Quote Originally Posted by Middie View Post
Coming at the Job at 90 when you've lazy leveled it can make it harder to pick up as there's a lot of mechanics swamping you at once and can feel overwhelming. That's not a shot at you, I also just lazy leveled Monk without really paying attention. Good old Prae spam got it there

Late EW I started paying attention to it and it was... confusing and chaotic, not going to lie, but I was really liking the style of the job.

So I made an alt! Materia has the road to 90, so leveling was insanely easy. It allowed me focus on rotation, then beast, then nadi. My UI was also poorly optimised, so it helped there too. Everything I learnt I could apply to my main.

If that's not an option, my other advice is the Trust/NPC dungeons. Use them and just focus on rotation, ignore the rest. The new system is jarring at first, but recently I've been really pumped at how my flow is getting better and it's getting more fun.
Then introduce elements from there, reading up on like the Balance to help give you an idea where to try and steer and focus.

For me, rotation/chakra/nadi is mostly sorted. I have no idea on the burst windows. People keep talking about odds and evens and I'm yet to find what that even means! (I've mostly been healer in FFXIV) But it's not impacting the fun at the moment leveling in the MSQ
I've mained MNK since Stormblood. The EW changes are neither confusing nor difficult to me, but that doesn't change the fact that the design decisions are still rather obtuse and go against the rhythm and flow the job used to have. Viper is essentially the wish-list of everything old-school MNK mains wanted from the job in 6.x but didn't get, and everyone loves it, but it's a shame that they didn't get to see what it was like in 4.4.

From just evaluating the overall kit from a game design perspective, Viper is a lot better designed as a package than Monk is, even putting aside whether or not I like the changes. It's just a much tighter package overall. EW MNK has around 45 seconds of convoluted resource micromanagement followed by around 2 minutes of nothing to do, and that downtime is incredibly boring. VPR has the "always on, gotta go fast" feel MNKs wanted, and we didn't like the downtime when it was considerably less in SHB when we only had a few oGCDs taken away. Now it's missing... everything... and stuff was put behind a convoluted version of NIN's mudra system that does not at all belong on the fists-fighting job since it's not NIN.

MNK still has RNG which everyone kept saying for 7 years to get rid of. RNG-based meter does not belong on a melee job whatsoever, regardless of whether or not they made it lesser. It should have none at all. They didn't fix that after more than half a decade of people complaining.