Before I start talking about how shadowbringers monk is a horribly designed class, I feel like I should mention some of the positive things that were done well about the class. This latest expansion brought a few noteworthy things that are great for monk. Our new AoE rotation is great, especially with the 5.1 changes to rock breaker. Form shift changes made running dungeons on monk far more tolerable. Having 2 charges on shoulder tackle makes the class a lot easier to use in certain situations. Finally, and contrary to what a lot of people say, six sided star and tornado kick are both great tools to have on a melee dps even though their uses are pretty niche. Now, after getting that out of the way, I'll start talking about why the balance team did a terrible job designing the current iteration of monk.
Needless deletion of old skills
Steel peak, howling fist, and internal release (among many other skills) are gone. I do not know any monks who ever complained about having these skills. They made the class feel more engaging, and made our burst windows stronger and more consistent. I don't think that these are necessarily the cause of the current problem with monk, but I felt it worth mentioning because I disagree with this design choice.
Greased Lightning 3 vs Greased Lightning 4
With the new fist of fire changes, monk actually does more damage under the effects of greased lightning 3 and fist of fire compared to greased lightning 4. The reason for this is how buffs stack in this game. Greased lightning gives us 10% damage per stack, and they stack up additively. So under the effects of greased lightning 4, we get 40% extra damage. Now if we have greased lightning 3 and fist of fire, that is both a 30% boost in damage and a 10% boost in damage from each buff respectively. These stack multiplicatively, so this ends up being 43% extra damage. Essentially, we are giving up 3% damage to gain 5% speed. While this usually is a worthwhile trade, especially because it allows monks to get an extra gcd into each buff window, there are times where it is actually worthwhile to go back into greased lightning 3 if you are certain that the 5% speed will not get you another GCD before a boss dies or becomes untargetable. I don't know if this was intended or not, but monks having to make this decision (which for mostly guesswork a lot of cases) is pretty ridiculous.
Perfect Balance and Anatman
Perfect balance is now a damage cooldown. More on this later. The result of this is anatman being used to gain greased lightning stacks in our opener. Monks now use a pretty horrid server-tick dependent opener that became the standard. Little did monks know that this would get even worse later down the line.
Riddle of fire rebalancing
From savage release to 5.1 monk was one of the most played classes in savage. I can say with near certainty that this was not because people liked the class; it was because the class was optimal to bring. Monks were near the top of the dps charts in terms of raw damage, and they also brought utility in the form of brotherhood and mantra. Why were monks so strong though? Because when savage was released, riddle of fire got a rework. I would argue that monk was in a very good position before patch 5.08. In 5.08, however, the balance team decided to rework riddle of fire by reducing the buff from 30% to 25% while also removing the 15% slow it had on monk gcds. This made the buff far more powerful that it should have been, and resulted in the class being borderline overpowered. I'm not really sure how this change was permitted to go live.
Riddle of Earth
I both love and hate this skill. I love it because of its utility it provides to our kit. I hate it because it tries to do too many things at once and it is extremely clunky to use because it requires you to take damage. There are two key things that we monks achieve with this skill. The first and most common use is negating our positional requirements. This is a great tool to have; it has 50% uptime at best and lets us save our stacks of true north. Unfortunately, we have to take damage for it to active. Secondly, this skill refreshes the duration on our greased lightning. This is necessary to achieve an optimal perfect balance window. More on this later. Again, you need to get hit to activate it. If there is no damage going out during perfect balance, you can't use it for this purpose.
Leaden fist, the cause of many of the current problems with monk
Leaden fist is why perfect balance is such a good damage cooldown. We want to alternate dragon kick and bootshine because this is our most potent sequence of gcds to use. Perfect balance lets us do this. This has a multitude of problems with it. Firstly, it discourages us from using perfect balance for its presumed intended purpose - to build up greased lightning stacks in our opener, forcing us to use anatman in our openers. Secondly, if we want to go the entire duration of perfect balance without using a snap punch or demolish, we have to proc riddle of earth to not lose greased lightning. This means that we have to know that we are taking damage at this time and have riddle of earth off cooldown for our perfect balance windows. Lastly, this creates very awkward timings on monk burst windows. We have our riddle of fire on a 90s timer, and our perfect balance on a 120s timer that do not line up well at all. I do not imagine that SE intended for perfect balance to be used as a damage cooldown in the way that it is, but this is what is happening right now. This problem wouldn't even be difficult to fix. All that SE would have to do is take some of the potency off of bootshine and dragon kick and move it to true strike, twin snakes, demolish, or snap punch. This would mean perfect balance is no longer a gain to use outside of our openers.
Poor distribution of potencies
Did you know that it's technically optimal to let the twin snakes buff drop? If you have enough skill speed (and most monks do to get all 6 gcds into perfect balance), it's worth using true strike twice for every twin snakes. The reason for this is because true strike's potency (240) is too much higher than twin snake's potency (170). This could VERY easily be fixed if true strike was dropped to 230 potency and twin snakes was raised to 180 potency. I'm hearing that this might have changed in patch 5.1, but I can't confirm this yet. Still though, this shouldn't have been allowed to go live in the first place.
Patch 5.1 and more anatman problems
I'll give SE a little bit of credit here. They tried to put an end to the horrid anatman openers that everyone used. Now anatman is on the gcd, and in most cases (other than the pre-pull anatman opener) monks will be losing an entire extra gcd to use anatman compared to before. The problem with this? It didn't work. Using anatman in the opener is still optimal. It just feels even more clunky than it did before. Doing a perfect balance opener feels so much smoother than the anatman opener right now. I just wish it was the optimal opener to do.
Closing notes
As of patch 5.1, monk is in a pretty awkward state. The people who play monk because they like the class are few in number because of the problems I outlined above. The people who played monk because it was optimal are leaving too because it doesn't have the edge that it once had over other classes. So what reason is there to play monk right now? The class isn't absurdly powerful anymore, and it doesn't feel very good to play either. I guess class loyalty would be the main reason to play monk? All things considered, monk needs some serious work to restore it to the class that many players, including myself, loved for the years prior to this expansion.
Continue reading...
Needless deletion of old skills
Steel peak, howling fist, and internal release (among many other skills) are gone. I do not know any monks who ever complained about having these skills. They made the class feel more engaging, and made our burst windows stronger and more consistent. I don't think that these are necessarily the cause of the current problem with monk, but I felt it worth mentioning because I disagree with this design choice.
Greased Lightning 3 vs Greased Lightning 4
With the new fist of fire changes, monk actually does more damage under the effects of greased lightning 3 and fist of fire compared to greased lightning 4. The reason for this is how buffs stack in this game. Greased lightning gives us 10% damage per stack, and they stack up additively. So under the effects of greased lightning 4, we get 40% extra damage. Now if we have greased lightning 3 and fist of fire, that is both a 30% boost in damage and a 10% boost in damage from each buff respectively. These stack multiplicatively, so this ends up being 43% extra damage. Essentially, we are giving up 3% damage to gain 5% speed. While this usually is a worthwhile trade, especially because it allows monks to get an extra gcd into each buff window, there are times where it is actually worthwhile to go back into greased lightning 3 if you are certain that the 5% speed will not get you another GCD before a boss dies or becomes untargetable. I don't know if this was intended or not, but monks having to make this decision (which for mostly guesswork a lot of cases) is pretty ridiculous.
Perfect Balance and Anatman
Perfect balance is now a damage cooldown. More on this later. The result of this is anatman being used to gain greased lightning stacks in our opener. Monks now use a pretty horrid server-tick dependent opener that became the standard. Little did monks know that this would get even worse later down the line.
Riddle of fire rebalancing
From savage release to 5.1 monk was one of the most played classes in savage. I can say with near certainty that this was not because people liked the class; it was because the class was optimal to bring. Monks were near the top of the dps charts in terms of raw damage, and they also brought utility in the form of brotherhood and mantra. Why were monks so strong though? Because when savage was released, riddle of fire got a rework. I would argue that monk was in a very good position before patch 5.08. In 5.08, however, the balance team decided to rework riddle of fire by reducing the buff from 30% to 25% while also removing the 15% slow it had on monk gcds. This made the buff far more powerful that it should have been, and resulted in the class being borderline overpowered. I'm not really sure how this change was permitted to go live.
Riddle of Earth
I both love and hate this skill. I love it because of its utility it provides to our kit. I hate it because it tries to do too many things at once and it is extremely clunky to use because it requires you to take damage. There are two key things that we monks achieve with this skill. The first and most common use is negating our positional requirements. This is a great tool to have; it has 50% uptime at best and lets us save our stacks of true north. Unfortunately, we have to take damage for it to active. Secondly, this skill refreshes the duration on our greased lightning. This is necessary to achieve an optimal perfect balance window. More on this later. Again, you need to get hit to activate it. If there is no damage going out during perfect balance, you can't use it for this purpose.
Leaden fist, the cause of many of the current problems with monk
Leaden fist is why perfect balance is such a good damage cooldown. We want to alternate dragon kick and bootshine because this is our most potent sequence of gcds to use. Perfect balance lets us do this. This has a multitude of problems with it. Firstly, it discourages us from using perfect balance for its presumed intended purpose - to build up greased lightning stacks in our opener, forcing us to use anatman in our openers. Secondly, if we want to go the entire duration of perfect balance without using a snap punch or demolish, we have to proc riddle of earth to not lose greased lightning. This means that we have to know that we are taking damage at this time and have riddle of earth off cooldown for our perfect balance windows. Lastly, this creates very awkward timings on monk burst windows. We have our riddle of fire on a 90s timer, and our perfect balance on a 120s timer that do not line up well at all. I do not imagine that SE intended for perfect balance to be used as a damage cooldown in the way that it is, but this is what is happening right now. This problem wouldn't even be difficult to fix. All that SE would have to do is take some of the potency off of bootshine and dragon kick and move it to true strike, twin snakes, demolish, or snap punch. This would mean perfect balance is no longer a gain to use outside of our openers.
Poor distribution of potencies
Did you know that it's technically optimal to let the twin snakes buff drop? If you have enough skill speed (and most monks do to get all 6 gcds into perfect balance), it's worth using true strike twice for every twin snakes. The reason for this is because true strike's potency (240) is too much higher than twin snake's potency (170). This could VERY easily be fixed if true strike was dropped to 230 potency and twin snakes was raised to 180 potency. I'm hearing that this might have changed in patch 5.1, but I can't confirm this yet. Still though, this shouldn't have been allowed to go live in the first place.
Patch 5.1 and more anatman problems
I'll give SE a little bit of credit here. They tried to put an end to the horrid anatman openers that everyone used. Now anatman is on the gcd, and in most cases (other than the pre-pull anatman opener) monks will be losing an entire extra gcd to use anatman compared to before. The problem with this? It didn't work. Using anatman in the opener is still optimal. It just feels even more clunky than it did before. Doing a perfect balance opener feels so much smoother than the anatman opener right now. I just wish it was the optimal opener to do.
Closing notes
As of patch 5.1, monk is in a pretty awkward state. The people who play monk because they like the class are few in number because of the problems I outlined above. The people who played monk because it was optimal are leaving too because it doesn't have the edge that it once had over other classes. So what reason is there to play monk right now? The class isn't absurdly powerful anymore, and it doesn't feel very good to play either. I guess class loyalty would be the main reason to play monk? All things considered, monk needs some serious work to restore it to the class that many players, including myself, loved for the years prior to this expansion.
Continue reading...