Quote Originally Posted by Drakanous View Post
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.