Soooo... Shadowbringers Monk

[ValStormbreaker]

Got my MNK to 80 and here are my thoughts.

People have oversold GL4. The speed increase is in hundredths of a second which is marginal. With AF4 gear, the Skill Speed is so low you need to get up to GL4 to have a GCD as fast as the end-game BiS gear for Stormblood, meaning you're not actually going faster, and you need to do an extra step to get to the same speed, meaning it takes longer to wind up. Combine this with the removal of damage-dealing oGCDs and that means you have less to do while going just as fast, making it feel slower to play. Potencies may have been changed to adjust for this damage-wise, but the result is that it's far more boring to play. It's still a problem if you have more than 2k SkS on your gear. The lack of oGCDs just makes it still feel like there's nothing to do in specific windows with forced slowdowns. This makes MNK boring to play and is not what players had in mind when GL4 was revealed. Their desire was to go FASTER, not to take longer to get to the same speed with less to do.

It feels like the job was largely tuned for dungeon encounters with a better AoE rotation, but single-target gameplay suffers. Anatman is a worthless skill. It only maxes your GL duration if you go up a stack of GL, which can only happen while you're already in combat, meaning you'd either have to lose DPS up-time to use it or save it for a phase change. There is not a single phase change in the game outside of o10s that is so long that Six-Sided Star and/or Riddle of Earth couldn't just be used instead for these purposes. O10s having an obnoxiously long phase change which doesn't deal damage quickly enough for you to use RoE is an encounter design issue and a rare one at that, not something MNK needs a tool to deal with. It doesn't generate GL stacks or maxes your duration when you're not in combat, and requires at least one GL stack to do anything, so it can't be used for pre-pulling. If you're already at GL4 it won't max your duration, so if you use it for a phase change and you have only a few seconds left on your GL timer, it just freezes the timer.

I'd much rather have abilities which allow me to regain a GL stack while maintaining DPS uptime than being forced to use this. It feels only useful for pausing at a dummy, but otherwise impractical and there are other, better skills which do the same things for GL stacks and don't take you out of the fight, which makes it redundant and not as helpful/useful.

I'll post my proposed solutions right after this because of the character limitations per pose :P

[ValStormbreaker]

Proposed solution: without changing anything else, just put Somersault and Axe Kick into PvE. Let Somersault give a Chakra stack and Axe Kick a GL stack. Make the recast timers 120 seconds. They don't have to be strong, they just need to be there, and need to be available at level 70 for any level-synced content for MNK to be usable. There's no development cost for these moves since they already have animations and effects working in-engine. They need only be migrated into PvE.

It needs the chakra stack one as well in addition to the GL one because the new meditative brotherhood trait upgrade still doesn't generate chakra stacks fast enough in a lot of cases to make Enlightenment feel worthwhile over The Forbidden Chakra. There's more to say about various high risks of wasting all 5 chakra on Enlightenment when dealing with trash mobs but that's another subject. I would say that Enlightenment's chakra cost should be reduced so it doesn't require a full set of chakra stacks, or its damage output is relative to how many chakra stacks you can spend, to allow for some more interesting meter management gameplay, but that's more of a wish-list thing. As for just single-target content, in a caster comp Meditative Brotherhood still isn't enough from the two tanks alone for tFC to be up reliably as an oGCD substitute, so having one of the oGCDs give a chakra would be useful.

I would argue that MNK lost more than was put back, looking at my hotbars, so I wouldn't think the removal of anything would be necessary, but it really needs both oGCDs as one doesn't feel enough. In the event something does need to be removed, I'd say scrap Anatman since it's too slow and interrupts gameplay. Give them a high recast so they aren't abused and then just call it a day.

If only one of these moves can be added, then allow for SSS to instantly max out GL stacks instead of just duration, provided that there's at least one stack, and this would justify the recast penalty more and make its usage more viable. But it really does need two more oGCDs IMHO and they need to provide some sort of recovery utility for both meters.

Overall MNK got a 4th GL stack but winds up feeling slower anyway and has too many forced slowdowns without enough to do in those windows. One step forward, two giant leaps back, and it became more boring to play.