Monk Needs a Complete Rework

[Shurrikhan]

Then they changed RoF and Form Shift and that didn't break the game.

But, compounded with replacing the mechanic that made TK worth using in combat (RoW as GL-acceleration) with one that made it even more punishing (RoW as GL-deceleration via the extra stack requirement) if one forgets it's garbage outside of guaranteed GL loss -- all alongside a double-length PB, to boot, and replacing the mechanic that made TK worth using at least in dungeons and before long jumps (i.e. Greased Lighting as an actual mechanic) with Form Shift spam, it did seriously fracture Monk.

I honestly don't care about the potency

I'm right there with you on the spirit of your argument, but potency relative to other skills within one's kit are exactly what allow skills to be used, or forces them not to be used, in capacities X, Y, and Z. It's why TK and SsS are currently borderline useless.

My dream would be to stand still and push NOTHING and still keep my stacks, and this may seem mindless.

I loved the hell out of T9 because it was so difficult to keep stacks up. There were times I had to use Rockbreaker for that tiny bit of extra range and I had to make Demolish my final GCD before jumps. That was awesome -- totally iconic Monk. It just should have been the difference between keeping 3 stacks and 2, rather than 3 and none.

GL is holding monk back from a gameplay stand point and a innovation stand point. The class will never grow and evolve with the current iteration.

Not that I'm horribly against replacing GL, so long as the replacement and its surroundings make the job as fun as, say, Heavensward high-SkS or late-Stormblood Monk, and in distinctly "Monk-like" fashion... you absolutely can. It doesn't need this Anatman nonsense or any of these half-brained attempts to make it half-baked.

GL merely needs to be something that's contextually difficult to keep up, but isn't too punishing upon letting a stack drop, and has periods of shifted behavior by which to vary gameplay. We had that in late Stormblood. It worked just fine. The problem is solely that they chopped it all at the knees when they should have capitalized on it. But you don't take a pair of dismembered legs as evidence that something was doomed never to stand. The late Stormblood design didn't fail; it was felled.

[Ramura_Sono]

Funny you should mention Shoha....

Remember when Shadowbringers launched and samurai got it's first niche disengage/boss jump skill as a capstone skill and the samurai community lost their collective minds and burned down the forums to the point that the developers completely reworked the skill into being part of their rotation?

Yeah, I do too... <stares directly at Tornado Kick and Six Sided Star>

No point in continuing to work on the prototype when you can just improve upon the final product.

[Arrius]

Ran monk again on a alt from level 1, and compared to the other melee jobs this is by far the least enjoyable one.

The damage ramp up takes too long, and GL is always down on the next group until level 52's Form Shift.
All the while the Samurai keeps their self buffs up for 40 seconds from the get-go.

[Sqwall]

Ran monk again on a alt from level 1, and compared to the other melee jobs this is by far the least enjoyable one.

The damage ramp up takes too long, and GL is always down on the next group until level 52's Form Shift.
All the while the Samurai keeps their self buffs up for 40 seconds from the get-go.

I would agree with this mostly for the NEW players coming into monk. Compared to how the lower levels are NOW and the removal of a ton of low level skills, ARR during 2.0 monk was amazing with all the skills it had to DPS originally.

BUT Form Shift never worked like it does now (as of recent). Form shift initially never reset your GL timer. It only changed your form... that's it. It was used for openers to get to courel prior to pull and grant a GL right off the bat with demolish or snap, and get you closer to courel to re-engage boss when pushed away. Perfect Balance was on a 180 sec cooldown in ARR...TWICE the length it is now. Losing your GL in ARR and HW were VERY punishing for monks.

It used to be quite a lot of fun before we lost and what was replaced.
1. Internal Release (replaced with no crit chance modifier have to rely on melds or food. Deep meditation is double rng gated 1. you have to actually get a chance to crit and 2. you have another chance to gain chackra from a crit) Internal Release should have just been rolled out as a trait with deep meditation then I could stack direct hit)

2. Touch of Death (replaced with nothing which still puzzles me to this day why we lost this skill, it was nice to have an additional DOT)

3. Howling Fist (Enlightenment which is now a choice skill betwee
n forbidden, this one sucked as we were losing an oGCD that looked damn cool to)

4. Haymaker (Forbidden chackra took over this I suppose, and I think it was if you evade and attack you could proc this, can't remember exactly. But it did have a slow debuff. Was for eating AOE and soloing really)

5. Steel Peak (This was our interrupt and and it did quite a bit of damage also, role actions removed all of the interrupts.....except for shield bash....it's STILL there)

6. Featherfoot (riddle of earth now for damage reduction, Featherfoot was more useful though as you gainged 20% evade for attacks for like 12 secounds I think? Can't remember)

7. Blood for Blood ( riddle of fire now )

Internal release was a HUGE part of our DPS, and was never addressed to help with our NEW crit RNG chackra. Back in Heavensward you could pop blood for blood, internal release and gain chackra fairly quickly.

Monk is barely a shadow of it's former glory. This JOB has only peaked twice imo. ARR Heavensward was the most stable monk ever was as far as a solid DPS from start of expac to end of heavensward without an huge changes.

I can only speculate how bad monk is play now at low levels since ARR skills were gutted away. Heavensward has got to be soooooo far away when starting from level 1.

[Shurrikhan]

....

This. Well, not all parts were as necessary, but some were sorely missed the moment they were removed.

I loved leveling Monk in 1.x. It just felt so damn versatile. You could tag-team. You could suppress to aid your tank. You could snap-tank, yourself. You could actually main-tank some fights, even.

And then ARR came around and it was stupidly fun there too.

In early ARR, Monk was distinctly eclectic. It's original spam skill was... Impulse Drive, of all things.

By late ARR, it was all about modular control (so you could get Demolish off just as the boss would be jumping away, as to use the delayed GL-refresh to let it last until the boss's return). Fracture and Touch of Death provided that, with potentially Impulse Drive or Haymaker in a pinch. That modularity allowed almost any SkS tier to work itself out. (Haymaker was painfully lackluster, but at least quite TP-efficient. It ended up being slotted by every Bowmage in HW in fights with gaze mechanics as to make use of the auto-dodge for a TP-efficient instant cast strike.)

Fracture and ToD's removal in StB left one of Monk's core mechanics, adjusting when you'd hit Coeurl or Opo-opo or Raptor, dead in the water. I honestly didn't think they could do anything more gutting until, well, they killed off GL itself via the Form Shift changes.

Heck, back then the passive eHP gap between tanks and melee was small enough that Monk could tank dungeons in a pinch, albeit at cost to everyone else's positionals. It looked gimmicky as hell, since you had to stand almost perfectly centered in the target's hitbox to get your positionals off before they could turn, but hey, I never had to wait for a tank replacement. Even in Pharos. The only issue was the lacking tank's worth of damage and another melee having to Provoke in from time to time.

HW extended Demolish's timer, allowing for better 2-3 target damage without exhausting TP and allowing for some really fun rotational breakpoints at high SkS. Sadly it was reverted in StB.

Though little was ever made of it in PvE, until StB we also had the ability to rip buffs off targets via One-Ilm Punch. Mob enraged for triple damage on their next attack (an already triple-damage special attack)? Rip it; now it doesn't matter that we failed to kill the mob in time. In PvP, the enemy Summoner pops Trance? Just eat it. Enochian? Sorry, mate. (Now, the latter's probably exactly why it was turned into a no-DR stun instead, but still... it was funny.)

We had a fun macrorotational oGCD flow across Elixir Field, Howling Fist, Steel Peak, and Shoulder Tackle.

Internal Release, you original damage CD (alongside cross-classed Blood for Blood) synergized well with Deep Meditation. Naturally, they simply moved that skill's effects over to Dancer, because who'd want to be able to synergize with their own mechanics... right?

I would seriously love to return to basically late StB Monk with just some further polish:

• GL stacks fall off one at a time.
• A well-tuned version of SsS and a replacement for Fracture, by which to provide modular control again.
• Chakra via Deep Meditation no longer RNG. Instead, you make potency-based progress towards the next point of Chakra.
• Meditate made passive. You continuously generate Chakra progress (at roughly twice your average ppgcd) while your GCD is refreshed/unused (i.e. during downtime). Thus the button can always just be The Forbidden Chakra.
• The Forbidden Chakra adjusted to consume all available Chakra, at 75 potency per point. Be sure to use it before downtime periods in which you might overcap, but otherwise bank it for Internal Release/Riddle of Fire and don't let it get it in the way of the rotational oGCDs.
• Stances revised to be more impactful and more than just FoF used (even outside of TK rotation).
• A more impactful Riddle of Earth. Or just trim it and work that part into the above.
• Riddle of Fire's slow removed. I actually liked it, because it made me happier about my SkS tier whereby I could perfectly sync both the normal and slowed-down pace to my debuffs, but I'm in the minority.

[Xau]

Though little was ever made of it in PvE, until StB we also had the ability to rip buffs off targets via One-Ilm Punch. Mob enraged for triple damage on their next attack (an already triple-damage special attack)? Rip it; now it doesn't matter that we failed to kill the mob in time. In PvP, the enemy Summoner pops Trance? Just eat it. Enochian? Sorry, mate. (Now, the latter's probably exactly why it was turned into a no-DR stun instead, but still... it was funny.)

one ilm punch was a one trick skill, its use was almost sorely for removing stoneskin on enemies on arr and hw, since it hardly affected anything else, and i mean, it was capable to remove other stuff, but dmg buffs were not one of those things what one ilm punch was capable to remove
and i mean, if one ilm punch was capable to do what you mentioned, the comunity could not have called one ilm punch a useless skill, and neither the dev team make a quest mention it as joke in a quest

[wereotter]

one ilm punch was a one trick skill, its use was almost sorely for removing stoneskin on enemies, since it hardly affected anything else, and i mean, it was capable to remove other stuff, but dmg buffs were not one of those things what one ilm punch was capable to remove

You could actually, I remember using it in The Antitower to take the berserk buff off some of the enemies in there back in the day.

But yes, it was a pretty useless skill. Which isn't to say they couldn't bring it back as part of a high damage combo. I had suggested it could work similar to the gunbreaker high damage combo, could work into tornado kick then six sided star

[Kabooa]

one ilm punch was a one trick skill, its use was almost sorely for removing stoneskin on enemies on arr and hw, since it hardly affected anything else, and i mean, it was capable to remove other stuff, but dmg buffs were not one of those things what one ilm punch was capable to remove
and i mean, if one ilm punch was capable to do what you mentioned, the comunity could not have called one ilm punch a useless skill, and neither the dev team make a quest mention it as joke in a quest

This is partly because you can't have required skills and only give them to one particular job in a game that doesn't have the party slots to have them all.

There's a reason so many things end up in the role menu.

[Shurrikhan]

one ilm punch was a one trick skill, its use was almost sorely for removing stoneskin on enemies on arr and hw, since it hardly affected anything else, and i mean, it was capable to remove other stuff, but dmg buffs were not one of those things what one ilm punch was capable to remove

King's Might in Amdapor Keep. Berserk in Antitower. Enrage off Gigas mobs. I'm sure there are a few more I'm missing. I don't think it worked on bosses, else it might have been useful on the oliphant in Dusk Vigil and the dino boss in the 53 dungeon. But, boss vs. non-boss was the only distinction. Any buff could be removed from a typical mob.

Again, "little was ever made of it in PvE." But that's only because they never bothered to give the vast majority of mobs any (meaningful) buffs, not because the skill itself was fundamentally flawed. It's just a matter of having removed the same skill from Archer in 1.18 (and I could have sworn one other class had it, too), such that it ran the risk of being required or unimpactful.

Heck, if they wanted it to be impactful without breaking fights, they could have just turned it into a (modified) buff-steal instead of a buff-purge.

[Ultimatecalibur]

one ilm punch was a one trick skill, its use was almost sorely for removing stoneskin on enemies on arr and hw, since it hardly affected anything else, and i mean, it was capable to remove other stuff, but dmg buffs were not one of those things what one ilm punch was capable to remove
and i mean, if one ilm punch was capable to do what you mentioned, the comunity could not have called one ilm punch a useless skill, and neither the dev team make a quest mention it as joke in a quest

We actually do not know how many ARR and HW buffs are removable (and how many StB and ShB might have) because the only way to know which ones are removable was using One-ilm punch (and now using Blue's Eerie Soundwave and the Dispel Logos Action). Cleansable debuffs and actions that can be Silenced/Interrupted had similar problems before the UI was altered so that they could be identifiable. I wonder how many enemy buffs would suddenly have an identifier if enemy buffs got the same treatment.