Monk needs to be nerfed hard. Change my mind.

[Raylazer11]

With the amount of utility and damage the monk brings currently, before patch 5.1, there is no real reason to bring any other melee besides maybe Dragoon as a Second melee. Sam doesn't do enough damage. Nin, though recently buffed, still has it's fair share of issues. The main one of which is trick attack.

The reason Nin has been so low on DPS was because of it's utility. Monk has great personal and raid utility, yet is top DPS.

Even though I personally dont like SAM in any regard I understand how it should be balanced because it's kit is 100% selfish. Dragoon I believed is balanced as the #2 melee DPS. Monk and Nin should be interchangeable because of the utilities they can/should provide.

But enough about me. If you think you can change my mind try it.

[Tobias_Azuryon]

+1

Even if NIN stayed where it's at, if Monk was lowered to where NIN is it would go a long way to making the "balance" make sense. We'll see if the SAM rework of Shoha fixes that though.

Monk where it's at currently is pretty ridiculous.

[Eliadil]

+1

Even if NIN stayed where it's at, if Monk was lowered to where NIN is it would go a long way to making the "balance" make sense. We'll see if the SAM rework of Shoha fixes that though.

Monk where it's at currently is pretty ridiculous.

Shoha will sadly not fix the whole sam issue but it will at least help us deal some more damage. The real issue is that our rotation is based on a specific SkS tier and having 100% boss uptime in order to not delay our burst. Fixing this will also help Sam get on the upper end of the melee job.

As for Dragoon, I keep saying that it does way too much atm, damage, buffs... Imo, if Monk's brotherhood was a general damage buff and not only a physical buff, yeah then Dragoon would need to be above. Atm however, I don't think that's the case.
I personally think that Sam should be way higher than it is right now, followed by Monk, then Dragoon and Ninja roughly on par. (Can't speak about ninja tbh, I don't have played the class at all :x )

That, and buffing some ranged dps and casters would make for a more healthy game balance overall...

[Tobias_Azuryon]

As for Dragoon, I keep saying that it does way too much atm, damage, buffs... Imo, if Monk's brotherhood was a general damage buff and not only a physical buff, yeah then Dragoon would need to be above. Atm however, I don't think that's the case.
I personally think that Sam should be way higher than it is right now, followed by Monk, then Dragoon and Ninja roughly on par. (Can't speak about ninja tbh, I don't have played the class at all :x )

I get ya regarding SAM. I think it's overly complicated for what it's supposed to do and suffers from skill bloat personally, but I only have what I've personally gotten to use it with and I haven't used it as much.

Dragoon's the melee DPS the others should be based around imo. Its crit buff is on a crazy cooldown, it does good damage at the cost of being in melee range, can buff a friend for 5% and can buff itself for short windows. This also doesn't even go into the fact that it's kit has several oGCD buttons and skills, on top of a resource management that becomes easier at 80 but still is something you have to keep up.

A perfectly balanced Melee DPS list imo would be:

SAM - The BLM of Melee, selfish and no utility but big deeps to make up for it.
DRG - Less damage than SAM, but more utility
MONK/NIN - same damage, same utility so that it's a choice rather than an objective meta.

To clarify by using DRG as a basis, the more utility, the less damage. The less utility, the more damage. That should be the golden rule, however Monk as it is currently breaks this rule.

Right now you have zero reason to bring a SAM into endgame content. that's not to say that SAM's aren't viable or good and/or that regular content you'll have "problems." But the fact remains that SAM barely offers anything to the table while supposedly being the "selfish dps" when Monk can flat out increase damage, increase heals, buff, and do insane damage by face rolling the keyboard across 6 buttons.

Monk is throwing off the balance of the whole melee DPS at the moment imo, because due it lacking any need to care about directionals, and having form shift and so many ways to balance GL and Chakras, any detriment the class used to have is effectively gone, especially now that you can stack Riddles without having to change Fists Style. They can literally do Riddle of earth, get a flat defense buff, ignore directionals, put on fists of fire, go to town on the boss, and then use North Star and by the time you get to the second Riddle of Earth is back up.

Monk has no detriments, meanwhile Ninja is ridiculously more complicated to play due to mudras/server ping/etc and has little damage. In a perfectly balanced game if NIN remains as hard as it is to play, it should have MORE damage than a monk because of how much you have to do to get the damage output out of it, but right now you can hit 30 buttons to get midddling damage as a Ninja, or you can just faceroll 6 buttons to hit the top of the dps with Monk. That's not a good place for the DPS to be.

[Tobias_Azuryon]

That, and buffing some ranged dps and casters would make for a more healthy game balance overall...

I think MCH could use a buff and overall help with dps on ranged attackers, but right now you get the sustained dps without any of the tradeoffs of melee DPS.

To use a exaggerated example, when doing Eden 1 there are lasers, movement, etc and my MCH can consistently without worrying about anything apply pressure and damage to the boss and continue to barrage them with bullets and my normal rotation. The DPS being lower (but maybe not as low as it is currently) makes perfect sense because Ranged DPS has no risk to reward in that regard, as opposed to Melee DPS which have to upkeep resources and stay in range of attacks or flat out stop damaging anything to avoid getting killed.

I've seen some people say that "movement" shouldn't be involved with damage calculations but I believe it absolutely should. If you can continue to barrage and destroy enemies while staying safe and far away and can't be stopped from casting, what's the detriment to the class? In an ideal scenario we'd get MCH to buff, get rid of the useless Tactician or give it more utility to make the nerfed damage make sense, give DNC more utility, etc. There's options there for their support class.

If a MCH does as much damage as a BLM, as some have proposed there's no point to play BLM. The balance there is that you can literally ignore mechanics and keep sustained damage on a boss. So anything other than a slight buff would raise my eyebrow a bit.

[Dogempire]

I think MCH could use a buff and overall help with dps on ranged attackers, but right now you get the sustained dps without any of the tradeoffs of melee DPS.

To use a exaggerated example, when doing Eden 1 there are lasers, movement, etc and my MCH can consistently without worrying about anything apply pressure and damage to the boss and continue to barrage them with bullets and my normal rotation. The DPS being lower (but maybe not as low as it is currently) makes perfect sense because Ranged DPS has no risk to reward in that regard, as opposed to Melee DPS which have to upkeep resources and stay in range of attacks or flat out stop damaging anything to avoid getting killed.

I've seen some people say that "movement" shouldn't be involved with damage calculations but I believe it absolutely should. If you can continue to barrage and destroy enemies while staying safe and far away and can't be stopped from casting, what's the detriment to the class? In an ideal scenario we'd get MCH to buff, get rid of the useless Tactician or give it more utility to make the nerfed damage make sense, give DNC more utility, etc. There's options there for their support class.

If a MCH does as much damage as a BLM, as some have proposed there's no point to play BLM. The balance there is that you can literally ignore mechanics and keep sustained damage on a boss. So anything other than a slight buff would raise my eyebrow a bit.

I mean I think that ranged and melee should be almost the same on movement intensive fights and melee should be a little higher on fights like E2S where there's not as much movement and melee has almost as much uptime as ranged.

That being said, I wouldn't mind ranged doing the same dps or maybe 100-200 more in exchange (Well dancer would still need like 400-500 more) for more useful utility instead of a 180s cd reduce damage that's basically the nerfed version of addle/feint. Something that ranged can provide that no other roles can considering any buffs ranged gives, minus dance partner, every other class can do but better.

As it stands now monk has better utility than bard/dancer and better dps, which is broken as hell.

[SpeckledBurd]

MNK w/ Brotherhood: ~450 rDPS
DRG w/ Battle Litany + Dragon's Sight: ~740 rDPS
NIN w/ Trick Attack: ~1300 rDPS.

If DPS is balanced based on contribution, then I fail to see why MNK would need to be nerfed when it provides the least amount of rDPS contribution, despite Brotherhood being on a significantly shorter CD than the majority of other raid buffs (barring Trick Attack). It doesn't contribute as much, hence, MNK does more DPS than DRG or NIN, it has to else its not worth using and while people will argue that "oh MNK can ignore 90% of its positionals" why does that matter when classes like DRG/NIN/SAM have less than half the positional requirements that MNK does? Being able to "ignore" positionals doesn't instantly put it above the other melee DPS, it just puts them on more equal footing.

As for Mantra, its nice to have sure, but at most its saving the healers 1, maybe 2, GCD heals at best each time its used and you're not using Mantra on CD because not everyone is taking damage to make the most of it. If anything, I count it akin to Curing Waltz or Endless Flight in that, it helps periodically but the actual contribution it provides is maybe 100 extra DPS from the healers, which is hardly anything to write home about, especially if you can clear just fine without it. Defensive utility has a cap to its potential, DPS utility does not, so utility like Mantra, Shield Samba, etc, really don't contribute as much as buffs like Battle Voice, Trick Attack, etc. and shouldn't be taxed as heavily as a result.

So, why does MNK need a nerf, exactly?

Because most of this thread is feely-craft lashing out at Monk for being the nail that sticks up slightly higher, even though it's not nearly as egregious as how DRG dominated throughout Heavensward and Stormblood and held its position via a vice grip on the design of the game. So while we're throwing out the actual numbers instead of feely-craft.
.

That being said, I wouldn't mind ranged doing the same dps or maybe 100-200 more in exchange (Well dancer would still need like 400-500 more) for more useful utility instead of a 180s cd reduce damage that's basically the nerfed version of addle/feint. Something that ranged can provide that no other roles can considering any buffs ranged gives, minus dance partner, every other class can do but better.

As it stands now monk has better utility than bard/dancer and better dps, which is broken as hell.

No, Monk doesn't have better utility than Bard/Dancer, that's just factually incorrect.

It certainly has stronger personal damage, but Brotherhood is still flat out the weakest party buff in the game. Battle Voice is 650-700 rDPS to Bard, while Brotherhood is 400-450 to Monk, and Devilment, Technical Finish, and Standard Finish add up to being 2000-2200 rRDPS. As Silver Strider said, even with Mantra that at best saves the Healers one or two GCDs which isn't anywhere near the difference between Battle Voice and Brotherhood.

And let's be real here, bringing Monk down to Ninja/Samurai in terms of Raid DPS doesn't actually solve the imbalance that exists in the game at the moment, because even if Monk is the strongest over BLM/DRG/NIN/SAM it's only by a small margin due to overperformance on E3S and E4S due to the way those fights are designed, DNC/MCH/SMN/BRD/RDM are all weaker than the weakest "good job", meaning Ninja, by a much larger margin (about 800-1000 DPS). If you nerf Monk it probably just puts us back into another 2 years of DRG/NIN melee Meta hell, and the Ranged/Non Black Mage casters are still under powered.

[Karshan]

I think MCH could use a buff and overall help with dps on ranged attackers, but right now you get the sustained dps without any of the tradeoffs of melee DPS.

To use a exaggerated example, when doing Eden 1 there are lasers, movement, etc and my MCH can consistently without worrying about anything apply pressure and damage to the boss and continue to barrage them with bullets and my normal rotation. The DPS being lower (but maybe not as low as it is currently) makes perfect sense because Ranged DPS has no risk to reward in that regard, as opposed to Melee DPS which have to upkeep resources and stay in range of attacks or flat out stop damaging anything to avoid getting killed.

I've seen some people say that "movement" shouldn't be involved with damage calculations but I believe it absolutely should. If you can continue to barrage and destroy enemies while staying safe and far away and can't be stopped from casting, what's the detriment to the class? In an ideal scenario we'd get MCH to buff, get rid of the useless Tactician or give it more utility to make the nerfed damage make sense, give DNC more utility, etc. There's options there for their support class.

If a MCH does as much damage as a BLM, as some have proposed there's no point to play BLM. The balance there is that you can literally ignore mechanics and keep sustained damage on a boss. So anything other than a slight buff would raise my eyebrow a bit.

No. Once again, a misunderstanding on movement and uptime and balance.

Let's work with examples (and pretend good blm don't have 99% uptime anyway so movement argument is a bit bogus, but we won't focus on that for the sake of the reflexion).

It would be cool if indeed on paper a BLM were to do 15k and a range 13k, but because of the conditions of the fight (what you describe with eden1) the BLM gets hindered and drops at 13k while the mch can "continue to pressure" and stay at 13k. That is balance. That is ok, and it follows a good principle.

However, this is not how things go currently. The numbers being discussed, the ones fflogs show, are In-Fight, full reality-confronted numbers, not just paper numbers, which means that DESPITE the fight conditions, a blm sits at 15k while mch is at 13. So why bring a mch if a blm can do 2k more even when movement and uptime are already taken into account ?

[Sathona]

I agree, Monk was overtuned honestly

[Rasikko]

I agree, Monk was overtuned honestly

Yet it wasnt enough to make me jump from last place DNC.