Quote Originally Posted by Powercow View Post
Numerically, Monk is doing great. This might hurt Monk's chances of getting interesting changes, because that'd involve having to re-balance them.

The concerns center almost entirely around the gameplay. That being said, if you like Monk, go for it. None of us know which jobs will be the "meta" in the future (really who would have predicted WHM not getting any DPS utility and being *the* meta pick for healers?) so just play what you like. FFXIV does a good job of making sure no spec is ever left so far behind that it's useless.
Thanks for your reply. I began leveling SAM first, but found that it got a bit stale pretty quickly. Now I'm bouncing around between MNK (fun, cool animations/sound design, but worrying complaints on forums), NIN (fun, cool animations/sound design, supposedly not very strong at 80), and RDM (cool, great animations/wacky sound design, but have heard it gets very easy/stale towards the end). Being able to switch jobs on the fly has put me in a state of choice paralysis - I don't know what to stick with! MNK is super cool and is strong in the raid, but the gameplay problems pointed out by experienced players make me think that I will be disappointed when I reach 80.