Endwalker Monks: The good, the bad, and the ugly Pt. 1

[Ghroel]

Hi everyone, this is my very first post on the forums so I'm going to start off by giving context about myself as a player and then jump into the meat and potatoes of this post.

I started FF14 around patch 4.4 with the sole purpose of playing a monk; I was really in the mood to play one in DnD and decided to scratch that itch in game. I was so ready to make a monk that my characters last name is Hammerfist. I fell in love with the unique style of positionals and the greased lightning mechanic; and I never thought about changing my main class...until now.

I'm not going to lie, when I first picked up Endwalker monk I said on my stream "this feels amazing and, monk is possibly, S tier dps again!". I spent the first two hours of my expansion experience at the FC training dummy relearning rotations and trying to learn the ins and outs of masterful blitz. Again, I will admit I was enjoying it...there's only one thing that deceived me at the time; I had a 1.92 GCD due to having full cryptlurker+535 relic weapon. This is where things start to get harry.

At the end of ShB Monk BiS GCD was around 1.96 so we could keep up pretty much everything with the 2 GCD down time of our TS+Demolish. Right now, however, we need to be at a minimum of 1.94 GCD to keep that up. I give to you this opener currently in testing on the balance discord for our lunar+solar chakra blitz opener https://i.imgur.com/1M5DHAu.png as you can see under the maintain, there's a bit of an issue. In an effort to potentially fix the 2 GCD downtime of our TW+Demolition we now need faster speeds to push and to mess our rotation with a TS>DK>Demolish combo. To put it into perspective for, say, dragoon players; that combo I just described would be the equivalent of you doing a Vorpal thrust>True Thrust>Full Thrust or for GNB players: Brutal Shell>Keen Edge>Solid Barrel. It's Antithetical to all muscle memory for all melee classes that it's a step backwards.

This now gets into another issue of mine with Masterful Blitz, The timer to use the skill. When you build up the 3 chakra used for Masterful Blitz, you then have a 20 second timer to use the skill or lose it. Doesn't sound bad on the surface until it's put into practice. I,first, want to make clear I'm not talking about the Perfect balance 20 second timer, I'm talking about after you've qued up your Masterful Blitz ability Elixir Field/Rising Phoenix/Celestial Revolution/Phantom Rush). Fights, such as, Rofocale, for example, have sections where the boss disappears and cannot be targeted/hit. If I end up using PB before a mechanic like Rofocales happens and I manage to get off my 3 GCD's before Masterful Blitz; I end up with a 20 second timer of a use it or lose it. Even if I use it I don't get the Light or Dark Nadi because it requires you to hit something and do damage. Why does this have a timer and punishes players? This is reminiscent of the Greased Lightning issue where cutscenes in fights would cause us to lose Greased Lightning (looking at you Eden's Gate: Resurrection). It's needlessly punishing.

[Ghroel]

This all stems from one thing. Masterful Blitz is a GCD. For a skill that has 2 skills that were formerly on oGCD (Elixir Field and Tornado Kick) and uses another skill as a resource to activate (Perfect Balance); I can see absolutely zero reason as to why Masterful Blitz in on GCD as opposed to an oGCD similar to The Forbidden Chakra with a 1 second recast. As Masterful Blitz stands, there's a constant clipping issue with Demolish. Every time a stack of PB comes up and you use it you either, end up clipping Demolish with 2-3 seconds to spare; or, have demolish go into down time. The current argument I can hear people say is "Just hold your Perfect Balance Charges for times when you don't clip or have downtime." Which my counter argument is, "Why are two of my old oGCD's on the GCD and why is a skill that's supposed to be the central crux of monk game play now not synergizing with the other mechanics of monk?"

That's not to say that everything is bad though. The new aoe rotation using Masterful Blitz is absolutely amazing. Brotherhoods change at lvl 88 granting 100% Chakra unlock upon your weaponskills has solved one of the main issues of inconsistency with the skill. Masterful Blitz, itself, is a step in the right direction. It just has the major flaws in your single target rotation as stated above which I will get into the fix now.

So, how to fix Masterful Blitz's issues? Put is on the oGCD on a 1 second recast timer similar to Meditate/TFC. Think about it, You can't exactly spam the ability you need to use Perfect Balance (which is a 2 charge 40 second refresh timer), 3 GCD's to even use the qued Masterful Blitz skill, and you need 3 charges of Perfect Balance to even get off your 1000 Potency nuke. So essntially you have to wait about 5 seconds between each Masterful Blitz use, 40 seconds at the start to get off Tornado Kick/Phantom Rush; what justification does it have to be on GCD other than potential design limitations in the programming? If it's a balancing issue then you can always change potency numbers. It just baffles me that the main mechanic of monk is on the GCD and clips into the delicate rotational balance needed to upkeep our timers. As for the issue of Nadi skills, have them be permanently qued up skills for a one time use that you can hold and you fix that issue.

I'm sorry if this was a long winded indepth rant about some of the fundamental issues plaguing monk right now; but, I felt it was important to bring to light these issues and start a discussion.

[VentVanitas]

Making Blitz an oGCD won't fix anything, and suggesting that change just for TS/Demo uptime seems gratuitous. It's really nowhere near as big of a deal as you think it is.

[BucklesTrespen]

Making Blitz an oGCD won't fix anything, and suggesting that change just for TS/Demo uptime seems gratuitous. It's really nowhere near as big of a deal as you think it is.

Agree. Also making it OGCD will mean we never see Phantom Rush animation play out and I need my Phantom Rush Animation

[Ransu]

Blitz being in the GCD is fine. The main problem imo is PB is too long of a CD.

[Ghroel]

Making Blitz an oGCD won't fix anything, and suggesting that change just for TS/Demo uptime seems gratuitous. It's really nowhere near as big of a deal as you think it is.

let me rephrase the issue than. Monk's whole concept has been this 1-2-3, 4-5-6 rotation. By having Blitz be on GCD it interrupts that flow by having a sometimes "and 7" on a 40s cd that begins to desync that primary combo system. Their initial fix to this was to give a free formless shift but that doesn't stop the GCD timer. By making it oGCD that solves that issue entirely. Yes i haven't addressed the issue of thing such as BH is still a 120s CD, why would you choose BH over TA? That's a discussion done to absolute death and me adding to that means absolutely nothing. As for the issue of not having dots/a 15% damage buff dropping off or a dot clipping more often seems counter intuitive to a small grievance people were having with ShB monk. That being we would have the two drop off during opener/burst rotations only to immediately bring them back up after two GCD's. There was never a consistent clipping nor buff down time issue whcih also bring about questions during rotation such as "Do I clip my RoF demo to keep my dot up or do I let it rollover and how long will it be till I get it back up?". When the solution to the problem is so close to being fixed on the long list of things that plague monk, you might as well start in the place where you can just flip a switch. Again, does this fix the BH vs. TA issue? No, of course not (to bring a much bigger issue into the discussion for a brief moment). But they did fix the issue of BH being inconsistent because of party composition by giving us imp. BH at lvl 88. Again, that's a step in the right direction but it isn't enough in the similar vain that MB is a step in the right direction but there's still something slightly missing to push it to the point that fixes an issue, albeit one that wasn't exactly a massive issue (in fact I would argue it was a non-issue during ShB), that has, now, been exacerbated to a degree. The only other solution to the issue is stats which becomes a slippery slope of making everything quicker which I don't think anyone wants especially after the current stat squish.

[TheCurls]

I’m no pro or anything but you say it’s 1-2-3 and 4-5-6 and sometimes 7 with Blitz.

Wouldn’t it end up being 7-2-3 with Blitz so it lines up just the same?

[waterboytkd]

To me, it sounds like the problem is with Demolish being a DoT that can only be used on a rotation.

Why not remove the DoT from Demolish, give it some other perk, and then change Six-Sided Star to:
- have a normal recast timer
- do much less damage
- and have the DoT

Since SSS doesn't interrupt our combos, we could simply weave it wherever it needs to be to maintain uptime on the DoT without clipping.

As for the extra perk on Demolish, I have no idea atm.

But this cleans up any DoT clipping or dropping, relaxes the rigid GCD windows monks want, and makes SSS actually useful, instead of suuuuuuper niche.