is there any hope for monk?

[SpeckledBurd]

Is there hope for Monk? Sure, but it's been tempered by bitterness at this point after Stormblood's promises of the Action Overhaul and Monk being the "Poster Job" (lol) gave me a ton of hope and utterly crushed any expectations with what they ended up delivering.

Monk has been in need of an action overhaul for the longest time of any Job in the game full stop. Going into Stormblood it had the greatest Number of useless actions of any job in the game, and even after the action overhaul it's still basically that. We had three fist stances, one of which we actually want to use because as a DPS we want the one that boosts potency. Skills like Haymaker, Featherfoot, Arm of the Destroyer and One Ilm Punch were worthless, and while they removed the two Former, the latter two are in the game and just as bad as ever. Tornado Kick in Heavensward was cool in terms of its animation but it’s opportunity cost was so high we could never use it except as a 1% mercy stroke. We had Purification, a TP regen that could only be used after using Meditate to build 5 chakras. Not a bad idea, Monk had TP woes in ARR, but building chakras was a damage loss unless the boss was untargetable…which meant you had already regained your TP, so the skill was useless. Meanwhile The Job Critical action, Perfect Balance (IE, your get to GL3 button) had an obscene cooldown, three times the length of equivalent skills Blood of the Dragon or Enochian.

The Stormblood actions and traits were also varying degrees of… bad. Tackle Mastery elected to try and tackle (heh) the issue with the fist stances while never actually fixing the inherent problem with Fists of Fire’s effect making the other two worthless, and it did so in the worst manner possible. Tackling in Earth gives you an effect you literally never want and it cuts your range, tackling in wind let you close a gap again, but only after using the gap closer once, and fire was additional potency… so you only wanted to stay in Fists of Fire more. Riddle of Earth is the dumbest conceivable solution to Greased Lightning possible. We have to get hit and take damage in order to refresh our stacks. The use case is when the boss jumps and does a big aoe. Sounds fine, but it isn’t because the bosses don’t always do an undodgeable AOE, sometimes you’re supposed to dodge and not supposed to take damage, so you have to run into the AOE like a fool (Shinryu, Rofocale, some others). Sometimes the boss won’t come back in time for it to be easy to refresh (ExFausts timing is extremely tight and if he thunders you gamble with your life). Sometimes they just don’t do an AOE in time, or AOE at all (Susano, Tsukiyomi, Lakshmi, some others). Further, because Greased Lightning’s duration is so short, if you didn’t get a combo finisher before the jump you might lose your stacks anyway. And, because you have to take damage for it to proc, a scholar critlo-ing might block you in the instances where it should work anyway (Twintania to Nael Transition). In Black Mage Terms, this would be like getting "Mana Ward Mastery: Extends Enochian Duration to Maximum when full 30% damage is absorbed" instead of tying enochian to AF/UI and letting you transpose”. Riddle of Fire is a powerful buff, allowing for Monk to have the strongest Burst in the game, but it also evokes the feeling of losing your stacks by giving you a slow, and quite a few people hate that and feel that it goes against what the Job is supposed to be. Monk’s timers also assume a ~2 second GCD so you’re required to clip or drop your buffs/dot occasionally. It was implemented to allow you to double weave when Brotherhood (discussed later) feeds you procs, but it’s literally impossible to get enough Forbidden Chakras to make this necessary. Deep Meditation and Brotherhood attach Bard Mechanics to Monk, but the procs come slow, they make Meditation worse at mitigating lost down time if you enter a down phase with Chakras built, and we have no means of dumping stacks early in the case we’re getting a lot of procs like Bard does with Pitch Perfect while also getting locked out of them because of Forbidden Chakra having a long cool down. Further, Brotherhood only procs from Weaponskills, not spells, so Monk just feels worse if there’s a caster DPS in the party. Many people don’t like the RNG aspect of it inherently, preferring the more consistent playstyle from Heavensward/ARR.

That was just at launch. Moving forward to 4.2, they made some other changes that, while it did make Monk recover from losing its stacks much easier, also allowed quite a few of the terrible design choices to coalesce into a lot of really clunky mechanics or made Monk suffer losses that no one else had to put up with. Riddle of Wind gained the effect of Granting one Stack of Greased Lightning and Perfect Balance’s cooldown was cut to a third because 3 minutes was unreasonably long and had been forever. That’s a good idea and it also made it feasible to use Tornado Kick, which a lot of people liked. Indeed, the optimal monk rotation involves doing that, but it’s extremely clunky. It takes a stance change and two oGCDs to finally get Riddle of Wind’s effect and one stance change to get back to fire after a Tornado kick. Monks buff durations, as mentioned, all assume a 2 second GCD, so wildly fluctuating it by dropping your stacks makes performing this rotation extremely tight and sensitive to fight mechanics. Some people like how much maximization this allows for, others hate the way it feels. It’s probably the most polarizing aspect of the job at this point, but since it goes against the devs stated desire to bring down the skill ceiling it means that the TK rotation is a total accident and probably getting the axe.

Purification also got an Aggro cut attached to it, so we can cut our aggro finally, but we’re the only job to lose 400+ potency oGCD to do it. Samurai doesn’t even lose kenki, just more efficient Kenki use. Black Mage doesn’t have to give up a Foul to Lucid, so why should Monk get penalized? Answer, it shouldn’t but it does anyway.

So at this point Monk has two problems both of which necessitate an overhaul. Bad Skills and Traits that work poorly or shouldn’t exist. The Three Fist Stances that shouldn’t exist and by extension Tackle Mastery. One Ilm Punch, a skill so bad the devs have mocked it in game on multiple occasions. Purification, which makes monk take a penalty for basic functionality that other jobs can just do and will soon be without it’s primary usage because TP is being removed. Arm of the Destroyer, a 50 potency AOE that costs more TP than our higher damaging AOE Skill, but hey it has a silence that’s never of use since everyone else can do that much easier and for less of a loss. It will be less bad in Shadowbringers because of TP's removal, but the amount of damage it does is so pitifully low that it’s often better to just bootshine in AOE. And Riddle of Earth, a skill whose activation requirement might make sense on a Tank but on a DPS just makes no sense. The other is skills, that while effective, go against what the job should be such as Riddle of Fire. Yet in spite of having so many bad actions, Monk still has basic utility missing from it's kit such as a ranged poke Weaponskill, an AOE Gauge dump, a disengage skill, a DPS neutral gap closer or movement skill, and literally any kind of new Weaponskill since ARR.

[enthauptet]

It'd be better if they just gave us 3.0 monk back to be honest. SB changes and tornado kick rotation are just a big joke (especially if you remember the job quests).

[Burningskull]

MNK will be awesome in 5.0 when they remove positionals.

[SpeckledBurd]

The positive to this is, the devs are aware of how poorly received Stormblood Monk has been. They acknowledged how much we didn't like Riddle of Fire's slow during a Q&A during sometime in 4.1 or so and I'd be surprised if they've missed the feedback on pretty much everything else wrong with the job. With Bard and Paladin going into Heavensward, it resulted in them being overhauled into the most popular iterations of those jobs ever. That is why I can still say there's hope for Monk, they have overhauled jobs to great effect when they actually knew what the issues are.

I'm just praying we get a an overhaul like Bard or Paladin and not one like Stormblood Machinist.

[KingFrost]

I hope they correct the flow of the job. Too much feels "off" about Monk.

Riddle of Wind is clunky. Double tackle keeps you locked in place, potentially costing a positional and is anathema to the job's motif of speed and agility (Read: Moving around a lot).

Stance dancing just adds to button bloat. FoW is still useless and FoF is still mandatory. They're only ever hit for ONE oGCD, which in and of itself feels like clunky design. 2 (3 with RoW/ST) more buttons to press for one move? A trait could solve this.

Riddle of Fire is anathema to GL3 and what makes Monk fun (For me anyways). This has already been discussed to hell and back, but it's still pertinent. It just shows that SE has no sense of what to do with Monk.

The job needs a makeover. Here's hoping the 24th leaves it sitting pretty.

[Physic]

I hope they correct the flow of the job. Too much feels "off" about Monk.

Riddle of Wind is clunky. Double tackle keeps you locked in place, potentially costing a positional and is anathema to the job's motif of speed and agility (Read: Moving around a lot).

Stance dancing just adds to button bloat. FoW is still useless and FoF is still mandatory. They're only ever hit for ONE oGCD, which in and of itself feels like clunky design. 2 (3 with RoW/ST) more buttons to press for one move? A trait could solve this.

Riddle of Fire is anathema to GL3 and what makes Monk fun (For me anyways). This has already been discussed to hell and back, but it's still pertinent. It just shows that SE has no sense of what to do with Monk.

The job needs a makeover. Here's hoping the 24th leaves it sitting pretty.

hmm, i hope they dont kill the job for me in making it better for you. But i guess no matter what someone loses

[Coltvoyance]

There's a lot I love about MNK, and there's things about it's current structure I absolutely hate.

The current Best DPS "Rotation" for MNK is absolutely ludicrous. The timing is incredibly tight and if you flub one button press it can all go to hell. TK Rotations are conceptually fun, but the way those rotations are executed feels BAD.

Lets put it this way. BLM has a rotation where what you cast and when you cast it makes sense. (This is not a call to make MNK as simple as BLM let me finish.) It has a rotation, specifically designed by the Devs to flow a certain way, like all classes. It has leeway here and there for you to mix it up, but generally "Your rotation will likely match the one they designed."

I cannot imagine any Dev looking at "Dragon Kick > Twin Snakes > TK > Snap Punch > Fists of Wind > Bootshine > Tackle > Tackle > True Strike > Fists of Fire > Demolition" and thinking "That makes sense. That's a very obvious flow of skills that the players will naturally pick up on."

The process of rebuilding GL stacks quickly feels unintuitive and cumbersome. Because it's supposed to. Because for 60 levels, the goal of the class was to maintain your stacks, because rebuilding them was a struggle - a punishment. Monk was initially designed to get stronger the longer the fight goes on. It's late-fight GL3 strength and speed was supposed to compensate for its slow start at the beginning. It's why Perfect Balance had such a long cooldown time.

TK Rotations where you're constantly building up, and tearing down your stacks feels awkward because repeatedly building your stacks in such quick succession is not how the class was initially designed to function. It's trying to overturn 60 levels of design philosophy.