@echo78:
Maybe I’m letting nostalgia get the better of me, but the current state of monk doesn’t feel *bad* to play (I missed whatever happened with monk at 5.0). Deep Meditation II alleviates *some* of the pain from double ring gating; it doesn’t solve the root of the problem by any stretch, but at least it’s not SB bad. At the time, monk definitely felt good in HW, but where other classes seemed to get more interesting ways to generate/spend resource (subjective I know, but bear with me), monk kind of just stayed the same; while this doesn’t necessarily have to be a bad thing, I think SE missed the mark with how they’ve handled monk past 3.0.

Consider SAM, which generates kenki (via traits and positionals) and sen. For kenki, they’ve got a _myriad_ of ways to spend it: Kaiten, Gyoten, Yaten, Seigan, Shinten, Kyuten, Guren, Senei. And then there’s sen, which can be used 3 different ways. Comparing that to monks just TFC and Enlightenment is laughable. Not to mention Meditation Stacks for Shoha.

Consider NIN, which has Huton, which I think is comparable to GL stacks; taking ~18s to ramp up under FoF vs using a mudra combination which is on a 20 cd. For all intents and purposes, we can imagine Ninki to be like a 2-stack-max charka gauge since all the spenders cost a discrete 50 gauge (it’s just that the generation of Ninki is more granular, so they break it up into that 0-100 bar); even then there’s 3 ways to spend it.

I agree, they “dumbed down” / took away a lot of things from monk (although to be fair, a lot of jobs had their skills pruned/consolidated/outright removed in SB and again in ShB). As I was writing this reply, I thought what makes monk special? You can see traces of it in SAM and NIN. Both SAM and NIN can reach similar GCD timers to Monk with Shifu and Huton. So in that regard, monk’s identity as a weapon skill slinging class is stripped away. At this point, I’d reckon it’d be impossible to *remove* the Shifu and Huton buffs from SAM and NIN; better to give MNK something new that makes them feel more unique.

*I’ve deliberately left out talking on behalf of DRG because I don’t have a lot of experience with the class.

@Mahrze:
Ahh. I haven't taken a real close look at when tanks unlock their "3 step aoe" (which I imagine is like DRK's Unleash > Stalwart > Quietus?) Anyway, I just understood it as par for the course. And yeah, for all the time it takes to ramp up, I'm still surprised that a skill like Tornado Kick exists. I really do hope Square breathes something new into monk, although how that'll look like I don't know.