Monk Changes

[SpeckledBurd]

I'm confused as to how a couple of skills Monk having that are circumstantial prevent it from having a cohesive kit. If that's the case then Black Mage needs to be reworked as well with Scathe, Fire II and Blizzard II basically being completely useless now. Monk's kit as a whole works, and it does a ton of damage. The only 2 DPS that are better off right now are Black Mage and maybe Dragoon.

Monk right now and has always had the most overly circumstantial skills in the game by an order of magnitude. Monk is also the only job where the devs consistently tie traits to those skills that are fundamentally useless. Fists of Fire, Wind, and Earth and by extension the two traits Enhanced Fists of Fire and Riddle of Wind, Tornado Kick, Anatman, and Six Sided Star. Are all extremely niche to the point of never being used or outright useless for their intended purpose.

1-2 Circumstantial skills is no where near the problem that Monk has where a 1/3 of its kit is useless and 2/3's of what they get when an expansion drops also being garbage.

Contagion. Aetherflow (on SMN). Most of Sch's DPS kit. Fire II and Blizz II aren't gone but are now completely obsolete. Deliverance. Unchained. Scourge. Dark Arts. Shield Swipe. The vast majority of MCH's old kit.

You know what those jobs also regularly get? New skills that are effective and that they get to use during their rotations or in the course of mitigating/healing a fight, whereas Monk has not seen a truly new rotational skill since Elixir Field and a new GCD we get to use on a regular basis is something we've never gotten before.

Except that it has. Monk got a solid amount of attention near the end of Stormblood which a ton of people were happy about and saw a ton of play in the final raid tier. A couple odd skills here or there maybe feel weird, but it pales in comparison to some of the job changes of the past (4.0 Warrior for instance).

Monk may need some work. Other jobs need it more.

Attention that was so poorly thought out that it produced an entirely new rotation that the devs didn't want us doing. And they undid all of the positive changes at the beginning of Shadowbringers, making Monk grueling to level and play instead of changing the lynchpin of that rotation.

Monk may need some work. Other jobs need it more.

Monk has had these problems for years while other jobs passed it by. I think Monk deserves as much attention as they do.

[Xelphus]

There has always been downtime in fights, and Monk had trouble maintaining or using stacks of GL during the downtime back in 2.0. A LOT of the skills you listed were for those instances. I agree that Anantman has more or less been replaced by the updates to form shift, but it absolutely had uses on release. Fists of Earth isn't great (but neither is any other defensive "stance" on a dps class) but Fists of Fire and Wind are both pretty damn important to you dps, considering FoF gives you a constant 10% damage bonus and Fists of Wind gives a 4th GL stack, both of which are dependent on their respective traits. Six Sided Star is certainly niche, but there are dozens of times where a melee has to peel off a boss to avoid a mechanic and lose a GCD (which is shorter for monk because of GL) and is great for maintaining GL 3 or 4 without having to resort to 3 form shifts or standing still for Anatman.

BLM hasn't gotten a regular GCD skill since FIV. Dragoon didn't get a new GCD this expac either. Bard got Apex Arrow but is hardly exciting atm. RDM got a new "finisher" but nothing else dramatically added to its rotation. SAM had no new GCDs added this expac either. Personally I have always really liked MNK, I just hated the feeling when you lose GL and lo and behold this expac that let me keep GL and move through the course of the fight without disrupting my rhythm.

Monk's main problem in HW was it's lack of utility, so they gave MNK Brotherhood. Since then they have increased the damage of MNK substantially, tweaked it's kit to make it flow very well even if you don't use certain skills regularly (which nearly every DPS has circumstantial skills, even BLM), and now on top of making it super easy to maintain GL, MNK is competing with BLM, a zero utility job, for top dps spot in pretty much every fight. That sounds pretty fantastic to me personally. They have given MNK a ton of attention, attention that has improved the job on an order of magnitude, especially when you consider that MNK had no place in the meta 2 expacs ago, and a rough spot at the beginning of the previous expac. Now groups are pracitcally requiring MNK in their groups because of how much damage it outputs.

So I will say it again: other jobs need more attention than MNK. SAM and NIN mostly, since they occupy the same role and there should be at least some justification to bring them over MNK (which there isn't right now), and then literally every ranged dps not named BLM (which despite having 3 circumstantial skills and 4 completely useless skills, I think is pretty much a perfect class atm). Fix the glaring issues with the jobs that barely anyone wants to play, and then patch up the #1 most played job in the game that does either the most or second most damage in every fight.

[SpeckledBurd]

Fists of Fire and Fists of Wind are only important to DPS because you need to have them up, not because they're good skills. Fundamentally you only want to be in Fists of Wind for 99.9% of the fight and sub to fire for the first 3 GCDs and the last SSS>TK. Which functionally makes it about as useful as Tornado Kick as it's ever been. There is no choice between the Fist Stances, they're an illusion of choice that shouldn't be in the game and that's what they've always been, but for some reason there's two traits tied to it.

You're absolutely wrong on Black Mage, it has gotten a new Single Target GCD Skill every expansion that see use every rotation cycle (Foul and Xenoglossy). It also got Despair this expansion. Dragoon on a technicality got one as well in the form of Raiden Thrust, but even if you don't count that it has consistently gotten new attacks to use every expansion such as Nastrond, Miragde Dive and Stardiver. Monk has gotten two "New" skills that we actually get to use on a regular basis, Elixir Field at 54 and Brotherhood at 70. Everything else has either been a top end replacement for something they removed from the kit at the bottom end or an overly situational piece of junk.

They haven't tweaked Monks flow at all, they've actually introduced GL4 which is something that should have required some changes to its timers and literally didn't change any of it's timers so the highest DPS rotation involves dropping a buff for its reapplication.

They haven't given Monk a lot of attention, they've neglected it and ignored player complaints consistently from expansion to expansion, introducing new actions that were completely redundant with old actions that could have just been improved , and let those problems fester. It was so bad that Yoshi-P apologized about Stormblood Monk during the lead up to Shadowbringers, but surprise surprise on launch very little of what people hated about Stormblood launch had actually changed. That's not attention at all. Even if Monk is performing highly now, that doesn't change that it's kit is and has been a junk heap for an expansion.

[Mahrze]

BLM hasn't gotten a regular GCD skill since FIV. Dragoon didn't get a new GCD this expac either. Bard got Apex Arrow but is hardly exciting atm. RDM got a new "finisher" but nothing else dramatically added to its rotation. SAM had no new GCDs added this expac either. Personally I have always really liked MNK, I just hated the feeling when you lose GL and lo and behold this expac that let me keep GL and move through the course of the fight without disrupting my rhythm.

So I will say it again: other jobs need more attention than MNK. SAM and NIN mostly, since they occupy the same role and there should be at least some justification to bring them over MNK (which there isn't right now), and then literally every ranged dps not named BLM (which despite having 3 circumstantial skills and 4 completely useless skills, I think is pretty much a perfect class atm). Fix the glaring issues with the jobs that barely anyone wants to play, and then patch up the #1 most played job in the game that does either the most or second most damage in every fight.

Prioritizing the jobs you mention and giving better thought of and planned QoL to other jobs should not be mutually exclusive. Jobs like MNK and BLM have such broken but working systems because they haven't the foggiest what to do to enable better options, so all they do to those jobs is add things to them that just make their basics seem more obvious in how "basic" they are. We can't just fall on this wheel of "what the flavor of the patch" job doting because it just makes things worse for the jobs that have to wait longer than others, I am aware that there can be jobs that don't need any or much tweaking, but that doesn't mean other jobs have to wait in line for problems to be fixed.

[Katie_Kitty]

Prioritizing the jobs you mention and giving better thought of and planned QoL to other jobs should not be mutually exclusive. Jobs like MNK and BLM have such broken but working systems because they haven't the foggiest what to do to enable better options, so all they do to those jobs is add things to them that just make their basics seem more obvious in how "basic" they are. We can't just fall on this wheel of "what the flavor of the patch" job doting because it just makes things worse for the jobs that have to wait longer than others, I am aware that there can be jobs that don't need any or much tweaking, but that doesn't mean other jobs have to wait in line for problems to be fixed.

I don't think there's anything "broken" about BLM. The past two expansions have been like a wet dream for people who want to play Black Mage. The job has simultaneously gotten easier to play and more powerful at every step along the way. Hell, square even intentionally broke the meta and gutted support classes just to justify black mage's existence and now we have a situation where powerful jobs are doing so much personal DPS that you can't even justify bringing any support classes because the rDPS they provide does not even come close to making up for the difference. They even created a new support class (Dancer) built around the idea of buffing a single powerful job to allow them to do insane amounts of damage.. And they reworked Astrologian in a way that means its entire purpose is to primarily buff single players at a time, they don't even have the option of spreading cards anymore. Literally everything about Shadowbringers has been built from the ground up in a way that appears to be tailor-made specifically to make Black Mage the most powerful and desirable job in the game. That's insane.

[SpeckledBurd]

I don't think there's anything "broken" about BLM. The past two expansions have been like a wet dream for people who want to play Black Mage. The job has simultaneously gotten easier to play and more powerful at every step along the way. Hell, square even intentionally broke the meta and gutted support classes just to justify black mage's existence and now we have a situation where powerful jobs are doing so much personal DPS that you can't even justify bringing any support classes because the rDPS they provide does not even come close to making up for the difference. They even created a new support class (Dancer) built around the idea of buffing a single powerful job to allow them to do insane amounts of damage.. And they reworked Astrologian in a way that means its entire purpose is to primarily buff single players at a time, they don't even have the option of spreading cards anymore. Literally everything about Shadowbringers has been built from the ground up in a way that appears to be tailor-made specifically to make Black Mage the most powerful and desirable job in the game. That's insane.

Black Mage is a dev favorite and it shows. Even when it isn't "meta" it often gets problems addressed with changes to its existing kit before they add new actions case in point, they just tied enochian to AF/UI in Stormblood which let you refresh it with Transpose instead of giving it something stupid like Riddle of Earth, and in Shadowbringers they made the Freeze changes retroactive rather than something earned in the leveling process. If they do have to make a fix with a new skill, the skill is always unbelievably good like Triple Cast for movement or 2x Xenoglossy for movement or burst.