Quote Originally Posted by Darian View Post
Yeah. Once ppl saw world 1st clear had a monk and not a single sam the whole thread got pointless very quickly.
Ultimately, in its current incarnation, MNK is a pretty niche pick. In order for the job to reach its full potential, all or most of the following need to be met:

-Physical-heavy party composition due to limitations of Brotherhood.
-Consistently heavy-hitting raid-wide damage for Mantra to be of any use.
-Fight needs to have no or little extended downtime (No extended transitions or MNK deaths in frequency more common than three minutes [PB cooldown], or boss vanishing for longer than 11-16 seconds without unavoidable damage [for RoE to maintain GL3] more frequently than once per minute [RoE cooldown].)
-Target needs to have flanks available for the majority of the fight (Examples of fights that do not are ones where the boss is unusually spin-happy or spams AoEs that require maintaining a single - or even entirely frontal - position relative to them. True North is a nice bandaid, but has a punishingly long cooldown for a class that loses a large chunk of its damage each time its rotation is forced away from the appropriate positional).

Have to admit that the fight mechanics of OSV4 relative to MNK's kit make it the exception that justifies the rule, rather than one that contradicts it. In contrast, jobs such as SAM, NIN, RDM, or BRD will hardly ever come across content that is more punishing to them than any potential alternative pick. This isn't to say that picking MNK out of personal preference, rather than looking to match fight criteria, is entirely out the window - but in those situations if one needs a strong melee damage dealer SAM will definitely be a more versatile option.

This isn't to say that I'm on the "nerf SAM!" bandwagon. Personally, if I've got gripes about MNK it's due to its large number of near-useless and/or contradictory abilities (Tornado Kick, Fists of Air, Tackle Mastery, One Ilm Punch, etc.), how downright clunky RoF makes the rotation, and how the damage is heavily dependent on both RNG and party composition (sure, Brotherhood in an 8-man with two tanks and two to three other physical DPS is golden, but try to bring it into a 4-man dungeon run with your other DPS being a RDM/SMN/BLM). Of course, these are all issues completely separate from the existence of SAM, and a few other jobs have glaringly more pertinent issues (ie. DRG, SMN, MCH).