The Worst Iteration of Monk. What could be different?

[Carighan]

They pull the -5s CD with most 120s-relevant skills eventually to protect against drift.

Though now that you mention it, I feel the game as a whole might benefit if they changed SkS (and SpS!) to work like this:

* SkS now affects the cooldown of abilities. All of them. All your skills.
* SpS affects the cast-speed of spells. Spells only.
* Neither affects your GCD, which is locked at 2,5s barring any job-specific modifiers to it.

Meaning SkS would give you some drift-resistance to how your skills line up, SpS gives you improved mobility (assuming re-evaluations of the scaling of both given the functional changes, of course!) as a caster. Neither can affect that you use 1 GCD-ability every 2,5s, or as a Monk every 2,0s.

The big upside of this would be that not only would SkS in particular have a real use outside of edge cases, it'd also bake "drift resistance" into a secondary stat. Which could be optimal or not based on a lot of factors, and most importantly is a "soft stat" (it depends on your connection and the weather on that day and whether jupiter and libra align among other things).

[Eremite]

That introduces some additional problems with MNK as you need a ~1.94 GCD to match up your RoF windows ideally and to help with fitting 11 GCD into a late-weaved Riddle of Fire. :/ Would also cause casters to have to blend SkS and SpS which I'm sure they'd gripe about. Probably not much though since most people just stack all the red materia as much as possible.

You'd probably still be drifting anyway - just everyone at different rates depending on their SkS values. (One person's 2 minute coming up at like 1:50, another at 2:00, another at 1:55, etc)

[Carighan]

That introduces some additional problems with MNK as you need a ~1.94 GCD to match up your RoF windows ideally

This is a problem, not a reason to keep another problem in the game. They should not justify one bad design with another that gets marginally less bad because of the former.

You'd probably still be drifting anyway - just everyone at different rates depending on their SkS values. (One person's 2 minute coming up at like 1:50, another at 2:00, another at 1:55, etc)

Yes, elimination of easy alignment would be another benefit.

[Shurrikhan]

They pull the -5s CD with most 120s-relevant skills eventually to protect against drift.

Though now that you mention it, I feel the game as a whole might benefit if they changed SkS (and SpS!) to work like this:

* SkS now affects the cooldown of abilities. All of them. All your skills.
* SpS affects the cast-speed of spells. Spells only.
* Neither affects your GCD, which is locked at 2,5s barring any job-specific modifiers to it.

Meaning SkS would give you some drift-resistance to how your skills line up, SpS gives you improved mobility (assuming re-evaluations of the scaling of both given the functional changes, of course!) as a caster. Neither can affect that you use 1 GCD-ability every 2,5s, or as a Monk every 2,0s.

The big upside of this would be that not only would SkS in particular have a real use outside of edge cases, it'd also bake "drift resistance" into a secondary stat. Which could be optimal or not based on a lot of factors, and most importantly is a "soft stat" (it depends on your connection and the weather on that day and whether jupiter and libra align among other things).

Hard pass. The primary benefit of SkS thresholds has traditionally been permissible ("nonstandard") rotational forks that in turn allow for increased adaptability, unique capacities (see late StB Triple-Kick), or new playflows (see Demo-drop in ARR, rotations to forgo the ToD/Frac lines in HW and StB, 2-2-3 in ShB, extra-Opo per RoF OD in EW, etc.). All that depends upon the ability to affect GCD speed.

Why must we constantly degrade, constrain, or outright axe permissible play or nuance just to ensure ease of raid-sync or, even worse, change for change's sake?

And no, what you suggest would not bake drift-resistance into SkS. It would specifically worsen both raid-drift even if you were to forgo some fraction of a GCD's uptime to minimize said drift and hurt GCD-CD sync at least as badly.

[Wasabi_23]

Endwalker MNK was a masterpiece. Optimal Drift MNK lives rent free in my head.

Dawntrail MNK with the ball system respective to the glowy buttons is a hot mess. It’s difficult to even keep track which input I should be going for when timers were easier to manage than constantly looking at a ball gauge or a glowy button to see what the next input is. It’s a large distraction and I sincerely wanna focus on my coordination more than looking at what is supposed to be my next GCD.

I can literally see the FFXIV dev team axing the six inputs we have and cutting them down to three, and giving it the VPR treatment: Dragon Kick - Bootshine, True Strike - Twin Snakes, Snap Punch - Demolish. Dragon Kick and Bootshine will be swapped in accordance to the change for leveling purposes. And the inputs will be displayed dependent on how many balls are stored. This change can be the death of MNK, or we can revert back to Endwalker MNK with whatever we’ve received from lv90-100.

It’s just… I can’t play PVE MNK anymore. I’ll stick to PVP MNK, but even then I’m very fearful of the eventual changes there.

[Carighan]

I can literally see the FFXIV dev team axing the six inputs we have and cutting them down to three, and giving it the VPR treatment

Yeah because Monk complexity was always a flat-out lie. It looks complicated until you actually play it. All they did in Dawntrail is make it so that you can understand the rotation from the game itself, instead of having to look it up on the internet. Same lack of complexity as before though. If the ants around buttons distract you, disable them and behave as before. Do 1:1, 1:1, 1:2 just as you remembered the ratios before so your eye didn't have to be glued to the buff.

Sorry, but I hate it when Monks pretend there was ever any depth to their combat system. This removal of smoke&mirrors is a really good change, as it exposes to everyone just how boring many jobs truly are once you remove the artificial complexity of the game not telling you how shallow it is. Maybe this can now finally lead to SQEX adding actual depth to the combat system.

[fulminating]

I have the solution. We remove some survivability from drk and allow mnk to use counter/perfect counter. Perfect counter can have the same rules as normal where you don’t take damage even if you miss, give back fists of earth as a stance, give back fists of wind as a speed boost because every monk likes going fast and just because ninjas are weeby shouldn’t mean they get to run faster and they cast magic anyway but monk’s arms are only 3 yalms long and give back fists of fire because sometimes there’ll be a magical tankbuster and it’d be better to let someone else deal with it. Mantra can have a party wide hp increase too, that’s probably fine for raidwides. This handily plays into the recent trend of bosses wandering back to the middle of the arena and spacing out as the monk can hit some positionals during these phases. Also put the positional requirements back on whichever ones had them removed, I keep forgetting to check which ones I don’t need to bother with anymore so have been doing them all anyway.

Dark knight can have riddle of wind if they want so they can get more tp to use guillotine more. It is a perfect solution that satisfies everyone.

[FlamboyantAsBurningInferno]

If the ants around buttons distract you, disable them and behave as before.

Wow! I can really do that?
Could you please tell me how to switch off the combo glowing?

[SomeGuy22]

Yeah because Monk complexity was always a flat-out lie. It looks complicated until you actually play it. (...) Do 1:1, 1:1, 1:2 just as you remembered the ratios before so your eye didn't have to be glued to the buff.

Sorry, but I hate it when Monks pretend there was ever any depth to their combat system. This removal of smoke&mirrors is a really good change, as it exposes to everyone just how boring many jobs truly are once you remove the artificial complexity of the game not telling you how shallow it is.

Old MNK always looked more daunting than what it actually was, but it wasn't just a 1-1-2 machine. If it was, optimal drift would not exist.

After the positional changes, my remaining enjoyment of the job came from adapting on the fly to downtime/when being forced to disengage from the boss, and refreshing timers earlier/later to make my burst hit harder. You didn't need to do those things, you could certainly beat everything in the game by strictly following the 1-1-2 ratio, but it was really cool to be able to find ways to squeeze more damage out of the job. There was depth, even if easy to ignore or not even that deep to begin with.

Now, you press the glowy. If not glowy, make it glowy. That's it.

[BabyYoda]

I would argue MNK currently is the most powerful iteration of the job,

I have some criticizim of the current design but I am having way fun with current MNK than old positional MNK.