Monk Needs a Complete Rework

[Ruiknao]

The RNG on Chakra has been pretty bad, not to mention the amount of possible overcapping that can happen during Brotherhood. But, I think there’s a couple of things they can do to fix that or at least reduce its issues without needing new actions.

Starting with Deep Meditation, I think there’s three different ways they can change it, two with some RNG, and one with no RNG. They could either:

1) Make a critical hit always generate a Chakra, making Bootshine a consistent Chakra builder, and change Dragon Kick’s effect to increase crit and direct hit rate (maybe 5%?).

2) Make it so that every weaponskill (except Form Shift) has a 30% chance of generating a Chakra, regardless if it crits or not. Bootshine’s effect can then be changed to opening a Chakra if the positional is met. Then Dragon Kick’s effect can still give Leaden Fist, but the potency could be reduced to 250 while that 50 potency can go into other weaponskills.

3) Have a couerl action (Snap Punch, Demolish, or Rockbreaker) open a Chakra while the player has the maximum amount of GL stacks. With that, Bootshine and Dragon Kick can keep their current effects, but still reduce the potency of Leaden Fist Bootshine to 250 with the other 50 potency going into other actions.

I think either one of these options could work, but what I would also like to suggest is:

- Increasing the cap of Chakra stacks from 5 to 7 (or 10 which I’d prefer, but other people have mentioned 7 for lore reasons) to reduce the possibility of overcapping.

- Changing the effect of ‘Meditative Brotherhood’ to work similarly to DRK’s Blood Weapon. So, instead of having a chance of other players giving you Chakra if they use weaponskills, only you will build Chakra each time you land a weaponskill while still upping everyone’s physical damage.

- Adding the effect of gradually building Chakra to Anatman while it’s channeled, giving MNKs a way to build Chakra in their downtime while giving Anatman a reason to be used.

I personally think regardless of what changes are done to the Chakra system, I feel that Meditation might be the reason why there’s a double-layer of RNG to it, as it’s a GCD that gives you a Chakra stack at the cost of doing nothing. If people want Chakra to be more of a resource that passively builds up while in combat, I think Meditation will have to be reworked, or even removed, but those are just my thoughts.

[wereotter]

....

The problem with this is it's still a bandaid on a bad system. I don't think any monks really enjoy the RNG aspects of the job. Yes this is mitigated by having bootshine always being a critical hit.... but I think more people just want to to have that aspect of the job removed entirely.

I do think it would be good to create some minor fixes for the job if they're not going to overhaul it entirely, and I do think that base that we should have more chakras to bank. Monk is literally the only job that has to use their gague at exactly 100%; dark knight, warrior, ninja all have a buffer where they can build more resources than they need to have to use their move, and 10 is probably the easiest to implement (and if they're worried about extra damage in the opener, maybe chakras 6-10 can only be opened in combat)

Potential issue I can see with the 100% critical hit opening a chakra means that perfect balance is now used on cooldown to do 5 bootshines and then execute a forbidden chakra. And while I like that since it's reminiscent of the tornado kick rotation in Stormblood.... I can't see the developers being okay with that kind of DPS increase.