Monk Needs a Complete Rework

[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.