Monk Needs a Complete Rework

[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.

[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

[Sora_Oathkeeper]

Snip

I'm not sure what numbers you're looking at, but a lot of your MNK parses are wrong. Unless you can give a source to where you got those numbers.

Here's the current rDPS standings in FFLOGS as of today:

MONK

E5S - 19,827.67
E6S - 18,223.72
E7S - 18,430.14
E8S - 16,067.73

DRAGOON

E5S - 19,721.15
E6S - 18,899.32
E7S - 18,323.13
E8S - 15,791.82

NINJA

E5S - 19,655.62
E6S - 18,669.65
E7S - 18,215.48
E8S - 15,989.42

Sources:
E5S
E6S
E7S
E8S

At 99th percentile Ninja is ahead of both, DRG and MNK in fights that have more frequent disengages (E6S, E8S and is practically tied with it on E5S). Samurai just blows them all out the water though unfortunately.

This raid tier overall has been pretty diabolical for Melee with buffs, SAM's been pretty lucky in the sense that it doesn't have oGCD buffs such as: Lance Charge, BL, RoF, Brotherhood, TA windows etc. all of which can contribute to its higher DPS because these fights have multiple phase changes during buff windows which either get forced out of alignment. Needless to say SAM is naturally OP anyway, but this raid tier has really shown its strengths and brought to light just how far behind the others are. I'd say the balance between MNK, DRG and NIN is for the most part really good. So while yes, at max percentile MNK, with perfect RNG on crits, chakras etc MNK is ahead. It becomes a lot more even at the 99th percentile when you don't get the God runs, though still slightly ahead.

Still hoping for some changes to play for MNK in 5.3 considering they said there would be more job adjustments. Will our feedback fall on deaf ears or will they finally change some of the more immediate problems to at least make us fun to play again?

[Todhaseo]

I won't be surprised if they take away elixir field in the next expansion. I'm noticing a pattern that they just do not want us to have any fun/cool looking skills at all, or gate them behind caveats that ruin our rotation and damage.

Speaking of, why is MNK the only job that has skills that actively punish the player for using them? I don't think there's a single other class out there with moves like that. You can argue "using X on Y job would offset our rotation-" but none are actually programmed to penalise you for using them like TK and SSS. It doesn't add depth or skill, it just makes it so that no one is going to use them.

Ive been saying this since Shb launched and now people are gaining aware of it. which im glad for.

[Shurrikhan]

Speaking of, why is MNK the only job that has skills that actively punish the player for using them? I don't think there's a single other class out there with moves like that. You can argue "using X on Y job would offset our rotation-" but none are actually programmed to penalise you for using them like TK and SSS. It doesn't add depth or skill, it just makes it so that no one is going to use them.

All specialized options punish players for using them outside of their intended situation. Xenoglossy/Senei/Bhavacakra when 2+ targets are present? That's a DPS loss. Even during forced melee downtime, using Piercing Talon in any but 1 GCD in 5 or Throwing Daggers in any but 1 GCD in 3? That's a DPS loss. Apart from punishing faltering awareness or physical handicaps, optimization exists primarily through those exact kinds of compromises, albeit in many more shades.

Monk just runs the odd line between "This is so crap otherwise that you obviously shouldn't use this..." and "This looks cool; surely I can use this more often than I seem to be able to?" atop perhaps the worst obfuscation of core elements among any job.