So... monk’s 60-70 skills

[Cabalabob]

Just started levelling monk to 70 and had a read through the skills and the thing that stood out to me was that they seem to be trying to make the fist stances more relevant with the riddles and tackle mastery.

But looking at the different tackles... I really don’t see what they were going for here. Fists of fire still increase damage while the others don’t so it’s still going to be the go to stance for a dps and they just reinforced this by making fire tackle do even more damage, riddle of wind I guess could be useful for stun locking, but what is with earth tackle? Less damage than the other two and adds a knockback to your gap closer? Why would you ever use that?

I feel like there’s some adjustments needed here, because I can see what they were going for by trying to give monk a kind of stance dancing element, but they didn’t do enough to make the other stances competitive with fists of fire.

First off, the stances themselves need to be adjusted, fists of fire being the default stance is fine, but the others need to be made at least situationally useful. So I’d suggest:

fists of wind- increases movement speed and increase critical hit rate by 20%. With increased critical hit fists of wind would have more synergy with deep meditation making it a good stance for building chakra, maybe using it alongside brotherhood to build chakra quickly would make it at least worth switching to for a short time. Increased crit would also go well with having 2 tackles since if you’re more likely to crit you have more chance of increasing the damage to make it less of a loss compared to fire tackle. (They could also change deep meditation to be any critical damage instead of just weaponskills so wind tackle would also help with opening chakras).

Fists of earth- decreases damage taken by 10% and removes positional requirements from weaponskills. Fists of earth is more of a solo oriented stance so removing the positionals would make it incredibly useful when you can’t get to the enemies flank or rear. It would still be a dps loss compared to fists of fire when in a group since you won’t be getting the damage buff from fire, but when solo or even in group content when mechanics force you into a certain position it would be useful over fists of fire as full potency would outweigh the 5% damage buff to base potency.

With these changes all of the stances would have some use and fire and wind tackle would be on a more level playing field.

The only other thing to adjust would be earth tackle. Again, I cannot understand what they were thinking with this. Anything would have been more useful, double stun duration, decreased damage dealt debuff, 20% slow to replace haymaker, a 50 potency DoT making it stronger than the other two over time.

I just feel like the monk adjustments with stormblood were too minor and nothing really changed since riddle of earth and fire don’t fundamentally change anything, tackle mastery is basically pointless since it won’t get people out of fists of fire and brotherhood and deep meditation are just some nice utility buffs. It would be nice to see the stance dancing element they are trying to introduce become effective.

[LeeraSorlan]

they will never make stances useful, simply because youd have the issue that SMN has...one pet will /always/ be better and thats the only pet youll ever use. I mean garuda is useful for a full caster comp but...full caster comp..lol.

Same with this...there will be once stance that does more dps with 100% uptime, thats the stance youll use...if ur fist of wind gives enough chakra to override fires 5% dps, thats the stance we will use, always.



Out of all the skills to come out of Stormblood, only brotherhood and riddle of fire are useful
RoE can be useful in very niche situations, but barely.


And both of those useful skills feel terrible to use...riddle of fire slows u down which ruins the core of what monk feels like..brotherhood is so underwhelming when you dont even get a full chakra stack or are solo or have those 3 caster situations.

As much as i hate streamlining jobs, they need to remove alll the extra tackles and stances, burn fist of fire into a passive dmg trait so its not a stance, remove the slow on riddle of fire (with an understandably decreased dmg effect), make brotherhood affect the monk, make bootshine always give a single chakra when it crits (or maybe even remove the RNG aspect altogether) and maybe give us back touch of death. Potency adjustments not included

[ValentineSnow]

they will never make stances useful, simply because youd have the issue that SMN has...one pet will /always/ be better and thats the only pet youll ever use. I mean garuda is useful for a full caster comp but...full caster comp..lol.

Same with this...there will be once stance that does more dps with 100% uptime, thats the stance youll use...if ur fist of wind gives enough chakra to override fires 5% dps, thats the stance we will use, always.

Not necessarily, SMN can't switch pets on the fly, wasted GCD, mp cost, cast time and all the "effects" of the pets are active abilities tied to a shared CD. With monk, the stances are oGCD skills with passive benefits. You can switch stance depending on what the situation calls for. Does using wind for chakra build beat fire dps? Perhaps, but once chakra is built we can switch to fire with no drawbacks, burst phase, then switch back to wind, once again, with no drawbacks. Can you hit your positionals? Yes? use fire/wind, no? use earth and you can swap between those as the fight demands.

[Cabalabob]

Not necessarily, SMN can't switch pets on the fly, wasted GCD, mp cost, cast time and all the "effects" of the pets are active abilities tied to a shared CD. With monk, the stances are oGCD skills with passive benefits. You can switch stance depending on what the situation calls for. Does using wind for chakra build beat fire dps? Perhaps, but once chakra is built we can switch to fire with no drawbacks, burst phase, then switch back to wind, once again, with no drawbacks. Can you hit your positionals? Yes? use fire/wind, no? use earth and you can swap between those as the fight demands.

This combined with the riddles would make switching stances more efficient than sitting in one stance. Even if wind becomes a dps increase over fire, you’d still want to switch to fire to use riddle of fire which would be a temporary increase over wind.

[LeeraSorlan]

its one of those things that sounds ok on paper but i dont feel like it would work, it would add pointless complexity for the sake of making the other stances useful, when it comes down to it ur just essentially pressing an OGCD when its up for whatever dps gain it might have..riddle of earth would be the only thing to really have use of strategically if it removed positonals, but that would essentially make true north useless, aside from the dmg boost in fist of fire under it. the rest would just be buttons you press, which i dont feel like is what the job really needs

[wereotter]

Maybe I'm alone here, but I don't mind the fist stances in general.

Some are less useful now than they were in Heavensward, but I still like to use them. I often will use Fists of Earth when raid-wide damage goes out, or if I'm targeted to take damage. In Heavensward this was especially useful if you ended up with brink of death to help you live through mechanics once your HP was massively penalized. Fists of Wind was also pretty handy while learning fights that required movement. Sophia EX comes to mind as a fight I regularly used all three stances. Sure they're niche skills, but they're not bad.

Considering Riddle of Earth is currently designed around you taking damage to refresh greased lightning, I wouldn't mind that staying as-is. But an overhaul to fists of wind would be welcomed, and I've suggested similar ideas myself. I think the added complexity would be welcomed considering how simplistic monk is compared to the other three melee jobs. The only learning hurdle to the job is learning your positionals. But, by level 70, you should be well past that and adding something else in would be welcomed.

[LeeraSorlan]

The problem, wereotter, is that if those moves wouldnt have killed you if you DIDNT use fist of earth, then you were taking a dps loss for no real reason, which is really what matters to endgame balance, dps. so while there are very very very few small minor situations where using fist of earth would have saved you, wheras not using it would have killed you..the other 99.9% of the time it makes the skill useless, because 10% mitgation is usually not enough to save your life if you were going to die anyway, not even counting how you wont know if the healer would make it to top you off or not in some situations.



Its not like i entirely disagree, id much rather them focus on the problems monk has and imo, useless stances are not a problem...sure its pretty underwhelming having skills youll almost never use at all, but its better they fix the skills we DO use first.


So im fine with the tackles and stances being untouched so long as they fix the real issues with monk.

[wereotter]

Back when brink of death massively lowered your max HP, there were mechanics that not using fists of earth definitely would kill you.

But this can now just be added to the long, long, LONG list of examples where the game evolved, and monk didn’t evolve to keep up.

[Sylvain]

Someone mad a lice (to me at least) proposition regarding the stance. Basically wind and fire would be something you alternate a bit like the bard songs while earth would have been an aoe stance where every thing you do splashes around. Looked rather cool