Monk Needs a Complete Rework

[Kabooa]

I think you might want to give more specific examples of what you want instead of just a list of what you didn't like.

[wereotter]

I think you might want to give more specific examples of what you want instead of just a list of what you didn't like.

The developers have had a habit of keeping useless skills, doubling up on skills you only need one of, and eliminating skills we actually do use. This happened both this current expansion as well as the last one.

For example, Touch of Death was removed last expansion, but One Ilm Punch was retained.

Monk has too many skills that are only there to either burn off all your Greased Lightning stacks or to just maintain them. In reality monk really only needs one to maintain stacks and one to spend them, and the rest of the skills should be either reworked or cut out entirely. My personal take, leave Tornado Kick as-is, and then make Perfect Balance just give you max GL stacks. Then cut out Anatman, Six-Sided Star, and Riddle of Earth in their current forms, and maybe make them into something different.

Some examples could be Anatman is a downtime skill that gives you a stacking damage up boost so that when a boss returns, from a jump phase, you do additional damage for a short period of time. Bring back Steel Peak and then have Six Sided Star simply replace it at higher levels as a higher damage version of the same skill with a new animation. Riddle of Earth could maybe then be a party utility skill that provides a small defense up boost to the party, and maybe lock it behind being in fists of earth?

Additionally I do think the removal of Inner Release was a bad idea with the current iteration of the job. With it being layers upon layers of RNG to unlock your DPS potential, Inner Release was one skill that helped tilt those odds in your favor. I do think that the RNG aspect of monk should be more like bard where if you get a critical hit, you get a chakra stack. It may require a nerf to the potency if Forbidden Chakra, but if you're able to use the skill more often, and you're guaranteed that if nothing else, after five bootshines you get a forbidden chakra, the job will feel better to play.

[Kabooa]

Then cut out Anatman, Six-Sided Star, and Riddle of Earth in their current forms, and maybe make them into something different.

Most of these suggestions don't actually alter current monk's gameplay. For example, Six Sided Star as just "Steel Peak but stronger" is just another bog standard "Use on cooldown, prioritize in burst window" OGCD. These get cut. It's not just Monk, this tends to happen across the board (I don't agree with it - I miss the shoulder ram animation - but thems the breaks)

On a personal level, I don't think the 50 and under Kit needs much work. Maybe a little number tuning (There's a pretty good analysis on Leaden Fist somewhere around here), but the FFF RRR weaponskills don't need much tweaking.

Moving forward, my own preference would be making Chakra and Greased Lightning play off each other more. An optional avenue would be having Fist/Riddles play into it somehow.

For example, lets take Anantman and Six Sided Star and create a very basic play between the two.

Six Sided Star
Weaponskill
2.5 Recast (standard)
Effect: Deals "X" potency (Slightly less than the average of the mainline combo). Grants 1 Chakra.

Anantman
Ability
45s recast
Cost: 5 Chakra
Effect: Grants Greased Lightning IV.

From these two changes we have a few implications.

Tornado Kick can be used now. Anantman allows one to TK at anytime it's up and maintain Greased Lightning - Provided the Boss isn't about to jump.
If a Monk needs to delay a GCD in the main combo, Six Sided Star allows this while also serving as some Chakra management.

To me these are good changes to the Monk's baseline kit. They start building a base of prioritization of Chakra and Greased Lightning, from which one could extrapolate more of the kit with that end-goal in mind, which does allow us to bring back bog standard OGCDs by building them around this concept.

Steel Peak, which becomes Forbidden Chakra with 5 Chakra.
Howling Fist, which becomes Enlightenment with 5 Chakra.

One of these have an independent CD from their Chakra variant.
One of these shares the CD with their Chakra variant, but gains significantly more strength.

With that, we have created a basic resource conflict with the Chakra skills, between the two chakra skills and Tornado kick (through Anantman).

[wereotter]

Most of these suggestions don't actually alter current monk's gameplay. For example, Six Sided Star as just "Steel Peak but stronger" is just another bog standard "Use on cooldown, prioritize in burst window" OGCD. These get cut. It's not just Monk, this tends to happen across the board (I don't agree with it - I miss the shoulder ram animation - but thems the breaks)

You're right, my suggestions aren't exactly ground breaking for how to improve the job, but then for me, I see monk's biggest problem as the fact that the job is and for many years has been, over bloated with useless skills, many of which survive the skill purges in Stormblood and Shadowbringers.

I am with you in that I would like to see the two resources of the job play into each other. I don't have a lot of ideas for this, but there could be something like a skill that turns all your chakra stacks into greased lighting, making skills that dump your greased lightning stack more viable to use.

They could also change up the monk numbers (this would be a nightmare to balance) in such a way that every stack of GL you get increases your speed but decreases your damage until you reach all four stacks and then burn them all for a big attack.

These might not be the best solutions, but I do think that most people agree that it would be nice for the job to gain something new to its core rotation which has been unchanged since ARR, and I think some adjustments to either how greased lightning or the chakra system works might be just the way to spice things up.

[Dlonzo]

So I'm no MNK main but I did play it alot during Stormblood and haven't enjoyed it as much in Shadowbringers. So whilst having a read through here I saw some nice ideas so thought I'd throw mine in the mix.

I read the Touch of Death being on the chakra gauge and thought that was actually really nice and would love that to happen!

So down to my idea:

TK and SSS tied to the RoF Buff, when you use RoF you gain an effect called 'Heightened Riddle of Fire' which activates TK and SSS respectively.

*New TK under RoF would go as follows*

TK: Under the effect of Heightened RoF, when TK is used you lose all GL stacks BUT your damage from GL is stored via the Heightened RoF effect but you lose your GCD Speed 'like old RoF in SB' and after TK is used it triggers SSS to be used.

SSS: Can only be used during Heightened RoF and after TK has been used, if not used during the duration of RoF then all GL stacks will be gone, but if used during RoF your stacks come back BUT RoF effect will end. So if you use it too early then you'll cut your RoF short as well.

Just something that came to mind whilst reading through all the good ideas for a Monk rework and thought I'd throw mine in there with them

So I guess the 2 skills would kinda be like a combo, but SSS would have a ex amount of time to be used before fading once you've used TK, so in theory you could go TK+SSS towards the end with a GCD weaved in between them etc etc.

Probably an awful idea but hey

[Sqwall]

So I'm no MNK main but I did play it alot during Stormblood and haven't enjoyed it as much in Shadowbringers. So whilst having a read through here I saw some nice ideas so thought I'd throw mine in the mix.

I read the Touch of Death being on the chakra gauge and thought that was actually really nice and would love that to happen!

So down to my idea:

TK and SSS tied to the RoF Buff, when you use RoF you gain an effect called 'Heightened Riddle of Fire' which activates TK and SSS respectively.

*New TK under RoF would go as follows*

TK: Under the effect of Heightened RoF, when TK is used you lose all GL stacks BUT your damage from GL is stored via the Heightened RoF effect but you lose your GCD Speed 'like old RoF in SB' and after TK is used it triggers SSS to be used.

SSS: Can only be used during Heightened RoF and after TK has been used, if not used during the duration of RoF then all GL stacks will be gone, but if used during RoF your stacks come back BUT RoF effect will end. So if you use it too early then you'll cut your RoF short as well.

Just something that came to mind whilst reading through all the good ideas for a Monk rework and thought I'd throw mine in there with them

So I guess the 2 skills would kinda be like a combo, but SSS would have a ex amount of time to be used before fading once you've used TK, so in theory you could go TK+SSS towards the end with a GCD weaved in between them etc etc.

Probably an awful idea but hey

I like the idea of making a "2nd Tier combo" with TK and SSS. I think I saw something on here about TK procing SSS. That I think could work. Having it gated behind riddle of fire would prevent spamming. The loss of the GL is troubling though, and slowing down the monk is concerning also. I was a little confused on the SSS stacks coming back portion, we lose our stacks and then get them back? While I like the integration of TK+SSS combo, but this would probably just be simpler to let us keep our stacks lol.

Good Idea though!

[wereotter]

I like the idea of making a "2nd Tier combo" with TK and SSS. I think I saw something on here about TK procing SSS. That I think could work. Having it gated behind riddle of fire would prevent spamming. The loss of the GL is troubling though, and slowing down the monk is concerning also. I was a little confused on the SSS stacks coming back portion, we lose our stacks and then get them back? While I like the integration of TK+SSS combo, but this would probably just be simpler to let us keep our stacks lol.

Good Idea though!

The whole job is getting reworked, as we know, and GL is becoming a trait.

But I too was thinking about using Tornado Kick and Six-Sided Star as another combo. Inspired by how Tifa in the 7 remake plays, and a bit of Gunbreaker... I had wondered about something like. Every time you execute Snap Punch or Demolish you get a resource stack, and for 3 of that stack at level 50, you can use One Ilm Punch, then as you level up, you gain Tornado Kick that combos off of One Ilm Punch and refreshes your Twin Snakes buff and finally ending with getting Six Sided Star to combo off Tornado Kick.

Then they could use Anatman as still a downtime skill that builds that resource when you can't hit the boss.

[Powercow]

I think you might want to give more specific examples of what you want instead of just a list of what you didn't like.

Anatman: The next 2 Weapon Skills will grant an additional stack of Greased Lightning each.

Six-Sided-Star: For the next 12 seconds, all of your weapon skills have a range of 25 yalms. No longer has the double global cooldown, potency reduced drastically.

Touch of Death: Costs 2 Chakras. 50 potency immediately, 25 more per tick over 30 seconds.

The Forbidden Chakra: Reduced potency.

Deep Meditation II: Now 100% on crit, instead of 80%. Double RNG layers, especially when they're this high, feel bad. You don't feel like you got a bonus chakra on crits, you feel like you got screwed out of one on a crit and didn't get a chakra.

Brotherhood: Now applies to both physical and spell attacks. Bonus chakras also come from both spells and weapon skills. Effect reduced to compensate.

It's not perfect and it certainly won't fix everything but it's a start. Anatman giving a couple of stacks will still allow for TK to be used while changing up Monk's flow enough to return the feel of "ramping up" that Monk was known for in 2.0. SSS having something unique could be interesting on bosses, giving us a disengage-type skill that's different than the other melee. ToD's return will shake up the rotation, even if only slightly. The DM2 and Brohood changes will make Monk less RNG-reliant and less comp-reliant. Yes we're still going to rely heavily on Battle Litany and Chain Strategem but it won't be to the extreme extent it is now. TFC's nerf is to compensate for the additional TFC casts, which would also work to speed up monk in an organic way by adding more oGCDs.

Just spitballin' ideas.