Monk Needs a Complete Rework

[3ureka]

If you're not constantly stomping, you're doing monk wrong hahah

But yeah, it would definitely be nice to have a less mind-numbing way to keep that up. At the same time, at least we *do* have a way to keep our stacks unlike DRG which loses everything. NIN's can always Huton > Hide, and SAM can just sit back.

[Mahrze]

If you're not constantly stomping, you're doing monk wrong hahah

But yeah, it would definitely be nice to have a less mind-numbing way to keep that up. At the same time, at least we *do* have a way to keep our stacks unlike DRG which loses everything. NIN's can always Huton > Hide, and SAM can just sit back.

They changed the blood of the dragon buff to have a 25s CD and the buff lasts 30s. At end game, you can never lose it and its only a button press every 25s rather than every 2-3s.


https://na.finalfantasyxiv.com/jobguide/dragoon/

[3ureka]

Oooh. F. My bad! I'll be the first to say that I'm guilty of maxing it and not touching the job after that lol. At least for the earlier levels, DRG can potentially lose all of their buffs if they don't hit anything in the next 25 seconds (I feel like they could probably move that lvl 78 trait that buffs BoTD to 30s down to be accessible earlier on); whereas monks get Form Shift at 52, which, for most cases, unlocks 100% uptime of GL stacks.

[Mahrze]

Oooh. F. My bad! I'll be the first to say that I'm guilty of maxing it and not touching the job after that lol. At least for the earlier levels, DRG can potentially lose all of their buffs if they don't hit anything in the next 25 seconds (I feel like they could probably move that lvl 78 trait that buffs BoTD to 30s down to be accessible earlier on); whereas monks get Form Shift at 52, which, for most cases, unlocks 100% uptime of GL stacks.

Yeah but the change to form shit was a direct skill change. the trait to BotD already was a thing in 5.0 launch. Form Shift's current iteration was one of the many "noticeable" flaws when they make bandaid changes to abilities that change the leveling experience. I don't disagree with your reaosning, but its more of the bandaid fix always trickles down to make things "OP" in earlier levels because everything is balanced for end game only.

A similar example of things that don't make sense after you ponder them is the second step of aoe combos for Tanks. DRK and GNB generate resource by default, but PLD and WAR don't until 20/30+ lvls respectively.

[echo78]

lol monk has been complete garbage to play for years, its hilarious there are still people in threads about monk asking what is wrong with it when its been well documented. I've played monk at a pretty decent skill level since early HW. Literally everything is wrong with monk. It hasn't had anything notable added since HW and has been dumbed down so much that its tedious to play and there is no longer anything fun about it. Like congrats, they finally removed the slowdown in 5.05 (remember the torture that was leveling monk in 5.0?) while leaving the rest of the job a dumpster fire. I'll check back for the 6.0 patch notes when they remove a skill and replace it with a skill that is the exact same thing, another GL maintenance skill that no one asked for and no one wants and probably a trait that increases the damage dragon kick does or some other asinine trait. The devs don't understand monk. They never will. Just give up on this job and go do literally anything else.

[3ureka]

@echo78:
Maybe I’m letting nostalgia get the better of me, but the current state of monk doesn’t feel *bad* to play (I missed whatever happened with monk at 5.0). Deep Meditation II alleviates *some* of the pain from double ring gating; it doesn’t solve the root of the problem by any stretch, but at least it’s not SB bad. At the time, monk definitely felt good in HW, but where other classes seemed to get more interesting ways to generate/spend resource (subjective I know, but bear with me), monk kind of just stayed the same; while this doesn’t necessarily have to be a bad thing, I think SE missed the mark with how they’ve handled monk past 3.0.

Consider SAM, which generates kenki (via traits and positionals) and sen. For kenki, they’ve got a _myriad_ of ways to spend it: Kaiten, Gyoten, Yaten, Seigan, Shinten, Kyuten, Guren, Senei. And then there’s sen, which can be used 3 different ways. Comparing that to monks just TFC and Enlightenment is laughable. Not to mention Meditation Stacks for Shoha.

Consider NIN, which has Huton, which I think is comparable to GL stacks; taking ~18s to ramp up under FoF vs using a mudra combination which is on a 20 cd. For all intents and purposes, we can imagine Ninki to be like a 2-stack-max charka gauge since all the spenders cost a discrete 50 gauge (it’s just that the generation of Ninki is more granular, so they break it up into that 0-100 bar); even then there’s 3 ways to spend it.

I agree, they “dumbed down” / took away a lot of things from monk (although to be fair, a lot of jobs had their skills pruned/consolidated/outright removed in SB and again in ShB). As I was writing this reply, I thought what makes monk special? You can see traces of it in SAM and NIN. Both SAM and NIN can reach similar GCD timers to Monk with Shifu and Huton. So in that regard, monk’s identity as a weapon skill slinging class is stripped away. At this point, I’d reckon it’d be impossible to *remove* the Shifu and Huton buffs from SAM and NIN; better to give MNK something new that makes them feel more unique.

*I’ve deliberately left out talking on behalf of DRG because I don’t have a lot of experience with the class.

@Mahrze:
Ahh. I haven't taken a real close look at when tanks unlock their "3 step aoe" (which I imagine is like DRK's Unleash > Stalwart > Quietus?) Anyway, I just understood it as par for the course. And yeah, for all the time it takes to ramp up, I'm still surprised that a skill like Tornado Kick exists. I really do hope Square breathes something new into monk, although how that'll look like I don't know.

[Malmstrom]

On the Fists buff, I thought I read somewhere that because of the way damage is calculated that Fire still ends up being stronger than Wind.


How about just do away with it altogether and come up with something else? Make a 4th GL stack a trait at whatever level it is now for FoW, because honestly Fists of X needs to go the way of Ninja poisons.

[SpeckledBurd]

On the Fists buff, I thought I read somewhere that because of the way damage is calculated that Fire still ends up being stronger than Wind.


How about just do away with it altogether and come up with something else? Make a 4th GL stack a trait at whatever level it is now for FoW, because honestly Fists of X needs to go the way of Ninja poisons.

Correct, because damage buffs are multiplicative Fists of Wind/GL4 is a flat 1.4x modifier on your potencies, while Fists of Fire is a 1.43x modifier. GL4 ends up being stronger over the course of the fight in spite of Fists of Fire's higher multiplier because of how it buffs auto-attacks to be absurdly strong on Monk compared to other jobs.

The Fist Stances going away is something people thought would happen going into Stormblood and instead we got 4.0 Tackle Mastery, which was more an appeal at the Fist Stances doing something than actually making them useful. I can only assume the reason there's two traits is because the devs were still terrified of GL4 being too fast for players, so they left in Fists of Fire to give people a choice between playstyles. But it’s just an illusion of choice in the exact same way Tackle Mastery was. People will always choose the option that does the most damage in this game, so the only time you'll ever use Fists of Fire is winding up to GL4 or for the last GCD of a fight. It's another piece of evidence that the devs don't know how people will play this game and that they had no vision as to what they wanted Shadowbringers Monk to be, so we of the same even though much of that was stuff we disliked as they patted themselves on the back about how well they'd done.

But I digress, At this point since the devs have proven that they aren't going to do anything worthwhile with the Fist Stances, I would happily see them go and have those traits remade into something else.

[ForteNightshade]

Correct, because damage buffs are multiplicative Fists of Wind/GL4 is a flat 1.4x modifier on your potencies, while Fists of Fire is a 1.43x modifier. GL4 ends up being stronger over the course of the fight regardless because of how it buffs auto-attacks to be absurdly strong on Monk compared to other jobs.

The Fist Stances going away is something people thought would happen going into Stormblood and instead we got 4.0 Tackle Mastery, which was more an appeal at the Fist Stances doing something than actually making them useful. I can only assume the reason there's two traits is because the devs were still terrified of GL4 being too fast for players, so they left in Fists of Fire to give people a choice between playstyles. But it’s a false choice in the exact same way Tackle Mastery was. People will always choose the option that does the most damage in this game. Really it’s more telling to me that the devs continue to have no idea how people play this game, and its further evidence that the devs had no vision on what Shadowbringers Monk actually would be. It’s just removing the Fist Stances would actually involving changing Monk and they're deathly afraid of that to the point that it's the least played job in the game.

The irony is they lack this same fear when it comes to Machinist. It really does go to show how completely out-of-sync the dev team seems to be at times.

[Oxdarock]

The Fist Stances going away is something people thought would happen going into Stormblood and instead we got 4.0 Tackle Mastery, which was more an appeal at the Fist Stances doing something than actually making them useful. I can only assume the reason there's two traits is because the devs were still terrified of GL4 being too fast for players, so they left in Fists of Fire to give people a choice between playstyles. But it’s a false choice in the exact same way Tackle Mastery was. People will always choose the option that does the most damage in this game. Really it’s more telling to me that the devs continue to have no idea how people play this game, and its further evidence that the devs had no vision on what Shadowbringers Monk actually would be. It’s just removing the Fist Stances would actually involving changing Monk and they're deathly afraid of that to the point that it's the least played job in the game.

Yeah, they're very out of touch with the class. You'd need to reach GL5 or 6 before the class becomes overwhelmingly fast for players, which it wouldn't. It'd actually be busted AF, lol. And what Fortnightshade pointed out was something I didn't even consider. Why can't MNKs be as fast as Hypercharge MCH? Lol! XD