Proposed fixes to Monk

[shinkin]

This feels more like a tourniquet. They fixed they immediate issue with a quick and easy fix. Later when there is more time they will do the serious changes needed.

My thoughts exactly, I think some of these changes may even be rolled back

[ownagepuffs]

Did a dungeon today. Never dropped GL after the first pack.

Didn't have to wait for the slow tank to pull bosses to maintain my stacks.

Pinch me I'm dreaming.

[IchiExorz]

Seeing these changes made me decide to lvl my MNK. lol

Sure some abilities seem a bit pointless now but I hope SE will rework them sometime down the line.

[PangTong]

To summarize my reaction in a sentence it'd be: "These are pretty obviously hasty bandaid fixes, but I'll take it!"

Monk is finally fun again. All else aside, it's finally no longer frustrating to play. No slowdown on RoF feels so much better it makes you weep for the 2 years it was left in. Riddle of Earth is finally useful and relieves so much of the burden of positionals without making them totally trivial. We can finally keep our Greased Lightning stacks between dungeon pulls. Longer forms, instant 5 chakra out of combat, and double radius Mantra are just icing on the cake. Whenever I played Monk before all I could feel was resentment for all the feedback that went ignored, but now I feel like I can finally enjoy the job again and from the bottom of my heart I am grateful.

So I don't want to complain too much, but I do still want to talk about a few things.

These changes really do feel like a quick patch-up job, a hasty attempt to plug the leaks without a strong consideration for the job's overall design. In particular, I feel the change to Form Shift allowing you to refresh Greased Lightning is especially dangerous. With this change the devs have essentially admitted defeat on making Greased Lightning a fun or compelling mechanic. They are giving up and saying "we don't know how to make this work" and so are just offering virtually infinite Greased Lightning. Monks should never lose Greased Lightning now unless they are stunned by mechanics or cinematic boss transitions. While I'm sure most people are rejoicing at this change, it does mean that the devs can never again attempt to make Greased Lightning maintenance a core part of the job's challenge, because now that Monks have tasted this convenience they'll never be willing to give it up. Removing this feature would be considered unacceptable and result only in intense backlash. For the job to evolve from this point on, Greased Lightning maintenance can no longer be used as a core gameplay mechanic.

Similarly with Riddle of Fire, removing the slowdown is essentially the devs admitting that their design was a failure and giving up on it, rather than going back to the drawing board. It would have been a mistake to keep the slowdown no matter what, but I do think it is a bit boring to just have a +Damage cooldown with no other effect, especially since it always lines up with Brotherhood and you always want to use it together with Brotherhood. It's not so bad I guess since several jobs have similar effects, but there was opportunity for flavour and identity with this skill, but the devs simply couldn't make it work, which is a bit disappointing. Still, I don't want to complain about this change since even the plain +Damage effect is so much better with no slowdown that it's unbelievable.

Besides these things, there are still a number of outstanding issues with Monk, but I'm currently content to leave these for future updates as the job is finally at least fun to play again. Namely the issues are:
- Tornado Kick is still borderline useless. I'm glad its tooltip finally got fixed to reflect its true potency, but its use cases are still extremely rare and difficult to pull off. I would very much like to see the greased lightning cost removed and the skill incorporated properly into the Monk rotation somewhere, especially since we lost so many other oGCDs with 5.0, the job is feeling a bit barebones right now.
- Anatman's intended purpose has been basically annihilated by the Form Shift change. Its only uses are now in the blatantly unintentional Anatman opener (which I'm still hoping gets fixed), or if you use Tornado Kick before long transition phases as a way to rebuild GL, but this only serves to make Anatman as useless as Tornado Kick currently is.
- Fists stances are still more or less pointless, even moreso now that Greased Lightning can be maintained almost indefinitely. Fists of Fire is only useful for about 20 seconds in the opener, and then you never touch it again. Fists of Earth is never useful. These abilities either need to be redesigned, or replaced.
- Still a bit too easy to overcap chakra unintentionally due to only being able to hold 5.
- Still a bit overreliant on crits for chakra generation.
- Still very underdeveloped when synced to lower levels. It could really use low level versions of Riddle of Fire and Elixir Field that then upgrade to those skills later, similar to how Hot Shot upgrades to Air Anchor or Inner Beast upgrades to Fell Cleave.

Hopefully these things will be addressed in future patches, and perhaps in a future expansion greased lightning can finally get something both interesting and fun to make it a core part of the job again, but if not I am at least basically satisfied with the state the job is in now.

[Xau]

Similarly with Riddle of Fire, removing the slowdown is essentially the devs admitting that their design was a failure and giving up on it

actually yoshida agreed what riddle of fire slowdown was bad on a interview he did on the media tour some time before the launch of the expansion, so this was meant to happen, probably they didnt removed it because they forgot about it, that or the noise we made was enought to them and decided for once do it already

anyway, i agree what this changes feels more like band aid fixes to issues what the job suffers from clashing whit a oposite way of content is done, riddle of earth current effect is proof of that, basically by making them give a 30 seconds long "true north" effect added to earth reply is them saying future content will have plenty of movement, so you guys might be unable to do your positionals for long periods so we are giving you all this to aleviate that!
as for form shift refreshing gl stacks, they can keep it only if you are outside of combat to help whit dungeons downtime, that way anatman can be still usefull if they decide to change the way is handled the skill from stand still to refresh gl timer to freeze gl timer until next action, literally, if they do that, form shift in combat refreshing gl stacks won't be needed at all

Some people are never satisfied. Can we not all just say thanks devs, we appreciate it?

Thanks devs, I appreciate it.

oh i am gratefull for what they did, now the job is fun to play somewhat, but a broken job will be still broken, since their solutions are just basically band aid fixes to a bigger issue, the bigger issue being they do not know on what direction take monk, since hw monk had always clashing concepts what did not mesh well, made worse on sb whit literal no changes until 4.2(changes what created a unitended rotation), besides that, on hw they created the whole chakra to be used, yet neither on sb or shb they did really tried to exploit that to evolve the job, we still use chakras on the same way than was used on hw, get 5 chakras to blow them all on one single attack(at least now we have the option to use it on either a single target attack or a aoe one, but thats very shallow), they need to exploit more this gauge by giving more skills what uses it in diferent manners, diferent mnaners as in, skills what requires less chakras to be used, as well diferent effects, orl add some skills what give us chakras by just using them(instead of this janky RNG we have)

[Kahnom]

I feel sorry for SAM now.they can’t keep up with us anymore.

[Carstien]

Some people are never satisfied. Can we not all just say thanks devs, we appreciate it?

Thanks devs, I appreciate it.

[Physic]

Some people are never satisfied. Can we not all just say thanks devs, we appreciate it?

Thanks devs, I appreciate it.

some people wanted this, so some are happy. I personally was always more interested in monk being interesting to play. All this does is seal monk in as being a highly effective, but simple and depthless job. I will say its probably really smooth now. Keep gl forever

you get gl4, and do it forever, with the one simple rotation forever. press buffs off cool down.

then when they eventually nerf it, it will just be a less effective boring job. So yeah, I basically just accepted monk is not going to be for me this expansion, or the foreseeable future, since they will probably stay on this path.

[Kolsykol]

Some people are never satisfied. Can we not all just say thanks devs, we appreciate it?

Thanks devs, I appreciate it.

Uh, not really?
Tbh these were some really no-brainer and small fixes that shouldn't have been necessary to begin with ( should've already been a thing ).
My main issues with MNK still remains, new abilities feel useless and doesn't really change up our rotation at all.

[MasyMasy]

Some people are never satisfied. Can we not all just say thanks devs, we appreciate it?

Thanks devs, I appreciate it.

Oh no, I'm completely satisfied... With BLM, DRG, MCH, WHM.... pretty much every class that I've leveled but SMN and MNK. And I do appreciate the changes that the devs finally made to monk.

But I'm insulted. Too little, too late is what I say. If these changes were implemented and taken into consideration with ShB MNK we could have gotten two entirely different skills that aren't Anatman or SSS. Skills that these changes completely invalidate their existence in this game. MNK is still at it's core 2.0 MNK without any job evolution past getting chakras. It's effectively the most braindead job in the game at this point because you hit your same six skills on GCD in order and the only thing you get to do beyond that is use a chakra once in a while. The class still has skill bloat that every other job has had removed (looking at you fist stances), it still has almost completely useless abilities (tornado kick and SSS) and it is now the only job that relies on RNG on RNG to perform (looking at you deep meditation). And to add the cherry on top it went through needless skill prunings that the dwindling playerbase the job had before it became meta in ShB lauded as the best changes monk ever got (Wind tackle).

So no, I'm not satisfied with monk. And while I appreciate the changes that they made with 5.05 that were the bare minimum to make monk playable, I'm not going to give them a pat on the back for fixing something that should have never been broken.