So - Monk Issues,

[RaionKansen]

amazing is certainly a way to describe it.

MNK already had a unique way to deal with disengagement scenarios in Six-Sided Star and Chakras. It's still lossy unlike Fire/Wind's Reply of course, but that really should've been how things were for a job that used to be a full-uptime melee fighter

Anything that remotely feels like a dps loss being treated like a sickness that must be purged is one of the biggest curses eating away at job design.

It lets them create more interesting boss design while keeping DPS checks tight and jobs balanced.

Its not eating away at anything. Its adding to combat design across the board.

I dont understand how you don't see that.

[SpeckledBurd]

Fire and Wind's reply are amazing.

I'm gonna take a wild guess that you don't do Savage or Ultimate at all.

Eh, I think they kinda suck from a playstyle and job fantasy perspective.

From a playstyle perspective Monk being the only job without a ranged option but with nonstandard disengage options is what made it unique. Having two GCD's worth of damage in it's burst phase is great if you're exclusively thinking about the job from making mechanics during two minute windows as unobtrusive as possible, but it also takes some of the fun/skill out of actually learning to execute your rotation such that you'd minimize your losses there out of the game which was part of the fun of prog back in Endwalker. But I'm also a Heavensward old head who doesn't even want Monk to have a burst phase in favor of it being the job that did moderate, consistent damage at a rapid pace.

In a similar vein, the change Six Sided Star so it consumes all of your Chakra for equivalent damage so that you always can disengage with empty chakra and therefore always maximize downtime instead of your downtime also being subject to a poorly thought out RNG system is one of the few legitimately smart changes they've ever made to the job and finally pushed it into being a legitimately great disengage skill for me instead of an expired cherry on top of a shit sundae that was Shadowbringers Monk. They also honestly could have just... expanded the chakra gauge slightly and achieved the same or a similar thing.

As for Job fantasy... I'm playing a Monk, I want to attack fast and do magic karate. That means maybe throwing out the occasional Kamehameha. But if I wanted to throw Fireballs and Wind blasts I'd be playing a caster. Elemental everything has always been a pretty bizarre flavor for the job and I don't know how it outlasted the Fist Stances when they were a repeated failure of job design to do anything repeatedly.

[RaionKansen]

Eh, I think they kinda suck from a playstyle and job fantasy perspective.

From a playstyle perspective Monk being the only job without a ranged option but with nonstandard disengage options is what made it unique. Having two GCD's worth of damage in it's burst phase is great if you're exclusively thinking about the job from making mechanics during two minute windows as unobtrusive as possible, but it also takes some of the fun/skill out of actually learning to execute your rotation such that you'd minimize your losses there out of the game which was part of the fun of prog back in Endwalker. But I'm also a Heavensward old head who doesn't even want Monk to have a burst phase in favor of it being the job that did moderate, consistent damage at a rapid pace.

In a similar vein, the change Six Sided Star so it consumes all of your Chakra for equivalent damage so that you always can disengage with empty chakra and therefore always maximize downtime instead of your downtime also being subject to a poorly thought out RNG system is one of the few legitimately smart changes they've ever made to the job and finally pushed it into being a legitimately great disengage skill for me instead of an expired cherry on top of a shit sundae that was Shadowbringers Monk. They also honestly could have just... expanded the chakra gauge slightly and achieved the same or a similar thing.

As for Job fantasy... I'm playing a Monk, I want to attack fast and do magic karate. That means maybe throwing out the occasional Kamehameha. But if I wanted to throw Fireballs and Wind blasts I'd be playing a caster. Elemental everything has always been a pretty bizarre flavor for the job and I don't know how it outlasted the Fist Stances when they were a repeated failure of job design to do anything repeatedly.

I don't think it makes Monk unique at all. Especially since six-sided star has always been better than DRGs terrible ranged attack. Monk is all about balance. I think them having a balance of certain elements makes sense to me. It also makes the rotations more interesting without making them very complex. Sometimes you send Wind or Fire's reply right away, other times you're holding it, sometimes until the very last moment. I had a blast trying to cleave as many Fire and Wind replies I could during M10s

[Carighan]

Aye, the near-total loss of class upsides and downsides and with it any and all actual uniqueness (not in the theme pasted over each job but the underlying things you do as the player) is a blight upon this game. And much of the community actively celebrates it, not realizing that yes of course you can balance 6 melee jobs somewhat tightly if they might as well just be a single one with 6 different ability themes to choose from.

[Arthur-Holt]

MNK isn't the most braindead melee to play DRG is way more straight forward unless you consider keeping one DoT up and trying not to backflip off the arena to be complex somehow