Monk Needs a Complete Rework

[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.