Monk Needs a Complete Rework

[SpeckledBurd]

Can you go more in depth?

Not the OP but sure.

In spite of being the best performing melee before everything else was brought up to par, Monk is basically the worst designed job in the game at this point by a huge margin. There's multiple redundant, overly niche or useless skills in the kit, there are many of the problems that the players have had with it dating back to A Realm Reborn and Heavensward that have gone unaddressed despite there being numerous complaints about them, and when the devs said that they were listening to our feedback moving forward into Shadowbringers they flat out lied to us and fixed none of the problems they introduced in Stormblood while also doubling down on either them or some of the previously mentioned problems in the jobs design. It's kit also, in spite of its many problems, is lacking in a number of ways compared to other melee jobs or even jobs as a whole. It lacks any sort of Damage neutral movement skill like Hissatsu: Gyoten, Shikuchi, and Elusive jump or a true ranged poke. It's Gauge isn't fleshed out in the slightest and indeed, is actually just a conversion of a downtime loss mitigation skill from Heavensward that was lazily given a gauge with little thought to how it impacted the effectiveness of the original skill or how the original design would impact it as a gauge rather than fully converting it into a true system.

If you want some more granular examples of this here's a few.

The Fist Stances: The big problem with them is that there's only ever been one stance you'd want to use as a DPS. In ARR through Stormblood that was fire because it boosted your damage the most. In Shadowbringers its Wind because it gives you access to GL4 which also just boosts your damage the most. In Stormblood they made an appeal to making them useful with Tackle Mastery which was so poorly thought out that it was a meme (lol Earth Tackle), and it only gained any use in 4.2 with Tackle Stacks which resulted in a rotation that the devs didn't want us using so much they nerfed Perfect Balance in Shadowbringers. In Shadowbringers they tried it again with Enhanced Fists of Fire and new Riddle of Wind, the two stances are incredibly close in damage to the point where Fire can occasionally be slipped into in a few edge cases the most common of which is the first 3 GCDs of a fight and the final GCD, but 99% of the time you want to be in Wind. Its an entire system they could remove and basically nothing about the job would change. This is something they flat out fixed on Ninja by removing Kiss of the Wasp/Viper as skills and just folding that damage into a trait, but on Monk it's persisted for two expansions.

Another problem that has gone unfixed is Stormblood RNG and how it makes Monk extremely comp dependent in terms of performance. Monk is still Crit RNG Dependent/Physical Comp Dependent which was maligned in Stormblood. Without a Dragoon and a Scholar providing Battle Litany and Chain Stratagem, Monk can't perform at its best. Unlucky RNG over the course of the fight also produces exponentially less damage than if you'd have good crit RNG. Similarly Brotherhood is a major contributor of potency in Monks burst phase, but its RNG only procs off of physical weaponskills. If there's more than one caster in the party, or you're even just in a 4-Man, Monk gets less procs and does less damage over the course of a fight, and because the procs are still RNG you'll occasionally get extremely unsatisfying Riddle of Fire burst phases where you barely get one Forbidden Chakra or don't get one at all. As with Ninja and Kiss of the Wasp/Viper, this was something the devs fixed on other jobs. Bard moved away from Crit RNG and comp dependence in Shadowbringers to its benefit. Monks design however is left behind.

As for useless or overly Niche actions, Monk has Tornado Kick and its most recent capstone skill Six Sided Star which fit in the exact same niche of "Thing I want to do when disengaging". The worse of these is Tornado Kick, which in costing Monk all of its stacks makes its use case so high it gets used all of twice in the Eden series outside of as a boss Execute making it about as useful as Shoha originally was. However like most other problems with Monk that have parallels in other jobs, the other job gets the fix and Monk has the skill sitting around for so long unchanged that the devs are willing to Break the jobs ability to function rather than fix the problem. When the ability to regain stacks let Monk use TK rotationally at the end of Stormblood, the devs undid the best quality of life they'd ever given it by doubling PBs cast time and removing tackle stacks which made Monk abysmal to level or even play in a dungeon in Shadowbringers until the Form Shift change. Six Sided Star is marginally better, being good for Short disengages, but its inherently at odds with the existing skill Meditate that existed for the exact same reason.

And in spite of all of these useless actions or outright bloat, Monk is still the least mobile of the Melee because our only movement skill has damage tied up in it. It's a mess of accumulated bad design and unfixed problems that are clearly solvable because other jobs have received fixes for similar or identical problems in the past. The devs know there's problems with it considering they admitted that Stormblood Monk's design was a failure in the lead up to Shadowbringers, but either they completely misread what the playerbase wanted, they're too married to their own concept of what the job is, or they're so self-sure that ARR Monk is the gold standard of a job despite how the game design has shifted since 2.0 that they're unwilling to fix things that needed fixing. Whatever the case is, what we have now isn't satisfying for the majority of players and the 5.05 changes were only a stopgap towards placating us that was immediately undone by them making Anatman worse. Supposedly the Japanese playerbase is being fairly vocal about this as well, so maybe we'll see change but who knows.

In terms of a rework on the level of something like Machinist I don't think that's necessary. The foundation of the class, Greased Lightning, its basic GCD loop, and Form-Based Combos, aren't broken in the way that Heat was in Stormblood for Machinist. But it hasn't gotten anything that's actually satisfying to use as a skill since Elixir Field, it's largely just unsatisfying replacements for stuff they strip from us at low levels or terrible utility skills. I'd say pretty much every skill it has past level 54 needs some serious examination and quite a few ARR skills as well.