Shadowbringers Monk is grueling and torturous in Dungeons - A regression to 2.0 monk

[GrumbleBeard]

Dungeons are absolutely miserable at the start of this expansion with all the scared single pulling tanks who afk before each pull to ensure I lose GL every single time. I was really hopeful for anatman to soothe some of this issue but it doesn't. All it needed to do was reset the timer on you GL outside of combat and it would be okay, but what point is it when I manage to save my stacks at one second left and they will disappear the second I try to hit something? Hoping for at least that small change in an upcoming balance patch, if not more.

[Chill_Ghost]

I feel Monk has been in need of a major overhaul since it feels like half the dev teams thinks monk is a slow class that goes fast and the other thinks it's a fast class that goes slow so we just get a jumbled mess that doesn't feel great. At this point I don't even care which one it is. Just please give a direction for my favorite class. It hurts that I don't want to play it anymore

[silverdragontyr]

It can't even be we're misunderstanding the class. In many, MANY fights the enemy will have moves that remove them from the battlefield for 5+ seconds. For any other class this is a non issue. However for Mnk, unless you JUST got off your Coeurl ws, there's a good chance you're losing your stacks.

Now, they have stated they wanted to make encourage Mnk to use skills like TK and SSS when you see these attacks come, but they have done nothing to show it. TK has a 330 potency and eats your stacks. 30 more than buffed bootshine now, which auto crits. SSS is 400, and maxes GL timer nice but often makes little difference as the enemy has to leave targetting and be back to targetable all within a window of about 12 seconds to compensate for server delay or you lose your stacks.

Now, being this high risk, there should be high reward right? A Mnk maintaining stacks should easily be one of the more powerful DPS. I can't say for recently but before while strong still managed to be right there around other DPS. While this is good, it means no one DPS is omg meta best must have, it also means any Mnk not having max stats is gimped. Further there is now no quick way to get stacks back until 80, except PB which again has a harsh 2 minute cooldown. If you use PB for DK > BS loop than you don't have it as a safety net. If you're encouraging an ability to be saved mainly for when you lose your power in an event that's dictated by the fight and something you can barely control then that's not a great design. So Mnk has two of their big skills, got at 50 and 60 respectively, that have little to no use.

I don't think they understand what they want to do with Mnk, much less what it's players want. I agree with others as it feels like a job with no focus. If you want it to be Crit boss then focus abilities around crit boosting and do things like make FC max GL timer, so it encourages you to spam FC. If you want it to be all about moving faster than anyone, then have abilities that focus on reducing gc even further instead of increasing it. Or even all cooldowns even ogcd ones. Make Mnk feel like a speed demon if this is your path. This middle of the road crap though? It leaves Mnk incomplete and unable to keep up.

[SaberMaxwell]

Source?
10 char

http://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/t...ealer-designer.

[SwarleyMcSwarls]

tornado kick was fun, building stacks back quickly was fun, sometimes fitting in two tornadoes was fun. High crit rates and more chakra was fun using riddle then going ogc happy was fun. Where are the synergies now? How often do you get to do some cool combos? well, level 80 I suppose maybe it all comes together somehow, I just don't see it tho.

I 100% agree with this. The way you could optimize with tornado kick and rebuilding gl stacks was so fun and such a welcome change/addition to the job. And they seem to have thrown that entire playstyle out the window. I was hoping this would finally be the expansion they'd give monk a worthwhile update because of how well they did with the mid Stormblood changes. But it really doesn't look like it right now to me.

[silentwindfr]

i think you simply have hard time to adapt *shrugs*
yes monk did loose a lot of stuff, don't means we have get nothing from it... the thing is yes loose GL hurt like shit.... but when you have all your gl you are a monster, let's be honest we are freaking fast, soo much fast that it's gonna be extremely interesting at higher level.

the trouble is at the start of ShB we did migrate from a monk based on TK (what was a nonsense) the goal of the monk first... is to reach max gl and become a force to reckon... in SB our goal was to use our GL and get them back fast because they had given us a lot of tool for get it back fast....

in ShB we don't play on TK, this skill is used when you are sure you will not be able to get back your GL before the next fight. (what was the goal of the skill at the base before the player base did find a way to make it part of our Cycle, what was clever)
in this expansion, we don't have tons of way to get back our GL fast, we have tool for keep it. but i will see at 80 before complain at how it is feel weird or bad, because seriously, if you complain about this monk.... you have seen nothing.... monk was a horrible in V1, ARR, did bring new tool and create a more interesting monk, HW was mixed and SB was simply bad... from what i stand, ShB is trying to fix the mess they have done in the two last expansion.

find more use for the chakra added with HW, and trying to give us a reason to use the buff added with SB. but who know.

[ValStormbreaker]

i think you simply have hard time to adapt *shrugs*

I think you are over-selling things a bit here. At level 80 with the AF4 gear, MNK is actually slower. It requires all 4 GL stacks to match the GCD speed of Stormblood end-game MNK, which takes longer to wind up due to the lack of an instant GL stack granting move. And even then, the removal of oGCD skills means there's not much to do in windows of forced slowdown even once you get to the 4th GL stack. The lack of that GL granting move even inhibits a recovery rotation for when Perfect Balance is on cooldown, whether or not the dropping of stacks has anything to do with a Tornado Kick use. Anatman is a new toy to use, sure, but it's incredibly redundant and impractical compared to better options, and its drawbacks are too significant to be as viable as people believe it to be based on how it sounds on-paper.

So no, this isn't an issue of needing to adapt or having trouble doing so. I can adapt just fine. The job itself became slower, and more boring with fewer things to do. It's been simplified into the ground, and that makes it less fun to use and less of a spectacle to behold. It's not a "can I find a way to do my rotation optimally" thing, it's an "is this job still enjoyable to use" thing. It's not a viability concern, it's a concern over MNK being BORING. Either way it still loses plenty of uptime opportunities it had in SB which is an overall net loss regardless of how you feel about the changes, and that's an unavoidable fact. I'd argue that even at +2k skill speed, SHB MNK is just boring to play without much to do in a single-target rotation due to the lack of oGCDs. You can buff potencies all you want, but that doesn't change the "fun" factor.

As for making comparisons to pre-SB incarnations of MNK... just because those MNKs were bad doesn't mean that complaints about SHB MNK aren't valid. And, we're at level 80 now. It should feel like a level 80 job, not like we're playing a level-synced HW MNK in post-SB content. If it feels lacking, it feels lacking. Adapting doesn't make it any less not as fun to use.

My proposed solution is just to add in two oGCDs which would give more to do during forced slowdown periods. One of those should give a GL stack back. To cut down on development costs I'd say just use some of the PvP skills that were deprecated from the game since their icons and animations are already done (i.e. Somersault and Axe Kick). Do that and watch all of MNK's problems go away.

[ValStormbreaker]

It's really off at 70, but it probably gets better once you get anatman. Even though I say better, I feel it will mostly feel equal or be slightly worse than how it felt before.

At level 80 with the AF4 gear, you need all 4 GL stacks to match the GCD speed of level 70 SB MNK in BiS gear, though you now have more windows of forced slowdown and the culling of oGCDs gives you less to do during that time, making it more boring to play. At its best, MNK feels better to use when the Skill Speed is north of 2000, but as a result of the lack of oGCDs to use, it will still feel only faster by hundredths of a second, and as such it will ultimately still feel slower and more boring to play than SB MNK.

Anatman feels pointless/redundant. It looks cool and seems neat on paper, but I can tell you that there's no reason to ever really touch it with SSS, RoE and/or a well-timed Rockbreaker/Snap Punch/Demolish. If you're at 4 GL stacks it doesn't max out your duration, only if you go up a GL stack as per usual. It can only give you GL stacks if you're in the middle of combat, not in-between where it just freezes your stacks. It can only give you stacks if you have one to begin with, and the GL stack generation is slower than just attacking normally.

It would be preferable to replace it with a skill that gives an actual GL stack while doing damage. Right now its only real use is if you're at a dummy and want to hold your stacks a bit while waiting for something to come off cooldown. It has zero actual practical application outside of something like the obnoxiously long o10s phase change where boss takes his sweet time to attack you, by which point your stacks have dropped before RoE can do its thing.


I wouldn't mind the 120 second PB cooldown if SSS maxed out our GL stacks to 4 instead of just the duration timer, so it could be used after a TK>Snap Punch for a recovery, barring any other sort of recovery options. However it would still feel like the job is lacking oGCDs to use in slowdown windows.

My preference is, without changing anything else, just to put Somersault and Axe Kick (two former PvP-exclusive moves) into the game with 120-second cooldown timers and adjusted potencies, and let both otherwise keep their tooltip descriptions (one gives a chakra stack, the other GL stacks). Doing this without changing anything else would instantly fix all of MNK's problems IMHO, and it's the most viable way for us to get added oGCDs because of the development cost of making new animations, effects and icons. These were already made and as a plus happen to look cooler than Steel Peak/Howling Fist.

The 120 second cooldowns would line up with PB's current recast time, and allow for a repeatable rotation every two minutes. Considering other changes which would open up other options if more oGCDs were available to push, this actually reduces the sting of the increased PB recast, and something like a more streamlined SB MNK.

[Silver-Strider]

Just a couple of suggestions.

1) Make Riddle of Earth into a group wide defense buff of 5%.
2) Lower (or remove the slow effect entirely) on Riddle of Fire and make it also offer a small crit buff to make up for the loss of Internal Release. Something like, Grant 5% extra damage and crit chance but reduce speed by 5%.
3) Make Form Shift refresh GL (but not grant) GL upon shifting from Courel to Opo Opo.
4) Make Tornado Kick only take up 1 GL stack so that its actually useful.
5) Have Anatman instead be a move that exchanges Chakra for GL stacks.

Just my thoughts.

[Sigmakan]

They just need to fix SSS and it wouldnt be so bad:
1) Make it oGCD, 30s cooldown
2) Keep the effect that resets your GCD cooldown to 5s
3) Lower potency drastically to offset fact that its oGCD
4) Instead of maximizing timer on GL, it should just add 10-15s to current timer