The Worst Iteration of Monk. What could be different?

[SpeckledBurd]

For what it's worth, I feel Heavensward had the best Monk set up. There was plenty to upkeep with Greased Lightning, 3 debuffs (Touch of Death, Demolish, and cross-class Fracture [when cross-class was a thing]), Dragon Kick when it was a debuff, and Twin Snake buff. Additionally, all 6 core class abilities were positionals which lead to quick movement and a high skill ceiling of planning your rotation and debuff upkeep.

I agree and Heavensward is the foundation that I'd have liked to have seen properly built upon rather than it constantly being eroded by system changes or peeling off mechanics to give other jobs. I honestly can't say that I like the current iteration of Monk all that much either, building orbs and spending orbs doesn't have the flow that I loved in HW and which kept me playing it during the iterations of the job that I found genuinely awful.

Going into Stormblood I would have leaned into Monk as being the job that doesn't hit hard, but hits a lot. Instead of Riddle of Fire which gave you a speed penalty for a damage bonus, I'd have done the exact opposite and make 100 Fists which would give a damage penalty in exchange for applying a Barrage effect to all outgoing damage to create an overall net DPS gain (IE: -40% Damage but X2 hits on all Weaponskills, Auto attacks and abilities for what would functionally be a 0.6 + 0.6 = 1.2x multiplier). It would feel faster without necessarily having to be faster which was the big fear of the devs during Stormblood.

Otherwise the biggest change would be to decouple Tornado Kick from GL so recovery wouldn't constantly be hamstrung by the devs to stop people from trying to use it. Something like "Executing X Number of positionals" or "Refreshed Greased Lightning X number of times" being the requirement to use Tornado Kick I think would be fair concepts, if functionally very similar to Enochian and Xenoglossy/Foul in practice. That lets Perfect Balance gain a reasonable recast to be used for recovery instead of needing to add truly asinine skills like Riddle of Earth and Anatman which frequently didn't work with how they built encounters.

Brotherhood or Monk getting any kind of partywide damage buffs I'm indifferent to, what matters is the second to second gameplay being satisfying. I still actively dislike RNG chakras and would really liked for them to build consistently rather than based on crits or RNG on top of crits.

From there there's plenty of room for growth I think and even giving Monk something like Blitzes could still be on the table as an addition since Greased Lightning is still on the more passive side of job mechanics rather than an active mechanic.

[Selvokaz]

...my feelings are mostly of confusion, one rotation restores your beast gauge, but the other rotation leaves you with 1 lv 2, and 2 lv 3s, which means if you run the 2nd combo again boot shine won't have its full potency? this feels wrong, while others might say it adds complexity I feel like it adds needless management, i'd rather you'd be able to jump back and forth between any skill that uses points of said beast gauge until you expend it all and have to finish the combo and then use the restore combo, then I remembered free form was a thing,

So answer me this, is it supposed to be Dragon Kick, Twin Snakes, Demolish, <-- Restore Combo or starter combo, then Bootshine, True Strike, Snap Punch, Form Shift, True Strike, Snap Punch, Form Shift, Snap Punch, back to Dragon Kick Combo?

am I alone in thinking it'd be better if Form Shift was ogcd? still has the same recast but doesn't share the same recast bar as weapon skills.

Also speaking of the 10 chakra charge, please tell me they are going to rework that, like that should just be the normal then so that you either choose to burst early with 5 or wait until you get 10 for a bigger bigger number from a much more powerful skill.