The state of Monk in Shadowbringers (long)

[PangTong]

A couple of other things I wanted to bring up that I didn't mention in my initial post:

- Missing the Bootshine positional is ridiculously punishing. With Bootshine's increased potency from Leaden Fist and the increased chance to proc chakras from Deep Meditation II, missing the Bootshine positional is like losing out on an entire GCD worth of damage. If the boss turns at the last second or if you can't be in the right position due to mechanics and you don't have a True North charge ready to use, you're losing out on tons and tons of damage by missing Bootshine. The only positional that's more punishing to miss is Trick Attack, but while a Ninja only uses TA every 60 seconds, Monks use Bootshine 5 times a minute.

- The 120 second cooldown on Perfect Balance makes playing Monk in dungeons absolute hell because you'll lose Greased Lightning between almost every pull unless the tank is doing big pulls and sprinting to every boss, even then there's area transitions where you'll lose it anyway. With no way to rebuild Greased Lightning quickly you're stuck building all the way up from scratch which is like 15-20 seconds where you're doing massively reduced damage. Imagine if another job like Dragoon or something had a 20% damage down debuff for the first 15 seconds of every other dungeon pull. It sounds terrible because it is but that's the daily reality of Monk.

- Six-Sided Star feels terrible to use. Even though it does have its uses, it's still 4-ish seconds where you can't do anything, not even form shift or charge chakras. Being on the GCD also makes it pretty awkward and difficult to use reactively, you kind of already have to know exactly when you need to use it during a fight, otherwise you'll miss your chance. Overall it just feels like something Monk didn't need.

[Infernocommander]

The only thing I disagree with you on is Riddle of Earth. RoE is a fantastic way to elongate GL3/4 in instances where you don't have anatman, one such example being the final trial of ShB. Without RoE would lose your stacks moving from one phase to the next. Other than that though, you right.

[silverdragontyr]

The problem is RoE relies on being it. If you're low on stacks and nothing's up, it encourages you to be hit. That's not a good ability design for a class not supposed to take hits. It's nice, but not really anything but an add on. That's a big problem with Mnk right now. Half our abilities are "It's nice, but...."

• Riddle of Earth - "It's nice, but you need to take damage."

• Tornado Kick - "It's nice, but you need to trade all stacks for a not great potency."

• Six-Sided Star - "It's nice, but really doesn't have use mid combat"

• Anatman - "It's nice, but can only really be used on bosses with long transitions where you don't have to move" (Not counting it's current exploiting server tic.

• Arm of the Destroyer - "What?"

[Kolsykol]

I am convinced at this point that someone on the team asked their ten year old son/ daughter to take care of Monk because that's how it feels.
Nothing makes sense, meanwhile everyone else got new awesome toys and play nicely :/.

[Xaert]

I have no faith in the developers to fix Monk, but I wholeheartedly believe that they'll "fix" AST and SCH right after or even before Raids hit. We're going to be put on the backburner another expansion, but in a worse state than before. The only thing they'll change is how Anatman works and how it'll force you to wait 3-4 seconds to get that stack given/refreshed because they don't like how any class can abuse their toolset.

Call me out on "feeding the negativity," cause that's exactly what I'm doing but I'm not going to be putting up with how Monk is currently. If the developers don't acknowledge how the community feels about it (and SCH and AST, not to diminish how they feel about it) or acknowledges it and refuses to fix it (kinda like how they just did going from Stormblood to Shadowbringers), I'll be dropping my sub. I just don't enjoy another class as much as I like playing Monk. It's not like we're playing a subscription-based game with one of the largest playerbases in current MMOs or playing a game from a AAA developer with the capability to bring in high quality employees.

...Oh wait...