What is the purpose of Anatman?

[Navnav]

As always in this game, i'm sure someone will tell me I'm missing the 'Big Brained' picture on this one, but what is the point of Anatman?
Monks have form shift, so i can just wait in a transition phase and press form shift before charging over to boss. Even better I can get laeden fist up, then get my twin snakes buff then follow up with my sure to be expired by then DoT.

Sooooooo, what is Anatman for?

[Brandedblade]

At this point it's a skill that's stuck in an awkward spot that will hopefully be pruned or massively reworked in EW. but it's supposed to be for keeping you from having to let your mechanics drop whenever you're unable to hit a boss.

[wereotter]

You use it to keep the twin snakes buff up.

Yes, you can formshift when you have to disengage, but also if you have to disengage and stack or something like that, you might as well use it. It's the difference of hitting a move to gain the damage up buff while it's not in effect, and hitting the skill with the damage up already in effect. It's minor, but it is still more damage.

I use it, as an example, in Matoya's Relict in the second boss fight while the party is on the cloud after killing the adds and waiting for the attack to go off (after doing all my meditates)

[Eclipse12187]

In its first iteration, it was ogcd used to build and maintain your greased lightning. SE didn’t like how the players were using it and changed it to be on the gcd. Following the changes to monk and removal of the greased lightning duration anatman only maintains your twin snakes buff. So no you’re not missing anything with anatman it’s just pretty useless as it is.

[SpeckledBurd]

It was originally a poorly conceived skill that was designed to upkeep and build Greased Lightning. Its requirements to actually work were so narrow that it was useless for its intended purpose and it in conjunction with the other questionable Monk changes basically broke the flow of the job for most of the expansion.

After they killed Greased Lightning it became the weird vestigial skill it is now, which is to save Twin Snakes but only after you've Formshifted for Formless Fist and capped Chakra with Meditation. It doesn't justify having a slot on your bar.

It's pretty questionable if there's anything they could do to salvage it in the future either since the typical point of a channeled skill like that is to build Gauge which Monk already has in Meditation. Hopefully it just gets deleted and turned into an Emote.

[wereotter]

After they killed Greased Lightning it became the weird vestigial skill it is now, which is to save Twin Snakes but only after you've Formshifted for Formless Fist and capped Chakra with Meditation. It doesn't justify having a slot on your bar.

Mild disagree here. Only in that in my experience if you have to disengage and have enough time to meditate and anatman, you can typically form shift on your way back to the boss rather than before popping anatman, which does give it a little more use. Though beyond that, yes. It was a niche skill to start with and it still is.

[Navnav]

So basically it serves absolutely no purpose apart making me feel like i am doing extra dps when in fact it's so negligeable it borders on dps loss. Gotcha, ignore the ability as form shift exists.

Or am i still being small brained?

[wereotter]

So basically it serves absolutely no purpose apart making me feel like i am doing extra dps when in fact it's so negligeable it borders on dps loss. Gotcha, ignore the ability as form shift exists.

Or am i still being small brained?

It's a minor DPS gain, not just a feel like you're doing more damage.

Twin Snakes gives you a damage increase on all your GCD moves and auto attacks of 10% so letting that fall off means you're doing 10% less damage until you can reapply it. If you let it drop off and use formshift you will still do less damage on the move that reapplies it (and if you decide to start in Opo Opo form to get a leaden fist or critical bootshine, then you're doing less damage on two GCDs. It's actual uses are few and far between, but it does help you maintain damage when you do use it.

[Mikey_R]

It's always been pretty much useless and now it is even more useless, you can ignore it.

[Sqwall]

All of the answers to your question are correct.

Also FYI.

The threads from all the monk mains have an insane amount of knowledge that should be acknowledged. I’m by no means an expert. But I have mained monk since ARR, and have seen it’s decent into what it ultimately became in shadowbringers. I will never forget the gigantic let down of each skill given to me through leveling. And the utter disappointment of my favorite class destroyed to a party trick.

When others that don’t know how far monk has come and the 40 miles of bad road we have dealt with. I for one am still hopeful no matter what the outcome is, because I know it HAS to be better then what we were getting for 6+ years.

Do yourself a favor and look up “monk rework” in the thread search. Months of reading material and you’ll understand why so many people are defensive of the job going in the wrong direction.