Thread: 5.0 MNK Problems

5.0 MNK Problems
Hello Everyone,

I am a MNK main here.

I want to talk about the state of monk I will break it into a two sections; Effectiveness and Feel/Identity.

Let us start off with Effectiveness. Monk right now is actually in a very good spot which kind of scares me more than it should. Given how balanced Monk is right now I fear any changes will be overlooked. We right now do great pDPS and add a decent amount of utility. So far EX fights feel good with what we have.

Second off Feel/Identity. Monk feels horrible. Our Optimal opener is hidden behind server ticks, it feels like we lost A LOT in order to gain buffs that in the end were just linear progression. Being busy and weaving skills and pushing out more and more damage has always been what monk is supposed to be about, but it feels we lost that feeling in favor of a lower skill floor and overall uninteresting changes.

Monk is in an identity crisis because most people played the class for the theme and for how the job rewards skill expression and skill.

Please hear our pleas!

My own personal opinions on changes I would love to see would be Anatman gives a GL stack instantly and Tornado Kick is limited to only 3 Stacks consumed. But I would welcome any new form of GL stacking like Riddle of Wind making an appearance where it empowers your next Shoulder tackle to grant GL stack.

The Jp forums have been quite vocal about MNK so here is hoping we eventually get a MCH treatment, the sad part is that as you mention MNK has the numbers so the devs must believe everything is A-Ok, so the best we can do is keep being vocal (Respectfully ofc), keep letting the devs know how we feel, if it worked for MCH and many other changes it must work for us fellow monks.

I very much agree, overall though I do not think it needs to be on the level of MCH rework to make MNK fun to play again.

Yeah it's pretty offensive to me that MNK has its skill speed taken away on all its endgame weapons and gear, except for one ring, but SAM gets SkS on its weapon. Um, what!?

It's slower. It takes an extra 3 GCDs (or one, under PB) to just match the speed of Stormblood MNK. But now we have the same forced slowdowns (plus a new one with SSS) and yet nothing to do during those due to the lack of oGCDs for weaving. We need two more, preferably one that gives a stack of GL, for it to be effective.

I personally champion getting Somersault and Axe Kick from PvP into PvE, because one gives a stack of chakra and the other stacks of GL, and the animations and icons are already made so there's no dev cost. Just put these in and all the problems are compensated for. Right now it feels terrible and is boring.

Exactly, I did everything I could in SB to keep MNK slower because it was easier to do my double TK combo and maximize damage. Now it feels I need to search hard for some SkS. Without our Crit RNG manipulation it feels awkward to only have 2 real oGCDs to throw out, I actually am starting to see the plus side to SSS while its pretty awkward its a great QoL as well as extremely useful in Raid situations where you need to continuously do mechanics.

TBH I want to see SSS + TK to be used together. Allowing you to gain stacks back in the window then continue back on and do the combo once again. I almost feels like that was what they intended but they gave us no method of doing that unless we do SSS after with a loss of POT...

Originally Posted by stormiekni

Exactly, I did everything I could in SB to keep MNK slower because it was easier to do my double TK combo and maximize damage. Now it feels I need to search hard for some SkS. [...]

See what you write here is a perfect example of something to note. There are multiple builds for BiS MNK in SB. On the Balance job guide by Tiffany Liz, there are builds with higher SkS, and builds with lower SkS but higher damage. This is a personal preference thing. I have tried MNK with a skill speed north of 2300 and it's still too slow for me, but then again, I come from fighting games like MvC2 and Guilty Gear so my brain is hard-wired for super fast button inputs, complex combos and counting frames in animations. That's not for everybody, though, so I respect you wanting to make things easier for you by slowing it down. A lot of that is going to be dependent on how you have your controls set up (mouse and keyboard, and is keybind/raid mouse button dependent, vs. controller with WXHB, so on and so forth) and how comfortable it is to use in your hands.

But the important thing is, we had OPTIONS. I could play how I wanted, and you could play how you wanted. We could use different builds and melds to cater to that and we'd be fine. We could both do the same opener, but handle things in ways that were uniquely comfortable for how we like to play. Now, we don't really have any options. Those were taken away from us. So for all they were saying about trying to break the meta and allowing for more play styles, it seems we were instead forced into one that isn't fun for anyone.

SSS and TK CAN be used together... it's just that without more oGCDs to use, making sure that the ones you've got are off cooldown so you can pull that off is going to be a rare thing to line up unless you're willing to sacrifice overall DPS output by saving your oGCDs for that window. And even then, the recovery is oppressively slow, even if you try to cheese it with using the unreliable method of Anatman + server ticks for a GL stack. We NEED more oGCDs, two to be specific. That should be mandatory, no fewer than two, regardless of what changes they make. At least one of them should give a GL stack.

If they remove Anatman to make this happen, I'm fine with that. If they change Anatman to allow it to be used out of combat to charge GL stacks, I'd still say we need an oGCD for a mid-combo recovery or else TK is pointless to use at any point in the rotation instead of SSS at 4 GL stacks and biting the bullet with an oGCD. I'd STILL say that even in that case, we still need two more oGCDs. If Anatman stays, the only way for it to really be viable is if it charged faster and also charged Chakra, so it could be used for pre-pull setup. Otherwise it would take too long to charge that, AND have all 5 chakras stacked, AND form shift 3 times.

(continued from my previous post) This is because they removed the thing where you could mediate 5 times and go into an instance or teleport to a zone with your chakra stacks intact. Now, if you walk through a door you lose all 5 stacks and have to meditate all over again. So pre-pull setup is obnoxiously long.

No matter how you spin it or adjust it... the ultimate truth is it needs two more oGCDs where at least one of them gives a GL stack, and there's no way around that. But luckily they have these depricated moves from PvP which are good to go and give the stacks, and can be integrated at low dev cost. So it's a simple solution IMHO. Change nothing else. Just put Somersault and Axe Kick into PvE. Give them 120-second cooldowns. Do this and all of the other MNK complaints with 5.0 wash away instantly. Easy peasy. No need to make this more complicated than it needs to be.

As for a fix that would allow TK and SSS to be used more optimally together... if SSS maxed out your stacks instead of just the duration but just required at least one GL stack to work, then you could TK > Snap Punch to begin your recovery rotation, and then use SSS at one GL stack and the potency loss from being at only one GL stack makes it like a faux-TK. Then they'd share a sort of yin and yang style relationship, where one taketh away the stacks and the other giveth back. This would simplify a double-TK(ish) opener for the people who thought it was too complex/convoluted so it's simpler to do, and provide more creative options for more skilled players who never had any issues with the double-TK opener to begin with. Everybody wins.

Either way I really feel like two oGCD as previously described should be mandatory, and we absolutely need more SkS. Even with an SkS of 3k I'd still say we need those oGCDs. SkS isn't enough. It's required but not enough.

In the live letter they made such a special mention of Monk not feeling like it evolved or feeling like it negatively evolved in Stormblood and I really thought they were going to look in the class.

I absolutely did not expect it to be worse.

Originally Posted by Rockette

In the live letter they made such a special mention of Monk not feeling like it evolved or feeling like it negatively evolved in Stormblood and I really thought they were going to look in the class.

I absolutely did not expect it to be worse.

I don't recall them ever saying this in the Live Letter, though I may be mistaken. I recall them saying that they wanted to open up the job to add more flexibility and creativity in rotations, which is certainly not what we got. But then again, I feel like a lot of stuff was also dumbed down because you have the easily-amused players and casual players who didn't like double-weaving because it required effort on their part, and the same goes for positionals. Lowering the skill ceiling is never, ever, EVER a good idea for balancing in ANY game. You want to raise the skill floor. Could MNK have used some streamlining? Absolutely. Is that what they did? No. It feels like they designed things which sounded neat on paper but don't really work in practice, Anatman being a fantastic example of this. This feels incredibly dumbed down and the MNK population is going to die out if this isn't fixed ASAP.

Seriously, it really only needs these two oGCDs and one of them can give a GL stack. Such a simple solution and it immediately resolves otherwise catastrophic problems. Best part is, the animations and icons have already been made so they just need to reintegrate/migrate them into the current PvE build. From a game development cost perspective, that's dirt cheap time and money wise. There's no reason why this can't be done by the very first patch, IMHO. Let them keep their same PvP tool tips, just give them 120-second recast times. Keep PB the way it is. Then you can save PB for a recovery rotation, use one of these oGCDs in place of Wind Tackle and then instead of having the opener be looped every 90 seconds, it just loops every 120 seconds to compensate for a few extra goodies like SSS, the boost to Meditative Brotherhood and the reduced recast time of tFC. The extra 30 seconds balances out with the new toys so that's fine by me.

That's it. All you need to do. Two measly oGCDs that have already been made. Let them keep their potencies and let the recast times be long. That's a good way to both balance Somersault's high potency and free chakra stack, and Axe Kick being an AoE with low potency but that gives you instant GL3, which would certainly be handy in dungeons and a long recast time prevents them from being abused. It's stupid simple. This is all MNK needs and then it's fine, without touching anything else.

That of course is the easiest solution to do to wash away the current problems, which I truly believe should be the IMMEDIATE course of action without touching anything else. Of course I would still recommend that upcoming gear in future patches include far, far more skill speed so MNK can really feel like it has grown instead of just taking longer to catch up to where it was. I'd recommend a skill speed north of 2,000 so our GCD is 1.80 or lower at 4 GL stacks, which can already be accomplished with gear from SHB, but sadly it's not suited to endgame content as the iLvl is too low. The Ronkan and Primal gear is just too slow and it's not fair that SAM gets SkS on their weapon but we don't get it on ours.

If they REALLY wanted to investigate proper QoL changes for MNK (which would be more invasive and take more time/money), I'd say to reconsider how chakra and GL is used since we have zero meter management with MNK outside of it being an "all or nothing" sort of thing. For example, we need max chakra for tFC and Enlightenment. It's not like we can spend 2 of the chakras to use a weaker but faster Enlightenment or if we have all 5, it's more powerful, red and leaves behind some kind of burning debuff/DoT effect. Kind of like in Street Fighter where there are several levels of Hadouken, and a burning EX Hadouken. If TK required a max of 3 stacks instead of all of them, allowing us to hold onto a GL stack would open up new options. And let's not even get started on us still having an MP meter which goes totally unused, but might open up some creative options if we could spend MP either on certain attacks, be it totally new ones, existing ones enhanced with magic damage (which would allow MNK greater synergy in comps with casters) or even just allowing us to quickly refill our chakra and GL gauges. MNKs have this entire MP resource bar which goes totally unused, so there's plenty of squandered potential there.

I'd also address the lack of an interrupt for MNK, since Leg Sweep doesn't count as an interrupt and doesn't work like Head Graze for BRD and can't interrupt casts by some of the FATE monsters in SHB areas. Losing the benefit of Silence on Arm of the Destroyer can be felt very strongly now. But, nevertheless, all of these are discussions we can have AFTER the high priority fix is made, which is just to put those two oGCDs in the game and give us gear with better SkS.