So apparently Dragon Kick spam Monk rotation is a thing and it's disgusting

[Aikaal]

Video proof

FFlogs from the video

Actually xivanalysis

I want to say, I'm not a main monk, I didn't level this job to 90 but it seems the dev team missed out on this. From what I can see, you basically just keep Twin Snake + Demolish up.

You completely ignore Snap Punch (250/310 flank potency) and True Strike (300 potency) and you simply spam Dragon Kick (320 potency). When TS is about to run out, you refresh TS + Demolish and you Bootshine because it is a guaranteed crit on 310 potency.

Essentially, you do SP + TS only to get that guaranteed crit. That said, you risk missing that flank positional. So the Dragon Kick spam version is just a brain dead rotation that relies on crit RNG and it seems pretty potent.

I do not believe this should exist and this is a pretty insane miss on the dev team. That said, I know a lot of people question how the game is currently balanced (myself included being a main caster player)

*edits* By the way, obligatory comment at how melees albsolutely need to do better DPS than casters and ranged phys because they are harder. Guess they can just spam Dragon Kick and it's hard.

[SpeckledBurd]

This obviously seems totally unintended, in much the same way as the Black Mage Paradox Rotation thing was. But the logic isn't of it isn't that high of a leap from Monk's strongest skills being its Opo-Opo form skills and Dragon Kick being Monk's highest non-DoT weaponskill. Supposedly there's some weird stuff you need to do during RoF windows and it isn't even as straightforward as just taking the guaranteed bootshine after the Demolish, but the fact that it can even be comparable is a big oversight.

Hopefully the devs take note of this sooner rather than later so they can delete it in 6.1, because this is stupid.

[Aikaal]

I do think it's not the intention like Paradox Mage. However, I'm concerned because SE did not nerf Paradox Mage; the buffed the hell out of Fire IV to discourage Paradox Mage.

I personally hope the do something to just balance and remove the DK rotation and not just buff Monk. Because Monk doesn't need it.

[HyperiusUltima]

So what you're saying is basically you replace all your attacks with DK until you need it after Burst...that doesn't sound right.

You're essentially doing 4 Dragon Kicks before you refresh Twin, and 5 before you refresh Demolish.

You also are losing out on potency from a 2nd Bootshine in the rotation, since the only time you ever Bootshine is after Demolish using your logic. I did some math and you're basically losing out on a large chunk of potency every 9 GCDs(200 Pot).

While it may be ok on paper and in logs, it's not going to help you do better in Savage when you're losing overall 1000+ potency over the course of a fight mainly because you're missing out on a second Bootshine Crit each time that outweighs spamming DK. If you're missing Flank positionals, then practice both with mechanics and your tank in a dungeon.

[baklava151]

"I fear not the man who has practiced 10,000 kicks once, but I fear the man who has practiced one kick 10,000 times"

[Aikaal]

So what you're saying is basically you replace all your attacks with DK until you need it after Burst...that doesn't sound right.

You're essentially doing 4 Dragon Kicks before you refresh Twin, and 5 before you refresh Demolish.

You also are losing out on potency from a 2nd Bootshine in the rotation, since the only time you ever Bootshine is after Demolish using your logic. I did some math and you're basically losing out on a large chunk of potency every 9 GCDs(200 Pot).

While it may be ok on paper and in logs, it's not going to help you do better in Savage when you're losing overall 1000+ potency over the course of a fight mainly because you're missing out on a second Bootshine Crit each time that outweighs spamming DK. If you're missing Flank positionals, then practice both with mechanics and your tank in a dungeon.

I'm not saying it's better but I will say the dude got a pink 99th percentile log by doing just that. Because you will automatically crit less with dragon kick spam so you will TFC less which is a significant loss. But... you basically remove a crap ton of positionals and you over-simplify the rotation by losing some damage that can still pink log. That's just the same scenario as Paradox Mage rotation.

[SpeckledBurd]

I'm not saying it's better but I will say the dude got a pink 99th percentile log by doing just that. Because you will automatically crit less with dragon kick spam so you will TFC less which is a significant loss. But... you basically remove a crap ton of positionals and you over-simplify the rotation by losing some damage that can still pink log. That's just the same scenario as Paradox Mage rotation.

It actually doesn't lose any positionals at all other than some Snap Punch's because they removed the non Demolish/Snap Punch positionals.

I'm assuming the only reason this works is that Dragon Kick has higher potency (320) than a non-crit bootshine (310), True Strike (300), and Snap Punch (310 from Flank), so by just replacing all of them with DK spam you gain enough potency compared to what you're losing by having marginally higher potency (which gets compounded by Dragon Kick still having the potential to crit and exponential crit scaling). There's also more going on with it than just spamming DK, there's some situations where they do Bootshine following a Demolish Refresh and some where they don't, plus they have very nonstandard Riddle of Fire windows.

Fixing this without buffing Monk should be pretty simple as well, just remove a handful of potency from Dragonkick so it's no longer above the average Weaponskill potency and put it on True Strike/Bootshine since as designed you'll only be using those every half rotation so you're still incentivized to alternate between the two.

[Mikey_R]

So what you're saying is basically you replace all your attacks with DK until you need it after Burst...that doesn't sound right.

You're essentially doing 4 Dragon Kicks before you refresh Twin, and 5 before you refresh Demolish.

You also are losing out on potency from a 2nd Bootshine in the rotation, since the only time you ever Bootshine is after Demolish using your logic. I did some math and you're basically losing out on a large chunk of potency every 9 GCDs(200 Pot).

While it may be ok on paper and in logs, it's not going to help you do better in Savage when you're losing overall 1000+ potency over the course of a fight mainly because you're missing out on a second Bootshine Crit each time that outweighs spamming DK. If you're missing Flank positionals, then practice both with mechanics and your tank in a dungeon.

I don't know how you done your maths, however, doing the standard rotation is a total of 6569 potency over 18 GCDs (Crit is 1.5 multiplier adding in 1/5th TFC potency for a total of 533 for Bootshine), which gives a 364.9 potency average per GCD, doing the DK rotation (taking Twin > Demo > Boot > DK x4) you do 2573 potency over 7 GCDs which is 367.6 potency average per GCD (this also loses out on one tick of demolish potency), Twin Snakes buff was not taken into account as it would not alter which one does more potency.

By taking these values and using the parse, work out how many GCDs (regardless of what they were) were used over the fight (249) and add in the twin snakes buff, then, over those 249 GCDs, the DK combo would come out at ~752 potency above the standard rotation. This obviously doesn't take into account buffs like Riddle of Fire/Brotherhood or the perfect balance windows, which would cause this difference to go down, however, it is still an extra Elixir Field worth of potency gained.

[HyperiusUltima]

I don't know how you done your maths, however, doing the standard rotation is a total of 6569 potency over 18 GCDs (Crit is 1.5 multiplier adding in 1/5th TFC potency for a total of 533 for Bootshine), which gives a 364.9 potency average per GCD, doing the DK rotation (taking Twin > Demo > Boot > DK x4) you do 2573 potency over 7 GCDs which is 367.6 potency average per GCD (this also loses out on one tick of demolish potency), Twin Snakes buff was not taken into account as it would not alter which one does more potency.

By taking these values and using the parse, work out how many GCDs (regardless of what they were) were used over the fight (249) and add in the twin snakes buff, then, over those 249 GCDs, the DK combo would come out at ~752 potency above the standard rotation. This obviously doesn't take into account buffs like Riddle of Fire/Brotherhood or the perfect balance windows, which would cause this difference to go down, however, it is still an extra Elixir Field worth of potency gained.

I'd like to see that comparison with buffs using both rotations in the sims. Really makes me wonder now if they accidentally busted MNK's DK. If they did, all they'd have to do is just put it on Snap and it'd be fine.

[AziraSyuren]

Hahahahaha what the fuck is going on here

God bless Endwalker for making meme rotations viable. What's next? Uncomboed enchanted Redoublement? Skipping job quests becoming a potential DPS gain (or at least neutral)? Single target overpower being part of the optimal WAR opener? -16s No Mercy?

Those last two are particularly likely if we get any cursed alignment fights.