IiPunch - Monk Guide

If DDing in general didn't take any skill, you wouldn't have so many players suck at them even with good gear.

Not really a fair assessment, if you use any semblance of logic in your argument.

If you avoid a wipe by killing it faster, what causes the wipe?

If the wipe is caused by too much damage, too quick.. surely increasing the time between TP threefold would help.

Too many debuffs too quick? Well, yagrush can remove spell debuffs like nothing. Resisting more TP debuffs and reducing TP moves certainly helps there.

Too much damage for MP to sustain? If only your WHMs had ebers pants+1 and a sense of rationality.

The only legitimate case for killing faster being safer is when the threat is at a consistant time interval regardless of TP feed or you're at risk of your buffs wearing. Take those out of the picture, and you have no realistic argument for faster=safer.

DDs (typically) need the brainpower to put on a DT set (of some kind). MNK doesn't have to bother.

Thats the honest reason whey we used mnk for delve. The slowest, worst, laziest, person ever could be handed brotixur and told to go punch tojil.

He didn't have to change gear, or ws, or do anything other than engauge and afk.

Ways to mitigate. Even if plans go south, 2,3 or even 4 failed 30 second zerg attempts takes less time than 1x 20 minute MNK attempt.
"Skill" - does BLU require skill? How about DRK?
What requires "skill" - this is a game 90% dependant on gear.
You want skill? Try soloing Titan Extreme on FFXIV as MNK. FFXI requires little skill at this point and more communication and coordination. So if you're human and can read/listen/talk, you're skilled.
That's the first beneficial situation I can think of for MNK - yes I can still solo the ***out of Quetz as Blu in 9 minutes, but I would gladly take 20 minutes to do it as MNK if it meant not having to deal with non-stop flail and wing attacks.

Wow... I take the time to find this gem for the lulz and miss half a page!

Well yeah... could say something about

That's not true at all, SMN can (and should) do a whole lot more than spam VS under conduit. Besides, what works in a low-man scenario doesn't necessarily translate to an 18-man fight, which ironically is where the real challenge is in these days of scaling HP.

MNK on the other hand is and has forever been a fairly limited job in terms of function and utility, which I guess is why its fall from grace as a top DD has been so keenly felt.

Who said anything about Wiping? If your brain makes assumptions, I'm not responsible for how logical or illogical they are; you are.
You avoid having to deal with a lot, not necessarily just a wipe, by zerging. It should be pretty intuitive to you even without hypothetical scenarios - the collective playerbase will always take the path of least resistance to attain desired outcomes. Zergs weren't an event SE announced. They came into exist out of human nature to get the most done in the least amount of time, at the cheapest cost. Who the hell said anything about wipes? That's an extreme. There's a fair bit of ground between 20-30 second zerg and wipe.
Everything else you types shows me you havent really played XI long enough or had enough diversity across jobs and content so not going to bother.

Communication and coordination is a skill. Programming gearswap is a skill. Knowing the damage formulas enough to craft your own gear sets is a skill. Knowing the skillchain attribute and combination system is a skill. Knowing FFXI's AI system well enough to predict when bad ***is about to happen is a skill.

There are plenty of skills outside of pushing buttons and those skills are what separate mediocre from good and good from great players. If the player base was even half as obsessed with those skills then they are with showing off the latest exclusive gear, then the games meta would be in a far better shape.

Welcome to the world of Square-Enix. How may I help you?

It will be this way until someone in the Board of Directors finally realizes the love that players still have for this game and re-injects million back into it and revamp it completely at better speed with more attention.

The game is on life support right now. (It could be worse)

We have to wait for FFXIV to code blue and die again and maybe this will let them realize which community is more important.

Or they will just leave things as they are and take and enjoy the dwindling cash flow..

I think you're setting the bar pretty low on "skill".
The one I would grant you is the skill to be able to calculate dps output based on inputs. Yes, that is a skill or set of skills. Gearswap scripting I guess as well.

But in the context of "gaming skill" there are many other games out there that have higher demand. Reflexes and reaction times, pattern spotting, even PVP skills like getting to know your enemy and their tendencies, strengths, limits.

To those who might not fully understand why zergs are so effective, it's because they overload the games AI. The AI in this game operates on timers and makes decisions based on those timers and various NM conditions (HP, TP, status ailments, ect). If you rapidly reduce it's HP then it can't respond fast enough to your damage. TP moves are what can be devastating in this game, the more the NM gets off the higher chance of something very bad happening. Rapidly depleting it's HP will cause the least number of TP moves possible and thus the least chances of the NM pushing an "I Win" button. This is also why "TP feed" is a joke, a set of properly buffed DD's will feed 2~3x more TP then the NM can actually use. Imaging only being able to WS every 9~11 seconds but getting 3000TP every 5 seconds, all that extra TP is lost because the NM either in the middle of an animation, or in a post-action global lock out. Trying to "control TP" will just extend the fights duration x2 and result in more total TP moves going off.

People don't like to hear it but that's how things are. You can think SE for their TP nerf years ago when they changed how monsters get TP.

Communication and Coordination has been the rarest skill in FFXI. Lots of people claim to know how to do it, but very few actually know how to work as a team instead of a collection of individuals, even fewer still know how to effectively lead said team. The rest just require some hard work researching and a desire to learn, but leadership and communication require a fundamental shift in thought process.

They need to get discord.
I think of how much easier things like Vrtra or AV would have been back in the day if we had discord. We have a lot of ADD/tunnel vision players (I'm one of them) who need reminders from time to time.

i've played as long as you have, i have every job geared as well as you do, and i've successfully multiboxed every event including master trials with no outside help.. which means i have the max attainable diversity for both job selection and content

but lets keep *** waving, it definitely supports the idea that you're correct

That's pretty much how it is.
The people making the decisions are only looking at numbers and not the relationship between them.

Example:I work in a big global brand. this global economic crunch has meant that I've had my marketing budget slashed in half. I dropped things like offline advertising and focused all my remaining budget into measurable activities that generated leads and conversions - digital.
That means Search engine optimization, social media and pay-per-click advertising mainly.
The board looks at how many leads and conversions we're getting from PPC (pay-per-click) advertising and think they are a bunch of geniuses when they say "most of our customers are coming from PPC". I say yup- that's true. So they say "all your other activities have been slashed. you can keep the budget you were spending on PPC only".
If they had given me a chance I would have explained that without SEO and Social Media support, PPC becomes increasingly less effective, and the less effective it becomes to more I have to spend on it to achieve the same volumes as I was previously.
Now I'm putting forth a request for triple my 2017 budget for 2018, to be where we were as an organization in 2016.
If they don't approve it, by the end of 2018 they're going to need to spend 10x as much to reclaim their market share.
That's how big companies work. No one listens to the people doing the work.
Don't even get me started on Finance
CFO: Our funding is coming to an end soon.
CEO: What should we do?
CFO: Cut marketing budget
CMO: so you're not making enough money to cover your overhead, and the solution is to reduce the function that is bringing in whatever revenue you are actually getting, instead of increasing it? *** genius. You finance guys should be given a special hat.

I get tired from waving mine because its so heavy!

Maybe buy a smaller one?

Yeah it's the weird half-buff nature of the JA changes that annoys me. There were so many far easier ways they could have made meaningful buffs to JAs without throwing a wrench into an expectation that Focus is a thing you can alternate with Aggressor for some Acc at almost all times.

Focus: keep original duration, add more accuracy

Dodge: whatever, do the same as Focus

Impetus: fix the stupid penalty. Maybe instead of shoehorning crit into the Focus adjustment, just adjust the badly deficient Impetus. Give it a very high crit rate and perhaps a somewhat short duration, and just drop the dumb consecutive hits requirement.

Boost: I like the idea of trying to do SOMETHING, we'll see if it's even working as intended or gets a follow-up adjustment though. I've always been partial to a no JA-delay stance that gives stronger WS stats (perhaps add a DEX mod like Utu grip and a large amount of WSD/WSAcc/WSAtk/WScrit rate?)

Mantra: Make it Mighty Guard, but with HP+/Def&MDef/Haste instead of Regen/Def&MDef/Haste. Why not? Can even keep the timer the same 10min, and do a rotation with other MNKs or BLUs on a 10min Diffusion timer.


Yeah. Another good option would be Reisenjima H2H assuming those are easy enough for you to get and you have the patience to throw stones at Oseem to get a good augment. Need very good augs to match the no-fuss Jolts though, so I guess that's a personal call.

Whenever Unity Dial is up don't forget to use on main and any mules too, as it does seem Comeuppances+1 are the best DPS non-RMEA. Generally beat Glanz, Austar/Pchan simulation showed the updated ones only ~50dps behind Godhands (and that doesn't even account for the STR+20 on them being potentially helpful if using Boost becomes a more relevant thing or gets further adjustments/fixes, or that acc was capped in the sim before even thinking about the Acc+41 on the weapon - I could see them as a near sidegrade to Godhands at least situationally).

Effective Communication isn't using a voice chat program. There is an entirely different skillset that revolves around maintaining positive control of an environment along with maintaining situational awareness, analyzing that situational for subordinating tasks and then disseminating those tasks in a fast and effective way. This also segways into team building and mentorship which is far outside the scope of this discussion. Suffice to say that in over a decade of playing this game I've met less then five people I would consider effective team leaders.

Most people are too sensitive, too emotional and completely unable to process criticism or take direction. You can not have effective teamwork with those present.

People still get slept by Cyclone Wing? Does no one swap into defensive/evasive sets? What happened...

Exactly..
Those same CFOs and the end of your script created FFXIV... Lol

Nothing happened, 90% of all players are glasscannons. 9% don't change gear at all.

and the last 1% care/use an add-on to automate it.

Took my MNKs out to albumen as is, because theoretical arguments certainly can benefit from practical experience. Setup was:
MNK MNK MNK GEO WHM | PLD BRD GEO (outside cors and brd)

Buffs were:
Attunement, Frailty, Wilt, Vex - idris
Entrust precision-torpor-fury for mnk party, entrust attunement for pld
Honor March, Victory March, Madx2, fire carolx2, ice carol, dark carol
rogues, fighter, sam, hunters

Food was miso ramen +1.

Gear was:
Spharai/x/x/ginsen
kenda/moon nodowa/brutal/sherida
kenda/kenda/niqmaddu/epona
str30 att da segomos/moonbow belt/kenda/kenda

Was some HQ kenda, nodowa, belt mixed in. One MNK had chirich ring+1 instead of niqmaddu. One had telos instead of sherida. None used WS gear, or any swaps at all for that matter. This was not by design, I simply haven't finished gearing them entirely and wanted to see how it went as is.

This was not a perfect success story that makes MNK look amazing, but I did win first try. Fight was approximately 5:50 from pop to death, I did not wait out adds or do anything special. Popped, slept adds, engaged immediately. Used revit prior to popping and after second sleep to have 3 troubs available. One MNK died at 80% after a string of counters because I failed to position it correctly. One died at ~10% when HP down landed at the same time they pulled hate, resulting in a double counter death. Albumen died a bit under 6 minutes into the fight.

TP were 15-20 seconds apart until the first death, significantly further apart afterwards. It was very trivial to keep the few debuffs that did land off. MNK's counters without counterstance were a significant help when hate was pulled.


If only looking at this fight, my conclusions would be:
-MNK damage is visibly lower in a zerg situation, to the point it makes a strong case for other jobs if you don't have the firepower I do.
-MNK damage, even with significant problems reducing output, is more than sufficient to zerg some of the hardest mobs around.
-MNK gets a very visible reduction in number of debuffs in that specific fight with those specific buffs.
-MNK's damage is surprisingly viable once bolster is off. The critrate, survivability, and accuracy afforded by kendatsuba seem to be a particular help in this situation. It actually made me somewhat interested in a potential 6man of albumen without using 1hrs. Obviously, sleeps would be the primary concern.

Keep in mind that I did not have WS gear, and the deaths amount to average of 2 DD. I would suspect with proper WS gear and no deaths, the same fight would have been around 3:15 to 3:30. I have seen a strong setup using WAR 1hr kill it in approximately 2:00. While 75-90 seconds doesn't matter that much, it does indicate that MNK's zerg potential as compared to a WAR is significantly reduced.

I did take a screenshot just before death of my party setup, in case anyone had any reason to doubt the fight. I may record a full video once I've finished WS gear and gotten my MNKs to the point I want them at.

tldr:

killed albumen using only mnks without ws set as dd, certifying that they do in fact have enough damage potential for high end fights

fight was not nearly as smooth and perfect as predicted, some refinement can be done but it certainly highlighted many of mnks limitations as well, draw your own conclusions

Easy fix on sleep aside from taking hate and being a RUN with proper buffs, use AOE healing trust even if you get slept it last all of 2 or 3 swings worth and you get credit for the wake up on evaluation.

I'll go play with mnk later tonight and see how bad I can do vs a much better gear tier monk.

Today we learned that "zerg" now means over five minute fights...

Dude all you showed was that it's possible to kill Albumen slowly with enough buffs and support, especially if your abusing outside buffers.

1 of 3 DD died at 80%. Another died at 10%. Thus, you're looking at approximately 2/3 of the actual damage potential. Throw in that none of them had WS sets, and all were using defensive gear, and the fight can be potentially reduced to significantly less.

I didn't claim to prove anything. I could easily have not posted at all, as it definitely doesn't support my argument in any meaningful manner. I posted it anyway, because it's relevant to the thread.

Thank you for taking the time to try it. I mean, we all knew it would be bad--you had to test it to see--but I still appreciate the time and the openness to share the experience.

You won't notice much change even with proper weapon skill gear. MNK is just that bad.

With all the buffs in the world, sure MNK can kill things too. But it is worse at killing things than any other DD job in the game. Full stop.

Kendatsuba has great magic evasion stats. Combined with Attunement and Vex and Carols, I'm not surprised you had high resist rates. Even with that, despite that, the fight wasn't this smooth thing that turned the content into easy mode. HP down resulted in a death.

But, all restating of the facts we've all shared aside, for the greatest effect you are seeking, just use the number of MNKs you need to maintain Chi/Penance and use any remaining slots for Kendatsuba SAMs. And like mentioned by Brotherhood, bring a RUN for even more resistance.

While it doesn't prove anything in favor of MNK, it's also just a first attempt with potential for improvement.

For one, I assumed perfect counter in combination with the counter rate would be comparable to the increased defense from cocoon and mighty guard. From what I saw, it significantly exceeded BLU's survivability in terms of pulling hate and being meleed to death. However, I overlooked that the MNK being countered could be a high risk of death in itself. This is something easily addressed(swap /war for /blu, or add a minne instead of doubling up on fire carols.. I was not using berserk to begin with for safety reasons).

The point raised about using MNKs for penance is a good one, in a situation like this with only 3 DPS, a single MNK using super revitalizer could put penance up for over 3 minutes. The damage difference would be much less pronounced with, say, war blu mnk instead of mnkx3.

I still don't honestly think MNK is worthless. I think people are quick to judge without making any attempt to experience it themselves. To be fair, acquiring all of the gear is not a small task for most, but it is much easier to write something off than give it a fair chance.

Let's not forget that we still have potential for boost to be recognized as broken, as player accounts largely indicate it's doing literally nothing. That could tilt the scales some more.

We've done what you just did but with more leeches, less geared people, no outside mules (you used four) and faster fights using RNG's. I'm serious on this, my RNG is thrown together and barely serviceable and we still clear that fight faster. We've done it even faster with heavy DD's but the counter-death is really annoying and can be a wipe if you get unlucky.

What everyone is saying is that MNK's damage output simply isn't competitive with other jobs to justify bringing it. It doesn't have to be the best but it must be much better then it currently is. Also you said zerg, a zerg is a fight that's over with in 60s, two minutes would be stretching it. You did an endurance fight where you focused on feeding minimal TP and hoped to kill it before an add randomly woke up and benedictioned + kaboom.