Quote Originally Posted by Ultimatecalibur View Post
One thing I've noticed is that the "core" Monk rotation has existed mostly unchanged since 2.0: Opo-Opo alternates between Dragonkick and Bootshine, Raptor alternates between Twin Snakes and True Strike, and Coeurl does a rotation of Demolish->Snap Punch-> Snap Punch. During ARR and HW getting the gcd down below 2.1 let you intermix a Touch of Death every 30s while maintaining everything else and you could replace True strike with One-Ilm Punch in the rare case you wanted an enemy's buff (such as stone skin) removed.

When Touch of Death was removed in the great DoT purge of Stormblood they really should have added in 2 "formless" weaponskills that could be intermixed into the core rotation. Instead Monkmostly ended up with a bunch ogcds which were "enhanced" versions of existing ogcds.
To be fair, until 5.x, there were always distinct higher-speed rotational strings, such as via
  • "Demo-drop" rotations in ARR (whereby DK was permitted to drop before Demolish and Twin before Dragon Kick itself to a loss of 36 bonus potency in exchange for 70 additional potency via an added Bootshine and True Strike per Demolish for a net gain of 34 potency minus 10% of any AAs or oGCDs that might occur over that period, making it effectively like any other positional, but in rotational form and requiring more foresight) and
  • FracToD strings in HW to minimize clipping and delay on the 21s Demolish.
5.x is the first time we've been forced into just one one rotational string ad nauseum, let alone Double-True without including Double-Boot to make the repositioning far less awkward.