Monk Positionals

[SpeckledBurd]

I don't want positionals to go away, because I don't want every fight to be Eden Leviathan. I don't want to find a place next to the mob and just sit still while mash button efficiently, ESPECIALLY with how SE can't seem to figure out what it is they even want the job's kit to be. The last thing Monk needs is to be made even more boring while still wrestling with mechanical issues that stem all the way back to 2.0.

The devs continued insistence on stripping away OGCD buttons because of "button bloat" despite keeping garbage like Tornado Kick as is, or giving us more garbage like Anatman and Six Sided Star, and their overreactions to people not playing the job "as intended" while working within the systems they have provided us, suggests to me that removing positionals from the job would not actually fix anything.

I would rather they remove True North entirely. Positionals are not that difficult even for someone of middling ability to accomplish if they actually put some effort into playing well. I understand that some encounters can make them considerably harder than others, but I don't believe for one second that the solution is to completely scrap positionals for that alone. Some jobs have it easier than others on certain encounters, and that is okay.

The job is already underplayed as is despite the considerable effort SE has expended into making it easier for players to accomplish the very minimum the job is capable of. Making it even easier will not actually address core problems with the job's kit as is. Unfortunately, because the devs have shown zero willingness to listen to the people who have been playing the job for some time, they are more likely to aim for people who have shown no interest in playing the job to begin with in the next round of "fixes."

The reason they reduced the damaage loss on a positional initially was because they perceived them to be overly hampering Monk in Alphascape where 2 charges of True North really didn't cut it for the number of times your movement could get locked down. But that's somewhat muddled because they also tried to buff Monk and Machinist that patch in a desperate attempt to get player numbers up for them. The thing was though, that really didn't change it.

At this point I also don't think Monk being the least played job is even strictly a matter of positionals, it's more of a death by a thousand cuts thing. Until now playing Monk has been a pain in the rear compared to everything else. Why deal with the headache of Monk and Greased Lightning only being upkeepable with a dozen niche skills when anything else with a more or less identical buff can keep it up by hitting literally one button and also gets rewarded by incredibly satisfying nuke skills like Foul, Xenoglossy or Stardiver. New players see that and don't bother, or they're intimidated by the positionals, the Form Based combos or the memes that have built up around Greased Lightning over the years so people don't jump onto it often. At this point Monk also pretty much has the reputation as being the the job the devs neglect which might have an impact as well. Why play a job the devs have eternally ignored and which people haven't been satisfied with for for nearly two and a half expansions now. If people do give it a try it's leveling curve has been trimmed out so it feels very bare bones and there's been very little in the way of skills and traits that you get and actually use so it doesn't retain people to 80. Then the people who ride it out to 80 don't stick with it because there's just nothing satisfying about playing it compared to any other job which are consistently getting at least 1-2 new exciting skills an expansion, while Monk is the only DPS job with less rotational skills than any iteration previously.

The job is just a continued disaster and they don't seem to listen to any of the feedback regarding it in the way they listen to the feedback that other jobs get (Shoha got reworked in a patch, people have wanted reworks for Monk skills for literal expansions and we still haven't gotten them).