Monk has too many Positionals

[Garet]

So if you've got them both to 60, it's probably a good place to start comparing how they feel in testing them out.

Yes they are both at lvl 65 plus now haha. You are correct that monk is so versatile because of the forms. Like you I like that we can weave into aoe and single target skills easily unlike other jobs wherein we need to finish or restart a single or aoe combo string from the very beginning.

What about Bard and Machinisit? any thoughts?

[Saefinn]

What about Bard and Machinisit? any thoughts?

I think it'll be hard for me to compare fairly. I've not got MCH to 80 and my experience of ShB MCH (which is very different to the older version) is exp grinding. I enjoy it, it flows well and you have a few different focuses to keep it from getting too monotonous, as you have your shooty shooty rotation, your tools, your wildfire rotation and your robot friend. Wildfire has its appeal in trying to squeeze as much as possible in short space of time trying to achieve the most damage out of a wildfire you can. And I know there's a challenge to timing your wildfire to get the most out of them. I have a couple of friends who main MCH who love it and rate it highly.

BRD, I know it gets its complaints and I am one of the people who likes ShB BRD. It's a late bloomer, which I know a few people have found off putting to level. I like that it provides support and that my focus changes based on the song I have up (and I rotate songs, which I felt was a cool idea) because each song has a different mechanics. Some people don't like it because it's too RNG focused and some don't like it because they're in a weird balance where they have to be in the middle of DNC and MCH in terms how its weighed as a support job and its personal DPS contribution, this means some find its support side lackluster and its personal DPS side also lackluster. But me, I like the juggling of actions and the song benefits to you and it ends up feeling like a very busy job, especially when you're dealing with more than one enemy (as your procs are based on DoTs, more DoTs = more procs). But until you're in that level 70 to 80 stretch bard can feel like it doesn't do a lot and is kinda dull and lackluster.

And I'd like to throw in a special mention for DNC. It's my chosen ranged DPS and it was what I mained for all content before I swapped back to healing for my group, it's very fluid and the RNG is inoffensive and you get a decent weave of oGCD's and the steps can be satisfying. There's a lot of movement too as part of your rotation has you move into melee range and En Avant is a life saver...though it can make you too dependent. I learned that when I took over as my group's healer again, which was when we were still learning Ruby EX, I found my timing of dodging certain mechanics was based on using En Avant...and that was my hard way of learning to not become dependent on it. And the Technical and Standard Steps can be fun. And ngl there is a novelty to being able to break 200k damage in a single skill (a crit direct hit Technical Finish). It's also a simple job, yet, despite being simple I've not grown bored of it (like I did RDM). It's because of things like that DNC despite being job with the lowest personal DPS (because of its support DPS) you still feel like you're dealing heavy damage.

And when you get Saber Dance, you have a codependence with your Dance partner as they will build your Esprit gauge. People with high APM will help build that faster. And when you Technical Finish, your whole party can generate it and can sometimes mean you get out some Saber Dances back-to-back.

[Garet]

Thanks for the replies.

Yea my bard is only level 50 so it is indeed kinda boring. not much to do except to wait for straight shot proc which rarely procs for me oddly. sometimes it does not even proc once in a boss fight lol. Does it proc more at higher level?

Last I played mch was back in heavensward and I know it has massively changed for the better now. But I think I will stick it out with bard based on your experience. I do love the archer archetype and I think bard is one of the jobs that will get good changes in next xpac along with monk

As for Dancer, the fact I failed so many times during its intro quest clearly shows I am not meant for it lol. But it does have super nice animations and visuals. the dance comboes are nice actually, So I understand why so many like to play it

[Saefinn]

No worries.

Thanks for the replies.

Yea my bard is only level 50 so it is indeed kinda boring. not much to do except to wait for straight shot proc which rarely procs for me oddly. sometimes it does not even proc once in a boss fight lol. Does it proc more at higher level?

Last I played mch was back in heavensward and I know it has massively changed for the better now. But I think I will stick it out with bard based on your experience. I do love the archer archetype and I think bard is one of the jobs that will get good changes in next xpac along with monk

As for Dancer, the fact I failed so many times during its intro quest clearly shows I am not meant for it lol. But it does have super nice animations and visuals. the dance comboes are nice actually, So I understand why so many like to play it

Procs are always 40% on the songs (40% per DoT). So it's better when you have all 3 songs, because there's no downtime where you're not proccing. So technically it doesn't go up. But Burst Shot will give a 35% chance of Straight Shot ready (Burst Shot is an upgrade of Heavy Shot) whereas Heavy Shot is 20%, so it'll mean you'll get more Refulgent Arrow procs, which can also be forced with Barrage. Caustic Bite and Storm Bite also have a 35% chance of triggering Straight Shot Ready.

If I recall Army's Paeon (and maybe somebody will correct me if I am wrong) will increase how frequently DoT's will hit and you get a trait at level 78 that makes the effect of Army's Paeon continue for 10 seconds into the next song, so that could increase chances of proc.

And you'll have a few more actions to play with later, like Soul Voice, which gradually builds up and can be launched into an Apex Arrow. You'll also get Empyreal Arrow, which you can weave, Sidewinder/Shadowbite, which you can weave too but their damage depends on how many DoT's are on the target. So there's some stuff that can break up the monotony more.

As a friend was levelling and was bored too and wanted to see what it's like at 80, I ended up recording me against a training dummy. I'm not going to claim I'm a good bard, so I'm sure anybody who watches in it can probably find flaws in my rotation. But it should give a feel of the pace and variety of skills & their frequency once you've got everything unlocked.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jHUs26VP8QE

[Garet]

Cool thanks for the videos. those visuals are nice.

[Ariel_Valmont]

It's close, but this isn't entirely accurate. Enochian has a duration of 30 seconds, making it closer to Blood of the Dragon than Greased Lightning. Greased Lightning had a duration of only 16 seconds and until a recent patch, prior to its transition to a trait, couldn't be maintained with Form Shift, making Enochian not only much more likely to be maintained through boss transitions or cutscenes, but also has for several years been able to be maintained through Transpose and Umbral Soul.

Additionally the punishment for losing Enochian wasn't as severe as the punishment for losing Greased Lightning. They both dropped you 15% damage, but the monk also lost 20% attack speed, and while Enochian could be reapplied with the press of a single button, the best option a monk had for recovering Greased Lightning was using Perfect Balance, and if that was on cooldown for any reason, it would take 10-12 GCDs in order to get it back up to full again.

The recast timer on enochian is 30 seconds, it’s duration is tied to astral fire/umbral ice which is not 30 seconds. It’s 15 seconds, hence why you have to refresh it with fire 1 after 3 fire 4s. So if you space the refresh, you have another 15 seconds before you can recast enochian. If you have poor spell speed, maintaining it becomes harder. Also, unless you have umbral ice or astral fire up you cannot cast enochian, so you have to press at least 2 buttons to get it up... and for some reason if you mana starved yourself you better hope you have a mana pot to use (not on cd) or that manafont is off cd.

Enochian does not survive boss transitions or cutscenes. At most youre making it through the platform transition in refulgence, but you could do that on MNK as well if you were smart about it.

Did losing greased lightning result in a more severe punishment, maybe, I don’t have the data to refute or corroborate that claim.

Umbral soul is a level 76 spell and was new to shadowbringers, it hasn’t been around for several years. Transpose isn’t used to refresh enochian, unless your in dire straits. (I’m aware it does, but it’s not ideal nor part of the rotation)

Knowing the fight was key to keeping greased lightning up, you didn’t burn PB when you knew a transition was coming up and you needed it.

[wereotter]

Umbral soul is a level 76 spell and was new to shadowbringers, it hasn’t been around for several years. Transpose isn’t used to refresh enochian, unless your in dire straits. (I’m aware it does, but it’s not ideal nor part of the rotation)

Point here is that for years before monk got its ability to refresh GL with Form Shift, black mage had the option, at the very least, to keep up the enochian buff 100% of the time with the hit of a single button, meaning that if a boss became untargetable for too long a period, the black mage could maintain their job-specific buff while the monk could not. And there was a point in time that the black mage could reapply that buff with the press of a single button on a 30 second cooldown while the monk equivalent of perfect balance had a 120 second cooldown.

This is why I say that while there are similarities between the two, in my experience playing both jobs, monk was far more punishing during down time than black mage.

[dezzmont]

As someone who mained Black Mage, Enochian is a good example of an upkeep skill, while I think GL was a platonic example of a 'homework' upkeep.

For one, Enochian was on a caster, meaning you can't just keep attacking endlessly mid content, and the way you lose it is tied to how greedy you are in the rotation. You are constantly reminded of how you might lose Enochian that makes keeping it up very instinctive, and your panic moves to maintain it are powerful but minor DPS losses if you fail to maintain it. If you fail to maintain Enochian, you go back to your old rotation and its very visible what went wrong, but you also 'get back into it' very quickly. It is integral to how the job plays and it is integral in a way where it lets you know exactly what the challenge is. It is very well integrated to everything you do with the job.

Monk's GL is just... a lot for an already VERY busy job in terms of information overload: You have positional abilities, a buff and debuff that grow out of sync with each other over their rotation, and thus an ever changing combo that has the order of your positionals slowly 'mutate.' This is REALLY COOL but adding 'oh and if I mess up or stop attacking for a bit I just lose the thing that makes my job do damage and attack fast, the other fun part of the job, goes away.' Combine this with Perfect Balance which has a weird interaction with your buff windows and your already thinking about a LOT to the point where you really don't need a 'big punishment' for dropping your combo. And you really only will fail to maintain GL either from pull to pull or because of fight specific stuff, making it sorta an unpleasant surprise rather than a thing your constantly tracking.

It also just crowds the space of the job. Black Mage has a lot of abilities that can help with maintaining Enochian, but only two really are 'panic maintenance' abilities: Umbral Soul and Transpose. The reset have usage in Black Mage despite being relatively niche, like Tricast. It helps too that Enochian is very 'hooked into' a lot of how black mage plays, while GL is sorta... stapled on? Which is ironic because it was there from the start while Enochian was a late add to black mage. You could remove GL entirely from the job and it would functionally be the same, which is low key exactly what happened, and kinda is a big reason why they probably removed it, GL is just a very abstract benefit to the job that mainly functioned to make it 'fast and flowy' but had severe playability and design issues.

I tried to get into monk but until GL was removed it just was way too overwhelming. Not in the sense it was 'too hard' but it felt like... it didn't 'like' being played, and I literally thought to myself "It really needs exactly one thing to go: Positional, or one of the upkeeps, or the fact the rotation 'desyncs.'" And Greased Lightning was easily the least interesting part of the job of those 4. I do appreciate monk mains don't feel good about how the job is right now, but I would love for Monks to be more about 'how do I skillfully use my flowing abilities' as a demonstration of skill. Jobs should generally be about how you can excel, squeeze a bit more power and performance out of them, than how bad you will be punished for messing up. The later is homework, the former is what Black Mage's Enochian upkeep is: squeezing in that one extra cast despite having to move in a fight, knowing when to just bail out, ect.

GL has the skill of knowing when to do mantinence, but its both unforgiving and its not really 'rewarding' so much as an 'avoid being punished' sorta skill, which isn't very fun. Hopefully 6.0 gives you something new to think about that is more a reward of mastery to be chased, than a downside to be fled.

[Ariel_Valmont]

Point here is that for years before monk got its ability to refresh GL with Form Shift, black mage had the option, at the very least, to keep up the enochian buff 100% of the time with the hit of a single button, meaning that if a boss became untargetable for too long a period, the black mage could maintain their job-specific buff while the monk could not. And there was a point in time that the black mage could reapply that buff with the press of a single button on a 30 second cooldown while the monk equivalent of perfect balance had a 120 second cooldown.

This is why I say that while there are similarities between the two, in my experience playing both jobs, monk was far more punishing during down time than black mage.

Having played both for years myself, I’d disagree, if you mess up enochian, you have to completely shift gears and do a different rotation, if gl drops off, and you had wasted perfect balance somewhere it didn’t need to be used, all you have to do is your rotation, albeit with a slower gcd that steadily increased in pace until you were back at it.

As previously stated, you can’t just press enochian and have it work, you need to cast something to give umbral ice/astral fire first.

You cannot maintain enochian through cutscenes, just like you couldn’t maintain GL, and any player worth their salt would have PB ready after.

As far as transitions go, SE has an uncanny knack to have the timing right in many of the fights where if you played optimally, GL wouldn’t fall off. (I’m aware that wasn’t always the case)


I stand by my original statement Gl is like
(corresponding or agreeing in general or in some noticeable respect; similar; analogous Enochian. You seem to keep agreeing with me, but then go on about how they are different, I never said they were the same.

The fact that one was “easier” to reapply is outside of the point of my statement.

[DaulBan]

Admittedly, I dont play monk

Hmmm, I think I've found your problem and I only read the first five words of your post