Monk Needs a Complete Rework

[Ramura_Sono]

By those who don't care if GL remains only a vague bonus rather than an actual mechanic.

Remove the haste buff from it and make it instead a monk passive, and GL can become an actual mechanic. The vast majority of Monk players want to go fast, and stay fast. Hell, TK itself was something we built up to and blew our stacks on in it's initial inception in the HW beta.

Every other jobs maintenance buff is a non mechanic. GL being an actual mechanic is arguably why Monk itself has become so stagnated.

If the desire is to return GL to being an actual mechanic, then how about we - for once - get something other than situational GL upkeep skills to interact with it?

[Shurrikhan]

Remove the haste buff from it and make it instead a monk passive, and GL can become an actual mechanic. The vast majority of Monk players want to go fast, and stay fast.

A passive haste gain is not a mechanic. It has no trigger. It has no decision-making. It has no unique reward system.

Hell, TK itself was something we built up to and blew our stacks on in it's initial inception in the HW beta.

It was only something "to just blow stacks on" -- which is not what's being suggested here, btw -- in HW beta because it was 500 potency at a time where Monk's 2nd highest direct damage skill was 340 potency and it cost 2.5 GCDs of uptime, with the next best oGCD being 220 potency.

Every other jobs maintenance buff is a non mechanic. GL being an actual mechanic is arguably why Monk itself has become so stagnated.

And they were each arguably far more engaging when they were mechanics. The difference is that the losses to their core gameplay has at least been compensated for over the later levels, while ours has remained untouched aside from having our means of and rewards for manipulating it skillfully reduced with the expansion. You can afford to get stale bread with a meal otherwise large and tasty enough to outright forget about the bread and enjoy everything else, but Monk has no 'everything else'; it's just the bread, which happens to be bordering on stale. And taking the filler components from other jobs just because they're analogous to what we need fixed in our own kit does nothing to improve those parts or by extension, our kit.

Let's at least look at what's fun about the other kits, rather than just tangentials like "Well, they don't have to worry about any core mechanics!" that are only salvaged by those fun parts that, while they might provide nothing in themselves, they at least don't get in the way of. It would be nice if our kit itself were already so damn fun that whether our core mechanics and playflow were interesting or not were irrelevant... but it's not, and at that point we might as well think about how the core experience itself can be improved upon.

If the desire is to return GL to being an actual mechanic, then how about we - for once - get something other than situational GL upkeep skills to interact with it?

I'm all for that. But turning it into just an extra layer of free potency as suggested above, let alone RNG-based potency via Chakra, is not that. Neither of those situations has anything in common with manipulating GL. One is RNG potency. The other is "I continued to exist without, at worst case, forgetting Form Shift also exists" potency.

[Burningskull]

What if they removed GL as a timer you had to upkeep and made it a trait. (Or keep it if you prefer). But gave you combo finishers that required you to be in Fists of Earth/Fire/Wind to use, all on their own GCD timers. Tornado Kick > Wind. Six Sided Star > Fire. Something > Earth. Each Combo Finisher also builds Chakra at a 100% rate. Meaning one Finisher = 1 Chakra. You spend Chakra on even bigger hits like Forbidden Chakra or Enlightenment (I think that's the name).

This would privide more of an evolution to the job. Pugilist teaches you your forms and combos and how to improve your speed with the GL trait. Monk comes along and shows you that by comboing right and in the right stance, aka Fist of Element, you can release your energy in combo finishers. Then later you learn you can also open Chakas with those finishers to now unleash even more devastating moves.

[Seraphor]

What about this for 6.0:

Telekinesis: 200 potency damage, range 25y, costs all remaining MP (1000 minimum)

[Kaiserdrache]

What about this for 6.0:

Telekinesis: 200 potency damage, range 25y, costs all remaining MP (1000 minimum)

Do you evedn understand and know what the word Telekinesis means? Lol, because I believe you don't

To make it short, Telekinesis is the ability to move objects via pure willpower from one point to an other one, like thinking about how you move a chair by the power of your mind behind you, so that you can sit down.

That is in terms of fantasy for RPGs like FF what people understand correctly under Telekinesis and thats definetely NOT an ability that a martial artistic monk will ever have, it suits not at all to the Job, would have FF14 a kind of Mentalist/Mesmer/Psionic/Illusionist Job, that would be a suiting skill for that in fact

[Imshail]

There's not much of a chance the devs will listen to feedback on this specific job, they've made that painfully clear

[StriderShinryu]

Definitely not as in depth on Monk as everyone else here (should just be hitting 80 shortly) but even in my experience so far it does feel like it needs something. More than any other class I've played, it feels like they had a solid concept of the class going through to 50 or maybe 60 but then the plan ran out so they just started adding stuff that seemed cool at the time. It really does feel like all of the tools are there to make for a really interesting and complete class but the way they work doesn't, well, work in a smooth and logical way.

I don't really have any specific ideas to improve things but it could absolutely use a rework.

One thing I will mention is that not having any sort of ranged attack is really annoying but that also feels like a strange part of the identity of the class.

[Gojin]

Agreed monk feels so boring to play now compared to other jobs, ninja and samurai get all these anime cool looking moves monk gets like one on a long cool down then the rng depended brotherhood move. So when I have to farm for striking glam gear I use my samurai now.

[Kalise]

Honestly, GL will always have a hard time being a mechanic so long as it's tied to any form of DPS increase, especially one that stacks up.

We see this with NIN, DRG and BLM where their maintenance "Mechanics" are non-interactive. Where you press a button to toggle it on and then you forget about it while you fight unless there happens to be a long transition phase (With the exception of NIN occasionally using a second finisher for their filler combo to refresh the duration)

If GL is tied to any form of DPS boost, then any kind of interaction that makes you concerned with spending it, will end up being mathed out if it's actually worth dropping that DPS buff for the use of the skill (Which tends to only be the case in times where actually stacking GL is trivial, i.e. StB with multi-Shoulder Tackle giving GL stacks)

As far as speed manipulation goes, it's a universally hated mechanic. Not only have Monks been vocal about how awful it is, but back when AST had cards, people often expressed distaste over receiving The Arrow because of how the shift in speed would mess with their rotations. Well, this is speed manipulation in combat.
One could propose a rework to the "Fists" that would enable people to select a speed of MNK they find the most comfortable. I.e. Earth is slow, Fire is medium and Wind is fast. With of course, the slower stances gaining increased %damage to compensate and make all 3 equal for DPS. This would also help alleviate the concern the devs have over the 4th GL stack and MNK becoming "Too fast" and having a rift between good and bad players widen since the bad players that cannot handle the high speed can instead opt for a lower speed that suits them.

If then, GL's speed and damage was then tied to Fist stances, there would be more flexibility in having GL be an actual resource, with the ability to spend it without having it compete with the raw damage gain you lose out on by having to restack it. Heck, you could even have GL stacks interact with Chakra too, something like "Gaining a GL stack while at max GL instead opens a Chakra" which would also open some more flexibility with Perfect Balance allowing it to be used to generate several Chakra quickly, in addition to adding in the thought process of whether you want to hold onto your GL stacks and generate guaranteed Chakra or if you want to spend them for TK and rely on just crits to generate Chakra while you build stacks back up (Which would likely be beneficial during periods of having crit buffs).

Though, if you wanted to keep GL stacks offering a passive benefit, you could use alternate stats aside from SkS or raw damage such as Crit chance (If Chakra is still reliant on crits...), heck, maybe even some inverse scaling where for example, at full GL you get guaranteed Chakra from executing Coeurl Form skills, but don't get any from random crits. While stacks take you from a 100% chance on weaponskill crit (0 stacks), 75% chance on weaponskill crit (1 stack), 50% chance on weaponskill crit (2 stacks) and 25% chance on weaponskill crit (3 stacks) before hitting the 4th and final stack.

In addition to this, you could also tweak Tornado Kick to where it's usable at any level of GL, but its damage scales up with each stack. So one can maintain low stacks if they wish to try and captialize on Crit buffs *Cough*Bring back Internal Release*Cough*

[Shurrikhan]

And I don't disagree with it being lucrative or something that can have benefits tied to. But based on what you can find as feedback with most posts from SB and onwards until they removed the slowdown from RoF, is that the slowdown was quite unwelcome, just like SSS's slowdown.

But just like how you may dislike Monk being centered solely around cooldowns, to the preclusion of any brawler style or interesting set-up, RoF was a slow-down forced upon us, rather than able to be flexibly and optionally integrated into rotation and thereby exploited as a part of Monk's unique advantages (e.g. flexible combos). Note that the same complaint was never used in connection to SB's TK usage; instead, TK rotations were villainized by their performance gap between high- and low-ping players and the clunkiness of their triple weave. The latter offered control and outside of meta comps was only a small gain at high SkS levels.

RoF lacked control and fit poorly with all but a couple SkS levels. The TK rotation, as might be expected for something utterly unintended, lacked polish in its buttonflow and stat balancing. But at least they each made use of the larger Monk kit when used properly. RoF allowed for perfect duration sync and a secondary rotation over its duration. TK allowed for RoW, stances, and PB to really mean something. That's what I want to see here: nothing going to waste.

Pushing the manipulation of speed as a Monk mechanic will at best be enjoyed to the same degree as the TK rotation -which itself was more enjoyed for the fact it made use of nearly all of monks skills...

And that's precisely what I want: to stop wasting the advantages the rest of Monk's kit would offer.

As far as TK just being Monk Foul. Why is that a problem? Homogeneity? If so where's your complaints about Dragoon and Black Mage.

My concern is that it would leave the rest of the kit's would-be advantages a pathetic vestigial waste for yet another expansion. The parts should be complementing each other, not left a hodgepodge of random tools with little synergy to each other.

Any homogeneity concerns about Dragoon or Black Mage would be found on Dragoon and Black Mage threads, respectively. Though, even there my concern has rarely ever been homogeneity, but rather making far better use of the existing kit rather than leaving something unpolished just to replace it later. None too shockingly, I've expressed dislike of both BotD and Enochian being mere maintenance gimmicks, offering that Enochian would more interestingly and usefully serve as a gameplay-adjusting cooldown (with F4 and B4 no longer locked behind it) and BotD as a gauge resource generated by skills, rather than just a cooldown, and again spent by Geirskogul or Nostrond.