Monk Needs a Complete Rework

[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.