A wordy observation of 6.X MNK

[VentVanitas]

With the announcement of Dawntrail as well as Monk not receiving any adjustments in patch 6.4, it is completely safe to assume that the job is going to remain untouched until 7.0, hence this thread. The point of the thread is more of a pulse-check to see what our grievances, hopes and dooms are going into the next expansion for Monk and a general vent post about my overall thoughts about the job rather than an in-depth analysis of its issues. So if you were expecting me to get into the nitty-gritty details then sorry lol.

Six Sided Star and other buttons

SSS has always been a strange skill. I'm actually fine with it being a situational tool rather than a main rotation button, so long as the niche it serves is substantial enough. However in EW, there have been a lot of factors contributing to its usage becoming scarcer. Thunderclap, the ridiculous striking dummy bosses, changes to MNK's rotation, clunk-ily coexisting with the job's other disconnect tools like Meditation, etc. Its main purpose more resembles old Tornado Kick (squeezing out damage before a boss vanishes/dies, though not to say it didn't always have this use even when TK existed), rather than the disconnect tool that I believe the dev team intended it to be. I am not asking for its deletion or for it to become a main rotation cooldown, I am however disappointed that it remains unchanged.

Not much to say about EW Riddle of Wind. It's just extra auto damage which I don't particularly find exciting. I'm pretty sure it only exists because people kept asking for Hundred Fists from XI. I would rather see it be reworked into a functionally different skill, preferably with a cooldown that isn't as long as 90s. My thoughts for Riddle of Earth are the same. It is way too easy to forget that these skills are even there.

Even when Greased Lightning existed, Anatman was still a joke and EW hasn't changed that sadly. If I have to be completely honest Monk does not need a channel ability at all, especially when so little fights give you opportunities to actually take advantage of it. I hate saying "just delete it" because SE loves deleting things and replacing what was lost with nothing at all (especially for MNK), but I struggle to think of what Anatman could even offer the job if it were to be changed. It's a glorified emote in its current state.

Thunderclap is one the best no strings attached additions Monk has received in a long time. The sheer amount of mobility you have on MNK now is unrivaled and you can get away with some utterly ridiculous things by abusing macros. I wish so many EW raids didn't have such stupidly large hitboxes on top of them rarely challenging melee uptime, because I want more fights to use this skill in. I do miss Shoulder Tackle (mainly the animation), but what Thunderclap offers more than makes up for it.

Blitz

Blitz is... fine, but it could be so much more. To give the dev team some credit, making use of MNK's individual forms and Perfect Balance was probably the most logical thing they could do for a Blitz mechanic and they handled that quite well if nothing else. However if you do not parse at a high level or participate in speedkilling then it is very lacking as a central job mechanic in my opinion. It is exclusively used inside burst windows, and the Blitz attacks themselves are just high potency skills and... that's it. Not much impact or relation to anything outside of Nadi which makes it feel too standard and boring to me (again, outside of speedkilling. I am aware how much the job changes in that scenario, but depth shouldn't be solely found at high levels of play).

Chakra

The big one. I will admit that if it wasn't so terrible, I'd be willing to tolerate the aforementioned issues I have with the job, because none of them are really that significant compared to Chakra. It is that much of a badly designed job gauge that anything that is related to it, be it loosely or directly is only affected negatively by it.

Firstly, crit procs. On paper, having a mechanic tied to a substat is neat, however the job makes no attempts to accommodate for its RNG nature. Despite being proc based, it does not allow any leniency unlike BRD's Perfect Pitch or DNC's Fan Dance. Meaning that if you successfully obtain a Forbidden Chakra, your first priority is to immediately use it or you are at risk of wasting a proc with your next GCD. Which further means that there is no real strategy or goal with Chakra. You pop it and move on, it's pure APM filler at its absolute worst.

Related to Chakra, is Brotherhood. The idea of rapidly gaining a resource and machine gun firing it off sounds cool, in practice however it is one of the biggest contributors to Monk being overall ping unfriendly. The rapid accumulation being tick based, as well as the self Chakra gain having a very strange delay to it means that the fate of your weave slots is left up to god while bursting. The aforementioned lack of leniency with Chakra and having to fire it off immediately exacerbates this issue even further. If you play at a high ping, you cannot play Monk without clipping unless you have third party plugins like Noclippy, which is against ToS.

They have managed to create a mechanic that feels unsatisfying and frustrating no matter what state it's in. In downtime it's thoughtless and infrequent, and in bursts it's too frequent and inflexible. I am not asking for it to be a copy of Kenki/Ninki, I do however, think that it's the biggest problem with MNK currently and it shouldn't be neglected for yet another expansion. Please for the love of Rhalgr, rework Chakra in 7.0.

I do think that EW MNK is in many aspects better than ShB MNK (though in this case it was kind of a "the bar is in hell" situation), but it still has a lot of issues that I would like to see be alleviated. Overall though I am ultimately bitter that EW removed a lot of things from Monk to make it feel more standard along with the other melee DPS, only for it to still end up as one of the least played jobs in the game. In any case, I'm interested to know what other people's thoughts are.