Monk Needs a Complete Rework

[monk-dps]

There are so many things wrong with the current version of monk its hard to know even where to start.
It really doesnt matter if the job is in a good place in dps.It feels like complete garbage to play.And im not talking from the view of anatman openers as thats a personal player choice to open that way.
The job is so boring now and has been dumbed down as much as possible to try and attract more players to the job.

Probably the worst change was to dragon kick.Why did it need to be changed?Nobody knows.Only monk benefitted from the debuff anyway.It's clear the change was designed to benefit people bad at playing monk so they dont have to keep a debuff up and replacing it with a buff that now has a 30 sec window for one skill to do extra damage.Also how bad are people that they need 30 seconds to hit one button honestly?This change alone has made the job a lot more boring and static in rotation.

Howling fist removed - Again WHY???.There was no justification for the removal of this skill.Button bloat?Yeah right.This skill would actually be used more than half off the situational meme skills that were later added on the job.Again feels like it was done to close player skill dps gap because people low skill players struggle to weave or double weave.

Internal release removed - Seriously? You make chakras crit dependant and then remove our crit buff.SO stupid...

Riddle of Earth change - 60 sec cd with 30 sec free positionals.Why even have monk as a positional based job if you're going to do that?
If people cant do positionals let them play samurai instead.

They really need to stop sucking all the fun out of jobs to accomodate bad play.I get the game is becomeing more popular but it doesnt justify punishing people who have stuck the job for years.

To be honest... there was a time where I'd disagree with everything you just said.. but right now. I'm in full agreement. Even more so with the skill removeals. Like gimmie me back what was lost, cause anaman, six faired sky, and spinning bird kick - spinning bird kick is fun- is just skills that replaced actual useful skills. So too many skills isn't the issue. Now we have skills we don't use or find useless when we had actual skills we were rewarded in using.

[Satarn]

Probably the worst change was to dragon kick.Why did it need to be changed?Nobody knows.Only monk benefitted from the debuff anyway.It's clear the change was designed to benefit people bad at playing monk so they dont have to keep a debuff up and replacing it with a buff that now has a 30 sec window for one skill to do extra damage.Also how bad are people that they need 30 seconds to hit one button honestly?This change alone has made the job a lot more boring and static in rotation.

The blunt debuff has been changed most likely because "well, we're removing piercing and slashing, so leaving this would be weird", but yeah, that's a really dumb reason. Leaden Fist doesn't just make MNK's gcd rotation more static, it's also responsible for the whole Anatman opener issue, due to making Leaden Bootshine spam in PB optimal.

Howling fist removed - Again WHY???.There was no justification for the removal of this skill.Button bloat?Yeah right.This skill would actually be used more than half off the situational meme skills that were later added on the job.Again feels like it was done to close player skill dps gap because people low skill players struggle to weave or double weave.

That's probably because of addition of GS4 making it near impossible to double weave. Increased chance to proc chakras was probably their "fix" for removing ogcds, but it really doesn't cut it and MNK feels slower as a result. I'd rather keep the gcd length above 2 seconds like NIN and have more stuff to weave.

Internal release removed - Seriously? You make chakras crit dependant and then remove our crit buff.SO stupid...

That's probably just because they figured that having 2 different buff windows with cds that don't align with each other every time was "too complicated", but honestly those drifting cds made MNKs rotation more fun due to not being as static.
Looking at all job changes in SHB, devs seem hell bent on removing any drifting or flexible resource management aka, anything that's actually engaging.
It also feels hella weird not having any damage buff before 68 as a dps job.

They really need to stop sucking all the fun out of jobs to accomodate bad play.I get the game is becomeing more popular but it doesnt justify punishing people who have stuck the job for years.

This. I wouldn't mind if we had various levels of complexity depending on the job you pick so newbies and more casual players can also find something for themselves, but dumbing down the entire game alienates those who enjoy more complex playstyles.
If the reasoning is that they want to let everyone play any of the "aesthetics", then perhaps it is time to start branching jobs into specs with different difficulty, rather than just adding more jobs.

[SpeckledBurd]

However, I'm not really sure if GS4 was even a good addition in the first place tbf. I feel like a higher number of abilities in SB at a slightly higher gcd length, did a better job at making the job feel fast and active as ogcds always have lower input gaps between them than any gcd. Not to say that the speed buff isn't important - they both play parts in making jobs feel fast-paced - but at gcd below 2 seconds weaving becomes an issue, hence why SE pruned MNK's ogcds in SHB which ironically makes the job feel slower.

All that said, it's just pointless rambling at the end of the day. I highly doubt SE would go back on big job changes and "admit their mistake"(not referring to TK or GS4 specifically, just MNK design in general), we'll probably just get another bunch of completely new alterations in 6.0. I'm honestly just insanely jaded and fed up with the design direction in SHB at this point.

Even though GL4 is really the only thing in Shadowbringers that its easy to have enthusiasm about (other than Monk actually having an AOE rotation but that’s a systematic change more than anything), I agree. It doesn't feel like it was a change they made because they had any vision for what it would be, it was a change they made because they felt like they had to after people railed against Stormblood Monk and GL4 kept getting mentioned in interviews. But it was made without any consideration for timers, because its now possible to squeeze in a second True Strikes in a Twin Snakes window with Twin Snakes falling off for its reapplication which I'm absolutely certain isn't intended. Even worse they made getting it feel like a wish was granted on a Monkey's paw because they trimmed all of our GCDs out of fear that it would be too fast. I'd also say that you could extend the criticism of GL4 not feeling like its part of any clear vision to all of SB/ShB Monk's changes, there's no vision of improvement just a desire to keep things the same that's at odds with needing to add things to it for a new expansion and the subtly changing encounter design.

I'd always been an advocate for GL4 to be something we'd enter temporarily in response to doing some Monk specific task like upkeeping GL for X amount of time/refreshing it a certain number of times. I also frankly wouldn't care if GL4 just didn't exist and for that level of speed to be emulated in some other way like a cooldown that doubles Auto-Attacks/Abilities and Weaponskills while reducing damage by 40% for a net gain of 20% overall. Regardless of what I would have done, the big thing is that there just doesn't feel to be any actual vision for what they want Monk to be going forward so much as a desire to keep it as it was in ARR. But in a game whose encounter and design has shifted drastically since then and which requires new stuff to be added every expansion, we've seen why that's a big problem. Even if it ended up being something I didn't entirely like such as spending GL routinely, I'd rather there be some clear idea on what they want Monk do be going forward rather than a confused mess that's a shadow of what it used to be like it is now.

As for admitting their mistakes, they did admit that Monk design in Stormblood was disappointing and a mistake in Live Letter 51 (I believe) leading up to Shadowbringers and they discussed it some in interviews during the media tour, but it just it turned out to be all talk and no action to actually address the problems they'd introduced with it. I'd already been pretty jaded with Monk at that point and it was the tipping point at which I just flat out didn't trust the developers any longer, because they'd abused that trust.

[Shurrikhan]

The blunt debuff has been changed most likely because "well, we're removing piercing and slashing, so leaving this would be weird", but yeah, that's a really dumb reason. Leaden Fist doesn't just make MNK's gcd rotation more static, it's also responsible for the whole Anatman opener issue, due to making Leaden Bootshine spam in PB optimal.

Its also weird that while each expansion has seen positional value decrease, DK-LF then offers us roughly some 200 potency over not using it at every opportunity. Using DK in place of BS is, in a sense, a positional. You previously could delay DK refresh (Flank) with an overextended rotation, at little potency cost (except where oGCDs are coming back up) at low SkS tiers or faint bonus at mid and a then-typical positional bonus at high SkS tiers. Having the choices of double-Boot (or "Demo-drop" where you let DK fade only for itself, Demolish's mere 70 potency, and at worst an auto-attack, at lower SkS) and full DK maintenance so close in potency for so many SkS tiers allowed for flexible positioning -- a (risky) 25-60 potency bonus to use, generally on par with a typical positional. Now, we're obliged to do the opposite, at some 3 to 8 times the potency at risk. Instead of allowing for the skills themselves to give us freedom of positioning, and the closest we had to freedom to align ourselves to our CDs, internal balance was replaced with "80+% of all your positioning impact is now in a single skill and a core mechanic is nullified half the time." That's horrible design.

And the sad thing is that Leaden Fist doesn't need to strip us of that positional freedom, but with so many already redundant tools, there's scarcely anything else Monks would have to look forward to in their blow-by-blow rotation. Our frequent damage CDs are mostly removed, PB's cooldown was doubled, we lost our earlier core CD and synergy with our Deep Meditation procs, and GL is no longer a resource to maintain, gamble, or work around (only to build once and then leave, essentially, a non-mechanic).

[EtherRose]

Are you high? Ninja's been consistently part of the meta and a job that entire game's openers have been planned around, ever since it's introduction up until 5.0, when it got nerfed too much for the first time. Regardless, power level has nothing to do with whether the job should be reworked or not - that's what buffs/nerfs are for, reworks are for gameplay/enjoyment issues.

Also last thing NIN needs is getting butchered and watered down like MCH got - 5.1 took some good aspects of the job away, but it removed ping issues and is still pretty enjoyable at least, now they should at most do some small tweaks like giving us back old Shadowfang.
Btw, reworked MCH is still pretty weak, quite a lot weaker than NIN which you think "needs an MCH-style rework to become stronger".

As for MNK - I don't think rework in the sense SE seems to understand it as would be good. MNK(or any job for that matter imo) shouldn't get turned 180 from it's fundamental mechanics/identity like MCH/DRK got - SE should instead look at what worked before(like TK rotation) and what never freaking works(aka Fist stances, seriously) and make changes based on that instead of reinventing it into pretty much an entirely new job.

No i'm not high but maybe you are or maybe both of us. So jokes aside you say "Part of the meta for openers up until 5.0". For me, that's a huge no. Iv'e been playing this game since 1.0 and once Ninja's were introduced and everybody was playing them THEN they fell off over time. In my raids,dungeons,etc., i barely see ANY ninja at all. Maybe for static raids yes but for overall, no. Throughout parsing logs ninja has always been at the bottom. Their DPS was not up to par like some others, their mudra was crap due to latency, etc. But in 5.0 with the changes they have become better but they still feel like their lacking which is why i propose an actual re-work like they did MCH. The re-work they did on MCH made the class WAY better than what it was. Yes, it does still need some tweaks but overall it is better. And re-worked MCH is not weak. IF you actually know the rotations and know how to play the job properly you can parse really high.

[Satarn]

Iv'e been playing this game since 1.0 and once Ninja's were introduced and everybody was playing them THEN they fell off over time. In my raids,dungeons,etc., i barely see ANY ninja at all. Maybe for static raids yes but for overall, no.

Your personal impressions, aka anecdotal evidence, are irrelevant and contradict actual hard data from FFlogs.

Throughout parsing logs ninja has always been at the bottom. Their DPS was not up to par like some others

That's because up until 5.0 FFlogs was showing only personal dps, not raid dps. NIN's big thing has always been Trick Attack(massive raid dps contribution) and their aggro management tools(utility and more raid dps through tanks) - if they were doing same personal dps as less rdps/utility focused jobs, it would be completely broken.
When you look at alphascape statistics for example, three most staple meta jobs(NIN, DRG and BRD) are on the bottom of the pdps on every single fight, but also hold the three highest numbers of parses for each of them - aka are the most used dps jobs.

It doesn't matter what kind of pDPS job does or what buffs they bring - at the end of the day the real strength is measured by their total rDPS, regardless of how it is achieved.

The job "still feeling lacking" is also not a reason for a complete rework - it's a reason for tweaks. Reworks like the one MCH got, boot the entirety of the job out of the game and replace it with something else.

And re-worked MCH is not weak. IF you actually know the rotations and know how to play the job properly you can parse really high.

MCH sits at third-worst rdps for each eden fight except for Eden Prime, where it's even worse at second-worst. Meanwhile NIN is a whole 1000 rdps ahead of them on 3/4 fights and around 800 on the remaining one.
That's 99th percentile btw, so pretty much the most skilled MCHs.

[SnowVix]

There are so many things wrong with the current version of monk its hard to know even where to start.
It really doesnt matter if the job is in a good place in dps.It feels like complete garbage to play.And im not talking from the view of anatman openers as thats a personal player choice to open that way.
The job is so boring now and has been dumbed down as much as possible to try and attract more players to the job.

Probably the worst change was to dragon kick.Why did it need to be changed?Nobody knows.Only monk benefitted from the debuff anyway.It's clear the change was designed to benefit people bad at playing monk so they dont have to keep a debuff up and replacing it with a buff that now has a 30 sec window for one skill to do extra damage.Also how bad are people that they need 30 seconds to hit one button honestly?This change alone has made the job a lot more boring and static in rotation.

"No one knows why they made this change that they literally said why they were doing it in a live letter" They removed all specific damage type vulnerability ups from all player classes. You should try paying more attention.

Riddle of Earth change - 60 sec cd with 30 sec free positionals.Why even have monk as a positional based job if you're going to do that?
If people cant do positionals let them play samurai instead.

yes, because there aren't multiple fights where you're locked out of positionals due to mechanics (and not just in shadowbringers, this has been a problem for a while) for longer than the two stacks of True North will work for you.

[Satarn]

"No one knows why they made this change that they literally said why they were doing it in a live letter" They removed all specific damage type vulnerability ups from all player classes.

Piercing and Slashing have been removed due to forcing certain job compositions, because not having slashing meant both your tanks did way less damage and not having piercing(which only DRG provided) significantly nerfed your physical ranged dps. Both those debuffs were causing massive balance issues and frustration for tanks and ranged players.

Blunt debuff was both only used and provided by MNK, so it had none of those problems - it was functionally just another full uptime self-buff. Clearly the only reason for it's removal was "because of the other two", which is a garbo reason to do anything and itself has caused issues, due to replacing it with Leaden Fist.

yes, because there aren't multiple fights where you're locked out of positionals due to mechanics (and not just in shadowbringers, this has been a problem for a while) for longer than the two stacks of True North will work for you.

Between 30 seconds per minute on Riddle of Earth and 10 seconds per 45 seconds from True North, MNK has more free-positional uptime than it has to actually do positionals. Those are no longer "windows of ignoring positionals", you get "windows of having to do positionals" instead. It's no wonder some people are thinking that devs could've as well just removed positionals entirely.

While it's true that MNK was way more positional-intense than any other melee and there are mechanics which make positionals a nightmare, extra 30 seconds per minute is an overkill. If MNK simply got 10 more seconds than the other melee it would've probably been fine too.

[SpeckledBurd]

Piercing and Slashing have been removed due to forcing certain job compositions, because not having slashing meant both your tanks did way less damage and not having piercing(which only DRG provided) significantly nerfed your physical ranged dps. Both those debuffs were causing massive balance issues and frustration for tanks and ranged players.

Blunt debuff was both only used and provided by MNK, so it had none of those problems - it was functionally just another full uptime self-buff. Clearly the only reason for it's removal was "because of the other two", which is a garbo reason to do anything and itself has caused issues, due to replacing it with Leaden Fist.

It's also worth noting that not only was this change unnecessary because no other job used blunt damage (and indeed it could have been converted to a self buff should a job with something like a Hammer been implemented), but it's not the first time Monk has had skills removed from it that played differently with its kit because other jobs had that change made. It is just a fact that Form System makes Monk work just a little bit different from other melee Jobs because of the freedom it provides, even if with the freedom it ultimately results in a GCD loop similar to the other jobs.

Case in point Touch of Death and Fracture (Fracture technically being Marauder's but Monk almost had more use of it than Warrior in Heavensward) were uncombo'd dots, so they got removed in Stormblood along with Phlebotomize and Scourge. On other jobs they were just a part of your rotation that you'd use in a set order without any divergence. For all intents and purposes skills like Scourge and Phlebotomize may as well have been combo'd. However Touch of Death and Fracture were different because of the free flowing style of Form Based Combos, they gave Monk a certain fluidity and freedom to weave weaponskills in between its combos that other jobs lacked and in contributed to the feeling of playing a martial artist. In terms of gameplay they were also useful tools for manipulating your GCD to make sure you could end on a Coeurl form hit so you'd have max stacks for a jump as well. Though all things being unequal when it comes to Monk, Warrior, Dragoon and Ninja have also all gained new skills they actually get to use on a regular basis to replace their uncombo’d DOTs.

Edit: I used One Ilm Punch in place of Touch of Death RIP.

Between 30 seconds per minute on Riddle of Earth and 10 seconds per 45 seconds from True North, MNK has more free-positional uptime than it has to actually do positionals. Those are no longer "windows of ignoring positionals", you get "windows of having to do positionals" instead. It's no wonder some people are thinking that devs could've as well just removed positionals entirely.

While it's true that MNK was way more positional-intense than any other melee and there are mechanics which make positionals a nightmare, extra 30 seconds per minute is an overkill. If MNK simply got 10 more seconds than the other melee it would've probably been fine too.

While it's an extra 30 seconds per minute, it isn't on command like True North is because it requires you to take a hit (which requires you to take damage instead of proccing through shields like Third Eye because god forbid they fix one of the fundamental problems with it). Depending on how much AOE damage is occurring during a given fight/phase there's a limit to when you can actually trigger the effect (which can also get screwed by a spread Adlo, still) and therefore there's a limit to when it can be activated and actually be useful. While in theory there could be 50 seconds of positional free attacking, that's not always the case in practice. To its credit there's also some optimization that new Riddle of Earth creates in terms pre-emptively using it so you catch an AOE just barely and having it be back up in time for a future mechanic.

That said, I don't think it was well thought out at all as a change. In terms of duration it's actually a bit overblown, a longer duration is warranted because of the activation requirements but 20 seconds would probably be a bit more appropriate. It struck me as a panicked change to make a skill that would be invalidated by the Formshift 5.05 change still have a use. It wouldn't have been a problem if Monk's ability design in every expansion wasn't a contest to design new skills that are as nonfunctional as possible in many situations, but that's beside the point. It is also a skill that fixes a problem that Monk has had for a while in terms of solo play such as single player instances or any time it makes you face tank a mob for a quest. For whatever these encounters don't give enemies omnidirectional positionals and without RoE (or even I'd speculate with only 30 seconds of True North) that hits Monk the absolute hardest now that they've basically reimplimented all of the lost positional damage they took from Monk in Stormblood onto Leaden Fist. For people who are decent at the game it isn't a problem, but there's a sizeable portion of the playerbase that struggles on Monk because of it.

[Shurrikhan]

Case in point Touch of Death and Fracture (Fracture technically being Marauder's but Monk almost had more use of it than Warrior in Heavensward) were uncombo'd dots, so they got removed in Stormblood along with Phlebotomize and Scourge. On other jobs they were just a part of your rotation that you'd use in a set order without any divergence. For all intents and purposes skills like Scourge and Phlebotomize may as well have been combo'd. However Touch of Death and Fracture were different because of the free flowing style of Form Based Combos, they gave Monk a certain fluidity and freedom to weave weaponskills in between its combos that other jobs lacked and in contributed to the feeling of playing a martial artist. In terms of gameplay they were also useful tools for manipulating your GCD to make sure you could end on a Coeurl form hit so you'd have max stacks for a jump as well. Though all things being unequal when it comes to Monk, Warrior, Dragoon and Ninja have also all gained new skills they actually get to use on a regular basis to replace their uncombo’d DOTs.

This. So much this. Fracture was effectively just a position-less skill you could use at disproportionate TP cost for its potency advantage because half its value was just in being position-less -- usable as often as every 18 seconds depending on the number of fillers per odd/even Demolish (similar to filler counts per TG on Samurai and odd/even minutes on Ninja). ToD was as small a potency bonus as it was largely so you could use it for flexibility. How the devs could fail to see how badly their removal (heck, we previously had Impulse Drive, too, if we really needed position-less filler) would affect Monk positional flexibility is baffling. Modular control and positions were the basis for our job back then.

The GL timer being as tight as it was back then made it so even the seemingly subtle tools could have tremendous impact, rather than tools needing to be obtusely significant to notice any impact. If you didn't know how to control your rotation during T9, you'd lose GL far more often than you ought. That interdependence and flexibility just made it all feel right; difficult, perhaps, but fitting -- especially in the fights that gave it the most challenge.

The HW model was close to perfection in terms of general rotation. Had Meditation just been a bit stronger so it could be used situationally to align your rotation... *chef's kiss*. (Of course, other melee job's ranged skills would need to be buffed in turn to make up for MNK's being the not only stronger in ppgcd but also not breaking rotations, or the buff to Meditation would have to be limited to when in melee range of an enemy.)

If TK was less cumbersome, I'd throw in a fluid, likely single-step Riddle of Wind and the one-minute PB atop it for a bit more macrorotational variance, give more reason to change between stances macrorotationally, and maybe use a different take on Deep Meditation for a bit more spice over the levels since, but still, that rotation was a work of art, especially at extremely high speeds.