Monk Needs a Complete Rework

[wereotter]

-Perfect Balance being on 40 secs is bad since your opener is scuffed. It either needs a 3rd charge or 30 sec cd to line up with RoF.

I agree that it's stupid that as-is you'll never align phantom rush with 120 second raid cooldowns, but this is as intended. The developers explicitly stated they designed monk so that it woudn't align with raid buffs. Personally I think this is a really questionable decision since monks have historically been underrepresented in savage groups that preferred taking jobs with more utility and buffs you can stack, so to have monk be such an outlier will only hurt the job more.

I worked out a bandaid to this, but really we shouldn't have to try to adjust the whole job just to make it work. If you do your first three masterful blitz as rising phoenix, then every phantom rush will happen in riddle of fire, and align with every 120 burst window from that point on. I only mathed it out based on the potencies of the blitz attack plus the bonuses from riddle of fire, though, and it won't be until the 6 minute mark that you're actually doing more overall damage by delaying.

Personally I hope this is just something they realize was a bad decision since the community is doing everything we can to figure out how align the big attacks to the buffs from the rest of the team.

-Removal of positionals is mixed. Personally I would have kept it but removed the chance of gaining chakra via cirts/bootshine and move it to hitting positional exclusively (no potency increase). That means that if you hit those positionals you get one charka regardless of crit removing the RNG of chakra gain entirely, outside of brotherhood.

This one sounds good on paper, but the thing I had to go back and check, every chakra stack currently is worth 68 potency. Gating your chakras entirely being hitting positional attacks, and assuming they were returned for all 6 of the rotation skills, means that you're actually punished more for missing one than you were before. Snap Punch right now has a 60 potency difference between hitting from the flank and not.

[Shurrikhan]

-Removal of positionals is mixed. Personally I would have kept it but removed the chance of gaining chakra via cirts/bootshine and move it to hitting positional exclusively (no potency increase). That means that if you hit those positionals you get one charka regardless of crit removing the RNG of chakra gain entirely, outside of brotherhood.

That's a worst of both worlds, I would think. It'd be greater potency loss (one-fifth a TFC, 68 potency) per missed positional, and would more tangibly affect gameplay such that one feels starved of a core resource if they can't successfully hit all the positionals.

I agree that it's stupid that as-is you'll never align phantom rush with 120 second raid cooldowns, but this is as intended. The developers explicitly stated they designed monk so that it woudn't align with raid buffs. Personally I think this is a really questionable decision since monks have historically been underrepresented in savage groups that preferred taking jobs with more utility and buffs you can stack, so to have monk be such an outlier will only hurt the job more.

I do not understand this community's fixation on getting everything to align under raid buffs even if something is clearly already balanced around not doing so.

To instead balance around that would just make the job more restrictive and essentially axe any benefit in light-party content (in which damage bonuses are fewer anyways and thus being balanced for missed bonuses in 8-man content effectively overpowers one in light-party content, where it does not matter) and remove points of decision for when forced downtime brings one near enough to alignment for it to be potentially worth it over n cycles remaining in the given fight. If you're going to be balanced around the strictures of 8-man content regardless, being purposely desynced merely removes a particular constraint.

That's not to say that constraints are bad--they are, after all, what makes for much of any job's gameplay--but a 'moment of decision' is generally preferable to a mere rigid 'check', at least imo, and here we've more decisions available to make as a result of desync than if it constrained to RoF cycles (especially if with further downtime between).

The issue with the 40s CD, on the other hand, is merely that we so rarely get to see Blitz. A 25, 30, or 35s CD, etc. (or even cooldown-reduction from other skills as to give less power to its opener alone, since you'd essentially enter with fewer than two charges) would therefore be preferable, imo, but not for any need to sync it to RoF or raid (de)buffs.

[wereotter]

I do not understand this community's fixation on getting everything to align under raid buffs even if something is clearly already balanced around not doing so.

In harder content, you want to be able to squeeze out every bit of damage you can. It has a lot of benefits, including making sure you don't hit the enrage timer, but also potentially allowing you to skip certain mechanics. So as a monk, ideally you'd want your hardest hitting move to align with a trick attack, embolden, brotherhood, battle litany, or whatever other buffs the party is throwing out. Since all the buffs stack, you get a lot more out of it if you can get your 1,000 potency phantom rush attack in that window rather than, as the developers designed the job, a 700 potency rising phoenix. It's free damage you're losing out on by playing the job as intended, and if we as a community find a way to get that damage back, it often forces the developer's hand to adjust jobs so that we get that damage.... or they end up nerfing the job so we don't. (see also wind tackle, tornado kick rotation)

[Shurrikhan]

In harder content, you want to be able to squeeze out every bit of damage you can. It has a lot of benefits, including making sure you don't hit the enrage timer, but also potentially allowing you to skip certain mechanics. So as a monk, ideally you'd want your hardest hitting move to align with a trick attack, embolden, brotherhood, battle litany, or whatever other buffs the party is throwing out.

Yes, obviously. But the kit was specifically designed to make it a larger less in constant uptime to wait for alignment that to just take sync where it comes. If Monk falls short of parity in 8-man Extreme/Savage content, the only "real" content, then that's more a matter of general tuning, not our capacity for ability alignment and they need only increase potencies faintly here and there.

There is no NEED for every ability to fall under raid (de)buffs so long as each job is balanced, and designing every kit to do have everything fall under raid windows, let alone strict 60|120s timings, just creates needless homogeneity in playstyle.

Since all the buffs stack, you get a lot more out of it if you can get your 1,000 potency phantom rush attack in that window rather than, as the developers designed the job, a 700 potency rising phoenix. It's free damage you're losing out on by playing the job as intended, and if we as a community find a way to get that damage back, it often forces the developer's hand to adjust jobs so that we get that damage.... or they end up nerfing the job so we don't. (see also wind tackle, tornado kick rotation)

For all intents and purposes, the only "intended" rotation is whatever the hell is optimal. You're not gaining "free" damage by getting 300 more potency under a single raid buff if you're ultimately losing even more than that by getting fewer Blitzes, Demolish ticks, or True Strikes (over Twin) in the fight, however.

[wereotter]

For all intents and purposes, the only "intended" rotation is whatever the hell is optimal. You're not gaining "free" damage by getting 300 more potency under a single raid buff if you're ultimately losing even more than that by getting fewer Blitzes, Demolish ticks, or True Strikes (over Twin) in the fight, however.

You either didn't read or didn't understand what I said. I didn't say you're not performing blitzes, I said if the first three are rising phoenix, therefore no elixir field and no phantom rush in the first 80 seconds, then from that point onward, every phantom rush, provided you're using your cooldowns when they come up, will happen under the 120 second raid-wide buff rotation and occur while you have riddle of fire up. But because you're not getting your first phantom rush until two minutes into the fight, it takes at least a 6 minute encounter for this to be a DPS increase over perfoming blitzes in such a way as to get to phantom rush as soon as possible, thereby never having it align with the 60/90/120 second buff windows as it will always fall at the 80 second mark in that rotation. As far as free damage, I'm counting any damage you're not directly responsible for creating. Adjust your rotation to refresh demolish while trick attack is up or an astro gives you a buff? That's free damage. Align your big burst so you're doing it under battle litany? That's free damage.

And as far as this is concerned, there is an actual intended rotation when the developers themselves stated they intended that phantom rush not ever align with the raid cooldowns. Any solution we come up with that gets it to align is not what they intended for us to do. They do design jobs with a rotation in mind they intend for players to follow, and while often they don't care if we create a different one, they also have, in the past, changed skills when we create a rotation they don't want us doing, which is exactly what happened with the tornado kick, wind tackle rotation from stormblood.

[Shurrikhan]

As far as free damage, I'm counting any damage you're not directly responsible for creating.

And I'm merely counting it as the net gain of optimizing around such.

it takes at least a 6 minute encounter for this to be a DPS increase over perfoming blitzes in such a way as to get to phantom rush as soon as possible

Which, again, does not seem necessarily to be a problem.

they also have, in the past, changed skills when we create a rotation they don't want us doing, which is exactly what happened with the tornado kick, wind tackle rotation from stormblood.

I'm not saying they won't have a vision in mind for how the class "ought" to work. I'm just saying it shouldn't matter one bit to us unless it's also optimal. When they tune the kit such that PR is more consistently worth holding, then our rotations change for a greater portion of content accordingly. Until then, it won't. It's not worth thinking about whether it's intended except in that it will be balanced to oblige certain --and only certain-- behaviors, which may or may not prioritize maximizing raid windows (if/when that has less relative potency dealt over the given fight than maximizing our own raw potency).