Monk Needs a Complete Rework

[Shurrikhan]

...

Stoneskin and Damage stacks in Wanderer's Palace; King's Might, Lightning Shield, Stoneskin in Amdapor Keep; certain bot buffs in T2; Stoneskin in T4; snake damage stacks in T5... As with any and all CC, OiP had plenty of things it could have been used on when launched, and yet only the T4 Stoneskin skip would have in any way made Monk obligatory; the rest were merely compensation for Monk's long wind-up (albeit far less punishing back then, as it started at only a 5% damage bonus per stack, not its later 7% or 10%) alongside its host of other situationals.

But, also like CC, it left two options: (1) continue to make things the mechanic could interact with and then not make enemies arbitrarily immune to it, (2) render the utility defunct and then remove it by not bothering with any of those mechanics or going out of the way to kill the ability.

Since HW launched, or arguably even since AK was nerfed (since it removed the ability to apply no-direct-potency DoTs to incapacitated targets without breaking the incapacitation, removed the accidental safety period in which incapacitation couldn't be broken, and nerfed CC across the board), the game has only gone in the second direction.

OiP was killed. --> CC was killed. --> All but two defensives on each non-tank job were killed. --> Tanking having to actually face enemy targets to block, parry, and auto-attack? Better remove that dross. --> Wait, there's still more than one defensive on non-tanks? Trim it! --> So on and so forth.

And why? Because something was specifically reduced to being situational enough to be called "useless", and rather than fixing the problem behind that uselessness (surrounding designs either inadvertently or specifically rendering it unusable), players insisted that we just amputate it entirely.

The question then becomes... what's next?

Stances are presently useless, so let's remove them rather than fixing them. GL's basically a non-mechanic, so let's remove it rather than making it interesting. We don't need so many DoTs, right, so let's trim Monk's ability to manage its GL timing through stanceless skills them. Positionals are basically irrelevant, so let's remove them while purposely ignoring how they were rendered far less manipulable by the last three things we removed.

It may be hyperbolic but it's not a Strawman, you're just trying to shift goalposts from your original position which was:

If I call it X and thereby argue Y on the first post, call it X and thereby argue Y in the second, and call it X and thereby argue Y in the third post, how am I shifting the goal here?

Yes, I've called OiP a situational utility. Because it was. It was undertuned and all forms of generally shat upon through the consequences of poor design decisions elsewhere, but it was a situational utility.

Anything situational has varying relative cost and benefit. Anything with benefit and zero cost that you nonetheless don't bother to use -- such as Mantra, Diversion, Shadewalker, and the like -- are not situational. They're non-essential, to a varying degree, but there is no real excuse for not using them. Not using them is not a matter of "the payoff wasn't enough to make it optimal", it's just you being lazy. The closest we've seen to OiP in terms of situational use have been Merciful Eyes or Purification when they provided massive enmity drops, to use or avoid based on how much tank rDPS could be gained for not having to keep up with you, or caster Raise or Manashift, although all but Purification more often came near to obligatory due to their low relative costs, while Purification was undertuned for any Monk in an already more or less ideal comp (as they would already have access to Tactician).

Now, is OiP the "hill I want to die on"? Not remotely. Its removal is just another symptom of people requesting ambutation over correction even when the thing they wish to remove has zero obligatory or negative impact on them (i.e. unlike Fire II in leveling roulettes, you could just remove it from your hotbar and never look back). It should be clear by now which I'm more peeved about.

So, for the last time, since you've so far accused me of giving undue praise to the devs in reply to quotes where I have only shown criticism and mourning the loss of OiP in particular where I've only used it as an example of, just as I've voiced several times prior in this thread, actually fixing things instead of just scrapping them and throwing in new BS in a haphazard hope to fill the void:

I do not care about OiP in particular. I care about not ignoring growing design issues that render unusable skills that should be useful. I care about fixing, rather than nonchalantly removing, core job components that still have significant potential, wherever possible.