Proposed fixes to Monk

[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)