Proposed fixes to Monk

[KanameYuuki]

I mean it's not like everything is now perfect, I, for one, am happy that this could be the dawn of a new era, it feels like they finally listened to us, and there was no way 5.05 would have brought a rework, they probs want at the very least to wait for savage, and if anything I'm actually looking forward to 5.1 - 5.2, etc.

There is a reason to keep the discussion going unlike before.

[BucklesTrespen]

Though I greatly welcome the QoC in meditation out of combat and the form duration, as well as eliminating the RoF slow - I'm not super happy with how they handled Form Shift and kept SSS on the GCD.

Can we not just get a new ability called Rolling Thunder or something, basically our own version of Umbral Soul - something along the lines of a 2 charge button with a ~45 second cooldown that simply refreshes GL timer. I'm super sick and tired of already spamming Form Shift endlessly in dungeons and trials, now I have to spam form shift more with this change.

Would having Form Shift an OGCD and grant 1.5s of Perfect Balance not be better than endlessly spamming and cycling through forms.

Lastly, SSS being on the GCD is still clunky as heck given the often narrow window of time we're given to "get out of the fire"

[silverdragontyr]

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.

[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.

[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

[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.

[Silver-Strider]

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

Thanks devs, I appreciate it.

Not that we don't appreciate the fixes we've been dying for since forever but to be fair, these issues were of SE's own making. It's kind of like saying thank you to them for fixing your window after they themselves broke it; Yes, you appreciate that they acknowledged and corrected their mistakes, until you realize they left glass shards all over the floor and are mildly peeved by it.

Is MNK's main mechanic (window) fixed? For the most part, I want to say yes.
Are there still highly niche/near meaningless skills (i.e. broken glass)? Tornado Kick, SSS and Anatman say yes.