Monk Needs a Complete Rework

[SpeckledBurd]

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.

I think they had that fear on some level, but Stormblood Machinist was so mechanically broken and unpleasant to play that it probably would have been harder to make anything of it that people would like than it would be to rebuild it. Even if they'd failed to make it as popular as it is, they'd have been hard pressed to make something worse, and even then they at least made a good faith effort of cleaning up their mess.

They are definitely out of touch with the Monk playerbase, you don't need to look much further than how proud they were of Shadowbringers Monk compared to how poorly it was received on Launch, or indeed how its currently the least played job in all content other than Ultimate, which is prone to sampling bias because it caters to such a small population of the playerbase. There was almost a glimpse that they might have gotten a clue in 5.05, but 5.1 just making Anatman a new addition to our gigantic useless action pile cinched it. They might make us eat our words in the next live letter and bring sweeping changes to Monk and make Anatman have a use, fix the fist stances, and even make Tornado Kick be something we use, but I wouldn't count on it. It'll probably be nothing again and we'll be left to rot till the next expansion as usual.

[Malmstrom]

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

I would break my hand if GL5+ was implemented.

And I would love every second of it.

[Malmstrom]

COUGH BUMP THIS TOPIC IS TOO GOOD TO NOT SEE MORE DISCUSSION.

Ahem.

[Oxdarock]

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.

It does slightly, but the haste buff from Wind and GL4 makes it a dps increase over the long run because:
-you get more GCDs and auto-attacks out of it.
-you're able to fit 11 GCDs within RoF
-you're able to fit in 6 GCDs within PB.

As for removing fists, yeah, that would make things easier and simpler, but I've always felt that knowing which fist to switch to in a given moment was one of those things that rewarded playing the class well, even if the damage increase was only minor.

[3ureka]

Something that I don't think has been touched on yet is PB's cooldown. 120 seconds seems a bit excessive when you consider skills like Kassatsu and Meikyo/Ikkishoten. Thoughts?

EDIT: Especially since this is the ONLY other way to ramp up quickly. I think we've already covered why TK's design is bad, so I'll leave that sleeping dog alone.

[SpeckledBurd]

COUGH BUMP THIS TOPIC IS TOO GOOD TO NOT SEE MORE DISCUSSION.

Ahem.

Unfortunately, there's little that can be said at this point that I haven't already said ad nauseum in this thread or in other threads. Monk feedback has been ignored for so long that it feels like providing it is a waste of time to many players.

Something that I don't think has been touched on yet is PB's cooldown. 120 seconds seems a bit excessive when you consider skills like Kassatsu and Meikyo/Ikkishoten. Thoughts?

EDIT: Especially since this is the ONLY other way to ramp up quickly. I think we've already covered why TK's design is bad, so I'll leave that sleeping dog alone.

The unfortunate thing is Perfect Balance's cooldown actually was 60 seconds between 4.2 and 5.0. They nerfed it because people were using it for the Tornado Kick rotation, so rather than adjusting Tornado Kick, an underused skill that people want to use, they decided to make Monk miserable to play in dungeons on launch by utterly shredding our ability to recover stacks and creating more problems instead of solving them.

Salt Aside, Perfect Balance is currently plagued by a problematic design where it's supposed to be our Blood of the Dragon/Enochian skill that grants us our buffs, but the actual way it functions makes it more like Meikyo Shisui in practice. Tornado Kick is obviously at direct odds with the design of it as a buff granting skill, but the new Leaden Fist buff really breaks PB as being used as something other than a pure utility skill. Before DK granting Leaden Fist was a thing, using PB to do GCDs out of order was a small potency gain at best because our weaponskills didn't really fluctuate too much around their average. You could spam True Strikes for a little extra damage but you'd have to refresh your buffs and lose a Crit Bootshine, so as gains went it was small. Leaden Fist Bootshine sits so far out of the normal average of Monk's weaponskills that using Perfect Balance to get more is a huge gain. Given their history with the job, I'd be surprised if this is intentional on the devs part rather than a total accident. The only way to fix it is to change Tornado Kick fundamentally so there's no incentive to burn stacks and to either rework Leaden Bootshine or rework Perfect Balance.

This is just another example of the many reasons Monk is in need of a rework.

[3ureka]

Ahh. Yeah, I could've sworn I was still around during SB when they fixed PB to be 60 seconds. Thought I was going crazy lol.

And you're right. TK definitely conflicts with PB (and MNK's design) on a fundamental level. When the whole philosophy of the job is to build and maintain stacks of GL, why would anyone ever think it a good idea to find a way to expend that resource? Maybe I'm the odd man out on this, but using TK as a "finishing" move doesn't feel at all satisfying or rewarding. Even if TK was changed so that it was an ogcd (with a maybe 30/60 second?) cooldown that was only available with max GL stacks, it wouldn't be very engaging; that, plus we all know how SE feels about pure dmg ogcds (RIP Steel Peak and Howling Fist).

Also, in regards to my previous post, it could be argued that Anatman is another way to "quickly" ramp up, but I'd counter with the fact that you have to literally stand and wait while building stacks suggests otherwise. Perhaps a fairer criticism would address drawing that comparison to begin with; looking back at it, using Meditate (outside of combat) is more akin to Ikkishoten. I think the whole "generate resource only while out of combat" design might be outdated; the reason I say that is because of skills like Ikkoshoten and MCH's Barrel Stabilizer (which just gives you a flat 50 heat for free), both of which require you to be in combat.

Even in my limited DRG experience, it seems like for them, they can just pop BotD at the beginning of an engagement and, so long as there's no disconnect more than 30 seconds in length, they should be able to upkeep their buff 100% of the time (where their challenge is making sure to use High Jump on cooldown and to align buffs properly).

Definitely in agreement with what you said, just disappointed and frustrated - but I repeat myself.

[Mahrze]

I recall making a similar topic early in 4.0 about these issues when the tackles were a thing. And it was no different than today. new exapc, 5 new skills, half are ok, the rest don't make sense.

We can dissect every component of MNK and can easily come to the conclusion that whoever designed MNK in 2.0 is not the same person who designed it in 3.0, who's not the same person who designed it in 4.0 and so on.

Edit: If you search for MNK/Monk threads in this section, you'll get about 5 pages or so about people saying the same thing over and over for years but the dev team doesn't really mind it since MNK still has good numbers.

[Sora_Oathkeeper]

It's the least played job in the game currently by a fair margin if we use fflogs as an indicator. Granted it's not 100% accurate naturally but it gives an accurate enough metric. The only place it's not bottom is in the current Ultimate. Outside of that it's bottom, and for a good reason, the job has barely evolved and become stale. I had high hopes for MNK going from SB to ShB, especially when Yoshida said the job he was impressed with during development for ShB was MNK. Really? Reflecting back on that statement I can only imagine Yoshi never touched MNK before then because it plays exactly the same just with different niches /shrug.

The job really does need some love. The only engaging part about the job is positionals imo. Outside of that it's very lackluster. Hoping it gets brought up in the live letter in a couple weeks.

[SpeckledBurd]

It's the least played job in the game currently by a fair margin if we use fflogs as an indicator. Granted it's not 100% accurate naturally but it gives an accurate enough metric. The only place it's not bottom is in the current Ultimate. Outside of that it's bottom, and for a good reason, the job has barely evolved and become stale. I had high hopes for MNK going from SB to ShB, especially when Yoshida said the job he was impressed with during development for ShB was MNK. Really? Reflecting back on that statement I can only imagine Yoshi never touched MNK before then because it plays exactly the same just with different niches /shrug.

The job really does need some love. The only engaging part about the job is positionals imo. Outside of that it's very lackluster. Hoping it gets brought up in the live letter in a couple weeks.

Yeah, it's actually less played now than it was when I noticed that trend a couple of weeks ago. Then Monk was still behind but relatively close to some of the other jobs in a few fights, now it's behind by a thousand plays or more in basically every tier. You could attribute it to it being the end of the patch cycle, but the ratio widening doesn't suggest that people are enjoying it.

I'd also say it isn't just that the job has become stale, though that's a contributor, it's also that the devs left many of the complaints from Stormblood unaddressed or doubled down on them. People hated how Monk was Physical comp dependent and nothing changed on that front, it plays poorly with Casters or Ninja and it's mudras due to neither party benefitting from Brotherhood for example. People hated double RNG gating for Deep Meditation, and we've still got that albeit at a higher percentage, but without the ability to boost the RNG in our favor through Internal Release so we have to rely on Scholar, Dragoon, and Dancer. Tackle Mastery was memed on for most of Stormblood because even at its most useful you still largely wanted to be in Fire stance because it offered the most DPS, and even with Tackle Stacks from wind stance you still spent most of a fight in fire, now we're in Wind stance all the time to the point where the other stances may as well not exist.

It'll be a shame if we don't get mentioned in the Live letter, because beyond 5.2 its pretty much hopeless that we'll see any change. They'll officially have left the job in a place the players dislike for four years.