MONK is to confusing / annoying of a class now

[Shurrikhan]

My confusion about the new Perfect Balance system is that it seems to fly in the face of the point of the ability. Perfect Balance removes the form requirements from abilities, which is cool. But the entire point of that before was to use a bunch of your highest damage abilities (Dragon Kick into Bootshine) without having to go through the full rotation to do them. Except now the Beast Chakra system seems to be suggesting that 2 out of 3 usages should use an ability from each form. Which means you pop Perfect Balance and then...use your rotation exactly like normal.

Not... quite, unless your rotational string would already have been perfected (e.g., Twin Snakes and Demolish are each refreshed only just before they'd drop -- ideally such that Twin is snapshotted onto the animation and you briefly see the buff disappear before reappearing and Demolish is as late towards the next global DoT tick as possible).

In practice, it will often work out that way depending on your opener, but you'll still end up with an extra Opo-opo and a better optimized Twin and Demo from each Solar.

[Shurrikhan]

Blitz being a clunky, janky, turd on top of a now gutted monk is the biggest issue though. There are ways to fix it, but why adamantly defend the integrity of a mechanic that actively drags down the entire class like this?

I defend Blitz because it brings back the rotational string manipulation that I loved about ARR and HW Monk, but better and more integrally than those iterations did.

4.3 Monk is still my favorite iteration of the job, but 6.x is just some handful of minor changes short of surpassing it, imo, and despite my earlier reservations, I think that Blitz is honestly a better core mechanic even than speed manipulation under 4.3 Monk's TK rotations (and I was one of the few to adamantly defend that over Shadowbringers Monk precisely because it offered nuance in manipulating rotational strings -- via RoF and TK speed-drops -- just as Blitz does now). Blitz provides towards the very things that made our identity work so well in the past: optimizing rotation via rotational insertions of variable length.

Would I have kept Fists of X if they were actually made to do anything of note? Sure, at least if they provided a means of manipulating/optimizing our rotational strings.
Would I have kept GL? Only if it actually again provided that core Monk identity of manipulating/optimizing rotational strings and acted as a legitimate resource of sorts with commensurate available payoff (upon being spent) for its ramp-up, as it somewhat did via TK in 4.3 (and ToD and Fracture, instead, did in ARR and HW).
And given that Blitz already provides that and makes our rotational insertions more frequent and interesting through the revised PB, I'm in no rush to find a place for GL again despite having been a huge proponent for it in the past (when it actually did something through its contexts).

[Windwalker]

My confusion about the new Perfect Balance system is that it seems to fly in the face of the point of the ability. Perfect Balance removes the form requirements from abilities, which is cool. But the entire point of that before was to use a bunch of your highest damage abilities (Dragon Kick into Bootshine) without having to go through the full rotation to do them. Except now the Beast Chakra system seems to be suggesting that 2 out of 3 usages should use an ability from each form. Which means you pop Perfect Balance and then...use your rotation exactly like normal. Maybe you can skip two abilities (like being able to do Dragon Kick -> PB -> Bootshine -> raptor -> coeurl), but it still feels very weird for this cooldown to be saying "your next 3 abilities can be used regardless of form, but you should still cast them like you normally would, one from each form".

It also straight up baffles me that they left Anatman. That ability needs to be either completely removed or seriously reworked.

Yeah, i never really used Anatman, the only time i found it useful was when we still had greased lightning stacks, but now they are passive.

[GrizzlyTank]

Really don't see why positionals had to go.

And the damage of our rush is removed for some reason...

[Marxam]

The only annoying thing about MNK imo is the fact Thunderclap needs a target. It should work like dancer's dash where it just dashes forward if you have no target but if you have a target it dashes to them. Though personally I would prefer to have it work like DNC's dash as switching between targets on a controller is very tricky especially when you consider that you use the dash at the last minute. Unless you drop a gcd or take the hit it's near impossible to target a party member outside of a point blank aoe at the last second to maintain uptime.

[Vahenir]

It gets even worse in alliance raids as you need to target someone within your group or it wont work at all. Which just ends up making it mostly useless for evading stuff since most of the time it takes way too long to target the right player in your group when theres a mess of other players all over as well. So a change like that would be really nice.

[elizeugba]

why is the op still a pugilist this worries me

He probably doesn't want to post as their main character.

To OP: I started playing MNK at the last patch of ShB and now am leveling as monk too and I'm loving the changes. Even though I can't tell how it is going to be at the endgame, complaining that a job is bad because you have to re-learn it after major changes is a weak argument.

[Noraiga]

I don't know how people failed to use Thunderclap, to me it's an amazing skill more than our previous one...
I mean i get that we all angry about some change but don't spit in the soup, before SHB we had basically no tools to escape.

Maybe for ps4 controller it's hard to target ? Which i could definitely understand.
To have a simple dash would not fit at all the animation which mean to create an whole different animation for that, we have to compromise. <= EDIT : I'm not on smoke but... i was wrong, the animation actually can fit a simple dash, they certainly would remove the stack btw ! ( I'm still totally fine with the current dash )

[Shurrikhan]

Really don't see why positionals had to go.

And the damage of our rush is removed for some reason...

The first is certainly questionable, but the latter...?

The damage we used to get from our rush wasn't removed so much as just put into the rest of our kit, meaning that we're now free to use our gap-closer as a gap-closer instead of RoF padding AND we can now use it allies. Not a bad deal at all.

[Silver-Strider]

The first is certainly questionable, but the latter...?

The damage we used to get from our rush wasn't removed so much as just put into the rest of our kit, meaning that we're now free to use our gap-closer as a gap-closer instead of RoF padding AND we can now use it allies. Not a bad deal at all.

While true, it does mean that we have less oGCDs to weave into our rotation, which slows the feel of the class considerably. Throw in that we still have near useless skills like Anataman and it really feels like MNK changes were half baked at best.