A lot of you guys will hate me for this, but I still complained in Endwalker about Monk due to the positional gutting and the Blitz mechanic that was dangerously close to other class abilities (Samurai and Ninja of a flavor). I'll admit though, it did grow on me a bit and was nice to see Perfect Balance given a purpose after they removed Greased Lightning (Which I was unashamedly a fan of).

I was always secretly praying for them to double down on Monk's positionals value, but I know the casual player base seemingly hate positionals, which puts me on the losing side. Somebody earlier mentioned wanting to see Monk operate with an ability like Barrage where you hit more for less. I would LOVE to have seen something like that. My main draw to Monk was the building up and accelerating of the class. Abilities that hit multiple times with lower potency were always so cool for me, think Dream Within A Dream for Ninja.

Another earlier post mentioned 3 iconic parts of Monk; Greased Lightning, Positionals, and Timers. I feel the homogenising or universalising (Maybe I used those words wrong, just making all the classes more and more similar) really takes away the identity of being a "____ Main". I feel the only class that still really has that would be an Astroligian, which for me is probably my most hated class, but I still level it and then leave it. I don't go posting on the forums how much I dislike the class, I'll just play something more my style. I feel the people who level Monk and it's not their taste really hate the taste of building up GL, and were not accustomed to the class to land all the positionals. Granted I do agree that at this point it would be like Greased Lightning 5 or 6, which might be a bit much, but I think they could design great mechanics to build and remove stacks and give the class more purpose than the current state of "aiming to land as many guaranteed critical hits so I can throw my balls all over the target" which just is not doing it for the class.

Hot take, but if my class only has potency to it, it's not a well designed class, and it's certainly not fun. How will the dragoons feel when they take the DoT away from their rear combo and just turn that into a potency buff for the 123 combo? A post about the "Nobody asked for this, this is just the direction they decided to take" I think is a true yet sad sentiment that I think should considered as a lot of people seem to be in agreement that the dumbing down of classes isn't fun.

For me, Viper has been a great addition and I loved the busyness of the class, but of course we will see that going away in 7.01. The people complaining about a class being too difficult apparently rings louder than the people who have played a class for a long time wishing that their class wouldn't lose defining factors of why the class was fun.