Quote Originally Posted by Shayuki View Post
As for what they should have done with Monk, heck, why not give Monks something that doesn't require them to do or give up something else? Tornado Kick? Lose Greased Lightning. Riddle of Fire? Makes weaponskill recast worse. Forbidden Chakra(Meditation)? Requires charging during jump / losing GCD. Greased Lightning? The amount of abilities Monks have that are designed purely to maintain Greased Lightning "Sometimes" is completely absurd. It's not like it's anything special, just a maintenance buff that allows Monk to be on par with the other classes. How about giving Monk something that just is GOOD, without massive trade offs or conditionals every single time? Why waste half of Monk's available additional skill slots on abilities just to make Greased Lightning less trash, and instead make it not be a pain and give them a lot of new, fun skills to use?
To everything prior to the quoted portion, I can only agree. Unless a means is developed to create viable choice between weaponskill progression (which is not constant in weight, which means there is no overall "choice" save but to specific globals or a number of globals per a given window, such as of Demolish) and Meditation, the decisions being touted still won't exist.

The closest I can see to this is trying to have a higher percentage of Bootshine casts now that their relative weight has been increased by Deep Meditation. But this, too, is not really a choice. One either creates a GCD that allows for a rotation that uses a higher proportion of Bootshines, or the "choice" remains a false one. Granted, math will most likely side with DK being dropped rather than Bootshine being used "too frequently" up to x GCDs so long as no oGCDs are to be used over the interval and depending on how many auto-attacks fall into it. Now that Bootshine no longer wastes damage contribution from Critical Strike stat (only towards Deep Meditation chance), and it guarantees one's 30% chance at generating a Chakra stack (sadly now down to 50 potency value from 64) and itself deals a relative 75 more potency than Dragon Kick, it seems possible that DK may best not be used for significant portions of time depending on one's Crit rate. But still the math is simply done in advance, best synced to, guidelines set for best performance given one's stats (accounting for when they vary from raid buffs), and then basically forgotten. For most things to be "interesting" they need to be both situational and rotational, both reactive and preemptive (given x change in y interval, how do I salvage or maximize the next occurrence at y+1?).

For the portion quoted, however, I can only offer a similar bit of advice: any added skill that is purely GOOD makes refuse of the rest. All skills at present come with trade-offs, even if one hits the edge of their balance rarely in normal rotation. In other words, their impact tends to be more negative than positive after a mere few hours of play. If it has no synergy, it becomes a redundancy and offers nothing meaningful(ly new). If it has synergy, it has dependence. It's hard to find something outright good that doesn't fall onto one side or the other. I'd offer that the best enter first as fixes or excuses but become far more than that. These are skills like Bane (ffs I don't want to have to DoT up all of these individually when anyone else could simply nuke them at the same time), or alike to Form Shift (especially were it just buffed in some manner), or to which Meditation approached through TFC and Purification, but, I'd argue, didn't quite make the mark. The skills that, as you said, "waste half of Monk's available additional skill slots on abilities just to make Greased Lightning less trash," on the other hand, seem to me more failure than success. They don't extend beyond salvaging or, worse, circumvention. They admit error rather than tout design and, rather than fix the error directly, bloat the whole construction with skills that would make the core mechanics look even worse in retrospect (or when down-synced).