the fact that only monk has an ability with OIP's effect. With no other similar ability added in 3.0, there's still no instance they can make OIP significant or else they require bringing a monk, which they have stated multiple times they don't want to do. The big problem with 4.0's OIP (if the community is understanding the new tooltip right) is that it is in the exact same boat as old OIP. If you can use it to stun things that either can't be stunned normally or after the duration reduction has reduced stuns to zero, then there is no instance that could make it significantly useful without requiring you bring a monk. Unless they added similar abilities to other jobs, I would've removed OIP as it simply takes up hotbar space.

Fist stances have had similar trouble at maintaining usefulness as the Summoner pets. We can use Fists of Earth as a damage reduction cooldown, but you basically want to be in Fists of Fire as much as possible. Fists of Wind, especially with sprint changes, is a waste of space. Because they did not set a precedent of adding fist stances in 3.0, I was expecting them to at least remove Fists of Wind. They could have saved hotbar space by removing FoW and added (even somthing wind related) at the same or a higher level so the total hotbar space wasn't increased. Since we're losing B4B and I don't want to entirely exclude elemental themed abilities, I would probably replace it with a speed buffing cooldown, similar to Presence of Mind on WHM.

On the rotation and simplification of it, nixing Fracture only really brings the ceiling down since it's not required and entirely possible to not equip and still do good dps. Nixing Touch of Death should bring the floor up (and the ceiling down), since it's another DoT you don't have to worry about and is necessary. The problem is that we now have no out-of-combo skills and no non-AoE positional-free skill. While I would admittedly change little in 4.0 with playstyle, I definitly wouldn't have removed both of these. I feel like monk needs some kind of filler move, and to be frank, a DoT makes the most sense to me. A low initial hit, long duration DoT makes the most sense to me, which is exactly what ToD is. Anything I propose to replace ToD would either likely make monk even more complex or be exactly what ToD is.

I would really like to rework Tornado Kick, but since it only puts us 1.5-2 GCD moves ahead at the cost of 30% damage and 15% speed, we end up behind REAL FAST if it's timed poorly. Unfortunately, it's in a funny situation where if it's buffed much over what it is now, then we'd use it any time it's up. I feel like the devs should have just accepted that direction and increased the cooldown to compensate. If it were some ~500 potency and/or only consumed one GL stack, then we'd always use it, but if it was also on a 2-5 min. cooldown, they could make it's total potency per second reasonable and still be a move primarily used when we're about to lose our stacks anyways. It may not be a wholly satisfying solution for some, but I'd take it as an improvement.

Considering the goal of keeping hotbar space roughly the same, if we also remove featherfoot, then given the party buff and FoW replacement we'd have space for 2 or 3 more abilities depending upon how we're counting Second Wind moving to role skills. For the sake of keeping the idea of simplifying the job, I would hesitate to add anything to the main combo (as much as would love to). Instead, I'd add more oGCD abilities, cooldowns, and/or buffs. Of note, that is all what they added in 4.0, but one is a maintentance/defensive ability and another runs counter to my concept of monk.

I already proposed a speed buff in place of FoW, so I don't think even more of the same would be good. With the addition of Direct Hit, and the presense of Internal Release, a buff to Direct Hit rate could be interesting. It could be similar to 4.0 Enochian and be a small buff that stays up as long as either GL or any Monk form is up or a larger buff on a CD just like IR, I'd prefer the former. Though I just suggested DH, it could buff Crit just as easily and synergize with procs (though DH could synergize with procs too if they made them).

They could have also added something in a similar vein to SMN's Fester, something like: "applies 15s debuff, at the end of the duration the target takes damage equal to 50 times each unique weaponskill you hit the target with." There would be a sweet spot in the duration to encourage the use of each main combo skill once without going into AoEs. This could also be moved into the place of Brotherhood, if the debuff applied to all party skills not just the monk who used it's skills, though the potency/cooldown would need to be adjusted.

These are simple to use cooldowns that most players would simply use when up (or keep up) so they should still allow gameplay to be quite simple but have unique effects and at the top level may be optimally used at a slight delay.

On passives/traits, I mostly like Deep Meditation even though it's RNG and not consistent. Others have pointed out that, unfortunately, if we get 1-4 chakra leading up to downtime, it actually reduces the usefulness of having meditate independently. There's also the possibility with Brotherhood that we'll get more procs than we can use at a time (have 4, gain 2+ simultaneously). So long as this kind of overhead is considered in balance, I'm good with DM.

If they had set a precedent in 3.0 (or even now, it'd be fine either way) of adding more Fists, then I'd understand Tackle Mastery better. Problem is they didn't and haven't. Further, the added effects from TM are basically just side effects, and we'll still use it in FoF 99% of the time rendering it mostly useless. Without more damaging Fist options, I wouldn't have tied anything to the Fist in use. If I were to add another trait that is fairly interactive, it would probably be a proc of some kind. If they wanted to destroy fine-timing, they could give X% chance to increase speed by 5-10% for 5-10s on Demolish tick crits. If they wanted to really up the usage of the Forbidden Chakra, they could have paired something like True Meditation with DM, that grants a Meditate on a Direct Hit 15% of the time (thus on a Direct Crit, you could generate 2 chakra). To get off procs they could still do somehting with FoE & FoF, say anytime you switch between the stances, you recieve half again the effect of the stance for 5s. So fast swapping stances would be 3s at 1.075, 2 at 1.025, and 1 at 1.0, averaging 1.045, less than 1.05 discouraging fast swapping. My gut says it'd need to be weaker still to discourage mid-combo swapping for Demolish, but the idea is that it would encourage swapping to FoE just before you take raid damage and back just before you get back to the boss. That could be really neat if balanced right.

Forgive me if some of this gets off topic, but there are a lot of things worth considering. And I have basically nothing to do until Stormblood