Thread: How should Monk 4.0 have been done?

Originally Posted by SpeckledBurd

If you want to fix the Fist Stances, making one also be a DPS increase isn't going to do it. If Wind's GCD increase results in a greater DPS gain than Fire's 5% outgoing potency buff, then you'll just sit in Wind all the time, and if it isn't you still just sit in Fire all the time.

So long as you're able to swap between them with low opportunity cost, those swaps become obligatory, rather than limited to one stance or another. For instance, if Fists of Wind were to grant 8% attack rate and Fists of Fire only 5% damage, and assuming one had sufficient TP, one would use Fists of Fire only for high per-execute potency GCDs (including same-global oGCD use), and Fists of Wind for the rest.

The decision-making this would cause would be based on uptime lost and your attack speed (essentially, counting modulars as your upcoming Coeurl nearest to Demolish as to make it take as long as possible before you're forced to clip or neglect a global tick, which would result in opportunity cost or lost potential tick damage), wherein the 5 potency lost from not buffing Shoulder Tackle with Fists of Fire, for instance, would be weighed against the rotational benefits of the 8% faster recast on that global allowing your DK to affect your next DK or your Demolish not to neglect a global tick. This would mean high skill-cap, but would still likely fail to interest most Monks, as far as I can guess from the three 4.0-related Monk threads.

Originally Posted by Deithwen

Unless you stack all the speedskill you can, which is not a good idea, you can't skip a DK/TS refresh. It's a DPS loss. And even if you do have enough SKS, the amount of crit and det you lose is so big it will still be inferior. Theory is nice, but numbers speak for themselves.

It's not merely theory. I use it daily.

Due to server leniency, wherein buffs are checked as a skill is released from queue, rather than at end of animation (which is when the duration is applied), the effective duration ends up a little over a half-second longer than stated. Similar to how Iron Jaws can refresh DoTs even after they've disappeared, a debuff like Dragon Kick will still apply to a skill's calculations as long as it was present when the action began, even if it falls off for the animation's duration before being reapplied. In my experience, I can lose DK/Twin on only the DK/Twin with as much as a 1.96s GCD. That's a trade of 150 potency for 29, or a net gain of 119 potency per 3 cycles.

Now, I can't guarantee that even then this would be a net DPS gain given the nearly 500 extra SS necessary, none of which will affect oGCD or AA damage, as I don't have equal item levels within SS and non-SS choices, but I can say that plateau makes a significant increase to DPS upon changing rotations, rather than clipping DK/Twin 2.2 GCDs short. Having spoken to a few top world/server Monks, they suspect that these means of increasing damage over time are not currently fully weighted for, and that, should TP issues be fixed, Skill Speed would otherwise be more viable than its given credit for.

Personally, I'd still guess that for Skill Speed to be balanced, it would need to increase attack speed (also affecting AA frequency) and all periodic damage (taking that to mean both DoTs and damage dealt by (oG)CDs), that it would have to be changed from reducing the GCD by a set amount per a hundredth-of-a-second (although this number does apparently vary beyond what decimals would entail) to reducing the remaining recast time by a specific percentage (such that it does not gradually come to scale exponentially, even if that's a far, far, far distant future), and that the TP refresh rate would have to be changed from 60 per 3s to 50 per GCD (MNK and NIN base TP costs increased to compensate).