Monk Needs a Complete Rework

[Kabooa]

Then cut out Anatman, Six-Sided Star, and Riddle of Earth in their current forms, and maybe make them into something different.

Most of these suggestions don't actually alter current monk's gameplay. For example, Six Sided Star as just "Steel Peak but stronger" is just another bog standard "Use on cooldown, prioritize in burst window" OGCD. These get cut. It's not just Monk, this tends to happen across the board (I don't agree with it - I miss the shoulder ram animation - but thems the breaks)

On a personal level, I don't think the 50 and under Kit needs much work. Maybe a little number tuning (There's a pretty good analysis on Leaden Fist somewhere around here), but the FFF RRR weaponskills don't need much tweaking.

Moving forward, my own preference would be making Chakra and Greased Lightning play off each other more. An optional avenue would be having Fist/Riddles play into it somehow.

For example, lets take Anantman and Six Sided Star and create a very basic play between the two.

Six Sided Star
Weaponskill
2.5 Recast (standard)
Effect: Deals "X" potency (Slightly less than the average of the mainline combo). Grants 1 Chakra.

Anantman
Ability
45s recast
Cost: 5 Chakra
Effect: Grants Greased Lightning IV.

From these two changes we have a few implications.

Tornado Kick can be used now. Anantman allows one to TK at anytime it's up and maintain Greased Lightning - Provided the Boss isn't about to jump.
If a Monk needs to delay a GCD in the main combo, Six Sided Star allows this while also serving as some Chakra management.

To me these are good changes to the Monk's baseline kit. They start building a base of prioritization of Chakra and Greased Lightning, from which one could extrapolate more of the kit with that end-goal in mind, which does allow us to bring back bog standard OGCDs by building them around this concept.

Steel Peak, which becomes Forbidden Chakra with 5 Chakra.
Howling Fist, which becomes Enlightenment with 5 Chakra.

One of these have an independent CD from their Chakra variant.
One of these shares the CD with their Chakra variant, but gains significantly more strength.

With that, we have created a basic resource conflict with the Chakra skills, between the two chakra skills and Tornado kick (through Anantman).

[Pyitoechito]

MNK doesn't need a rework, but when 6.0 comes around hopefully they'll trim a lot of the bloat that is Greased Lightning and form maintenance skills. There's just so many of them. I feel like the "Fist of XXX" skills will probably be pruned by then, too, in favor of keeping the riddles and adding more interesting skills (can keep the fists skills as traits maybe).

I mean, they have 4 downtime maintenance skills in Tornado Kick, Anatman, Meditation, and Form Shift. They could easily retool Tornado Kick into an oGCD that's used more regularly, like removing the GL-burn and limiting it to only being usable during Riddle of Fire like how Nastrond works only during DRG Life of the Dragon.

[SpeckledBurd]

MNK doesn't need a rework, but when 6.0 comes around hopefully they'll trim a lot of the bloat that is Greased Lightning and form maintenance skills. There's just so many of them. I feel like the "Fist of XXX" skills will probably be pruned by then, too, in favor of keeping the riddles and adding more interesting skills (can keep the fists skills as traits maybe).

I mean, they have 4 downtime maintenance skills in Tornado Kick, Anatman, Meditation, and Form Shift. They could easily retool Tornado Kick into an oGCD that's used more regularly, like removing the GL-burn and limiting it to only being usable during Riddle of Fire like how Nastrond works only during DRG Life of the Dragon.

I don’t think Monk needs a full rework either, but waiting until 6.0 for any kinds of changes to Monks kit is literally making Monk wait two full expansions before there's a chance for the players to be satisfied with it. That's insane, especially when so many other jobs have gotten substantial changes in 5.1. Some might say that Monk has seen fixes already, but the 5.05 stuff only fixed a small handful of the problems with the job. They finally fixed the Riddle of Fire change which is undeniably a good change, but it can't be forgotten that they for whatever reason intended to leave that in for 5.X until the playerbase expressed its displeasure. But largely it was just done to make Monk playable in dungeons with the Formshift changes, because 5.0 Monk in dungeons was miserable. Meanwhile 5.1 stuff flat out made one of the few remaining use cases for Anatman feel awful every time and by and large just reversed any goodwill 5.05 gave Monk.

The fact of the matter is Stormblood Monk was so disliked that the devs admitted that it was a misstep that dissatisfied people in all of the Shadowbringers prerelease press discussion that brought it up, and everything they produced for Monk on Shadowbringers Launch was even worse to the point where it was the worst received DPS by a huge margin. They're basically two full expansions behind with the job at this point and if it isn't a priority for them to fix it ASAP then it should be.

[Powercow]

I think you might want to give more specific examples of what you want instead of just a list of what you didn't like.

Anatman: The next 2 Weapon Skills will grant an additional stack of Greased Lightning each.

Six-Sided-Star: For the next 12 seconds, all of your weapon skills have a range of 25 yalms. No longer has the double global cooldown, potency reduced drastically.

Touch of Death: Costs 2 Chakras. 50 potency immediately, 25 more per tick over 30 seconds.

The Forbidden Chakra: Reduced potency.

Deep Meditation II: Now 100% on crit, instead of 80%. Double RNG layers, especially when they're this high, feel bad. You don't feel like you got a bonus chakra on crits, you feel like you got screwed out of one on a crit and didn't get a chakra.

Brotherhood: Now applies to both physical and spell attacks. Bonus chakras also come from both spells and weapon skills. Effect reduced to compensate.

It's not perfect and it certainly won't fix everything but it's a start. Anatman giving a couple of stacks will still allow for TK to be used while changing up Monk's flow enough to return the feel of "ramping up" that Monk was known for in 2.0. SSS having something unique could be interesting on bosses, giving us a disengage-type skill that's different than the other melee. ToD's return will shake up the rotation, even if only slightly. The DM2 and Brohood changes will make Monk less RNG-reliant and less comp-reliant. Yes we're still going to rely heavily on Battle Litany and Chain Strategem but it won't be to the extreme extent it is now. TFC's nerf is to compensate for the additional TFC casts, which would also work to speed up monk in an organic way by adding more oGCDs.

Just spitballin' ideas.

[wereotter]

Most of these suggestions don't actually alter current monk's gameplay. For example, Six Sided Star as just "Steel Peak but stronger" is just another bog standard "Use on cooldown, prioritize in burst window" OGCD. These get cut. It's not just Monk, this tends to happen across the board (I don't agree with it - I miss the shoulder ram animation - but thems the breaks)

You're right, my suggestions aren't exactly ground breaking for how to improve the job, but then for me, I see monk's biggest problem as the fact that the job is and for many years has been, over bloated with useless skills, many of which survive the skill purges in Stormblood and Shadowbringers.

I am with you in that I would like to see the two resources of the job play into each other. I don't have a lot of ideas for this, but there could be something like a skill that turns all your chakra stacks into greased lighting, making skills that dump your greased lightning stack more viable to use.

They could also change up the monk numbers (this would be a nightmare to balance) in such a way that every stack of GL you get increases your speed but decreases your damage until you reach all four stacks and then burn them all for a big attack.

These might not be the best solutions, but I do think that most people agree that it would be nice for the job to gain something new to its core rotation which has been unchanged since ARR, and I think some adjustments to either how greased lightning or the chakra system works might be just the way to spice things up.

[Noctisnine]

As one of the few monks that did savage and has been playing monk since stormblood I think monk really needs changes, but a rework? I don't know if a complete rework would do the trick, honestly what he needs is to get a proper rotation where he fully uses all of his skills, meaning we don't need situational skills like Tornado kick and six sided strike. Of all the melee jobs he is the least fun to play right now, anatman opener was nerfed pretty hard and we still relay on server ping, he lacks impactful skills, look at dragoon for example he gets his burst window unlocking this new cool skill while all we get is... forbidden chakra. That why I'm probably gonna change job when the next savage tier arrives, monk is just meh.

[EtherRose]

Monk doesn't need a rework. Monk has always performed well through and through. Just because you guys don't like the way it is now despite it still being very high on the boards doesn't mean it needs a rework. They could change some things yes but not a "Rework". The only other class that needs a rework is Ninja. Ninja has always been at the bottom and rarely anyone plays it. Even with the new changes recently it's still slow. They just need to rework it like they did Machinist.

[Akiudo]

Monk doesn't need a rework. Monk has always performed well through and through. Just because you guys don't like the way it is now despite it still being very high on the boards doesn't mean it needs a rework. They could change some things yes but not a "Rework". The only other class that needs a rework is Ninja. Ninja has always been at the bottom and rarely anyone plays it. Even with the new changes recently it's still slow. They just need to rework it like they did Machinist.

why would nin or any class for that matter need a rework because its at the bottom of the dps charts ? asking for a rework because a class feels clunky or unintuitive makes sense on a general level, but because its not topping the charts ? thats just numbers, you could give nin 50 potency on every single skill and it would be top dps everywhere by a bigger margin than its currently lagging behind (which really isn't all that much), or you could rework it completly a lá mch and at the same time have it deal worse dps than it does now, numbers are the literally worst reason for a rework unless theres some fundamental flaw in the design that inflates or deflates these numbers.

In the same vein, monk performing well isn't a reason to say the class works, a class can be top dps and still feel shitty to play, or it can feel great to play yet be so bad no one wants to take it. The reason why people ask for a monk rework in the first place is that its basically the same class now that it was in ARR while every other class evolved, monk now does the same as it did during ARR, just that now monk has extra tools to keep greased lightning. At this point basically every second new skill monk gets during each expansion is redundant, monk has more than enough ways to keep gl , yet instead of changing things up they simply double down on that for 3 addons straight now

[SpeckledBurd]

Monk doesn't need a rework. Monk has always performed well through and through. Just because you guys don't like the way it is now despite it still being very high on the boards doesn't mean it needs a rework. They could change some things yes but not a "Rework". The only other class that needs a rework is Ninja. Ninja has always been at the bottom and rarely anyone plays it. Even with the new changes recently it's still slow. They just need to rework it like they did Machinist.

Monk was bottom tier of the melee beneath Ninja until 5.0, hate to break it to you. Just because Monk did more personal damage didn't mean it outdid the contribution of Trick Attack/The Aggro tricks Ninja had, and even with the TK rotation Monk barely matched it. Ninja was always strong from its introduction in 2.4 until 5.0, and right now it's still better than Monk was historically such as in Heavensward. It also says a lot now that Monk isn't the flavor of the month...it's back to being one of the least played jobs in the game by a pretty huge margin.

Monk's kit is a mess and it's undeniable. We've continuously lost low level skills and had them re-implemented at the top end instead of getting anything new, the devs still haven't given it the Stormblood Useless Action rework for things like the Fist Stances, it's still missing certain basic utility skills like a DPS neutral movement skill, and they still haven't addressed many of the problems with the design people had with it in Stormblood either. It doesn't need to be rebuilt from the ground up, but it needs nearly a third of its kit gutted and changed.

[Zarkovitch]

The job suffer from "we don't know what to do on this expansion with this..." there a chance where this job might get adjustment in 5.2 or 5.3. Worse case it be at on next expansion like always.