Monk Needs a Complete Rework

[SpeckledBurd]

Whether you liked TK or not is a matter of taste I suppose. What I mean by saying that it worked, is that it's accomplished several things:
- Adding an interaction with MNK's core mechanic - GS - which capitalized on its unique quality of being a buff that has to be build up with stacks.
- Added more synergy between several skills in the job's kit(TK, PB, Coeurl gcds, Wind Tackle, IR and RoF).
- Made a pretty niche skill(TK) a regular part of MNK's rotation.
- Made up a significant portion of the job's dps.
- It also did not really affect the GS maintenance mechanic during downtime/disengagements, so it could work perfectly well alongside current Form Shift and SSS.

Basically, it was not just something they tacked on that turned out to just be some niche skill that sees use only a couple times per fight. Which is insanely ironic, as they didn't even add it on purpose.

As for GS not being designed as a resource to be spent - TK rotation was not SE's design either. The point is that just because something was not originally designed for a certain purpose, does not mean that it should never evolve for it if there's potential to make it work.

The one clear issue with TK was the need to weave 4 skills just to get a single GS stack from RoW, which was obviously a result of it being unintended and could be easily fixed by tying that GS stack to a dedicated ability instead of the fist mechanics SE so illogically clings to.

I don't like the idea of making TK another Xenoglossy for 2 reasons: one is obviously that it's kind of lame to just grab a mechanic from BLM and slap it on MNK, other is that it doesn't interact in any way with what makes GS unique - which is the stack building. Neither does adding a skill which instantly grants you full stacks, as then you just make GS a "single button application" buff like anything else.

Those are all fair points, and indeed they're reasons I at least appreciated the existence of the TK rotation in Stormblood even if I personally found it jarring to use.

However there was another issue with the TK rotation for people that you're forgetting, using TK drops Greased Lightning which has a very tangible feeling on your gameplay. That feeling of losing your stacks has been ingrained into Monk to be awful and tantamount to failure of playing the job correctly. I'd actually say it is the single most awful buff to lose in the game because of it, and it was arguably a biggerer big reason that the TK rotation didn't feel good to use for many than having to do four weaves for one oGCD. This is the primary reason why I and many others fundamentally disagree with the idea of Greased Lightning being a resource to spend rather than a buff to be maintained: losing Greased Lightning is a terrible feeling pretty much by design, and any use of Greased Lightning as a resource is going to cause that to occur regularly.

Further, Greased Lightning 4 being the principal addition to Shadowbringers' Monk exacerbates the feeling of losing your stacks, and therefor that particular unpleasant aspect of the TK rotation in two ways. First is that the haste you're losing is stronger than before ,so you end up feeling even slower relative to what you lost in Stormblood. Secondly is that the manner in which we build Greased Lightning is still slow, it will now always take additional time to build back towards our baseline. There's a couple of ways to avoid that problem but none of them are particularly good. Introduce a "Restore GL to full" button via Anatman/some revision to Perfect Balance does it but it has the problems you mentioned, or they completely decouple the haste from GL and have it just be persistent while Greased Lightning would just be a damage buff which I don't particularly see as a good solution either.

TK as Xenoglossy was just an off the cuff suggestion that struck me as simple to implement while avoiding the very real problem of "Using Greased Lightning and going to Zero feels bad", I'd certainly be open to other ideas for it, be it by gaining some resource from refreshing Greased Lightning or possibly by hitting positionals properly.

MCH rework might've been well received, but it is a good example of one that's been so radical, that it might've as well been a new job honestly. Not a single mechanic from HW/SB MCH has been kept intact - heck, even aesthetics have mostly been changed - and I think that's a terrible direction to take with any job, unless there's really nothing enjoyable about it at all.

That and also I think it's been reduced to something utterly dull, but that part's obviously subjective given its popularity.

To be quite honest, an argument could be made that that was the case with regard to Machinist at the end of Stormblood. However I think it would be off topic for this particular thread, and since I'd say we're both in agreement that a 5.0 Machinist style rework isn't what we'd want for Monk since the foundations of Monk as a job aren't as broken as Heat was, so we can drop this particular tangent.