Monk Needs a Complete Rework

[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).