Monk still needs a complete rework

[IruruCece]

And it definitely is going to have to wait to 6.0 and beyond before it gets a proper one. Elemental Fists will still be there for some reason, though.

[Jukebox12]

why is this thread even up we all know they don't know super major changes until 6.0

[Ramura_Sono]

Probably because they said themselves that making us wait until 6.0 would be too long. It was foolish of us to expect them to actually put in the effort, I guess.

[Remonade]

And it definitely is going to have to wait to 6.0 and beyond before it gets a proper one. Elemental Fists will still be there for some reason, though.

What is this thing about the elemental fists players don’t like? It’s not like having it there takes away from anything, and I personally enjoy the extra defense.

[Beddict]

What is this thing about the elemental fists players don’t like? It’s not like having it there takes away from anything, and I personally enjoy the extra defense.

It's because boosting damage is always better than not boosting damage. There may be three Fists, but Fists of Fire is just so powerful compared to the other two that there is no choice involved.

[IruruCece]

What is this thing about the elemental fists players don’t like? It’s not like having it there takes away from anything, and I personally enjoy the extra defense.

The extra defense is basically worthless by any measure. If you're speed running old content off sync, and you're dying to masses of mobs still, either your gear or your gameplay is at fault, and whatever mitigation is provided by Earth isn't going to offer a visible difference. You'd still be rolling faster by sitting in Fire and killing somewhat smaller groups of enemies then.

This has been a problem with the job pretty much from HW on. I wasn't around as a monk during ARR so I can't speak to whatever utility the elemental fists had back then, but SE shifted hard away from it and never, ever, EVER adjusted the job's kit accordingly. From HW through to ShB, the dynamics of what elemental fists we used in combat saw ONE somewhat meaningful change... and then 5.4 nixed it entirely with the removal of GL, that being "open fights in fire, switch to wind when you get to GL3, then sit there for the rest of the fight/sit there until you need to re-open again because a cutscene/death took GL away from you."

I can understand, to an extent, the removal of GL. They were designing content and fights that specifically hurt Monks the most in terms of performance, and lots of players do not like needing to reset due to circumstances beyond their control. They even acknowledged this in ShB by giving us form shift spam, Anatman, patching PB, and even a new capstone ability (six sides star) specifically meant to be used for disengaging before a boss phase change in the vain hopes that we would retain GL for long enough that boss would be vulnerable again and we could smack it with a combo finisher.

But in the infinite wisdom of the developers, they made all those efforts on their part worthless because so many bosses include situations that more or less force the loss of GL anyway no matter how well the player does their job.

There were ways to fix this without outright removing GL entirely. No matter how many times some players will claim otherwise, GL was a core part of the job. Core enough that it was worked with and around for the duration of the game up until now, core enough that SE focused a considerable part of our kit to help keep it going.

Ripping it out and replacing it with broad potency buffs (that will likely be reversed come 6.0 and whatever awkward thing they insert into the job by then) and little else doesn't fill me with confidence that they actually know what the hell they want Monk to be. That GL could be turned into traits, yet elemental fists could also be reverted back to something even less interesting than before in the same patch suggests to me that there's next to no reason to expect SE to do right by the job and the few players who continue to stick with it despite everything.

[Valkyrie_]

I found it bizarre to see most monk mains loving the idea of making GL a trait.
What i always loved about monk wasn't just the speediness, but the "ramp up" feeling it had, as well as the reward for keeping it going.

I feel like they butchered monk identity when they made it too easy to keep your stacks with the GL timer increase, and making form shift a braindead skill that gives free GL timer resets.

They should have kept GL hard to maintain, but also make monk the most damaging class of all the dps, so that it would reward players for playing well on a skillfull class.

And what monk always needed reworked was not GL, but the fists, specifically FOF.
They should rework fists to all give utility buffs, NOT dmg increase.

Heres some ideas i have:
FoW, movement speed buff and slightly slows the GL timer, using anatman while in this stance grants party movement speed for 5s after anatman ends.
Required to enter GL4, but not upkeep it.

FoE, def buff, and grants 1-2s of GL timer each time taking damage, using anatman while in stance will grant a party wide def buff.
Dying while under FoE reduces the next weakness timer received by 10s.

FoF, 20 yalm passive 5% healing & phys defense aura around monk, also turns Demolish into a conal aoe DOT and shoulder tackle into a sort of aoe that increases potency for each enemy passed through with the attack.

Other than that, revert GL trait, revert GL timer, revert form shift, remove party dmg buff on brotherhood, make MNK the top damage dps again(or at least same as sam/blm).
And finally rework riddle of earth and anatman to not affect GL and do something else.

[Renkei]

Monk is second place Melee DPS right now, and its skill floor has increased a lot, i know it is a bit dumbed down though unfortunately. but at least you don't' have to worry about losing stacks. i think its something that the job will evolve and get used too. i think asking to be absolutely top dps in its current state without a higher skill ceiling is a little silly.

there's tons of jobs that are in far worse states or have had similar treatment when it comes to identity.

[Drakanous]

It does, but I think this is a great starting point. IMO, GL and Chakra never worked together like they should have; they never complimented one another other than the passive "GL makes chakra stuff hit harder". Now, with GL as a passive where I think it belongs, the devs have a whole lot more wiggle room to devote more ability real estate to chakra. Granted, the system itself needs a facelift and I wouldn't be against another kind of gauge (something similar to LS in Monster Hunter World or Tifa in FF7R), but it's a hell of a lot more interesting than GL was. Up until this point we always had to have abilities focused around building GL, maintaining GL, recovering GL, getting rid of GL. Now all that space can go towards chakra. That's just my take, though, and I know it's not everyone's cup of tea.

[IruruCece]

Now, with GL as a passive where I think it belongs, the devs have a whole lot more wiggle room to devote more ability real estate to chakra.

Arguably, Chakra has also been a consistent thorn in the side of the job, and only now that we have way too much chakra generation going on does it further expose other problems with the tool kit, namely that we don't actually have very much to spend Chakra on. I would happily give up all three elemental fists (and accept further adjustments on the current GL traits to account for losing FoF) if they got replaced with some new OGCds to spend them on. Hell, give us a new combo along the lines of GNB's Continuation that works off the new ebb and flow of Chakra. Something. Anything other than those three buttons, only one of which I will ever really care about in any meaningful way. We already did this for at least two expansions! Ironically, ShB is the FIRST TIME I can remember where I had a real incentive to switch from one stance to another mid-fight!

I don't think there's anything inherently wrong with having a job with some sort of ramp up to reach it's DPS peak, that was actually something I found appealing with the job. I felt clever when I figured out how to push to GL1 at the start of my opener in HW (even if it wasn't actually the most efficient way to go about things). GL was clearly meant to be the thing that represents the player is on the ball, and their reward is increased speed and damage. That's fine. I would go so far as to argue that it is important, from a design standpoint, to have a "ramp up" for a DPS job that encourages players to naturally find ways to maximize the use of their toolkit in those opening moments in combat, and the reward for doing so should be a noticeable increase in their contribution to the group.

What wasn't fine was that for years, TK would take GL away from us, for basically no real gain. It was our Six Sided Star before Six Sided Star, but somehow worse. What wasn't fine is that Monks had been consistently losing this self buff due to reasons far outside of our control well before ShB, and when they acknowledged this problem with Anatman, SSS, improved Form Shift, they continued to design fights that would roundly invalidate these new tools!

Whatever they give us in 6.0 and beyond, I think they need to give us the sense of "building power", and then being able to use that power on a consistent basis. To me, outside of positionals, the "build up" and finding the flow in the middle of a long fight to maintain my full strength while dealing with whatever the game was throwing at me was the essential Monk Thing that no other job really nailed in the same way.