How is monk after the rework?

[wereotter]

Yeah Monk would be unplayable without those positional-ignoring charges. We are getting farther and farther away from my original point. And I’d like to see a venn diagram of people saying that PB is easy spam and people who think that the bootshine positional is too punishing to miss. Like you have true north and ROE right? (Which I keep in easy to reach spots for a reason)

Monk had no positional nullyfying skills in ARR and Heavensward and I managed to play the job just fine....

But when it comes to Perfect Balance, it just so happens to have the same cooldown as True North, so... you should always have that available to use during that phase.

[Shurrikhan]

Monk had no positional nullyfying skills in ARR and Heavensward and I managed to play the job just fine.....

Tbf, at that time Monk had up to 4 skills usable that had no positionals. Optimized and without conditionals, that was mostly down to ToD and Fracture, and thus limited to roughly every 30 and 18s, respectively, but it was still significant.

Heck, unless you were needing to up your dodge chance or physical defense, neither of which worked on most raid damage, there was little cost to taking Impulse Drive, which was an entirely on-demand positionless skill (once its positional was moved to Chaos Thrust early on in ARR), albeit at 10-20 more TP than the average Monk skill.


...Honestly, I much preferred that over the oGCD nullifiers we have now.

[Vyrerus]

Tbf, at that time Monk had up to 4 skills usable that had no positionals. Optimized and without conditionals, that was mostly down to ToD and Fracture, and thus limited to roughly every 30 and 18s, respectively, but it was still significant.

Heck, unless you were needing to up your dodge chance or physical defense, neither of which worked on most raid damage, there was little cost to taking Impulse Drive, which was an entirely on-demand positionless skill (once its positional was moved to Chaos Thrust early on in ARR), albeit at 10-20 more TP than the average Monk skill.


...Honestly, I much preferred that over the oGCD nullifiers we have now.

It was not early on in ARR lol. Impulse Drive kept the rear positional until 2.5. I remember the pain that was DRG's positional based combo starters for almost all of ARR. Miss the positional? No combo for you, retry until you get the positional. It's what literally kicked DRG out of raiding in FCoB until 2.5.

[Shurrikhan]

It was not early on in ARR lol. Impulse Drive kept the rear positional until 2.5. I remember the pain that was DRG's positional based combo starters for almost all of ARR. Miss the positional? No combo for you, retry until you get the positional. It's what literally kicked DRG out of raiding in FCoB until 2.5.

Admittedly I should have double-checked. Since it was on-demand and therefore pretty easy to land, I didn't have any super firm memories; I just didn't remember it being a hassle and had DRG capped by 2.1, so I figured it was soon after. (Heck, most of my memories of Impulse Drive surround when it was optimally used twice or thrice per Demolish on Monk since Monk's native potencies were so low and Demolish's DoT initially didn't scale with GL...)

Alas, it was 2.45. My mistake.

[ssunny2008]

. I remember the pain that was DRG's positional based combo starters for almost all of ARR. Miss the positional? No combo for you, retry until you get the positional.

Stuff like that would actually bring enjoyment back to the gameplay.

Doesn´t matter which class you play... get max level, open balance discord, be friendly to a dummy about an hour and feel like a master on your class. The variety and decision - making by the player got pretty much nullified and i´m pretty sure it´ll get even worse with endwalker.

Monk is atleast one of the last classes, where you´ve a bigger gap between "good / bad played". But if we look at the latest rework, things will go nuts in the future too.

[Amh_Wilzuun]

Monk had no positional nullyfying skills in ARR and Heavensward and I managed to play the job just fine....

But when it comes to Perfect Balance, it just so happens to have the same cooldown as True North, so... you should always have that available to use during that phase.

You are correct... I guess I tend to not use TN on PB because it's more fun to me. It's still fast GCD and more weaving compared to WAR.

[SpeckledBurd]

We are getting farther and farther away from my original point.

I mean your original suggestion was fine on paper and pretty in line with how the devs develop skills now, but I think we can infer from the tenor of the discussion that followed that people don't really care for Perfect Balance and Leaden Bootshine as they're currently implemented. By extension there isn't a ton of interest in making the Perfect Balance phase cap off with a new skill that is functionally Leaden Bootshine Plus, and we'd rather see something else instead of building on it in the future.

There isn't a need to try and salvage something that people don't like about Monk. On some level the many half-assed attempts at doing that is what lead to Greased Lightning ultimately being removed when there were clear ways to make it work in content, and more often than not it's what has caused Monk to be a graveyard of pointless traits and skills.

[Amh_Wilzuun]

I mean your original suggestion was fine on paper and pretty in line with how the devs develop skills now, but I think we can infer from the tenor of the discussion that followed that people don't really care for Perfect Balance and Leaden Bootshine as they're currently implemented. By extension there isn't a ton of interest in making the Perfect Balance phase cap off with a new skill that is functionally Leaden Bootshine Plus, and we'd rather see something else instead of building on it in the future.

There isn't a need to try and salvage something that people don't like about Monk. On some level the many half-assed attempts at doing that is what lead to Greased Lightning ultimately being removed when there were clear ways to make it work in content, and more often than not it's what has caused Monk to be a graveyard of pointless traits and skills.

To be fair, there are also plenty of people out there who like the bootshine rotation as a baseline but have other problems with the job (useless skills, lack of build-up, tornado kick animation clipping, etc). The people talking recently aren't representative of everyone. You are right that my suggestion is in line with how the devs develop, which was my intent in making it. I think it just adds onto what we have, making it more satisfying, while being something I could actually see them doing. I don't think it would make the job any worse per se. I am just keeping my expectations low and offering up one suggestion for now that is feasible. I would like to see a really cool system like blitzes and whatnot implemented in the future though. Another idea is to have the bootshine plus be used during downtime but make PB more nuanced somehow

[Shurrikhan]

On some level the many half-assed attempts at doing that is what lead to Greased Lightning ultimately being removed when there were clear ways to make it work in content, and more often than not it's what has caused Monk to be a graveyard of pointless traits and skills.

That said, there is also a difference between

• making use of a given mechanic (as 4.3's TK rotations did, and would have better done if they just weren't so damn ping-unfriendly due to the requisite triple-weave, which could easily have been removed by having Wind Tackle itself giving GL and the full attack potency),
• introducing counter-play and pay-off (as a better tuned version of HW's TK may have, especially if usable at any stack count at proportionate pay-off), and
• simply devaluing or otherwise defecating all over said mechanic (as per Anatman in place of the shorter Perfect Balance CD and Riddle of Wind, or even just extending GL from an actually pressing 10 seconds to what could only fall off between phases at 16 instead of having it fall off a stack at a time).

While we can give up on a mechanic as if it were fated all along for doom despite being the most iconic piece of a job's pacing and presence in combat, if it worked, then worked better, then worked better still, only to be killed off because the latest additions decided to go opposite of everything that worked before it, is that really the mechanic's fault?

[SpeckledBurd]

To be fair, there are also plenty of people out there who like the bootshine rotation as a baseline but have other problems with the job (useless skills, lack of build-up, tornado kick animation clipping, etc). The people talking recently aren't representative of everyone. You are right that my suggestion is in line with how the devs develop, which was my intent in making it. I think it just adds onto what we have, making it more satisfying, while being something I could actually see them doing. I don't think it would make the job any worse per se. I am just keeping my expectations low and offering up one suggestion for now that is feasible. I would like to see a really cool system like blitzes and whatnot implemented in the future though. Another idea is to have the bootshine plus be used during downtime but make PB more nuanced somehow

I'd be pretty confident to say there's significantly more people who dislike Leaden Bootshine than like it when you consider the last two years of discussion around Shadowbringer's Monk as a whole on the OF. DK/Leaden Bootshine's spam has come up a lot as far as examples about what people have considered to be an issue with the job in Shadowbringers, as well as Leaden Bootshine's positional being disproportionate when Monk already is loaded on positionals.

While we can give up on a mechanic as if it were fated all along for doom despite being the most iconic piece of a job's pacing and presence in combat, if it worked, then worked better, then worked better still, only to be killed off because the latest additions decided to go opposite of everything that worked before it, is that really the mechanic's fault?

Sure, but Greased Lightning still had major issues, as basically every bit of feedback going as far back as Heavensward can attest. And when their solution to Greased Lightning's issues for three straight expansions were always half measures that were guaranteed to fail outside of narrow circumstances and the penalty from losing it was falling from the baseline other jobs operate at directly to doing as much damage as a Healer with weakness, then it was a serious issue for both it's recovery and upkeep to be awful. The fact is they'd developed the mechanic so poorly that the scope of "Fixing Greased Lightning" had to be expanded to "Fixing Greased Lightning and the third of its kit that is terrible upkeep skills in such a way that we can win any scrap of approval from the most scorned player group in the game" only added to the issues.

That said, I still would rather we have old GL, preferably with the PB timer from the back half of Stormblood and measures taken so PB was just a recovery tool/niche damage option (as it was in Heavensward essentially) rather than an accidental big damage cooldown. I'd go so far as to say that the GL system actually was fixed in 4.2 when Perfect Balance was 60 seconds and that nerfing it to two minutes instead of changing Tornado Kick so it wasn't being used in a non-developer mandated way was basically the crux of Shadowbringers Monk being the trashfire it has been. The only reason I'm okay with it is that they can't make the same mistakes they've made for three expansions in a row by adding something else like Anatman or Stormblood era Riddle of Earth.