The Worst Iteration of Monk. What could be different?

[Shurrikhan]

Only tried it against a striking dummy but I really hate the "feel" of it now. Pressing Dragon Kick and Twin Snakes no longer gives me a buff, Demolish doesn't DoT the enemy. The buttons feel hollow now. They only exist to buff the "real" buttons.

Aye, and the part that I expect was missed on the developers is how different a maintenance buff that needs to be played around will feel from a maintenance buff that does not. At present, because a double-Lunar opener is so often the go-to, our only risk is 15% of the difference between Raptor-buffer and Raptor-spam and between Coeurl-buffer and Coeurl-spam...

...which... has seemed to normally remain pretty automatic to avoid under normal rotation, from what I recall in single-target combat (as there's... nothing to friggin do or juggle in AoE anymore anyways, AoE isn't relevant to this), though I forget whether that's from Blitz starting on 1st, 2nd (open after DK), 3rd (for lower SkS, opening after Twin and Demo since you can't get in the extra Leapopo anyways due to both Reply GCDs taking space in window) or 4th (opening with buffs)GCD.

Will test to check once I can get on after work.

What keeps me from maining Monk is its Chakra procs. The 10 possible stacks should be baseline and not only during brotherhood. To play the monk perfectly you need to hit an ogcd that may come or not come after your very fast gcd attacks.

Outside of Brotherhood, the Chakra can only come from your GCDs, so you always have time to spend whatever Chakra you generate, immediately after generating them. While it's far from fun to do as a broader habit, you can actually just spam Meditation up until the last second of your GCD's refresh to make your spender go off automatically if and only if you have enough Chakra to use it, since it won't queue weaponskills (only use abilities) until then.

Early on, I was a big advocate for, at minimum, "Hold 7, spend 5" (or, ideally, "Hold 7, spend <all available>") so that we had a bit more margin, but sometimes the need to spend them asap and actually think at least a little about Chakra in the moment rather than as a banking mechanism (a la modern Bloodletters) actually feels more good than bad to me. /shrug