Monk Needs a Complete Rework

[Shurrikhan]

What's especially frustrating about Six Sided Star being just a disengage, beyond the obvious problem of Monk's kit already being a graveyard of overly situational skills, is that this expansion has seen multiple capstone abilities that are simultaneously the powerful satisfying big hit you want your capstone skill to be while also being skills that provide other utility. Just to name a few examples Star Diver is both a powerful oGCD that's satisfying to use and an additional gap closer every 60 seconds, Xenoglossy and Scorch are powerful finishers without cast times allowing for free movement (and in Xenoglossy's case you can stack them to use three consecutively with proper timing), and Shoha is both a free shinten every 40ish seconds and an additional source of potency from meditating in downtime.

If Six Sided Star had that kind of smart design and there were situations where you could use Six Sided Star without the extended recast while it still had the recast as a disengage tool, such as getting a free cast during Riddle of Fire or from Proccing Earth's Reply, then it wouldn't be nearly as controversial of a skill as it ended up being.

While I completely agree as to how SsS failed compared to the wonderful likes of Star Diver*, especially, I don't think it even needs special circumstances or like. It just needs decent potency.

With, say, a 20% Crit Chance (2855 Crit), our average PPGCD at speeds capable of sustaining Twin Snakes until just short of Twin Snakes itself via a typical Double-True rotation (which then means clipping a tick of Demolish per Demolish), is roughly 6260 effective weaponskill-potency over 18 GCDs, or roughly 348 weaponskill effective ppgcd (prior to GL, since that'd be constant anyways).

For SsS to run equal that with that, it'd need 561.5 potency (which is twice the above effective eppgcd minus the value of the chance of generating a 5th of a TFC, divided by the Twin Snakes multiplier and base Crit effective damage multiplier [crit-chance times crit-damage multiplier]).

If we didn't want it to be used constantly, but did want it to see use for rotational sync and multiplicative burst, we'd just set it to, say, 540 potency, a positional short of standard rotation as if to compensate for the fact that it has no positional and can be used at any time. And I could have sworn that was much nearer the originally advertised potency than what we ended up with, too...

Much like TK, SsS's failure seems a case of the devs not trusting players to be able to do the math and thus squishing a skill down entirely to niche use through potency adjustments, such that all but one of its originally intended uses are obviously disallowed, rather than trying to provide sufficient in-game tools to deal with the game's complexity. That, more than anything, seems to be what really holds Monk back, especially when devs are so satisfied by their own intentional gutting of an ability that they assume it could never come back beyond its adjusted (overly limited) capacity -- see RoW-TK Monk and the lack of fluidity adjustments introduced with that skill despite making a very different playstyle optimal. We have a lot of tools that easily could have made sense and played synergetic parts with each other, but instead they get squandered because the devs only want to deal with the symptoms of skill-gap rather than its roots (i.e. by making the actual complexities of the game more accessible).

* I pointed out Star Diver in particular because it fits perfectly with Dragoon's playflow and how its optimization as a whole tends to work and feel. It's a skill that can be used at any time within a 30 second period, banked for mobility or damage, while also hitting plenty hard. Xenoglossy, on the other hand, is nice but is effectively bloat -- what could have been just a trait, an upgrade to Foul itself to cause it to change animation and deal higher damage when only the initial could be hit. Shoha, while now fitting cohesively with Iajutsu (albeit with certain new issues caused), was originally even more controversial than SsS just because it tried only to supply one purpose -- to effectively double the potency-per-tick value of Meditate -- much like the downtuned SsS and got in the way of SAM's incredibly fixed, incredibly tight rotation.

[wereotter]

Shoha is both a free shinten every 40ish seconds and an additional source of potency from meditating in downtime.

Funny you should mention Shoha....

Remember when Shadowbringers launched and samurai got it's first niche disengage/boss jump skill as a capstone skill and the samurai community lost their collective minds and burned down the forums to the point that the developers completely reworked the skill into being part of their rotation?

Yeah, I do too... <stares directly at Tornado Kick and Six Sided Star>

[Ramura_Sono]

Funny you should mention Shoha....

Remember when Shadowbringers launched and samurai got it's first niche disengage/boss jump skill as a capstone skill and the samurai community lost their collective minds and burned down the forums to the point that the developers completely reworked the skill into being part of their rotation?

Yeah, I do too... <stares directly at Tornado Kick and Six Sided Star>

No point in continuing to work on the prototype when you can just improve upon the final product.

[Shurrikhan]

...

If I wanted the majority of unique Monk gameplay reduced to what we see on other jobs, I'd... play those other jobs, and get a more cohesive experience for doing so.

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, even if it had plenty of room for improvement. It's the half-assing that's come since that's left us in our current predicament, though.

[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.

[Arrius]

Ran monk again on a alt from level 1, and compared to the other melee jobs this is by far the least enjoyable one.

The damage ramp up takes too long, and GL is always down on the next group until level 52's Form Shift.
All the while the Samurai keeps their self buffs up for 40 seconds from the get-go.

[waifugenerator]

MNKs niche is that it's the only job to get progressively worse every expansion why should we change that

[Sqwall]

Ran monk again on a alt from level 1, and compared to the other melee jobs this is by far the least enjoyable one.

The damage ramp up takes too long, and GL is always down on the next group until level 52's Form Shift.
All the while the Samurai keeps their self buffs up for 40 seconds from the get-go.

I would agree with this mostly for the NEW players coming into monk. Compared to how the lower levels are NOW and the removal of a ton of low level skills, ARR during 2.0 monk was amazing with all the skills it had to DPS originally.

BUT Form Shift never worked like it does now (as of recent). Form shift initially never reset your GL timer. It only changed your form... that's it. It was used for openers to get to courel prior to pull and grant a GL right off the bat with demolish or snap, and get you closer to courel to re-engage boss when pushed away. Perfect Balance was on a 180 sec cooldown in ARR...TWICE the length it is now. Losing your GL in ARR and HW were VERY punishing for monks.

It used to be quite a lot of fun before we lost and what was replaced.
1. Internal Release (replaced with no crit chance modifier have to rely on melds or food. Deep meditation is double rng gated 1. you have to actually get a chance to crit and 2. you have another chance to gain chackra from a crit) Internal Release should have just been rolled out as a trait with deep meditation then I could stack direct hit)

2. Touch of Death (replaced with nothing which still puzzles me to this day why we lost this skill, it was nice to have an additional DOT)

3. Howling Fist (Enlightenment which is now a choice skill betwee
n forbidden, this one sucked as we were losing an oGCD that looked damn cool to)

4. Haymaker (Forbidden chackra took over this I suppose, and I think it was if you evade and attack you could proc this, can't remember exactly. But it did have a slow debuff. Was for eating AOE and soloing really)

5. Steel Peak (This was our interrupt and and it did quite a bit of damage also, role actions removed all of the interrupts.....except for shield bash....it's STILL there)

6. Featherfoot (riddle of earth now for damage reduction, Featherfoot was more useful though as you gainged 20% evade for attacks for like 12 secounds I think? Can't remember)

7. Blood for Blood ( riddle of fire now )

Internal release was a HUGE part of our DPS, and was never addressed to help with our NEW crit RNG chackra. Back in Heavensward you could pop blood for blood, internal release and gain chackra fairly quickly.

Monk is barely a shadow of it's former glory. This JOB has only peaked twice imo. ARR Heavensward was the most stable monk ever was as far as a solid DPS from start of expac to end of heavensward without an huge changes.

I can only speculate how bad monk is play now at low levels since ARR skills were gutted away. Heavensward has got to be soooooo far away when starting from level 1.

[Shurrikhan]

....

This. Well, not all parts were as necessary, but some were sorely missed the moment they were removed.

I loved leveling Monk in 1.x. It just felt so damn versatile. You could tag-team. You could suppress to aid your tank. You could snap-tank, yourself. You could actually main-tank some fights, even.

And then ARR came around and it was stupidly fun there too.

In early ARR, Monk was distinctly eclectic. It's original spam skill was... Impulse Drive, of all things.

By late ARR, it was all about modular control (so you could get Demolish off just as the boss would be jumping away, as to use the delayed GL-refresh to let it last until the boss's return). Fracture and Touch of Death provided that, with potentially Impulse Drive or Haymaker in a pinch. That modularity allowed almost any SkS tier to work itself out. (Haymaker was painfully lackluster, but at least quite TP-efficient. It ended up being slotted by every Bowmage in HW in fights with gaze mechanics as to make use of the auto-dodge for a TP-efficient instant cast strike.)

Fracture and ToD's removal in StB left one of Monk's core mechanics, adjusting when you'd hit Coeurl or Opo-opo or Raptor, dead in the water. I honestly didn't think they could do anything more gutting until, well, they killed off GL itself via the Form Shift changes.

Heck, back then the passive eHP gap between tanks and melee was small enough that Monk could tank dungeons in a pinch, albeit at cost to everyone else's positionals. It looked gimmicky as hell, since you had to stand almost perfectly centered in the target's hitbox to get your positionals off before they could turn, but hey, I never had to wait for a tank replacement. Even in Pharos. The only issue was the lacking tank's worth of damage and another melee having to Provoke in from time to time.

HW extended Demolish's timer, allowing for better 2-3 target damage without exhausting TP and allowing for some really fun rotational breakpoints at high SkS. Sadly it was reverted in StB.

Though little was ever made of it in PvE, until StB we also had the ability to rip buffs off targets via One-Ilm Punch. Mob enraged for triple damage on their next attack (an already triple-damage special attack)? Rip it; now it doesn't matter that we failed to kill the mob in time. In PvP, the enemy Summoner pops Trance? Just eat it. Enochian? Sorry, mate. (Now, the latter's probably exactly why it was turned into a no-DR stun instead, but still... it was funny.)

We had a fun macrorotational oGCD flow across Elixir Field, Howling Fist, Steel Peak, and Shoulder Tackle.

Internal Release, you original damage CD (alongside cross-classed Blood for Blood) synergized well with Deep Meditation. Naturally, they simply moved that skill's effects over to Dancer, because who'd want to be able to synergize with their own mechanics... right?

I would seriously love to return to basically late StB Monk with just some further polish:

• GL stacks fall off one at a time.
• A well-tuned version of SsS and a replacement for Fracture, by which to provide modular control again.
• Chakra via Deep Meditation no longer RNG. Instead, you make potency-based progress towards the next point of Chakra.
• Meditate made passive. You continuously generate Chakra progress (at roughly twice your average ppgcd) while your GCD is refreshed/unused (i.e. during downtime). Thus the button can always just be The Forbidden Chakra.
• The Forbidden Chakra adjusted to consume all available Chakra, at 75 potency per point. Be sure to use it before downtime periods in which you might overcap, but otherwise bank it for Internal Release/Riddle of Fire and don't let it get it in the way of the rotational oGCDs.
• Stances revised to be more impactful and more than just FoF used (even outside of TK rotation).
• A more impactful Riddle of Earth. Or just trim it and work that part into the above.
• Riddle of Fire's slow removed. I actually liked it, because it made me happier about my SkS tier whereby I could perfectly sync both the normal and slowed-down pace to my debuffs, but I'm in the minority.