Thread: Monk ignored for 4.1

Originally Posted by ErzaScarlet77

i havent seen MNK in such a long time now. both in raid and leveling

Most of 4.1's content really puts the issues with Monk's kit under the microscope. Skalla's second boss forces you to lose your stacks repeatedly with the mechanic where you become a Spriggan and Perfect Balance is never up for when you're back. The third boss of Rabanastre's darkness ability similarly, forces you to lose your stacks if the raid is too slow. If the Alliance is fast, you can stand in his AOEs to save your GL3...but also get a vuln stack and then lose your GL3 again in the next 30 seconds because Riddle of Earth will be on cooldown. Shinryu EX does the exact same thing with his charges in phase 1, and his final phase again demonstrates how stupid the fuckoff long cooldown of Perfect Balance is with the add phase>running across his tail>final phase thing. Either you start slow on adds and have Perfect Balance for Shinryu proper, or you use Perfect Balance during the add phase and don't have it for final phase Shinryu. It would have been greeeat to use a skill that would let us maintain our stacks while running across his tail, but we can't because Riddle of Earth is pointlessly situational.

Originally Posted by SpeckledBurd

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Lets not even talk about ultimate bahamut. GL3s timer really shows off how bad it is. Especially bahamut phase. Every time I play Monk I feel like im supposed to be playing the best dps in the game due to how stupidly strict all the timers and GL3 maintanence skills are along with chakra spam. Then you realise your dps is at the whim of the party comp. Its just very unfun to play due to rng, slowdown, button spam in downtime and strict timers.

HW mnk was fine because extra forbidden chakras defined how many chakras you could squeeze out during downtime no matter how small. We could easily just get rid of deep meditation rng and make a currently pointless cd useful;

-Make steel peak similar to mug from nin and have it grant us our resource (5 chakras) every 60s lower peak potency down to 100.

-Reduce PB CD 80s

-Make TK an aoe CD based off chakra.

-Revert all potencies back to HW values including forbidden chakra.

-Fist stances deleted. FoF now passive.

-RoW is now double auto attacks for the next 3 auto attacks. 120s CD

-RoE is now an aoe 8% mitigation on the group. 120s CD

- New CD 'flash lightning' instant GL refresh. 60s CD.

-RoF: reworked and replaces Brotherbood and is now an aoe 5% buff to everyone for 10s no extra chakras due to steal peak changes.

-Silence removed off AotD. Potency increased to 100.

-Elixir Cannon: shoots a beam of aether in a straight line 10yalms. Shares a CD with Elixir field. (Maybe button bloat but ive often wondered why we cant shoot it forwards?)

- One ilm punch: renamed to Six ilm punch. Creates an aoe shockwave in a straight line Potency at 110. (Rockbreaker can stay 130) at least monk would have a meaningful aoe rotation without awkwardness.

Just a few things i'd change. Values can be tweaked for balancing. But the main point is to;

1. Line up raid buffs better with other raid buffs.

2. Delete RNG via steel peak every building stacks to 5 every 60s (which atm is what deep med gives us if rng is kind) no longer need the slowdown from firing so many forbidden chakras. Id rather have less, consistent forbidden chakras at high potency than low, frequent ones at random. Leading to point 3.

3. Keeping the core of monk mechanics as speed and hard hitting. While having only form shift and flash lightning compliment the GL3 maintenance.

Originally Posted by KanameYuuki

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The devs had so many ideas to work with going into SB though, people were thinking up new abilities back in HW too to counter Monk's lack of raid synergy, I'm sure Tornado kick being on the chakra system back then was mentioned a few times too for aoe uses because, like now it's not used much. (although used more often back then due to no RoE especially in A11). Changes to PB were constant however, it became evident that when you outgeared A11s back then but couldn't skip Lapis due to skipping everything else that PB lengthy CD posed a lot of problems for monk, PB came back at the worst times possible. If you pushed any phase in that fight you were more than likely to never have PB up for phase transitions. At min ilvl prog it didn't matter because you could only skip the 1st GA-100. But after that, oh boy did Monk suck hard to retain stacks. A12 inceptions NEEDED the monk to end on a GL refresh otherwise you would lose it. Monk needed a lot of perfect scenarios to do the dps it lived up to. But it was all for naught because party synergy wasn't there. It's the same story now except even worse imo, because we aren't even at the top yet our playstyle still feels like we are. It really sucks as a 4 year monk main to suffer the same issues I did in HW because the devs couldn't come up with a decent moveset or be lazy and implement some of the better ideas for Monk. Such as Chakra on every GL3 refresh. Nope they stuck it behind rng instead.

My post above is where i'd like to see the job headed, which would put us more inline with other comps that revolve around 60/120s synergy line ups. Our utility is the worst right now because of that, and because BH is an indirect buff to the monk, we can't hold it optimally for synergy because it HAS to line up with our RoF so it becomes suboptimal w/e you do, bleh. Monk is in a complete mess from a design standpoint. Nothing lines up with other party members, we have 2 form of RNG for chakra gains. Which honestly could be solved by a CD to gain 5 chakras, maybe every 2 minutes (if the potency was rebuffed to HW levels) and have have a trait that just gives us a guaranteed chakra every boothshine crit. This would work out that every minute you'd gain 1 FC through good play, and 2 at the 2 minute mark. On top of the ridiculous RNG we got the most convoluted crap with RoF because they really wanted us to fixate on the RNG aspect of BH chakras. Which as i mentioned could disappear if given a consistent way of gaining chakra (CD or guaranteed bootshines), then there'd be no need for this ridiculous slowdown because we wouldn't be at the whim of RnG TFC popping up. It's like they took 1 step forward and 2 steps back with this job going into expansion. Everything has a god damn consequence attached to it, like Riddle of Earth. Great in theory, but why such a ridiculous way to achieve it? Not only that, it forces me out of my best dps stance. Then we get possibly one of the worst traits in the expansion; Tackle. Mastery. such a master of all 3 tackles i only need one. Go home SE you're drunk. And brotherhood was just lackluster. like i said, no synergy with anything else and casters don't even benefit. takes 3 mins before it lines up again with anything. and the extra added rng element just makes it infuriating when it doesn't go your way, but equally infuriating when it does because you now have a 5s recast on TFC.

I'm sorry if people get tired of my complaining. But i'm not going to stop until action is taken about this job that's lost it's identity and fun factor. Are we crap DPS? not by any means. But why work 100% harder than every other melee job to see no benefit whatsoever and be screwed because the devs can't be bothered to give us a PB cd reduction or design fights that Monk can be equal to drg and ninja in terms of resource and buff management.