Greased Lightning and Huton

[Kaedys]

Having the alternative to armor crush vs. to always Aeolian Edge is a nice change of pace from just using the basic 1-2-3 rotation every 60 seconds.

I know this post is from more than half a year ago, but I'd like to point out here that it's very easily possible to still vary the rotation into Armor Crush on the regular even without the buff extension aspect. The most common method of doing that is by attaching a DoT to it (ex. Chaos Thrust, Demolish, Goring Blade, etc). Since they're removed the DoT via Shadow Fang, they could easily attach a DoT to Armor Crush instead. Setting the DoT at 30s would cause Armor Crush to be used as often as it currently is. They could easily tune the damage so it's worth using in ST but not in AoE, or attach a non-stackable bleed to one of the AoE abilities (or a new ability, like an alternative combo off Blossom).

[Morzy]

Greased Lightning was a skill that was holding monk back as a job. Monks only had a 16 second window, and while the buff kept itself up automatically as the monk moved through its rotation, the monk also had less opportunity to disengage for any length of time without losing its buff. Add onto that the cooldown on perfect balance, while it did change over the years, was up to 2 minutes between uses, so if for any reason the monk did drop greased lightning, they had a 2 minute cooldown before they could use a skill to help recover, otherwise they were doing 10-12 GCDs before recovering it

To be precise, it would take 7 GCDs to get three stacks of GL back if you form shifted into coeurl form and did demo followed by two sets of your rotation (6 GCDs).

GL didn't hold the job back as much as SE didn't know what to do with an otherwise decent level 50 job, and this idea was shown to be the case in 3.0, 4.0, and 5.0.

[Morzy]

Said that, after GL was gone, of course the job became naked and bland, but looking at what Monks are getting to make up for it, the job might finally be interesting for me to play with.

Bland is a good way of putting it. I didn't like BLM which is why I stopped leveling it after a while of my dissatisfaction with Enochain. Still, it wasn't as easy as keeping GL and telling the dissatisfied players to play another job like I do. Monk had far more issues to trifle with that the devs were bandaiding over the years.

[wereotter]

To be precise, it would take 7 GCDs to get three stacks of GL back if you form shifted into coeurl form and did demo followed by two sets of your rotation (6 GCDs).

GL didn't hold the job back as much as SE didn't know what to do with an otherwise decent level 50 job, and this idea was shown to be the case in 3.0, 4.0, and 5.0.

In the scenario you describe, no. It wasn't seven GCDs, it would have been eleven.

I suspect you forgot to count that form shift is on the global cooldown, which ups that count by one. Additionally before its removal, greased lightning had four stacks, not three. So you were looking at ten weapon skills before you got back up to dealing full damage, plus you had a speed penalty while in that situation making the time to recover longer. And when comparing it to Huton, if a ninja dropped huton right after using their only charge of ninjutsu, it would take them 20 seconds to be able to reapply it, but the monk would need more time than that to reapply, you were looking at 22-28 seconds to build back up all four stacks.

[Kaedys]

And when comparing it to Huton, if a ninja dropped huton right after using their only charge of ninjutsu, it would take them 20 seconds to be able to reapply it, but the monk would need more time than that to reapply, you were looking at 22-28 seconds to build back up all four stacks.

To be fair, though, Greased Lightning didn't require you to sacrifice damage to gain the stacks. Using a Mudra charge on Huton is a minimum of 650 potency lost, using EW's potency numbers, due to what could otherwise have been a Raiton. And that rises to 1500 potency with the new combo chain off Raiton. And it could conceivably be either a much larger damage loss, or a much longer time to reapply, if your next Mudra charge was due to be used on Suiton to set up a Trick Attack window (which 1 in 3 Mudra charges is used on in typical usage)

[wereotter]

To be fair, though, Greased Lightning didn't require you to sacrifice damage to gain the stacks. Using a Mudra charge on Huton is a minimum of 650 potency lost, using EW's potency numbers, due to what could otherwise have been a Raiton. And that rises to 1500 potency with the new combo chain off Raiton. And it could conceivably be either a much larger damage loss, or a much longer time to reapply, if your next Mudra charge was due to be used on Suiton to set up a Trick Attack window (which 1 in 3 Mudra charges is used on in typical usage)

Except it did. You forget that dropping greased lightning was a 30% damage reduction penalty on all your skills in addition to a reduction to your auto attacks (which were more powerful on monk than any other job) AND the slowdown on your global cooldown (a punishment it shared with ninja)

Doing the math on just the loss until you get to GL3 (becuase 3 to 4 ultimately only raised speed and auto attack damage) you lose 429 potency. That loss was amplified if you considered using a perfect balance to regain your greased lighting instead of doing the dragon kick - bootshine spam. This also doesn't count the damage lost for any chakra stacks you might have over capped while rebuilding or the damage lost on using it without full stacks. Same with holding onto an Elixir Field use while rebuilding.

And I refuse to acknowledge the Endwalker scenario since with GL not being a thing it's no longer something you can fairly compare. Monk likely would have also lot more potency in the next expansion for dropping GL than it did before the skill was removed.

[Taranok]

Except it did. You forget that dropping greased lightning was a 30% damage reduction penalty on all your skills in addition to a reduction to your auto attacks (which were more powerful on monk than any other job) AND the slowdown on your global cooldown (a punishment it shared with ninja)

Doing the math on just the loss until you get to GL3 (becuase 3 to 4 ultimately only raised speed and auto attack damage) you lose 429 potency. That loss was amplified if you considered using a perfect balance to regain your greased lighting instead of doing the dragon kick - bootshine spam. This also doesn't count the damage lost for any chakra stacks you might have over capped while rebuilding or the damage lost on using it without full stacks. Same with holding onto an Elixir Field use while rebuilding.

And I refuse to acknowledge the Endwalker scenario since with GL not being a thing it's no longer something you can fairly compare. Monk likely would have also lot more potency in the next expansion for dropping GL than it did before the skill was removed.

That's all a really fancy way to say the devs should consider just removing self-insistent maintenance buffs like BotD (removed/permanent trait) GL (removed/permanent trait), Huton (still present/punished heavily), AF/UI (Present/hyper-punished) Storm's Eye (Present/eased a bit) and so forth. There's actually a good reason to remove this mechanic from Samurai, as it wouldn't affect their desired rotation too much provided it was balanced correctly, as you still want to do all 3 melee combos, so having the additional punishment on top is meaningless.

In some cases there's an argument to keep it (E.G. Storm's Eye) because it's the only thing that exists to provide texture to a rotation, but in other cases (Huton) it exists to the arguable detriment of the rotation as a whole. You're still only using Armor Crush twice a minute so it's not really impacting the rotation all too much, and with the shift towards a naruto-esque theme and rotation, the removal of Huton means they can free up an otherwise unused mudra slot and redesign the rotation around something more interesting for the ninja fantasy, anchored with a standard positionless 1-2-3 combo during downtime. Where would their positionals be then? Well, TA, they could consider bhava having a flank requirement, and other such oGCDs to give the class its unique texture in the direction they want to take the class. That's just my thought on it.

Also do remember in the old Monk design, while ramping up GL they were getting a lot of their damage bac each cyclek, so the penalty was reduced over time. For Ninja, they were ground to a halt until they could huton again, which came at the loss of a significant amount of potency on top of the already painful skill speed loss.

[wereotter]

Also do remember in the old Monk design, while ramping up GL they were getting a lot of their damage bac each cyclek, so the penalty was reduced over time. For Ninja, they were ground to a halt until they could huton again, which came at the loss of a significant amount of potency on top of the already painful skill speed loss.

I factored this in when doing the math regarding how much potency the monk lost while building back up to full greased lightning. Addiitonally I assumed the monk player would form shift and start with demolish, having one stack from that point on, and compared the damage potencies to to if the monk had full GL while performing the exact same skills. That number might have been even higher, however, if the GL4 monk was able to get in more GCDs. That I didn't bother figuring out.