Monk Needs a Complete Rework

[SpeckledBurd]

Looking at the Data on Monk a little closer and comparing it to the previous survey, the overall percentage of Monk respondents who are satisfied is down by about 12%, the number who are indifferent on the job is up 10%, and the amount dissatisfied is up 3%. In general it was a shift towards dissatisfaction across the board with greater numbers of players who were extremely dissatisfied and overall drops in extreme or even moderate satisfaction.

[Sora_Oathkeeper]

Looking at the Data on Monk a little closer and comparing it to the previous survey, the overall percentage of Monk respondents who are satisfied is down by about 12%, the number who are indifferent on the job is up 10%, and the amount dissatisfied is up 3%. In general it was a shift towards dissatisfaction across the board with greater numbers of players who were extremely dissatisfied and overall drops in extreme or even moderate satisfaction.

Part of me is happy that it's doing poor because it means more potential for a rework, while the other part of me is disappointed because my favourite job is in the gutter, at least in terms of playability, fun, and also the fact that SE never seem to care much about MNK so it probably won't see a rework.

[Noctisnine]

I changed to sam in this raid tier and let me say the only thing I miss about monk is the faster movement speed wind gives you. The rest of samurai's kit is far superior when compared to monk, you have a shield, a gap closer that costs kenki, a skill to disengage and a ranged attack for when you need to stay away doing mechanics but dont wanna lose a gcd. Monk is just a poor choice to play right now. Ninja sam and dragoon are all better.

[Ultimatecalibur]

Lately I've been thinking about how to fix the Monk and one thing I realized is that Perfect Balance might be the cause of a fair amount of design problems. Perfect Balance forces all Form based weaponskills to be unique buttons which prevents them from adding more Form abilities as they want to limit the amount of button bloat.

If Perfect Balance was removed and replaced with another method of quick Gl generation they could do something like the following with their ability to change weaponskills and abilities based on buffs:

• Bootshine (No Form/Opo-opo Form) - default action tied to the button.
  • Twin Snakes (Raptor Form) - Bootshine would turn into this when Raptor Form is active.
  • New Skill (Coeurl Form) - Bootshine would turn into this when Coeurl Form is active. Could possibly have increased potency when you have more than X open Chakra.
• True Strike (Raptor Form) - default action tied to the button.
  • Demolish (Coeurl Form) - True Strike would turn into this when Coeurl Form is active.
  • New Skill (Opo-opo Form) - True Strike would turn into this when Opo-opo Form is active. I'd imagine it getting the Leaden Fist bonus (i.e. +150 potency) and do some like always opening a Chakra if you have less than say 3 (in addition to Deep Meditation's Chakra gains from Crits).
• Snap Punch (Coeurl Form) - default action tied to the button
  • Dragon Kick (Opo-opo Form) - Snap Punch would turn into this when Opo-opo form is active.
  • New Skill (Raptor Form) - Sap Punch would turn into this when Raptor Form is active. Potency could increase when you have less than X Chakra open.

Add in a Formless Weaponskill on say a 10s cooldown and you could have a rotation with 10 different weaponskills on only 4 buttons.

[Seto_Mimyho]

snip

Or... Hear me out. What if they just changed GL from being the most unresourse like resource to exist in this game into not being something else. I don't understand people's obsession with trying to change the main rotation of the job by introducing new GCDs into the mix. When the single best course of action is reworking how GL interacts with the kit or just simply remove it entirely and just make it a passive trait.

At current we have a bunch of abilities that manipulate GL in some shape or form.

Perfect Balance - level 50, Most used for DK + BS spam during rotation or quick restack after say e8s cutscene/openers.

Form Shift- level 52, the best GL maintenance tool we've EVER gotten for downtime management also used to get into Coerul form for the opener.

Tornado Kick- level 60 (Capstone of HW), The Boon and Bane of MNK at times; designed for when you 100% without a shadow of doubt can't keep your stacks. (savior of SB MNK, rip)

Riddle of Earth - level 64, Get hit to keep GL stacks. Okay in SB, but now it's used to pepega our way through positionals.

Anatman - level 78, The most somewhat okay, but really not tool recently given. Standing in place and generating stacks, which is nice, but requires you to stand in place and do nothing during it... Also on the GCD cause, they didn't like early optimization attempts.

Six Sided Star - Level 80 (Capstone of ShB) - Weird disconnect tool worth approximately 2 GCDs worth of time that can't be used in rotation but is situationally okay at saving your stacks if you mess up a PB window / forget to Formshift.

These 6 abilities interact/manipulate GL in some capacity in extremely niche ways that could just be solved with 1 button press. We lose out on so many awesome potential abilities cause, SE keeps trying to give us tools to mitigate downtime that we have nothing outside our standard 6 GCDS and a handful of oGCDs during uptime.

It would also help tremendously if SE would let MNK evolve and change from expac to expac instead of living in ARR but with fewer oGCDs and 5% faster.

[Xau]

snip

in me opinion, one way to change GL is by making what once the timer reach 0, instead of droping to no gl, it only removes one stack of gl

[Eliadil]

Or... Hear me out. What if they just changed GL from being the most unresourse like resource to exist in this game into not being something else. I don't understand people's obsession with trying to change the main rotation of the job by introducing new GCDs into the mix. When the single best course of action is reworking how GL interacts with the kit or just simply remove it entirely and just make it a passive trait.

This is a good reasoning tbh, most of these skills, especially Tornado Kick or Six Sided Star could have an additionnal effect attached to them to be considered "worthwhile". I talked on another post how Tornado Kick would be much better if it ended RoF instead of GL stacks when RoF is active. And Six Sided Stars is kinda useless seeing how we got Anatman anyway who does the same job but better. So it would need another design entirely right now in order to be interesting, and you could just merge its current effect with Anatman.

Because right now when the boss is about to disengage, peoples use Six Sided Stars into... Tornado Kick ? Like... That doesn't make any sense. GL management wasn't that easy at the beginning of ShB sure, but with the post-expac buffs, their 80 skill is almost useless in most situations and is imo one of the thing that needs the most attention.

[Ultimatecalibur]

Or... Hear me out. What if they just changed GL from being the most unresourse like resource to exist in this game into not being something else. I don't understand people's obsession with trying to change the main rotation of the job by introducing new GCDs into the mix. When the single best course of action is reworking how GL interacts with the kit or just simply remove it entirely and just make it a passive trait.

Fixing GL will not fix all the problems the Monk has. There is also:

• a Calcified (nearly Fossilized) core gcd rotation that lacks the flexiblity that the original Form based Combo system implied when compared to the 1-2-3/4 system of every other melee class/job
• 3 Elemental Fist stances that tend to end up having 1 useful stance and 2 stances with limited use even in optimization.
• secondary resource that the monk has no direct control over generating unless they are not currently engaging a target (they are then unable to utilize the resource until they reengage with a target),
• (as you point out) a bunch of niche abilities with overlapping purposes of which their usefulness is more determined by fight timing than by how they interact with the job's rotation.

A rework needs to fix all 5 problems and removing GL/turning it into a passive trait just won't do that.

These 6 abilities interact/manipulate GL in some capacity in extremely niche ways that could just be solved with 1 button press. We lose out on so many awesome potential abilities cause, SE keeps trying to give us tools to mitigate downtime that we have nothing outside our standard 6 GCDS and a handful of oGCDs during uptime.

Perfect Balance was the original quick GL generator cooldown with additional open access to the Monk's two utility abilities (Rockbreaker for AoE silence and One-Ilm Punch for buff stripping). Reducing it from a 4 minutes cooldown, to a 3 and later 2 minute cooldown made it vastly more usable but the fact it makes all weaponskills usable no matter form requirements ends up forcing button bloat when adding new weaponskills.

Form Shift has been probably one of the most cheered Monk additions even when its primary purpose was to let the Monk start fights/phases with DK->TwS->Demolish. The StB additional ability to maintain GL made it even more useful. Only real problem with it now is that it requires 3 gcds to refresh GL.

Tornado Kick had a very niche position from the start. In some fights it never needed to be used while other fights you needed to use it regularly and you needed to know the exact times and hp%s to properly use it. It has a 10s cooldown and little reason to use it that often.

Riddle of Earth's original implementation is perhaps one of the best examples of why stance locking abilities is a bad idea. It required pushing 3 ogcd buttons to extend GL and sacrificing damage dealt to reduce damage received isn't a trade most players will happily make. ShB's addition of the ability to ignore positionals for 30s every minute might be overkill for making the ability useful.

Anatman is a flavorful ability (standstill and charge up) that fits the job fantasy but suffers from FFXIV's fight design that either wants you moving when not hitting a target or is doing a cinematic cutscene. High end fights don't really want you sitting still doing nothing for the 12s to 14s needed to charge up. Anatman was also made a gcd action because SE didn't want to require player to use a server tick tracker to play the job optimally/near-optimally.

Six-sided Star is a good example of an unintuitive and seemingly unnecessary ability that doesn't really fit. How is this even a capstone ability?

It would also help tremendously if SE would let MNK evolve and change from expac to expac instead of living in ARR but with fewer oGCDs and 5% faster.

The rotation isn't even really living in ARR. In ARR you could intermix Touch of Death and Fracture to realign your rotation if it was desyncing.

[Seto_Mimyho]

snip

1. Gonna disagree here, While it's true the GCD rotation is archaic it's not as bad as you might think it is.
Rotation wise we have 2 branches of skills; Damage + Buffs/Debuffs.
Damage: Bootshine, True Strikes, Snap Punch
Buff / Debuff: Dragon Kick, Twin Snakes, Demolish

We have 2 rotations in use at current; Standard of Alternate Twin + True & Double True Strike.
So a rotation could look like this: (assuming mid-fight with all stacks of GL) DK ->Twin->Demo ->BS ->True ->Snap ->DK ->Twin ->Snap ->BS ->True ->Demo
or
DK ->Twin ->Demo ->BS ->True ->Snap->DK ->True ->Snap ->BS ->Twin -> Demo
Looking at other classes

• NIN follows your 1-2-3/4 rotation
• SAM goes by 1-2-1-3-4-1-5-6
• DRG is 1-2-3-4-5-1-6-7-5-4 and can not deviate in the slightest without breaking combo.
• meanwhile MNK could follow 1-2-3-4-5-6-1-2-6-4-5-3 or 1-2-3-4-5-6-1-5-6-4-2-3

2. Agreeance here, but it's not that bad just bloats buttons that could be fixed by making them traits or just combine all into one
3. I do wish that Chakras weren't as RNG as they are, but they're not detrimentally holding the class back
4. As said, They interact with Greased Lightning, if they didn't have that caveat they could be fleshed out and used more freely (Mainly TK + SSS)

I do appreciate you reiterating the abilities I listed, but you got some things wrong with them. Mainly:

• PB's CDs were 4 minutes to 3min to 1min up to the current 2min. And optimally speaking while it may open all your buttons, you're only going to be using it to spam Dragon Kick and Bootshine with 1 Coeurl move / RoE to refresh GL.
• Form shift didn't get the GL refresh until Shadowbringers, not Stormblood. (assuming StB is Stormblood).
• TK is a weird one, while necessary in some places, it never got its chance to shine as it did during patches 4.25 to 4.55. The Tornado Kick Rotation was one of the single most accidentally amazing things to come from Stormblood MNK thanks to Wind Tackle + 1m PB.
• RoE never needed 3 oGCDs to activate you'd just hit it and it'd shift you into FoE and then only needing 1 press to go back to FoF. But back in SB, this was one of the only ways to keep GL during long disconnects if you didn't use TK cause you knew you can keep your stacks and PB was on CD.
• Anatman is just bad even if thematically it would make sense. Why does it have the caveat of needing to stand still to maintain GL when every other class has ONE button they push to maintain their class buff. it being on the GCD doesn't help either since it just makes it clunky to use.
• SSS is a, "I fucked up Perfect Balance and need to quickly fix my stacks." Button or a Finisher button along with TK

And MNK is stuck in ARR, with or without ToD / Fracture. Your core rotation doesn't change at all from Level 50 and you don't have the oGCDs to fill up space like other classes do or the intuitive gauges as they do.

[Renkei]

I changed to sam in this raid tier and let me say the only thing I miss about monk is the faster movement speed wind gives you. The rest of samurai's kit is far superior when compared to monk, you have a shield, a gap closer that costs kenki, a skill to disengage and a ranged attack for when you need to stay away doing mechanics but dont wanna lose a gcd. Monk is just a poor choice to play right now. Ninja sam and dragoon are all better.

Dragoon Reporting in, Right now it's mostly Samurai, Monk and Dragoon are doing poorly along with Ninja, Though Ninja has the most powerful disengage option. Monk Out Performs Both classes and the majority of the fights with the exception of the second fight of course.


E5S > E8S.

MONK
21,641.7
18,633.2
21,072
17,682.5

DRAGOON
19,845.2
19,153.2
19,408.2
15,591.6

NINJA
19,706.8
18,470.1
17,543.0
15,431.8