Monk Needs a Complete Rework

[SpeckledBurd]

I feel like it's also worth considering just how few people are actually playing Monk post 5.1. Now that Monk isn't the flavor of the month Job by virtue of very slightly overperforming over the other melee, Monk has fallen to the least played job in the game based on the number of FFlog Parse uploads it has compared to other jobs. In Savage it's below Ninja in plays despite Monk arguably being the stronger job in terms of raid damage and having Mantra, and it's actually less played than Red Mage which has a case for being the weakest job in the game at the moment. The Copied Factory is another important data point, in that its probably the best indication for how Monk is perceived outside of the relatively small group that's doing savage content. There it shows an even bigger disparity in player numbers with Monk having about 5000 uploads less than the next least played job (around 12000 monk players to 17000 Ninja players), when they're the only two jobs with less than 21000 plays. While this is certainly not a perfect metric due to the bait for people to upload to FFlogs being the leaderboard aspect and thus it’s extremely prone to publication bias if someone is dissatisfied by their performance, it is still the best look at what people are actively playing as opposed to what they just have unlocked or leveled as some census methods will provide by taking lodestone data.

While we can argue all day and night about what we want them to do (which we have been doing since the beginning of Stormblood if not throughout Heavensward) it doesn't change the fact that the devs need to do something about the Monk kit at this point. By all indications the Shadowbringers iteration of Monk is as unpopular or less than the Stormblood iteration which was a Developer admitted flop with the player base.