Monk Needs a Complete Rework

[Mahrze]

Exactly my feelings on the matter.

Leaden fist and Raiden Thrust feel to me like Refulgent Arrow felt for me with BRD back in 4.0. Albeit Leaden fist is not as strict as Raiden Thrust for the proc itself.

[SpeckledBurd]

It's the least played job in the game currently by a fair margin if we use fflogs as an indicator. Granted it's not 100% accurate naturally but it gives an accurate enough metric. The only place it's not bottom is in the current Ultimate. Outside of that it's bottom, and for a good reason, the job has barely evolved and become stale. I had high hopes for MNK going from SB to ShB, especially when Yoshida said the job he was impressed with during development for ShB was MNK. Really? Reflecting back on that statement I can only imagine Yoshi never touched MNK before then because it plays exactly the same just with different niches /shrug.

The job really does need some love. The only engaging part about the job is positionals imo. Outside of that it's very lackluster. Hoping it gets brought up in the live letter in a couple weeks.

Yeah, it's actually less played now than it was when I noticed that trend a couple of weeks ago. Then Monk was still behind but relatively close to some of the other jobs in a few fights, now it's behind by a thousand plays or more in basically every tier. You could attribute it to it being the end of the patch cycle, but the ratio widening doesn't suggest that people are enjoying it.

I'd also say it isn't just that the job has become stale, though that's a contributor, it's also that the devs left many of the complaints from Stormblood unaddressed or doubled down on them. People hated how Monk was Physical comp dependent and nothing changed on that front, it plays poorly with Casters or Ninja and it's mudras due to neither party benefitting from Brotherhood for example. People hated double RNG gating for Deep Meditation, and we've still got that albeit at a higher percentage, but without the ability to boost the RNG in our favor through Internal Release so we have to rely on Scholar, Dragoon, and Dancer. Tackle Mastery was memed on for most of Stormblood because even at its most useful you still largely wanted to be in Fire stance because it offered the most DPS, and even with Tackle Stacks from wind stance you still spent most of a fight in fire, now we're in Wind stance all the time to the point where the other stances may as well not exist.

It'll be a shame if we don't get mentioned in the Live letter, because beyond 5.2 its pretty much hopeless that we'll see any change. They'll officially have left the job in a place the players dislike for four years.

[3ureka]

On the off-chance that Square does use fflogs as a metric to gauge monk participation in content (I don't think they could/would officially say so with their stance on 3rd party programs), the changes I think most of us would like to see will take longer than a few weeks to implement.

Edit: But I'm down for even an announcement that they'll take another look at monk.

[Powercow]

Edit: But I'm down for even an announcement that they'll take another look at monk.

The last time we got an announcement that Monk was going to get looked at, Anatman was put on the GCD. The time before that, we lost everything that made the Tornado Kick rotation. The only thing I'd have to look forward to in regards to an announcement for Monk changes is a morbid curiosity on what else they could possibly do to it.

[SpeckledBurd]

On the off-chance that Square does use fflogs as a metric to gauge monk participation in content (I don't think they could/would officially say so with their stance on 3rd party programs), the changes I think most of us would like to see will take longer than a few weeks to implement.

Edit: But I'm down for even an announcement that they'll take another look at monk.

They wouldn't need to, they have their own metrics on exactly how many people are playing what job within a time frame. FFlogs has just been mentioned because it's one of the only metrics for tracking job use the players have.

As for how long they've known, that's anyone's guess. I'd speculate that Monk would have seen an abrupt drop in plays immediately after 5.1 when it was no longer the strongest DPS, but the devs really should have something in the pipeline in terms of Monk revisions after the launch reception was abysmal to say the least.

[Age_of_Oblivion]

Class would benefit hugely from a fourth stance in the mix imo. Or more, even. I like the core idea - fluid stance changes with positionals around the boss. But I’ve been levelling it lately and I gotta say... it’s kind of a bummer realizing that the class basically doesn’t change after you pick up Dragon Kick. You get a few tools for maintaining GL stacks, you get... an absurd amount of abilities poured into making Forbidden Chakra a thing (seriously why does this skill exist before Deep Meditation), and you get some niche ways to damage a boss before a phase transition or a big movement. There is so much more you can do here! Extend the stance dance, give branching options that change your fist stance, maybe even define an endpoint like Despair on Black Mage.

[3ureka]

snip

In regards to introducing TFC before Deep Meditation, I think that might've been more of an archaic design choice. My immediate thought goes to NIN and Trick Attack, and how that was (for all intents and purposes) locked until you learned Suiton. I'm just speculating, but I imagine the reason for delaying the introduction of Deep Meditation and Suiton so late is due to the story tied with both jobs. Well, tbh, I don't remember the exact details of Deep Meditation and if there was even a big deal about it in MNK's story (it's been literal years since then); NIN's story is more fresh in my mind (capped it this expansion).

[Mahrze]

In regards to introducing TFC before Deep Meditation, I think that might've been more of an archaic design choice. My immediate thought goes to NIN and Trick Attack, and how that was (for all intents and purposes) locked until you learned Suiton. I'm just speculating, but I imagine the reason for delaying the introduction of Deep Meditation and Suiton so late is due to the story tied with both jobs. Well, tbh, I don't remember the exact details of Deep Meditation and if there was even a big deal about it in MNK's story (it's been literal years since then); NIN's story is more fresh in my mind (capped it this expansion).

Chakra's are as early as ARR job quests iirc. It the whole reason Widargelt offers to "train you". Cuz he wants another MNK to help him open his chakras. But most of this ends up moot since they don't really bother to design things around the leveling curve. All is about the end game.

Edit: yeah, just checked the ff wiki for the mnk xiv story. It is since then. Lvl 60 job quest gives ytou the title "of the 14th Chakra". Its the one people keep using as a cornerstone on how MNK has 5 available chakras as a gameplay but we somehow have unlocked all 14 and don't have it as a resource and what not.

[3ureka]

Chakra's are as early as ARR job quests iirc. It the whole reason Widargelt offers to "train you". Cuz he wants another MNK to help him open his chakras. But most of this ends up moot since they don't really bother to design things around the leveling curve. All is about the end game.

Yeah. I think Square would have to rewrite quite a few things if they wanted all the jobs to feel good while leveling to cap.

Also, thoughts on something like this for monk?:
So, since we're heavily positional focused, how would you feel about getting a buff for hitting all the positionals for a full cycle of opo-opo > raptor > coeurl? Once you've attained the buff, every weaponskill afterward will be treated similarly to DRG's Raiden Thrust, where they'll get a nice little potency boost. However, this buff will fall off as soon as you miss your first positional, which will (literally) keep us on our toes. I think with the tools they gave us in Riddle of Earth and 2 stacks of True North, this might be viable.

[SpeckledBurd]

In regards to introducing TFC before Deep Meditation, I think that might've been more of an archaic design choice. My immediate thought goes to NIN and Trick Attack, and how that was (for all intents and purposes) locked until you learned Suiton. I'm just speculating, but I imagine the reason for delaying the introduction of Deep Meditation and Suiton so late is due to the story tied with both jobs. Well, tbh, I don't remember the exact details of Deep Meditation and if there was even a big deal about it in MNK's story (it's been literal years since then); NIN's story is more fresh in my mind (capped it this expansion).

Meditation and The Forbidden Chakra aren't really tied to the story, the Heavensward skills only tied in loosely with the skills you were learning and didn't really correlate that well, and the Stormblood skills didn't really have a story tie in except for Brotherhood. The reason we have TFC so much earlier than Deep Meditation is that its original design isn't a gauge skill, it's a downtime damage loss mitigation skill. In Heavensward when the boss would jump for like 30 seconds, you'd hammer Meditation and come back with The Forbidden Chakra to make up for the fact that you probably lost your stacks(though granted you still do that, but in Heavensward that was its only use).

The disparity in levels between them is a result of Deep Meditation coming later in Stormblood where their big draw was that they were giving every job a gauge and performing an action rework to revise the jobs. In Monk's case, it really didn't get either of those (And honestly still hasn't lol). They gave Chakra a gauge, but they didn't actually change the system for it at all. They just tacked on an effect at higher levels that let it build in combat while leaving it as it was at low levels and also not really doing anything to make it a system, you'll notice we don't get Enlightenment until Level 74 which is about ten levels after pretty much every other DPS job gets an AOE use for their Gauge. If they'd given Monk more than 10 minutes of development time going from Stormblood to Shadowbringers and actually addressed player concerns, we'd get an AOE Chakra dump at like level 58 when we previously got purification (which was sort of that in Stormblood in that it was only good for AOE, but its 2 minute cooldown kept it from being a true dump) or they'd have changed Tornado Kick to a gauge dump so it would have an actual use.