Monk Needs a Complete Rework

[Shurrikhan]

Well, some 50 pages later of Google Docs notes and write-ups and steadily increasing frustration over the game's lack of undermechanics to make for a compelling leveling experience without making individual skills seem at least slightly bloated... I'm going to shelf my larger rework idea for now and instead throw out some decidedly band-aid suggestions in the meantime:

Background Changes:

• Skill Speed and Spell Speed combined into Speed, which now increases Auto-attack and Periodic damage by the same rate at which it increases GCD rate, rather than less efficiently than Determination.
• Replacing effects with remaining duration now allow for up to the last 2 seconds of its duration to be added to the replacing application.
• Critical Hits again deal a flat +50% damage. Chance has been increased to compensate. (Between this, changes to Speed, and changes to Deep Meditation, Monk is now free to stack as much Speed as they like.)
• Skills which previously guaranteed an effect now instead increase its chance by 100%. Chance in excess of 100% is now converted into additional effectiveness, e.g. a 120% chance of a +50% damage Critical Hit would instead become a 100% chance of a +60% damage Critical Hit. (Raid buffs are no longer wasted on Bootshine's auto-crit.)

Monk Changes:

• GL4 removed in favor of allowing for two speeds (though, barely different for now, which I don't much like) via Fire and Wind and faster ramp-up times, and mostly just to accentuate the two stances and allow for a 2.00 GCD sooner.
• We get Internal Release back, as a 90-second CD that increases Crit chance by 30%, which later upgrades to Move Like Lightning (replacing RoF) to grant additional Damage or Speed, depending on stance. Note that with the Crit chances, this is a straight-up 15% damage buff to Bootshine/LF crits.
• Greased Lighting changed from 10% Damage and 5% Attack Speed per stack to 5% Damage, Attack Speed, and Movement Speed per stack. Potencies increased to compensate for this and for Riddle of Fire eventually being reduced to a 20% Damage buff.
• Fists of Wind now "Increases the maximum Attack and Movement speed granted by Greased Lightning by a further 5% and grants half its maximum benefit to each immediately, granting the rest over each stack." One thus ramps up over 10/12.5/15/17.5/20% increased Attack and Movement Speed over GL 0/1/2/3. It affects about 94% of your damage.
• Fists of Fire now "Increases the maximum Damage speed granted by Greased Lightning by a further 5% and grants half its maximum benefit to each immediately, granting the rest over each stack." One thus ramps up over 10/12.5/15/17.5/20% increased Damage over GL 0/1/2/3.
• Fists of Earth removed for now.
• Stance-changes now consume charges. 3 charges. 25-second recharge time. Cooling rate is doubled when not currently affected by the global recast time.
  
  
• Greased Lightning now falls off 1 stack at a time. Once a stack falls, the next is increased back to 4 seconds less than the previous maximum.
• Gain the Fluid Form trait at level 30. This causes every GCD's time off the GCD to give you access to a further Form. Progress towards the next shift is now shown by gradually un-greying the affected weaponskills and you can queue weaponskills that you will soon have access to, to go off as soon as the GCD's time has completed. Form Shift as an actual skill is no longer necessary and no longer needs to be spammed in pre-combat, but neither can it halt GL.
• Dragon Kick and Leaden Fist interaction nerfed. Dragon Kick now increases Bootshine potency only from 180 to 270, while its own potency remains at a mere 180/200. A Dragon Kick + Bootshine therefore deals only 65 less raw (crit-inclusive) potency than two Bootshines, making it a much milder use of Perfect Balance. (Exact numbers TBR.)
• Perfect Balance's cooldown has therefore been reduced back down to 60 seconds and it now allows you to slip into any Form on the next weaponskill within 10 seconds after its duration ends.
• Anatman now ticks once per global cooldown rather than on the server tick. Its cooldown has been reduced to 15 seconds.
  
  
• Chakra now stacks to 7.
• Meditation is gone. You now generate 1 Chakra for every half-GCD's time not spent on the GCD, to a maximum of 7 Chakra. This achieves the same result as spamming Meditate, but without the spam and without ignoring the benefits of Attack Speed and Skill Speed. Progress is shown via a bright, pulsing line moving across your Chakra bar over the time spent charging. The Chakra gauge itself now looks like a bar and 8 dividers, across which one progresses from 0 chakra to 7. Partial progress is saved and can be continued at any point. (The only real gameplay effect is that you are no longer wholly punished for clipping on double-weaves, as you'll be generating Chakra over that time, and you have far more flexibility with your Meditation timings.)
• Flow of Combat (renamed from Deep Meditation) causes the raw potency dealt by your weaponskills to advance your progress towards your next Chakra. Guaranteed critical strikes generate proportionately more progress than normal (including from IR, etc.). Every 1400 (TBD) potency dealt grants a Chakra. (This works alongside progress via standard 'not-under-the-GCD' Meditation.)
• Flow of Combat II (renamed from Deep Meditation) causes the potency dealt by your weaponskills to count 50% further towards generating Chakra. Voila; you are no longer Crit-dependent and the raw potency added from extended rotations better allows for Chakra growth, giving Fists of Wind a fair shot against Fists of Fire.
  
  
• Tornado Kick now also deals 50% AoE damage. Potency revised slightly to make it just barely optimal in very certain circumstances but of little enough power to be safely avoided by most.
• At level 64, you again gain Tackle Mastery. Wind Shear (formerly Wind Tackle) deals 150 potency to the target and all enemies in a line towards and behind the target and generates GL. Red Lotus (formerly Fire Tackle) now deals 140 potency and detonates existing damage over time effects on the enemy, dealing their remaining periodic damage to the target and half the skill's total periodic damage to all enemies nearby. For 30 seconds after using Wind Shear or Red Lotus you gain access to Echo of Wind, effectively the movement portion alone of Shoulder Tackle, via the same hotkey (a la Dream Within a Dream and Assassination, but without needing the second action slot). Thus, you lose no mobility for optimizing damage.
• At level 68, you gain Move as Lightning, a 90 second cooldown which for 20 seconds increases your Critical Strike chance by 30% and causes your stances to instead generate the whole of Greased Lightning on their relevant effect, rather than merely increasing its maximum by 5%, thus generating +30% Damage and +15% Attack and Movement Speeds in FoF or +15% Damage and +30% Attack and Movement Speeds in FoW.
• Riddle of Earth is... to be decided upon...
• At level 76 you gain the Lightning Form trait (in place of GL4, since you already have access to its speed increase), which upgrades Move as Lightning to briefly force Fists of Lightning, granting the benefits of both stances (for +30% Damage and +30% Attack and Movement Speed atop the basic +30% Critical Hit chance) for the 20 seconds. Once the duration ends, you return to your previous stance. So, it lets you go fast and hit hard, much like GL4 did.
  
  
• Brotherhood now affects all damage and now causes allied potency dealt to source Chakra at 25% of the rate of one's own strikes. No RNG, just steady progress that rewards speed and high potency skills and thus slightly penalizes running Double-Monk, who still have the lowest raw potencies. (Actually NIN probably includes the greatest raw potency-per-second during burst...) Since Monk is already balanced around its optimal party comp, one without caster dps, this will have no direct effect on pDPS unless the rounding of the potency of certain skills compensated for the change to GL to the nearest 10 potency has gone faintly over the intended mark, in which case they'll be tuned back.

So, fixed:

• No longer Crit- or RNG-dependent. Skill Speed is now pretty decent. Wind is basically balanced against Fire, if not slightly ahead most of the time, because of how Deep Meditation works, but is no longer forced upon us either. Swaps are possible.
• The the two downtime spam skills, including the one that made GL irrelevant, are also removed. Ramping up is far less of a pain because Riddle of Wind (now a one-step "Wind Shear"), the 1-minute PB, and Fists of Wind giving 10% Attack Speed baseline.
• At around a 65-potency bonus over double-Bootshine, Leaden Fist isn't quite so strong, making it no longer quite so punishing to skip, but still letting it be worth using PB for. (Would rather revise further.)
• We get to go really fast during our big CD...???

Not fixed:

• Monk still takes few unique opportunities and is generally half-baked.
• Leaden Fist, while less broken, is also less satisfyingly (overly) powerful.

Possible extensions:

• May rework stance swaps into latent CDs with benefit (e.g. doubling their normal bonus for a couple seconds) to pace out their use rather than arbitrarily limiting them via charges, though I worry about the damage benefit they could have. I'd still much rather go whole-hog with stances, but that's a very ambitious task.
• Need to rework RoE.
• Again, this is just a pathetic bandaid, imo, even if it smooths things out.