Monk Needs a Complete Rework

[Sqwall]

If I wanted another Shoha mechanic, I'd just keep playing SAM. If I wanted Ninki, I'd keep playing NIN.

That a skill is undertuned does not make it fundamentally broken. SsS right now is the equivalent of True Strike dealing at best 5 more potency than Twin Snakes. That doesn't make the idea of a direct damage alternative fundamentally broken; it just lacks the potency to create a worthwhile niche. If SsS had the likes of 500-540 potency, it'd play a very different part in our macrorotation.

TK, likewise, wasn't broken until they explicitly chose to break it by listening to the overlap of the "We need GL4!" and "Tackle Mastery is a slap to the face" crowds, rather than just making each stack more powerful, thus getting rid of RoW while doubling the CD of Perfect Balance.

The same goes for turning GL from a core mechanic to a once-per-instance punishment by allowing Form Shift to reset it. They made tools that fit but lacked impact and then abandoned them entirely, making them pointlessly redundant, instead of simply giving them the impact they needed.

Late Stormblood Monk wasn't broken; it performed damn well and was damn fun. It's the half-assing that's come since that's left us in our current predicament.

Monk NEEDS to be a DPS and not a novelty act. Yes I can go play NIN or SAM, but I don't entirely identify with those classes. I identify with MNK, and I keep coming back to it time after time. I thought late game stormblood mnk was a blast, "flawed" but loved racking up my GL and actually using TK when I had wind tackle GL gain. With that one fix it made me get back into Monk and enjoy it again. I find it hard to believe that they thought monk was a threat to unbalance the game DPS wise leading into ShB. Because monk at release was pretty lack luster DPS wise imo. Then they changed RoF and Form Shift and that didn't break the game.

It feels like SE is afraid to fix monk because it's just going to cause more work for them with other classes when the potency whining begins. I honestly don't care about the potency, I just want the class to work and FLOW with out gimmick skills and novelty one off designs. Fix the potency later. It needs to be fluid and cohesive while keeping the speed of the class, with resource maintenance being less of a focus/burden and more passive. My dream would be to stand still and push NOTHING and still keep my stacks, and this may seem mindless. But given everything monk has to deal with, constant positional's, chackra RNG, GL timer, GL itself, AOE, a wicked fast constant rotation, and trying to stay alive.

GL is holding monk back from a gameplay stand point and a innovation stand point. The class will never grow and evolve with the current iteration. It worked in ARR and HW, but stormblood failed to capitalize on updating the class, and another missed opportunity in ShB. And now here we are.

[Shurrikhan]

Then they changed RoF and Form Shift and that didn't break the game.

But, compounded with replacing the mechanic that made TK worth using in combat (RoW as GL-acceleration) with one that made it even more punishing (RoW as GL-deceleration via the extra stack requirement) if one forgets it's garbage outside of guaranteed GL loss -- all alongside a double-length PB, to boot, and replacing the mechanic that made TK worth using at least in dungeons and before long jumps (i.e. Greased Lighting as an actual mechanic) with Form Shift spam, it did seriously fracture Monk.

I honestly don't care about the potency

I'm right there with you on the spirit of your argument, but potency relative to other skills within one's kit are exactly what allow skills to be used, or forces them not to be used, in capacities X, Y, and Z. It's why TK and SsS are currently borderline useless.

My dream would be to stand still and push NOTHING and still keep my stacks, and this may seem mindless.

I loved the hell out of T9 because it was so difficult to keep stacks up. There were times I had to use Rockbreaker for that tiny bit of extra range and I had to make Demolish my final GCD before jumps. That was awesome -- totally iconic Monk. It just should have been the difference between keeping 3 stacks and 2, rather than 3 and none.

GL is holding monk back from a gameplay stand point and a innovation stand point. The class will never grow and evolve with the current iteration.

Not that I'm horribly against replacing GL, so long as the replacement and its surroundings make the job as fun as, say, Heavensward high-SkS or late-Stormblood Monk, and in distinctly "Monk-like" fashion... you absolutely can. It doesn't need this Anatman nonsense or any of these half-brained attempts to make it half-baked.

GL merely needs to be something that's contextually difficult to keep up, but isn't too punishing upon letting a stack drop, and has periods of shifted behavior by which to vary gameplay. We had that in late Stormblood. It worked just fine. The problem is solely that they chopped it all at the knees when they should have capitalized on it. But you don't take a pair of dismembered legs as evidence that something was doomed never to stand. The late Stormblood design didn't fail; it was felled.