Monk Needs a Complete Rework

[SpeckledBurd]

Piercing and Slashing have been removed due to forcing certain job compositions, because not having slashing meant both your tanks did way less damage and not having piercing(which only DRG provided) significantly nerfed your physical ranged dps. Both those debuffs were causing massive balance issues and frustration for tanks and ranged players.

Blunt debuff was both only used and provided by MNK, so it had none of those problems - it was functionally just another full uptime self-buff. Clearly the only reason for it's removal was "because of the other two", which is a garbo reason to do anything and itself has caused issues, due to replacing it with Leaden Fist.

It's also worth noting that not only was this change unnecessary because no other job used blunt damage (and indeed it could have been converted to a self buff should a job with something like a Hammer been implemented), but it's not the first time Monk has had skills removed from it that played differently with its kit because other jobs had that change made. It is just a fact that Form System makes Monk work just a little bit different from other melee Jobs because of the freedom it provides, even if with the freedom it ultimately results in a GCD loop similar to the other jobs.

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.

Edit: I used One Ilm Punch in place of Touch of Death RIP.

Between 30 seconds per minute on Riddle of Earth and 10 seconds per 45 seconds from True North, MNK has more free-positional uptime than it has to actually do positionals. Those are no longer "windows of ignoring positionals", you get "windows of having to do positionals" instead. It's no wonder some people are thinking that devs could've as well just removed positionals entirely.

While it's true that MNK was way more positional-intense than any other melee and there are mechanics which make positionals a nightmare, extra 30 seconds per minute is an overkill. If MNK simply got 10 more seconds than the other melee it would've probably been fine too.

While it's an extra 30 seconds per minute, it isn't on command like True North is because it requires you to take a hit (which requires you to take damage instead of proccing through shields like Third Eye because god forbid they fix one of the fundamental problems with it). Depending on how much AOE damage is occurring during a given fight/phase there's a limit to when you can actually trigger the effect (which can also get screwed by a spread Adlo, still) and therefore there's a limit to when it can be activated and actually be useful. While in theory there could be 50 seconds of positional free attacking, that's not always the case in practice. To its credit there's also some optimization that new Riddle of Earth creates in terms pre-emptively using it so you catch an AOE just barely and having it be back up in time for a future mechanic.

That said, I don't think it was well thought out at all as a change. In terms of duration it's actually a bit overblown, a longer duration is warranted because of the activation requirements but 20 seconds would probably be a bit more appropriate. It struck me as a panicked change to make a skill that would be invalidated by the Formshift 5.05 change still have a use. It wouldn't have been a problem if Monk's ability design in every expansion wasn't a contest to design new skills that are as nonfunctional as possible in many situations, but that's beside the point. It is also a skill that fixes a problem that Monk has had for a while in terms of solo play such as single player instances or any time it makes you face tank a mob for a quest. For whatever these encounters don't give enemies omnidirectional positionals and without RoE (or even I'd speculate with only 30 seconds of True North) that hits Monk the absolute hardest now that they've basically reimplimented all of the lost positional damage they took from Monk in Stormblood onto Leaden Fist. For people who are decent at the game it isn't a problem, but there's a sizeable portion of the playerbase that struggles on Monk because of it.