MNK and DRG: How are they?

[wereotter]

Good thing theres more than 1 cross hotbar

It's the only DPS job I have to do this on, which implies on its own that the job has too many buttons. Flipping through that many hotbars just isn't something that I want to do, since I also set up a hotbar on every job for AOE rotation skills.

[ZiraZ]

It's the only DPS job I have to do this on, which implies on its own that the job has too many buttons. Flipping through that many hotbars just isn't something that I want to do, since I also set up a hotbar on every job for AOE rotation skills.

and not for NIN or MNK?
where do you hide all the mudras and raijus

[Sparkthor]

My main complain about dragoon is it's like they got two differents rotation with no interaction between them :
- the GCD rotation of 10 weaponskills, 3 in aoe with Wyrmwind thrust addition in EW
- The Jump/Geirgoskul one with Life of the dragon

Also Life of the Dragon feel boring now compared to Reaper's Enshroud, and without copycat it, I think to have a shorter Life of Dragon which change our GCD would be nice (and would be a nice opportunity to have some iconic weapons skills like Ala Morn)

What i would think to be nice :
- Keep the gcd rotation as it is.
- Tide together Spine and Dragon Dive, on 60s cd. Keep jump as it is, maybe put Mirage Dive as a weaker and earlier Wyrmwind thrust
- Keep lance charge, but fuse Battle Litany and Dragon Sight to a more generic party boost -> Something like +10% dommage/crit for self and +5% dommage/crit for party, last 20s (to mimic Lance charge duration), to prevent macro use.
- Having Geirgoskul tide with F&C and Wheeling Thrust -> Like +10 on a bar with Geirgoskul cost 50. Using Geirgoskul would give eyes for Life of the dragon.
- Life of the dragon is now a buff which will let you use specific abilities :
-> A combo : Empowered true/vorpal/full thrust, Drachenlance and Ala Morn as F&C and Wheeling thrust replacement
-> 2 uses of nastrond
-> Stardiver as a finishing weaponskill.
- A tool to have access to Life of the dragon on the opener, like a trait on DragonSight.

This is something i would like to see.

[wereotter]

and not for NIN or MNK?
where do you hide all the mudras and raijus

Monk's core single target rotation needs 14 hotbar slots, cross hotbar is 16 so you have room for all your skills you will be using on a regular basis plus two more. Situational skills I put on the extended crossbar since I don't need to monitor the cooldown on them. Ninja's core rotation is 17 skills, and I get around this by including Meisui on the extended hotbar since it's always used in conjunction with the two minute burst window you can track the timer on with Mug/Ten-Chi-Jin. Plus you don't need to put both forked and fleeting raiju on your main group of skills since you're pretty much always using fleeting raiju. There's rarely a time you're in the middle of your burst phase and need to disengage then use the gap closing aspect of forked raiju to get back into range, but I just have it sitting on the extended cross hotbar for the never times I've needed to do this.

Dragoon on the other hand has its weave skills you have to monitor, damage increasing cooldowns, and core rotation of skills at 18 moves. I've yet to find a hotbar setup for the job that lets me easily access all the job's moveset and track the cooldowns I need to use all on one cross hotbar. The job doesn't need a huge skill purge, but could use 2 or 3 skills either trimmed out or merged into the same button, or even some of the skills changed from damage dealing to pure movement, like if Spineshatter Dive had it's damage moved onto other skills and was purely a gap closing skill.

[ZiraZ]

Monk's core single target rotation needs 14 hotbar slots, cross hotbar is 16 so you have room for all your skills you will be using on a regular basis plus two more. Situational skills I put on the extended crossbar since I don't need to monitor the cooldown on them. Ninja's core rotation is 17 skills, and I get around this by including Meisui on the extended hotbar since it's always used in conjunction with the two minute burst window you can track the timer on with Mug/Ten-Chi-Jin. Plus you don't need to put both forked and fleeting raiju on your main group of skills since you're pretty much always using fleeting raiju. There's rarely a time you're in the middle of your burst phase and need to disengage then use the gap closing aspect of forked raiju to get back into range, but I just have it sitting on the extended cross hotbar for the never times I've needed to do this.

Dragoon on the other hand has its weave skills you have to monitor, damage increasing cooldowns, and core rotation of skills at 18 moves. I've yet to find a hotbar setup for the job that lets me easily access all the job's moveset and track the cooldowns I need to use all on one cross hotbar. The job doesn't need a huge skill purge, but could use 2 or 3 skills either trimmed out or merged into the same button, or even some of the skills changed from damage dealing to pure movement, like if Spineshatter Dive had it's damage moved onto other skills and was purely a gap closing skill.

So make a separate bar just to track cooldows, can controllers not do that? although you don't really need to, you always know when stuff is coming back just by monitoring a single 30, 60 and 120 second ability, I never look at my SSD, Sight or DFD cooldown, I know I'm getting both SSD and DFD for every 2mins burst which always happens when Litany comes up, and Litany means Sight too and a Life Surge at least. Really the only cooldowns I'm staring at are GsK and HJ.

I don't see how cooldown tracking has anything to do with button bloat, for me button bloat is extra abilities that need to be pressed for no reason, like when Minor Arcana was a separate button, HJ and MD being separate has a very important purpose, all the other jumps have a purpose for a job that has a oGCD heavy playstyle, if anything I think drg currently has the perfect amount of keys for a dps job.
If you made SSD a movement only ability the 2 min timers would feel very boring and not much would be gained, since you already don't really need to track it's cooldown.

[wereotter]

So make a separate bar just to track cooldows, can controllers not do that?

If we can, I've never seen the option. I'm not going to say 100% it doesn't exist as sometimes they add things in or they're there but burried... but I've been playing since 2013 on console and this is an option I've never found. You use the R1 button to cycle through the hotbars you've set, and you can double tap R2 and L2 to get the extended ones. Using cross hotbar, that's really it. There's no separate hotbar that just sits there to tell you when your skills are off cooldown. But even then, you're saying to do this because literally one DPS job needs it. And even then, you still have to fiddle with more hotbars to make the job work for its normal rotation than any other DPS job needs to do. That's the very definition of having too many buttons on the job

If you made SSD a movement only ability the 2 min timers would feel very boring and not much would be gained, since you already don't really need to track it's cooldown.

It's no different in this case than when they deleted shoulder tackle as a damage dealing skill on monk and made it into a skill with no damage explicitly for movement. Monk lost one of it's weavable damage skills, and the change is largely considered a massive positive. Giving melee jobs access to movement skills that don't have to be used for damage is, in my opinion, a good thing.

[Absurdity]

They fixed some things with monk, but the masterful blitz mechanic its now built around throws the entire rotation into chaos, so people generally do not stick with it. There are statistics backing what I'm saying as well.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wciTbFt0U6M&t=215s

If we go by that statistic in a vacuum then BLM is also a terribly designed job that desperately needs a rework.

As Xeno himself said in that video you use to prove your point, Monk is a well designed job and it performs well too. It just isn't very popular, it never has been, because it is not as flashy as other jobs and very punishing, just like Black Mage.


By that same statistic warrior would be one of the best designed jobs in the game and while I would absolutely disagree with that assessment as someone who has mained warrior for 6 years, my opinion is completely irrelevant in this case. The statistic isn't about how well designed a job is, it's a popularity chart.

Warrior is easy to pick up, easy to do well on, barely punishes you for mistakes and completely trivializes lower end content, so obviously it's going to be a popular pick for the average player.

[VentVanitas]

There are many things about MNK that I do not consider designed well and I don't think it is helpful for anyone to dismiss potential discussion. Yes, the popularity of a job does not represent its quality- but there is merit in understanding why MNK is played so little compared to its DPS brothers and it's not as simple as chalking it up to Monk being punishing (which is not true anymore) or being "hard to play" (a subjective metric). Do not get me wrong though, I do not share Fendred's rather surface level and unhelpful opinion of "no one plays Monk therefore rework it."

[AlgernonBlackwood]

There are many things about MNK that I do not consider designed well and I don't think it is helpful for anyone to dismiss potential discussion. Yes, the popularity of a job does not represent its quality- but there is merit in understanding why MNK is played so little compared to its DPS brothers and it's not as simple as chalking it up to Monk being punishing (which is not true anymore) or being "hard to play" (a subjective metric). Do not get me wrong though, I do not share Fendred's rather surface level and unhelpful opinion of "no one plays Monk therefore rework it."

For a start, it would be nice if the job was actually playable without third party mods. It's the job I find the most fun, but I've all but given up on raiding with it due to the fact that it forces double weaves on you despite being literally incapable of accommodating them when playing on console.

I've tried everything I can think of to make it work, but you just can't get around the windows where you need to hit both RoF and PB without clipping, drifting RoF, or rearranging your entire rotation to avoid these windows.

edit: actually, I guess delaying your PB until after your Raptor works okay. You still have time to fit everything into RoF. It just feels kind of bad.