RIP MNK 1.x - 5.x

[Mikey_R]

"The gameplay element of stacking Greased Lightning will be done away with

Take the whole thing as it is. The GAMEPLAY element of stacking GL is gone. The gameplay element of stacking GL is gone and has been gone for a while, turned into a trait, that is passive and arguably, not a gameplay element.

[MicahZerrshia]

Honestly if they didn't make the changes to smn they did, changes I have wanted since 2.0 when I first picked smn up due to having all other jobs capped in 1.x and subsequently fell in love with, I would 100% be giving monk an actual shot with these changes, up until now I barely did enough to level cap it, in fact in shb I took it from 70-80 via pixie tribe quests alone.

It sounds like its going to make the job so much more interesting than, gotta get behind them, now to the left, go back again, now to the right, oh crud the tank is spinning everything and my dps is going into the toilet! Help me Cid!

[Anahlise_Auhn_Giinslai]

Saw that on the other thread, good to know.

Still feels confusing that they would mention it in the way they did. "The gameplay element of stacking Greased Lightning will be done away with - So to compensate for that Chakras will be unlocked at a lower level." as if it was still there. Miscommunication I suppose.

It also makes no sense to me... My best guess is perhaps the Greased Lightning I-III traits get the delete, and we have Greased Lightning IV from the start, or some thing...

As for Chakra, being unlocked at Lv54, I wonder just how much lower is lower...

Also, a bit of a mean joke, a thing that I did notice. EndWalker Monk is more or less just ARR Monk Mark (VI? ARR, HW, SB, ShB, 5.4, now 6.0), at this point... Chakra brought below Lv50?, Blitz at Lv50?,(unless Perfect Balance is no longer a Lv50 action) from a re-design of Perfect Balance...
Monk is still ARR Monk, just ARR Monk Mark (how-ever many times it has had a rework), and I dare say one of the best versions of ARR Monk, if we compare this new version of ARR Monk to previous ARR Monk versions.

[Morzy]

As long as the potency isn't massively out of place elsewhere, 120 second Brotherhood is actually an improvement. One of the issues with Brotherhood at a top end is that a 90 second burst window doesn't align with most raidbuffs since they're in 1 or 2 minute increments. This lets Monk work better with other jobs.

Riddle of Wind looks like a replacement for something at a lower level since they've gutted a decent amount of the kit at lower level to rework it. There's a possibility that the "Fists of..." still exist at lower level, but now as buffs and they get upgraded to the Riddles at later levels, however that's just speculation on my part and it could just be a replacement for something that's completely gone.

As for replacing Arm of the Destroyer with an upgrade... well they sometimes do that to throw in a trait. Since Monk seemingly has a lot more in store than the standard 80-90 3 skills and 2 traits I'm willing to look past a changed animation. Plus it's massively better than the last time they did this with Tackle Mastery which didn't even change the animation.

Overall I'm still just waiting for the liveletter. Compared to Shadowbringers/Stormblood what they've showed is really promising, there's no major red flags that I can see, and they've given us decent explanations of what's going on with nearly everything but Anatman. I'll save flipping out until then.

I agree. It has been a long road to promising Monk changes. I have seen you post about Monk over the years, and it is nice to be hopeful with you.

[MrSmiley]

The skill replacing arm of the destroyer looks cool (though I liked arm too) but... omg rockbreaker looks SO bad. I am actually kind of annoyed the first two aoes look so cool then our finisher is that derpy looking flash.

[IruruCece]

Sounds like you re advocating purely from the PoV of endgame content

This isn't really from a purely endgame perspective, and more from a "wanting to be engaged by the game" perspective. Positionals, in addition to the original GL system, is why I mained monk for two expansions. No other job felt the way monk did to me. I liked being on the move constantly, it encouraged aggressive play in a way that literally no other DPS does. That, and I can't stand jobs where I just stand and deliver.

Short of bosses putting up AoEs, or mechanics demanding you move out of melee range, or the aforementioned tank griefing, missing positionals is your fault. If you don't want to miss them, get better at them. Recognize there are times where you can't hit them no matter what, but that when you can, you should. That's what makes the difference between average monks and the ones who perform better than the rest of us.

From my perspective, you're advocating from a perspective of not wanting to actually put in the effort that players better than us do, while still wantiong to be rewarded just the same, and that's pretty terrible for any game, not just this one. SE spent literally years doing that for this and other jobs and none of it has actually worked anyway, while also adding onto the problems that multiple jobs still face going into Endwalker.

Also: if you have a tank that is new, explain to them how to do something if they're making mistakes that affect you as well. If you're not helping players when they make serious mistakes, especially in a raid setting, you might be content to just let them keep screwing over other DPS in the raid, but other players won't be. It also makes the concern you showed earlier for tanks spinning mobs endlessly feel pretty hollow. Why even bring it up? Is it or is not an actual problem? There are still going to be positionals in EW, and there will still be newbie or griefing tanks spinning bosses.

One of those you can correct. The other, you report and move on.

[wereotter]

Edit: Just went to do a rotation without using the True Strike and Twin Snake positionals, and guess what? Absolutely makes ZERO difference. Because you will still do positionals for two of your abilities every 3 hit combo, you are mostly already in the correct position for them anyway. The change makes absolutely no difference to anything. If you like the positionals, breathe. Nothing really changed. If you don't like the positionals, suffer, because nothing really changed.

Did you pay attention at all to the discussion regarding the removal of the positional requirements on those two skills? They explicitly stated that the reason they were removed was so that you can use them during perfect balance, getting your blitz charged up without having to dance back and forth between every skill. They weren't removed for ease of play.

The new dash skill is 100% welcome to me. I didn't like using my only mobility option for damage, so I appreciate that they gave it a damage-less gapcloser to cement it as the quick footed fighter.

I may be in the minority here, but I have a feeling this will be a skill I almost never use. I can see it being very handy for PC players not using a controller, but the process of targeting a party member to teleport was already not great for controller on black mage, and if the point to use it is to greed more up time, the process of targeting a party member from the list on the controller, then executing the skill will largely negate any benefit it might have had. I'll still work as a gap closer, but that's about it.

[Shurrikhan]

Did you pay attention at all to the discussion regarding the removal of the positional requirements on those two skills? They explicitly stated that the reason they were removed was so that you can use them during perfect balance, getting your blitz charged up without having to dance back and forth between every skill. They weren't removed for ease of play.

A change made so that we can act "without having to dance back and forth between every skill" is not a change made for ease of play? Really?

We already did that with every form of Perfect Balance to date, including under tighter and more punishing constraints, and we did just fine. And it's not as if those two skills lost their positionals only during Perfect Balance; they're just plain gone.

Personally, I'm fine with True Strike losing its positional. Losing Twin, too, seems a bit overkill, but whatever. But let's not pretend that intent remotely matters to any iteration of job design save in that it may accelerate the next iteration. Whether they wanted this to somehow only be used for PB or not is irrelevant when their change was to remove it at all times, not just during PB.

I may be in the minority here, but I have a feeling this will be a skill I almost never use. I can see it being very handy for PC players not using a controller, but the process of targeting a party member to teleport was already not great for controller on black mage, and if the point to use it is to greed more up time, the process of targeting a party member from the list on the controller, then executing the skill will largely negate any benefit it might have had. I'll still work as a gap closer, but that's about it.

On this, agreed. I would have preferred instead for my Tackle to become a backstep when (well) within melee range. Simpler, cleaner, more intuitive.

[wereotter]

A change made so that we can act "without having to dance back and forth between every skill" is not a change made for ease of play? Really?

We already did that with every form of Perfect Balance to date, including under tighter and more punishing constraints, and we did just fine. And it's not as if those two skills lost their positionals only during Perfect Balance; they're just plain gone.

Personally, I'm fine with True Strike losing its positional. Losing Twin, too, seems a bit overkill, but whatever. But let's not pretend that intent remotely matters to any iteration of job design save in that it may accelerate the next iteration. Whether they wanted this to somehow only be used for PB or not is irrelevant when their change was to remove it at all times, not just during PB.

Poorly worded I'll admit... but as it is now I mainly see people using True North in conjuction with the Perfect Balance burst.

My point was the removal seems to be to allow ease of use of blitzes even if it does nothing to change the positions we go to in the normal combo. It may just be muscle memory, but I can't see myself treating them as though they had no positional outside of blitzing since you still have the same requirements on the other four moves. Movement won't be terribly impacted by their loss. So when he complained that the removal of the positional changed nothing when he tested it as-is on a striking dummy, that to me seems like removing two without really changing anything about the core rotation of the job.

[Shurrikhan]

My point was the removal seems to be to allow ease of use of blitzes even if it does nothing to change the positions we go to in the normal combo. It may just be muscle memory, but I can't see myself treating them as though they had no positional outside of blitzing since you still have the same requirements on the other four moves.

I mean it's literally a free GCD per three-form-cycle by which to move from back to flank. If you used Boot, you've got an extra GCD to get in place for Snap. If you used Dragon, you've got an extra GCD to get in place for Demo. In certain rotations where it'd time out about the same anyways, it might not amount to much, but no positionals on ANY Raptor Form skill is still... pretty significant.

...I guess my main peeve with this change is that it doesn't fix the lead issue in that unlike in ToD and Fracture a la ARR/HW, these non-positionals aren't also Any-Form and therefore the advantage they grant is largely subject to luck of timing. If we wanted to actually fix the issue, the obvious solution would have been to give a formless short CD (probably with a couple charges) on a single GCD (unlike SSS) by which to use the given GCD and/or modulate the length of any rotational string or to simply offer a "safety" mechanic, such as building stacks over time by which our positionals would count as having hit successfully even if they don't (consuming that stack).