Monk Needs a Complete Rework

[inhaledcorn]

Anyway, what I came here to post:

After further reading, I think Tornado Kick does need a rework, and I had two ideas:

Idea 1: making it more like Foul, as in you can use it as long as you keep GL up for a certain amount of time. With the update to Form Shift, this can make a fairly consistent big hit.

Idea 2: to play off the gaining of Chakra and my earlier suggestion of gaining Gates for each gain/refresh of GL, this is another Chakra skill, but it sits on a timer, like how you have your spammable Kenki/Ninki skills, then that one that you build up to use.

I think I'd rather have the former than the latter, imo, as I feel the Foul-like mechanic would be more fun. However, if this becomes a Chakra skill, Six-Sided Star could become the Foul-like skill for Monk, as I really feel it could benefit from it.

Fist stances: I think Wind and Fire should become passives, with Earth becoming similar to Riddle of Earth (cooldown that resets GL and reduces incoming damage) until Riddle of Earth is learned, replacing it outright (which grants the ignore positional buff).

[SpeckledBurd]

Anyway, what I came here to post:

After further reading, I think Tornado Kick does need a rework, and I had two ideas:

Idea 1: making it more like Foul, as in you can use it as long as you keep GL up for a certain amount of time. With the update to Form Shift, this can make a fairly consistent big hit.

Idea 2: to play off the gaining of Chakra and my earlier suggestion of gaining Gates for each gain/refresh of GL, this is another Chakra skill, but it sits on a timer, like how you have your spammable Kenki/Ninki skills, then that one that you build up to use.

I think I'd rather have the former than the latter, imo, as I feel the Foul-like mechanic would be more fun. However, if this becomes a Chakra skill, Six-Sided Star could become the Foul-like skill for Monk, as I really feel it could benefit from it.

Fist stances: I think Wind and Fire should become passives, with Earth becoming similar to Riddle of Earth (cooldown that resets GL and reduces incoming damage) until Riddle of Earth is learned, replacing it outright (which grants the ignore positional buff).

The sad thing is a lot of these suggestions have been suggested in the past and have been pretty well received here and on other forums/reddit.

[Shurrikhan]

The sad thing is a lot of these suggestions have been suggested in the past and have been pretty well received here and on other forums/reddit.

By those who don't care if GL remains only a vague bonus rather than an actual mechanic.

[Ramura_Sono]

By those who don't care if GL remains only a vague bonus rather than an actual mechanic.

Remove the haste buff from it and make it instead a monk passive, and GL can become an actual mechanic. The vast majority of Monk players want to go fast, and stay fast. Hell, TK itself was something we built up to and blew our stacks on in it's initial inception in the HW beta.

Every other jobs maintenance buff is a non mechanic. GL being an actual mechanic is arguably why Monk itself has become so stagnated.

If the desire is to return GL to being an actual mechanic, then how about we - for once - get something other than situational GL upkeep skills to interact with it?

[Shurrikhan]

Remove the haste buff from it and make it instead a monk passive, and GL can become an actual mechanic. The vast majority of Monk players want to go fast, and stay fast.

A passive haste gain is not a mechanic. It has no trigger. It has no decision-making. It has no unique reward system.

Hell, TK itself was something we built up to and blew our stacks on in it's initial inception in the HW beta.

It was only something "to just blow stacks on" -- which is not what's being suggested here, btw -- in HW beta because it was 500 potency at a time where Monk's 2nd highest direct damage skill was 340 potency and it cost 2.5 GCDs of uptime, with the next best oGCD being 220 potency.

Every other jobs maintenance buff is a non mechanic. GL being an actual mechanic is arguably why Monk itself has become so stagnated.

And they were each arguably far more engaging when they were mechanics. The difference is that the losses to their core gameplay has at least been compensated for over the later levels, while ours has remained untouched aside from having our means of and rewards for manipulating it skillfully reduced with the expansion. You can afford to get stale bread with a meal otherwise large and tasty enough to outright forget about the bread and enjoy everything else, but Monk has no 'everything else'; it's just the bread, which happens to be bordering on stale. And taking the filler components from other jobs just because they're analogous to what we need fixed in our own kit does nothing to improve those parts or by extension, our kit.

Let's at least look at what's fun about the other kits, rather than just tangentials like "Well, they don't have to worry about any core mechanics!" that are only salvaged by those fun parts that, while they might provide nothing in themselves, they at least don't get in the way of. It would be nice if our kit itself were already so damn fun that whether our core mechanics and playflow were interesting or not were irrelevant... but it's not, and at that point we might as well think about how the core experience itself can be improved upon.

If the desire is to return GL to being an actual mechanic, then how about we - for once - get something other than situational GL upkeep skills to interact with it?

I'm all for that. But turning it into just an extra layer of free potency as suggested above, let alone RNG-based potency via Chakra, is not that. Neither of those situations has anything in common with manipulating GL. One is RNG potency. The other is "I continued to exist without, at worst case, forgetting Form Shift also exists" potency.

[Ramura_Sono]

A passive haste gain is not a mechanic. It has no trigger. It has no decision-making. It has no unique reward system.

And? Would the damage buff half of GL not be enough to facilitate such a thing?

The problem is giving up speed is antithetical to the feel of monk. That's the reason why RoF was hated. Why TK saw it's first potency nerf. You can't tie the haste to any mechanic that asks you to willingly lose it and expect it to be well recieved. It would be like asking ninjas to give up mudras/ninjutsus, or dragoons to give up jumps as part of a mechanic. Look at HW Bard. Giving up a core part of the feel of the class, no matter what reward is gained, or decisions involved, will always be met with disdain.

Let's not pretend that the decision making facilitated by the difficulty of maintaining GL in the past would have in any way been lessened if GL was purely a %damage buff.

If GL can't become a meaningful mechanic with the haste buff removed from it then let's leave it as a non-mechanic. There are more places to fit in meaningful decision making than just GL alone.

[Mahrze]

Remove the haste buff from it and make it instead a monk passive, and GL can become an actual mechanic.

A passive haste gain is not a mechanic. It has no trigger. It has no decision-making. It has no unique reward system.

And it still isn't. GL being treated as a "mechanic" is exactly why MNK doesn't change. I can safely assume the whole reason why FoW is the only one that can go to GL4 is due to them treating GL as a "mechanic". And I have no issues if it was a mechanic that was rewarding, but it isn't. Its why we keep getting more and more abilities to maintain it and "manage" its loss.

GL can be much more by leaving the speed gimmick penalty out of it. Make the speed a passive trait and stop messing with how people expect the job to be fast. GL being only "power" related would still be a mechanic people would want to optimize since it would focus on what everyone wants in any number: do more damage. And an example of that already exists in BLM's "Enochian".

MNK has enough "penalties" on its performance as it does layers of inconsistencies within its job design. Wane the severity and number of penalties to a job that should be much more straight-foward than it is, and you're off to a good start.

[Shurrikhan]

And it still isn't. GL being treated as a "mechanic" is exactly why MNK doesn't change.

How is that, exactly, when it has not been treated as a mechanic save for precisely two times? Back in ARR it was a significant skill gap component for which MNK was rewarded with optimized damage bordering on or exceeding that of optimized BLMs. The only other time was during the later half of SB, during which it also inadvertently enforced a TK playstyle at lower SkS levels due to the sheer power of its timeable burst in an era swamped with large performance gaps from raid buff optimization alone but at least made intelligent, synergetic use of its toolkit. Those are the only two times, and the only two directions, in which the devs have ever tried to really make a core gameplay loop out of it, and neither of those required any additional bloat or skill-spam be devoted to its use, unlike the Form Shift spam between fights we see to day atop Anatman, SSS, and TK all competing for a part of play so underwhelming that its interactions are niche (Anatman, TK, SSS) or pure gimmick/anti-QoL (Form Shift spam).

There is no requirement that GL not be rewarding. It already has been, and that's been when taking only a slim part of the opportunities available to it.

GL can be much more by leaving the speed gimmick penalty out of it. Make the speed a passive trait and stop messing with how people expect the job to be fast. GL being only "power" related would still be a mechanic people would want to optimize since it would focus on what everyone wants in any number: do more damage.

Like what? Give me something more than just Foul or Chakra-but-with-even-more-RNG and I'll probably be quite invested. But until then, GL retaining its speed component, a Dragon Kick rework, a bit of internal potency balancing, and that GL speed component finally being played around as part of the core experience is all that's needed in order to return branching rotational options that can turn Monk's stale, unvaried rotation into something capable of tremendous nuance, tactility, and flexibility, so I'm naturally going to want GL to retain its speed component until your alternate version it offers something better than a nuanced, flexible, and tactical rotation. Tornado Foul is not that.