The Worst Iteration of Monk. What could be different?

[Eremite]

One massive help would be to make Riddle of Fire a 55s cooldown instead of 60s (or make it affected by SkS). As it stands now, you need very low ping and extreme attention to avoid drifting your 2m buff.

Having some kind of a ranged attack would be nice... I don't know how they've managed to go this long without adding one.
Most other melee can spam some kind of ranged attack when having to go out (DRG: 150 potency, VPR: 200 potency, NIN: 120 Potency + gauge, RPR: 300 potency and gauge). The best we can do is build chakra at around 80 potency each for when we get to go back in (unless it caps).

Just feels bad to play at the moment. I feel like I'm working my ass off to keep up with rotation and avoid drifting Brotherhood to get outdone by other jobs with a much more braindead rotation. :/ This tier being extremely melee unfriendly with PF strats doesn't help.

[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).

[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.

[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.

[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.

[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.

[Eremite]

If the ants around buttons distract you, disable them and behave as before. Do 1:1, 1:1, 1:2

This doesn't actually work out in actual gameplay - the Opo-Opo stance tends to get out of sync with the Raptor stance after every other Perfect Balance window.

It's weird stuff like this that makes it feel like it wasn't play tested more than a cursory "good enough". I'm curious if there's anyone on the team that does job actions that plays MNK.

It does at least add a *little* bit of complexity if you want to play perfectly.

I'm actually fine with MNK as it is, but would still love to see Riddle of Fire cooldown shortened to 55s to fix the 2m drift problem.

Also a ranged attack - even if it's adding like a 15-20 yard range to Forbidden Chakra so I have something to do while I'm having to dip out for 5-10 seconds yet again because this tier hates melee.

I suppose my 3rd ask would be letting Meditate grant a Lunar + Solar nadi when out of combat. The double lunar opening is f***ing cursed and it would be nice to be able to do a big burst on pull like literally every other job.