honestly agree with your ranking and analysis of each job. Also, I hope the devs set a new standard with gap closers for the next expansion, just let them be like Monk who does not have any kind of dmg tied to it, it's just utility to get you to keep on using your GCD's. There could be exceptions of course, like for example Dragoon dealing dmg with their actual jumps or Samurai doing as well since it does initially consume gauge, but still, I would rather have mobility not tied to damage burst windows as it is right now.
and overall i hope they just keep getting creative with the animations. Reaper opening portals, SMN flame punching and monk anime-dashing were so cool, while the others old movement skills are just *character slides really fast to location*. There's a world where we get a kurosawa-like stylized cut dashing for samurai, and a true teleport for aetherial manipulation, and i wanna live in that world
Yeah that would be nice. Reason why I like Reaper is cause of the gap closer. I'm controller on PC. And it's soooo much easier to have a directional front and back gap closer then a targeted or ground targeted one. Also dislike DRK for it clunky gap closer animation.
NIN and MNK should definitely be the gold standard for melee gap closer design. Shukuchi makes most mechs requiring correct positioning super simple. "Oh no I'm on the wrong side! POOF!"
I started playing Monk a couple months ago and I was definitely intimidated at first, but once I played it for a while, it actually felt really comfortable to play and pretty easy to get into. The only other melee I put a decent amount of time into was DRG and I actually feel like I have an easier time staying on rotation with monk because on dragoon, if you mess up and do the alternate line of the combo, you can't change it again until you get all the way back around, but if you press one wrong button on monk, you can easily switch back to the right flow.
Definitely true with the general rotation, but mnk burst windows are very punishing if you hit a wrong button or even mistime a chakra proc ogcd and clip You can salvage stuff to "fine" more easily but doing optimal can be pretty difficult
for me i just don't like having to keep up buffs or debuffs and with monk you're doing that like every other combo. Maybe i'm just weird and everyone else likes it but to me it just feels like busywork and not really exciting. So far Reaper is the only melee job that has really clicked with me(aside from the weird double enshroud burst window).
@@pforgottonsoul literally every melee job has to do this. Dragoon has its power surge buff, ninja has huton, samurai has both fugetsu and fuka, and reaper does it the other way around by needing to maintain death's design on the boss. Monk's disciplined fist management isn't any different from the others.
@@anthonydelfino6171 Monk's Disciplined Fist is significantly different from the other melee jobs in multiple ways. Most importantly, when you look at all four other melee jobs, there really isn't much risk of losing your damage buff if you follow a standard rotation. For Ninja and Reaper, you can extend both buffs to 60 seconds without damage loss (generally), and they are incredibly easy to reapply, especially Reaper. Samurai and Dragoon have longer combos, but the buff durations EXCEED the amount of time before you would naturally reapply them, thus making them permanent when following the basic gameplay loop. Neither of these are true for Monk. Monk has an incredibly short duration buff which lasts for a mere 15 seconds, ideally you apply it every other combo similar to dragoon, but there are some issues. Namely downtime and Masterful Blitz. Unlike the other melee jobs, which all have longer (30-60s) buff timers, Monk's 15 seconds is so short that literally any GCD-costing downtime (A melee aoe, a phase transition, a distance mechanic, etc) will cause you to need to reevaluate when you apply your next twin snakes. For example, if you just pressed Twin Snakes before a boss used an AoE which made you lose 5 seconds of melee uptime, you will now have to apply twin snakes twice in a row or risk dropping it, not something you would normally do. It's much more rare for any of the other four melee to face this issue. Masterful Blitz causes this same issue, but is built into the monk's very rotation. Monk, like Dragoon, has a loop of combo abilities that it presses under optimal conditions. You'll notice that they have not added a new GCD to Dragoon's rotation, and the reason for that is because it would mess up Dragoon's GCD loop. However, they have done this exact thing to Monk. Every time you press Masterful Blitz, you lose roughly 2 seconds of your Twin Snakes buff and your Demolish debuff, forcing you to reapply them earlier than you normally would or lose uptime. In this way, Masterful Blitz causes your GCD rotation to unintuitively drift, and change the order of your abilities like sand shifting beneath your feet. Lastly, Monk is the only one of all 5 melee where your damage buff can not only easily fall off during your burst window, but be unable to reapply it without significant damage loss. Reaper can always just press Shadow of Death, it will cost Ninja a GCD but they have Huraijin, buff uptime is built into Samurai's Meikyo and combo, and Dragoon simply needs to remember to alternate its two combo chains for full uptime. On Monk, depending on what GCD you entered Riddle of Fire on (Which as a reminder is constantly changing due to how masterful blitz and any downtime at all affect your rotation), you can have anywhere from 13 to 0 seconds of Twin Snakes left. This changes which Nadi and masterful blitz combo you have to do first. If you have a longer duration, then you have to do the lunar nadi first, and if you have a shorter duration, then you have to do the solar nadi first. If you mess up this process it could cost you upwards of 500 potency or even more depending on exactly how you mess it up. Is Monk flexible? It really depends on your definition of flexible. For optimal play, Monk requires knowing the class inside and out in a way not many other jobs demand of you even at the highest level. You need to monitor your short duration buff and debuff timers religiously, and be extremely aware of how every GCD or missed GCD is going to impact your rotation. However, for casual play, Monk can get away with a lot of mistakes and still deal fantastic damage. If you don't stress about every little thing, it's probably much more "freeing" to be able to fix a mistake on monk compared to other classes as the OP stated. I'd argue that it's only easy to fix mistakes on monk because it's also incredibly easy to make mistakes on monk, but it's just going to depend on how you look at it. As for what patrick watkins said, while you can say "all buffs are the same lol", you're just wrong. The system of GCDs the buff is baked into matters, the speed with which you apply and reapply the buff matters, and the pattern of how frequently, infrequently, or rigidly you must apply the buff also matters. Monk's Disciplined Fist buff is a buff, yes, and all melees have a buff or two they must maintain, yes. But monk is unique in that its buff is incredibly short, which means it requires more visual attention, will more easily drift its duration, and can much more easily fall off during a burst window when its uptime is most crucial.
NIN main since 2.2, this is a really good guide for any trying to learn melee jobs. Set your mudras in a position on you hotbar that you won't move them and practice repetition for about an hour each day on a dummy, then its second nature. Biggest problem is missing mudras, trick /mug for burst windows and deaths (will wash your whole rotation). NIN Supremacy!!!
Been wanting to come back to FFXIV and NIN was my go to melee class. I was concerned about the change to Trick Attack but has that functionality been shifted to Mug now?
@@bonedragon7665 yes the raid buff has been moved over to Mug now and it makes us do bonkers damage when you stack with Trick Attack. Mug + Trick Attack + Hyosho = PAIN
It can also be helpful if the names of the hand symbols if you remember them as a 1 2 3 or like a X O S T (or AXYB) remembering those small patterns can help you learn your combos a lot easier.
@@LightyGab a = credit for the groups dps affected by your buffs, r = the dps you individually are contributing. Separated like this so it's easier to compare how much jobs like bard and dancer contribute over all since they do more group buffing compared to jobs like samurai and black mage that are purely raw damage Edit: I had it backwards, whoopie's daisies lol
Another thing is Huraijin doesn't just max out your Huton timer, it actually grants Huton if you don't have it so you can get it back without using mudra on it
The main reason I like Ninja best of the melees is its insane versatility. It has a LOT of ranged attacks compared to the others and will let you keep damaging even in messy groups who don't always handle all mechanics perfectly and in weird fights where you've forgotten the mechanics, the ranged + teleport lets you just wing it on the fly. Teleports, shields, heals, lots of ranged. While I agree that they are all even at a high level the ninja just lets you do everything all the time.
Endwalker Monk is the shining example of a good rework in this game. A lean job but still has a high skill ceiling. It seems like the devs really leaned into job fantasy too by making the job more fun and impactful than ever. Give it a try! It's very smooth and is very good to play in Endwalker's current combat design. Also for cons I would have mentioned chakra overflow still being a problem during BH
I really wish it was a seperate job. Not a fan of the new Monk. It's still the only melee dps I'll play but I honestly would love to go back to right after launch of Shadowbringers when we just got GL4. ARR and HW were sensational and SB ruined it, finally in Shadowbringers it felt perfect. Gave off a real DBZ type feel. Building up your GL stacks and maintaining it, popping Riddle of Fire which slowed you down but increased your damage so it was kinda akward, but then when you got GL4 at 76 it felt like this is it boys we going SSJ2. Increasing the damage without losing speed. You felt like you were an absolute menace darting about hitting your positionals and nuking anything that moved. Always loved the feeling of flicking the switch from Fire to Wind. Now the current one just doesn't have the same impact, whilst it is easy to play it just doesn't feel like it evolves anymore. I also can't believe I have got to the point where I want all positionals removed when the job I grew up playing was positional king as when it's only the one positional now it just seems out of place.
I will say, i disagree with this view. I dont think MNK is a shining example of a rework, its not a great rework. I would barely even call it a rework if i am honest. It goes beyond the mechanical aspect of the job, which, arguably, is kind of not as fun. The job is the only one without a unique LB or running animation, it has useless skills that are at capstone levels and outside of some exceptions the weapon design is really dull, almost SAM dull. And i say all of that with heavy heart, its literally the only job i play since ARR and i cleared ultimates and savage raids, so it its not just the 'casual' content. I honestly think that for a mechanical and artistic stand point they have no idea what to do with MNK. It took 3 xpacs to make TK usable (Outside of TK rotation in SB), Bh is still by far one of the worst conceived skills in the game, well maybe not as much now as its just a buff and chakra overflow is still trash. Btw why is Bs still a god awful looking skill? Anatman does nothing, SsS is even more pointless now. Enlightment and TFC tied to the same resource is incredible dumb, there is no reason for that. Why is it that there is no new core skills? I mean DRG has them why cant we? We are already stealing form other jobs designs, if MNK is to be a petry dish of ideas at least put some cool looking shit in it. Ahh well a bit of a rant, either way, i hope that there are some interesting changes to MNK tool-kit or at least visuals in the new patch.
@@hamptonwooster The running part is actually wrong. MNK running animation is the exact same as every other job when they have sheated their weapons, including crafting and gathering jobs, even when they have their weapons(tools really) on hand. (In case it wasnt obvious i meant sprinting animation) As for the LB that is true, however you are missing a few things. Unlike BLM, which was the only caster(actually i completly forgot that SMN existed, point is still the same though), we had 3 melees with the same LB (MNK, DRG AND NIN), no reason not to improve or change that. Now arguably, you can say that is more cost efficient to not change it, and it would be true, but it still feels lazy.
When it comes to job guides I have a few regular favorites CC I like to go to but your Vs series are my FAVORITE and I always look forward to them. Great job man!!!
As beginner FFXIV player, for me this video is perhaps one of coolest and really descriptive about skill rotations of different physical jobs in nice visual way + the explanations added
Thank you so much for posting this! I was looking for a new melee DPS class to max out (only one that's 90 is Ninja) and I saw your other Versus videos and thought the other day "if only Mr Happy had a melee Versus" and it couldn't have been better timing! Decided to go with Samurai in the end after watching this video :)
@@anthonydelfino6171 my first thought upon actually messing around with Enshroud after unlocking it was “with this GCD there’s no way in hell these have positionals.” And sure enough, that was the case.
Really surprising to me that the rest all came in second. Would have loved to hear which of the 5 needs quality of life improvements, even if you still think they all perform well That said thank you again for your detailed analysis videos. As someone that plays a little bit of every job it helps to be a refresher of specific mechanics that I might be forgetting about playing casually
I out of the five, the only ones I play at the high levels are DRG, SAM, and RPR. I think DRG is the only one that needs some QoL, which might be addressed in the upcoming rework. The animation locking is still a pain alongside the double weaving not always responding as fluidly as it should (I don't notice this as much with my other jobs except DRK to a lesser extent). At most I think that SAM's issues Shoha I and II should be combined into one button (arguably the same can be said for Shinten/Kyuten and Guren/Senei).
@@Skyztamer That's why you don't double weave with a jump attack. Otherwise it's just getting used to the animations and not being stupid with your timings. I really hate that they're reworking the job soon because I actually really enjoy it right now.
@@liyifenn - Most of the time, combining weapon skills is done to make the job more playable for controller players, which Yoshi-P very much wants to continue supporting, while still being able to add in new abilities and redesigned rotations to keep the jobs from growing too stale.
I dunno about the other melee, but as a NIN main, the only QOL improvement I really want is for the server to actually read my Mudra inputs 100% of the time. It REALLY sucks to mess up the combo of Mudra and I don't think there's an easy solution without completely scrapping the unique design of the job. Other than that, it's hard to complain about the job anymore - especially after they addressed our 6.0 complaints. We can still do decent damage when forced to disengage from melee, have insane mobility, have a defensive button that only MNK can really beat, plus we boost the raid's damage during the 2-minute burst window... I'd honestly only ask for more raid utility. MNK and RPR both have ways to help keep the raid alive, but NIN still rides entirely on the popularity of Mug's debuff for raid utility. I still want for Phantom Kamaitachi to be an oGCD (especially because of how pet potency works), but it's not really a big deal until 7.0 when we might get more buttons to play with.
I've played them all, and I thought that Reaper would be my 2nd main through the expansion (PLD is my 1st), but MNK has ended up being my favorite of the melee dps. It's been a while since that's been the case, but I really like the state Monk is in right now.
Interesting I'm leveling everything and ended up really liking PLD, so it's my Main now. Do like Reaper as melee. Now lvling SAM which I like cause of BIG DMG. So maybe I'll like Monk more...? Still need to start lvling it. Hate DRG which is strange seeing as it's a strict rotation like PLD, but to much weaving for my liking and no star diver in burst. Ninja I like, but the work learning opener and rotation is hard when in unfamiliar content.
@@Blazingbeard When it comes to the Melee jobs, it really just comes down to which rotation you enjoy the most. Do you want minimal Off Global attacks but a very fast global cooldown? That's Monk. Ninja is all about maximizing your burst window. Dragoon has a fixed rotation with lots of off globals. Samurai has BIG hits and proper use of their buffs keeps their off burst time minimized. Finally, Reaper builds their two gauges and kinda feels like a hybrid Monk / Dragoon. Personally, I enjoy Monk the most and Ninja the least. Samurai and Reaper are tied 2 and 3 with Dragoon at 4 because its easy to get their long combos interrupted and their buff is awkward to use. But again, that's all personal preference.
@@diamondmagus thanks for this. I know it's personality preference. But as I like PLD and OP likes it too with Monk as 2nd. So I inferred that I might like Monk too. So now I'm leveling it. See if I like it.
Very glad Monk got a rework for Endwalker. Got it up to level 50 because I love punchy bois, but in ShadowBringers, every skill had a positional attached to it which was way too overwhelming for me. Now Monk was my first level 90 melee and I love it's freedom and simplicity, my go to job for lower level content
My recommendation for anyone starting out on melee for the first time is to start with Samurai to get comfortable with positionals, personal mit, and a looping rotation. I find samurai to be very straightforward in the looping rotation and with so many buttons to press, it can really make someone feel comfortable on the role. after that, moving to monk is an easier transition since they share gear, have a similar gcd, and positionals are similar.
I found it confusing during the quest unlock, and randomly mashed buttons as I had no idea what they did. Plus most beginners to melee don't have access to samurai and start the game in ARR with lancer and pubilist. They can pick up rogue at 15 as the earliest next one. I started as marauder and seitched to rogue and ended up staying with ninja to the end of Shb and loved it over the years. It kept getting better and better. But I switched to whm for EW and second rdm now and have yet to take ninja past 80.
@@manbearpigsereal Monk has been my main DPS since ARR. Not a fan of the new one but I still stick by it. I also main PLD as my tank, and it is currently perfect to play. I guess I better enjoy my last month of a good job before Yoshi destroys this one too. I'd rather they just release new jobs instead of completely reworking jobs. I'd rather have the choice of what I want to play. For me Yoshi has currently killed MNK, MCH, DRK and soon PLD. I wish I could believe he would do a good job but his track history says otherwise.
I don't wanna sound mean to my brothers and sisters in arms who main dragoon as a Lallafel but something about that combo in itself looks and sounds so weird, I really don't know what it is as I can take lallafel players seriously when they main any other job but as a Dragoon they just look hilarious/ridiculous to me
While it is fun to rank them based on their level 90 gameplay, most people will have to experience them at their base level so here's my ranking of the jobs that I have personally tried (sorry Monkey and Weeb users, I haven't had the time to pick those up) and how they feel as you level them. None of them are at level 90 because I am a poor sprout who just stopped at Endwalker to help some people on Discord to catch up, but it is something that bugs me about the game. • *Dragoon* - A Fun to play as, fun to backflip; and while the only torture is not having an AoE attack early on, I think this job has one of the more fun rotations as you level it. Plus, you get to fight Nidhogg the intended way. The only changes I would (obviously) make are to provide a weaker AoE attack near level 15 and replace it with the proper attack at 40 using traits or something. The animation locks are dangerous, but not tedious. • *Reaper* - B It might just be the edge, but this job is so fun to play as you level it. Once you get Enshroud, though, it becomes hard to do
It’s funny I love Ninja _because_ it’s “boring” between its bursts. IMO dps jobs in FFXIV are a bit too fast paced and button heavy, to me it’s too hard on most dps to properly do a rotation and do raid mechanics. I’m a healer main tho so maybe that’s why.
personally the classes that are boring between burst windows are perfect for me, with ninja all I really gotta do is hit my opener and then just focus on avoiding damage until trick attack cooldown goes under 20. Its very manageable vs like samurai where you need to be following a constant rotation which can get tricky during certain fights and dealing with mechanics
i agree with you on boring rotations between bursts, but imo Samurai... slowly but surely ended up being my more comfortable melee dps to use. At some point you're not really thinking about how what buttons you're pressing, but really just the Higanbana dot uptime. the EW changes certainly made the class a hell lot more flexible to play around with the cooldowns, too! Though... Kaiten, my beloved, I miss you
Very well explained! I must agree that monk is the best all around DPS. Although very close in some aspect, If I need to order them by strengths for the different DPS jobs I would go with something like this: MNK DRG NIN SAM RPR Burst Speed 4 1 5 3 2 Personal dps 3 1 2 5 4 Defence 3 1 4 2 5 Mobility 5 2 4 1 3 Raid Buffs 4 5 3 1 2 Total Points 19 10 18 12 16
I'd argue reaper for first place defensively and ninja for second over monk. 3 charges of 20% mitigation sounds pretty good, and mantra sounds neat, but there's some important factors. For mitigating single hits, shields are vastly superior to damage reduction. Let's say a monk player has 1000 HP and a raid wide attack is going to damage the party for 200 damage. 20% on a raid wide is fairly reasonable. The monk presses Riddle of Earth, which, assuming no other defensives are active, is going to reduce damage taken by 20% of 200, or 40 damage. Meanwhile, a Ninja who presses Shade Shift shields themselves for 20% of their HP, which is 200, meaning they take 0 damage from the attack, and there is no diminishing returns on shielding. The cooldown is a question, of course, but so is the duration. A Ninja's Shade shift lasts for a whopping 20 seconds, compared to a paltry 6 second per charge of Riddle of Earth if used during uptime. Shade shift lasts long enough to cover multiple hits if there is shield remaining. Now, with a cooldown of 120 seconds, Monk can fit in 4 Riddle of Earth usages per shade shift. Going back to our earlier example, that would be 40x4, or 160 damage reduction if used perfectly 4 times. That's lower than Ninja, and it was spread out over multiple abilities. With how raidwide damage and healing work in this game, it's often better to block significant damage from a big attack than it is to block small amounts over time, especially when diminishing returns get involved. Still, monk has Mantra as an additional cooldown. The problem with Mantra is that it only increases the healing of spells, aka GCDs. Most healers don't want to use GCDs to heal, with the exceptions of White Mage's lilies and Scholar's Deployment Tactics. With good coordination, it can help when a WHM is spamming lilies or provide more (Probably overkill tbh) burst shielding from a scholar, but that's kind of it. Ninja presses one button and gigachads through a big mechanic every 2 minutes, which gets even better the more downtime a fight has, such as the new ultimate. Reaper also has a shield which is quite good with its short CD and aoe regen. If utilized correctly, can let healers move oGCDs to more deadly mechanics later in the fight, and possibly reduce the amount of GCD heals needed, increasing group dps. Thanks for coming to my ted talk.
@@Bravadorado My consideration for defence was to be used for something unavoidable in a raid scenario, as it is always better to avoid something that can be avoided entirely. In case with ninja, it has a lots of movement options which is better for surviving overall. Depending on the fight mechanics Shade Shift may not always be usable for consistency sake, but it is a strong defensive ability like The blackest night. Haven't considered the Armor value for the different melee classes so it may shift my scores again.
Ninja here, it does seem intimidating but you level from 10 so you get these abilities slowly and can learn as you go. Not like Samurai or Reaper where you're just thrown into the deep-end with lots of skills right off the bat.
I've been a samurai main for years, but losing Kaiten was rough. Kenki as a system has been made almost completely superfluous, since functionally all it does now is meter out how frequently you can spam Shinten. There's no thought or planning going into when to spend it, since Ikishoten is on the same timer as Seinei/Guren, so you simply use those together and burn all other kenki on Shinten. Kaiten's absence in the rotation is keenly felt, and it makes the whole thing just feel bad. They claim they axed Kaiten to combat button bloat, but they kept Shoha and Shoha II separate??? Make it make sense.
Especially considering the development told us to try it with an open mind and let them know how we felt about the changes,, only to be met with deafening silence when everyone and their mother was like "please for the love of all that is holy give it back"
I had tried every melee job (including Reaper) before looking at Monk. I honestly thought to myself that the only melee I'd enjoy was tanking and the occasional Red Mage/Sage flirtations with the front line. When I finally gave Monk a try, what I thought would annoy me turned out to be it's best feature. As a monk, you *can't* mess up your 3-hit combo. You can't use a Raptor skill or Coeurl skill without the requisite form (powers exempting). One of my largest DPS losses, and a true annoyance for me as a player, was fat-fingering the wrong button in a rotation because I was too focused on avoiding that AoE on the ground. Now, while I haven't hit 90 yet, my monk zips around the battlefield nailing positionals with ease and abusing True North like a short CD power stim. I have fun in melee now. The moral? The community gives the best advice when they say "try everything". Something will eventually click. :)
Just a note, Mrhappy, I thought this video didn't exist because it wasn't in the playlist. Happy to be wrong, but I was real sad when I finished the last one.
I always see it as a “Good Problem To Have” when all the jobs perform relatively similar. So you can exercise as much freedom of choice. Great selling on the game. RPR & DRG are my mains though 🙂
The things that got me to to a healthy baseline for monk was just throwing out a dragon kick and a twin snakes when I felt like I was lost rotation wise.
I like reaper, dragoon, for simple and easy combos. Samurai is cool but overwhelming for me, and haven't raise ninja and monk because less interesting, maybe one day
Samurai is insanely easy. Use your dot to determine burst windows and keep that dot up. No kaiten so just use your gauge if you want but save some for 2 minute windows. Start on the balance discord for openers and read up on burst windows and it's really easy.
I've played Samurai ever since I started the game back in Stormblood. My absolute favorite job. But for someone like me the "convert sen into 10 kenki each" skill I never use. Like I get why, but why should I use it when I can just keep going and get a Setsugeka instead. Heck the button isn't even on my hotbar cause it's that useless to me. (Bring back Kaiten Squeenix senpai)
For endgame, if you don't use hagakure (the skill that converts sen to kenki), then you will naturally misalign all of your burst from raid buffs. This then nets you a loss of damage; having all your hard hitting attacks under raid buffs is significantly better than an extra midare. Now, you can use alternatives fillers that does not use hagakure, but hagakure fillers typically will be dps increase over these alternatives. Also hagakure allows you to correct mistakes in your rotation to realign yourself back. For example, let's say you accidentally did 2 combos for the red sen back to back. Now you are behind 3 gcds within your rotation. You can now do a 3 gcd filler with Hagakure to force yourself back into your loop. Obviously, none of this really matters for any content that is not endgame. Heck with how far in the patch we are, we have enough gear to compensate for "unoptimal" rotations. So, play however you want.
Technically yes but you go to flank only once every 30s to press Armour Crush and then you just chill at the rear and Trick is every minute. With two True North charges you should have decent uptime on the positionals. Dragoon has to change positional between two gcd and you do it every 4th and 5th gcd so it's quite a difference in the movement requirement between those two jobs.
@@Noctornus yes, some jobs change for positional more frequently than others. Just people tend to forget that trick does have a positional potency increase, as Happy seemed to when saying dragoon was the only job that had three positional skills. Similarly monk is changing over to the rear every 8 GCD despite only having two, so it moves just a little less frequently these days to hit those than dragoon does despite having fewer positionals than ninjas. It wasn't a call out because you have to move for them, just more a reminder that you do want to be mindful of that move on ninja
Honestly? With the recent patch the melees are just SO close to eachother, like you mentioned at the end, that it really just feels up to complete and utter preference. Personally I'd put ninja at the top, due to being able to perform the best in situations with a lot of downtime (correct me if this has changed since the release of DSR), which truthfully puts it massively ahead in fights like ultimates. I think coupling NIN with a resource building job might be the best way to play DSR due to NIN's high damage during high downtime parts lets a RPR (or other gauge job) build full gauge for full uptime parts like Nidhogg and the end. That's my argument for why I find NIN to be A BIT stronger than the rest. But as you said, that's just in one situation. The others excel in other situations.
I never got interested in ninja, but since EW I have absolutely loved it and has been the only job I REALLY click with. It flows really well and when you hit that 150k hyosho in opener/ odd burtst it is a massive dopamine hit
you mention at 25:18 that positionals affect Kenki gain, but this was removed with Endwalker. Kenki gain is static now, the weaponskill's direct potency is reduced if you don't meet the positional requirement.
Yeah I noticed that too. The weapon skill’s potency isn’t necessarily reduced if you don’t hit a positional, it just does normal combo potency. Hitting a positional grants bonus potency (of 50 I believe)
@@saysay8920 Not always, if you missed a positional previously it could cost you an ogcd which could and did cause you to lose some of your burst during your burst window. Now every pull should be the exact same with you having the same resources every time. Which is what they are going for, they are adding consistency to jobs.
Cool video but you're using outdated info in a few places. 1. Phantom Kamaitachi doesn't consume a Bunshin stack anymore. 2. Samurai no longer gets increased Kenki gains on hitting his positionals, just increased damage. You could chalk it up to the video being a long time in the making, but while PK was changed in the middle of the expansion, the Kenki gains on positionals aren't a thing since Shadowbringers.
Idk about monk. Every time I enter a trial or raid with a reaper in the party all us Dancers fight over the reapers. This is of course if the jobs have about the same ilvl.
Probably bcuz its the easiest melee job imo so It Is very likely that a Reaper Will make full use of its kit and therefore also full use of the dancer's utility. Not a lot of people play monk and among those who do lots of them are still learning the job so they might struggle a bit in Making use of the Monk's whole potential. So yeah most of the time buffing a Reaper or samurai Is the safest option
Reaper's downtime problems are made worse with the sole fact that the job is resource negative even with full uptime. At bare minimum it should be resource neutral, ideally resource positive if the game design insists on downtime, because it has by far the most damage baked in to its resource generation compared to every other job in the game. If it were up to me I would: 1) Scrap Death's Design. It's a boring GCD tax that just eats in to your burst windows and resource spenders and its 2 uses per minute alone drop your Soul generation hard. Replace its functionality with Death Warrant from PvP (or just a Wildfire copy). 2) Decouple the 50 Shroud from Plentiful Harvest and make that a separate resource generation skill like Barrel Stabilizer or Bloodfest. This lets you distribute your Shroud as you please in fights with downtime prep. 3) Add Shroud Gauge to Harvest Moon and put a cooldown on Soulsow. 10-20 gauge is plenty. You'll only get this once per fight with full uptime and with downtime you're only "catching up" with it because you typically lose up to 10 or so GCDs in a downtime section.
And my boy monk takes the crown, the only thing it needs to be the perfect job is to have a ranged attack for either downtime or dungeons but it hasn't been a problem for me since thunderclap arrived
Holy moly, someone who pronounces the reaper skills correctly. My ears are blessed! I suffer whenever I get hit by lag with NIN. If I could reliably hit the mudra without lag screwing me I'd be all over the job. DRG feels bad for similar reasons thanks to the animation locks so I'm curious if the rework is gonna fix that. SAM I'm generally happy with, though I wish they combined the shoha skills into one button instead of getting rid of kaiten. In fact there are a couple of skills they could have made into AOE with fall off type skills to reduce button bloat... but everyone knows this and has been talking about this since they removed kaiten. MNK and RPR are just very fun all round, but not for me.
I mained Monk since ARR and the removal of positional's, removed my "focus" to play the job, they kept my focus and while Blitzes are very damn good, i miss the need to move around. i struggle to enjoy any of the melee now, Monk does feel nice with the raw speed but i guess im still annoyed at yet more dumbing down instead of encouraging people to actually pay attention to what they are doing.
really hope they just axe away reaper's debuff, i hate applying it. especially in dungeons, i wouldnt hate it so much of it maybe got refreshed when you use gibbet/gallows/guillotine? i just hate stopping my rotation to just, re-apply the debuff.i also kinda wish using communio gave you soul sow so you had a way to recharge it outside of downtime/phase transitions.
I might add another pro for Ninja that it has very flexible range, make it able to peel-off and still bursting. Now that you have Phantom Kamaitachi that barely a dps loss when you're cucked out of melee range so it's a decent job for learning the fight while still do decent dps. For Samurai, positional don't effect resource generation anymore, iai jutsu has craaaaazy range now, and you can slide cast iai jutsu at a bit past half way cast so there's hardly any problem for mobility.
I'm interested in Monk. As a controller player, how does Monk compare to Samurai and Reaper? I play and enjoy both of those jobs, and I believe I can play them both to good levels. Is Monk significantly harder? Would I be staring at my hotbar a lot?
As a monk player, i can say you'll be staring at your buff/dot more than your hotbar, a key thing about monk is to never let your buff and your dot drop so you'll be adjusting your rotation to make sure they don't. It's an easy job to pick up with a lot of flexibility to adapt to the fight at hand. I'd say Monk is harder than Reaper but easier than Samurai. Reaper is pretty plain outside of burst window and Samurai has 3 ressource to keep track of, Monk need you to keep track of where you are in your rotation to know what skill to pull next but the ressource management is pretty easy, chakra are basically fire when it's ready if you don't have another ogcd to pop (A downside of Monk's fast gcd is that you can't double weaver without clipping your gcd) and perfect balance is just alternating between two combos depending if you have nadis open or not.
Monk is harder than reaper, and its debatable if its harder than SAM. Monk has a more complex burst phase but is less punishing if you mess up. Sam's rotation is less complicated but is also stricter. I play monk on controller and don't need to stare at my hotbar too much, but having your buffs visible is very important for this job so you will be looking at that a lot. It's a lower action count job so it's very nice on controller.
I play on a controller and have been a main on monk since 2015. The job is pretty comfortable once you can get it set up right, and like with any job, have the muscle memory to know what buttons to push to do what skill. I would argue at this point it's probably one of the easiest jobs in the game (though do take in mind the years of experience I have on it) It no longer has a positional requirement on every weaponskill. It just has some personal buffs to watch for and a dot to track on the enemy, but that's not terribly unlike samurai and dragoon. Also the job uses up far fewer buttons than any of the other melee jobs, so there's not as much to learn. The only real learning curve will come with knowing how to get your nadis, and that the opener of the job isn't entirely intuitive if you want to get phantom rush to fall in the two minute burst windows.
Let me just emphasize the “NINJA IS REALLY BORING BETWEEN BURSTS” part one more time. The job needs more love than Dragoon as far as I’m concerned. Animation locking is one thing, being outright boring is a whole other. All the new Endwalker changes have just felt overall really bad save for maybe Hollow Nozuchi and that’s literally just passive.
Yeah, it does. I get that they need to rework dragoon so they can expand it in the future, but DRG feels really good, and enticed me away from NIN this expansion. DRG always has a lot to do; NIN, not so much.
I feel like when i look at act, because it shows adps by default, it will have samurai usually shit all over everyone in dps by a few thousands of dps. My static has one that's been tryharding a bit and he is just unparalelled. Even in all pug runs i had with him.
Personally dragoon would be my favorite melee if it didn't have so many buffs to manage. I'm fine with a group buff and a combo buff, but dragoon has 3 more on top of that, and it just feels like it's too much. I also personally miss the mirage dive they changed and then walked back. But overall, it just feels a bit too clunky to me, even if some people find the buff maintenance fun. We'll see if the rework cleans things up a bit.
It's great that you get PB at 50 and it does literally nothing. A slight potency buff in your combo and that's it until 60. Then at 60 nothing changes. You have your entire rotation that you will use at 90 outside of oGCDs. Personally I want Shadowbringers launch Monk back.
I think RPR deserves the #2 spot mainly due to its group healing, with honorable mention to its flexible positionals and higher potency on its ranged attack.
surprised you didn't mention this when talking about reaper's awkward burst window but their raid buff goes out sooner than everyone else's meaning it falls off before the end of burst phase for many other jobs, making them a giant pain to play with
There’s an adjustment where rpr will begin their burst with arcane circle at 6 seconds instead of 9, only at the first 2 minute mark. That’ll allow it to line up with everyone else’s buffs who are about 2 gcds behind
I always thought Monk should use Meditate in a situation where you are out of range to build stacks until you get back in range. Or is that not worth it?
better to use six sided star then get back in range before the longer gcd cooldown is over so you can start attacking normally again. Meditate is better when the boss is straight up untargetable
-> Use SSS -> If you're still out of range, form shift -> If you're still outside of range, meditate for chakras -> If you're still outside of range, anatman because why not? -> If you're still outside of range, PAIN
Only problem I have with SAM is that its animations (in its basic rotation) are a little slow and clunky -- maybe it only seems that way bc the skills themselves don't seem very flashy as opposed to, say, MNK or RPR. I haven't gotten very far with it (highest lvl is 65?), but I do like it more as time goes on. The alt that has it is stuck in HW patches atm, so I don't really have much use for Kenki yet besides the jump back and gap closer skills. That AoE that uses 25 kenki you get at 62 is sitting on my hotbar taunting me at this point. At of all DPS I've leveled, only RPR is at 90 and I absolutely love it. It's nice, flashy, and quick with great aesthetics. I used to love DRG more, but I haven't gotten the hang of its rotation yet! It was my first class ever so I really want to love it. MNK and NIN are great--MNK I'm still getting used to even tho it's my fav after RPR, but NIN is 3rd. It took awhile for me to try it bc a friend was pulling a lot of bias against it (they've had a lot of bad luck with jerks playing NIN) and they were my only exposure to it, but that's changed. Again, love the video, and this was definitely something I needed. Gonna try a few things on MNK the next time I get on, I'm still struggling with moon and sun rotation.
for showing off imo show the jobs from the side (not always from top / behind).., can see the animations better from the side (like on dummies).., but you used the "jobs trailers" to show off animations, makes sense to to show how they feel when playing (above / behind view) too ...that said love watching your "VS" vids, and they are informative (all important stuff are packed in there + extras)
I'm feeling like RPR is going to be getting some reworks. If not in one of the upcoming patches, then at least by 7.0 Deaths Design is clunky and doesn't blend well into the kit, and the awkwardness mentioned in the cons. In concept it flows and works well, but it could use some smoothing out to let it flow more naturally and feel more refined in it's design.
As of patch 6.28, Melee are in the best place they've ever been. The balance is nigh on perfect and the difference between one and another is minimal at best. It truly is a time when you can choose which is your favourite to play and enjoy playing it
Meanwhile mch and rdm players are crying in a corner lol I'm glad melee are close now after those rpr buffs last patch but damn se give those jobs some love lol
Mantra and riddle are basically the reason I swapped to monk back during p3s. The DPS is really nice, but the defensive aspects put in some serious work with prog and PF groups. Now if only brotherhood would stop popping after my weave windows...
Me: Stop saying jibbet! Also me: Wait...*looks up the word "gibbet". Sees pronounciation as "jibbet"* *walks up to the mirror and points at self* Me: Stop saying "gibbet" (hard g sound)
When Reaper was revealed I knew it was gonna be my main until something else caught my interest down the line. Though I'm not a fan of edgy things that wasn't really a factor for me. The pretty colors and fun gameplay loop was awesome. I was a ninja main but a big cat man didn't seem right for roleplay purposes so I played Gunbreaker for a long while, though I really don't like playing tank at all. So when Reaper was shown mainly as a Hrothgar I knew I had to switch.
Happy you made a mistake when explaining Nin's Phantom Kamitichi it doesnt use a bushin ready stack it was changed in 6.2 i believe it has its own seperate buff now as can be see in your vid
yeah i can never decide between monk and reaper. i wanna focus on just one damage dealer. maybe i'll wait for the new expansion with the 2 new damage jobs
Whenever I see people say SAM is a difficult job I always get confused, how is pressing 9 keys in order complicated? This comes from someone who mastered the Ninja opening in a day.
I'd honestly recommend Samurai has a starter job for any new player simply because while it has one of the lowest skill floors imo, the skill ceiling is equally as high and there is SO much potential for optimisation.
4:30 correct me if I'm wrong but doesn't the potency of fang and claw or wheeling thrust increase if one is used before the other, raising its potency to be tied at the highest damage in dragoons gcd skills?
You *do* get a 100 potency boost on whichever of Fang and Claw or Wheeling Thrust is the fifth hit of your combo, but heaven's thrust is 80 more potency. It's still correct to use Life Surge on the fifth hit if you have both Dragon's Sight and Lance Charge active and can hit the positional, but only so long as you don't lose a usage on Heaven's Thrust with any buffs.
They've basically been maasacring my poor Samurai since Stormblood, imo. Not the damage or effectiveness, but the fun factor. If went from having am extremely flexible, fun rotation to a slow, plodding static rotation in the last two expansions. When compared to the other jobs it just lacks the "fun" factor now.
As a DRG main i kinda disagree with "simple combos", you have many things to do between these, you have use your jump between, you have to position yourself behind or on the side of the boss to do more damage, you have to learn how to efficiently use life of dragon to not waste dps and more. Like buffs, you have to keep them sometimes to adjust with Samourai combos and don't use them on CD.
I'm surprised happy didn't mention what happens to reapers if they die right before their 2 min. It feels really bad to lose an entire shroud window because you lost the 50 gauge. Huge dps loss
@@bicks4436 Meh, Ninja and samurai are pretty ok between Mug, Meisui, Ikishoten, and Shisui. All they lose is some ogcd gauge. Reapers though, as mentioned, lose the entire first half of their burst frantically trying to gauge up and get that second half in.
@@slimfastsubaru2043 Yeah monks have to start the whole rotation over with double lunar, or put Phantom Rush on the 1m. It's hard to fix, but only if they die during the wrong minute. Same problem with SMN; if they die between Bahamut and Phoenix, suddenly it's the Bahamuts on the 1m and Phoenix during 2m buff windows, and that's impossible to fix unless they intentionally die again.
@@SapphireDragon357 though for summoner, if not for the weakness debuff, dying and getting phoenix on the 2 minute window is actually a DPS increase over being in bahamut for it. Phoenix phase has about 100 more potency when you execute all the skills than bahamut does during that same time.
true, when I was new to savages, i suck at doing mechanics while also doing my job rotations but ninja's downtime gave me a breath time so i could fully focus on the mechanics and remembering what is the next mechanic while doing the basic rotation + bhavacakra.
Surprisingly nobody has mentioned this, but SAM positionals don't affect Kenki anymore. They're just a straight potency difference like other classes.
Thanks for mentioning this. I was surprised when I heard that in the video so you saved me some unneeded research.
Hate that change
honestly agree with your ranking and analysis of each job. Also, I hope the devs set a new standard with gap closers for the next expansion, just let them be like Monk who does not have any kind of dmg tied to it, it's just utility to get you to keep on using your GCD's. There could be exceptions of course, like for example Dragoon dealing dmg with their actual jumps or Samurai doing as well since it does initially consume gauge, but still, I would rather have mobility not tied to damage burst windows as it is right now.
and overall i hope they just keep getting creative with the animations. Reaper opening portals, SMN flame punching and monk anime-dashing were so cool, while the others old movement skills are just *character slides really fast to location*. There's a world where we get a kurosawa-like stylized cut dashing for samurai, and a true teleport for aetherial manipulation, and i wanna live in that world
Yeah that would be nice. Reason why I like Reaper is cause of the gap closer. I'm controller on PC. And it's soooo much easier to have a directional front and back gap closer then a targeted or ground targeted one. Also dislike DRK for it clunky gap closer animation.
I ABSOLUTELY agree
NIN and MNK should definitely be the gold standard for melee gap closer design. Shukuchi makes most mechs requiring correct positioning super simple. "Oh no I'm on the wrong side! POOF!"
I started playing Monk a couple months ago and I was definitely intimidated at first, but once I played it for a while, it actually felt really comfortable to play and pretty easy to get into. The only other melee I put a decent amount of time into was DRG and I actually feel like I have an easier time staying on rotation with monk because on dragoon, if you mess up and do the alternate line of the combo, you can't change it again until you get all the way back around, but if you press one wrong button on monk, you can easily switch back to the right flow.
Yep. The rotation is 'forgiving'. Currently my fav - even over my SMN because of survivability in ugly fights.
Definitely true with the general rotation, but mnk burst windows are very punishing if you hit a wrong button or even mistime a chakra proc ogcd and clip
You can salvage stuff to "fine" more easily but doing optimal can be pretty difficult
for me i just don't like having to keep up buffs or debuffs and with monk you're doing that like every other combo. Maybe i'm just weird and everyone else likes it but to me it just feels like busywork and not really exciting. So far Reaper is the only melee job that has really clicked with me(aside from the weird double enshroud burst window).
@@pforgottonsoul literally every melee job has to do this. Dragoon has its power surge buff, ninja has huton, samurai has both fugetsu and fuka, and reaper does it the other way around by needing to maintain death's design on the boss. Monk's disciplined fist management isn't any different from the others.
@@anthonydelfino6171 Monk's Disciplined Fist is significantly different from the other melee jobs in multiple ways. Most importantly, when you look at all four other melee jobs, there really isn't much risk of losing your damage buff if you follow a standard rotation. For Ninja and Reaper, you can extend both buffs to 60 seconds without damage loss (generally), and they are incredibly easy to reapply, especially Reaper. Samurai and Dragoon have longer combos, but the buff durations EXCEED the amount of time before you would naturally reapply them, thus making them permanent when following the basic gameplay loop. Neither of these are true for Monk. Monk has an incredibly short duration buff which lasts for a mere 15 seconds, ideally you apply it every other combo similar to dragoon, but there are some issues. Namely downtime and Masterful Blitz.
Unlike the other melee jobs, which all have longer (30-60s) buff timers, Monk's 15 seconds is so short that literally any GCD-costing downtime (A melee aoe, a phase transition, a distance mechanic, etc) will cause you to need to reevaluate when you apply your next twin snakes. For example, if you just pressed Twin Snakes before a boss used an AoE which made you lose 5 seconds of melee uptime, you will now have to apply twin snakes twice in a row or risk dropping it, not something you would normally do. It's much more rare for any of the other four melee to face this issue.
Masterful Blitz causes this same issue, but is built into the monk's very rotation. Monk, like Dragoon, has a loop of combo abilities that it presses under optimal conditions. You'll notice that they have not added a new GCD to Dragoon's rotation, and the reason for that is because it would mess up Dragoon's GCD loop. However, they have done this exact thing to Monk. Every time you press Masterful Blitz, you lose roughly 2 seconds of your Twin Snakes buff and your Demolish debuff, forcing you to reapply them earlier than you normally would or lose uptime. In this way, Masterful Blitz causes your GCD rotation to unintuitively drift, and change the order of your abilities like sand shifting beneath your feet.
Lastly, Monk is the only one of all 5 melee where your damage buff can not only easily fall off during your burst window, but be unable to reapply it without significant damage loss. Reaper can always just press Shadow of Death, it will cost Ninja a GCD but they have Huraijin, buff uptime is built into Samurai's Meikyo and combo, and Dragoon simply needs to remember to alternate its two combo chains for full uptime. On Monk, depending on what GCD you entered Riddle of Fire on (Which as a reminder is constantly changing due to how masterful blitz and any downtime at all affect your rotation), you can have anywhere from 13 to 0 seconds of Twin Snakes left. This changes which Nadi and masterful blitz combo you have to do first. If you have a longer duration, then you have to do the lunar nadi first, and if you have a shorter duration, then you have to do the solar nadi first. If you mess up this process it could cost you upwards of 500 potency or even more depending on exactly how you mess it up.
Is Monk flexible? It really depends on your definition of flexible. For optimal play, Monk requires knowing the class inside and out in a way not many other jobs demand of you even at the highest level. You need to monitor your short duration buff and debuff timers religiously, and be extremely aware of how every GCD or missed GCD is going to impact your rotation. However, for casual play, Monk can get away with a lot of mistakes and still deal fantastic damage. If you don't stress about every little thing, it's probably much more "freeing" to be able to fix a mistake on monk compared to other classes as the OP stated. I'd argue that it's only easy to fix mistakes on monk because it's also incredibly easy to make mistakes on monk, but it's just going to depend on how you look at it.
As for what patrick watkins said, while you can say "all buffs are the same lol", you're just wrong. The system of GCDs the buff is baked into matters, the speed with which you apply and reapply the buff matters, and the pattern of how frequently, infrequently, or rigidly you must apply the buff also matters. Monk's Disciplined Fist buff is a buff, yes, and all melees have a buff or two they must maintain, yes. But monk is unique in that its buff is incredibly short, which means it requires more visual attention, will more easily drift its duration, and can much more easily fall off during a burst window when its uptime is most crucial.
NIN main since 2.2, this is a really good guide for any trying to learn melee jobs. Set your mudras in a position on you hotbar that you won't move them and practice repetition for about an hour each day on a dummy, then its second nature. Biggest problem is missing mudras, trick /mug for burst windows and deaths (will wash your whole rotation). NIN Supremacy!!!
Been wanting to come back to FFXIV and NIN was my go to melee class. I was concerned about the change to Trick Attack but has that functionality been shifted to Mug now?
@@bonedragon7665 yes the raid buff has been moved over to Mug now and it makes us do bonkers damage when you stack with Trick Attack.
Mug + Trick Attack + Hyosho = PAIN
@@chaoskenji sweet thanks for the clarification!!
@@bonedragon7665 yes, what Chaos said and trick now only applies to your personal dps
It can also be helpful if the names of the hand symbols if you remember them as a 1 2 3 or like a X O S T (or AXYB) remembering those small patterns can help you learn your combos a lot easier.
"Dragoon VS Monk VS Ninja VS Samurai VS Dragoon" look i know reaper isn't the best right now but that hurts :(
Reaper has the highest aDPS of all jobs with buffs. Only samurai and black mage are higher.
I been maining it in prog and it's not bad. It's the easiest melee and it's very forgiving, I almost always top dps.
@@Levi_Skardsen what is aDPS and rDPS recently been using logs but idk.
Dragoon 2.0 :V
@@LightyGab a = credit for the groups dps affected by your buffs, r = the dps you individually are contributing. Separated like this so it's easier to compare how much jobs like bard and dancer contribute over all since they do more group buffing compared to jobs like samurai and black mage that are purely raw damage
Edit:
I had it backwards, whoopie's daisies lol
“Gosh, how did you get so good with Samurai?!”
“It just makes Sens.”
Correction on the positionals part at 7:05, NIN also has 3 positionals (Aeolian Edge, Armor Crush, and Trick Attack)
I love Reapers play style, I’ll always play it.
I also love the idea I’d DRG (I’m a huge polearm fan lol) but it’s felt clunky to me since ARR.
Literally the same with me, I looove Polearms, especially Glaives, but I just don’t like the feel of Dragoon enough to use it.
yeah the way the jumps work and the timing on their buffs is painful lol
My main grievance with Dragoon atm is that we no longer have the Leash. I miss it.
I think the worst thing is that we lost blood of the dragon aura
Lol I get a chuckle out of happy just picking the job he likes and is biased for, then simply saying the other jobs are a “tie”.
Should note that Phantom Kamaitatchi no longer consumes a charge of Bunshin. You only need to use it within the 30 second timer.
The timer is actually 45 seconds long.
Another thing is Huraijin doesn't just max out your Huton timer, it actually grants Huton if you don't have it so you can get it back without using mudra on it
The main reason I like Ninja best of the melees is its insane versatility. It has a LOT of ranged attacks compared to the others and will let you keep damaging even in messy groups who don't always handle all mechanics perfectly and in weird fights where you've forgotten the mechanics, the ranged + teleport lets you just wing it on the fly. Teleports, shields, heals, lots of ranged. While I agree that they are all even at a high level the ninja just lets you do everything all the time.
Endwalker Monk is the shining example of a good rework in this game. A lean job but still has a high skill ceiling. It seems like the devs really leaned into job fantasy too by making the job more fun and impactful than ever. Give it a try! It's very smooth and is very good to play in Endwalker's current combat design.
Also for cons I would have mentioned chakra overflow still being a problem during BH
I really wish it was a seperate job. Not a fan of the new Monk. It's still the only melee dps I'll play but I honestly would love to go back to right after launch of Shadowbringers when we just got GL4. ARR and HW were sensational and SB ruined it, finally in Shadowbringers it felt perfect. Gave off a real DBZ type feel. Building up your GL stacks and maintaining it, popping Riddle of Fire which slowed you down but increased your damage so it was kinda akward, but then when you got GL4 at 76 it felt like this is it boys we going SSJ2. Increasing the damage without losing speed. You felt like you were an absolute menace darting about hitting your positionals and nuking anything that moved. Always loved the feeling of flicking the switch from Fire to Wind.
Now the current one just doesn't have the same impact, whilst it is easy to play it just doesn't feel like it evolves anymore. I also can't believe I have got to the point where I want all positionals removed when the job I grew up playing was positional king as when it's only the one positional now it just seems out of place.
I will say, i disagree with this view. I dont think MNK is a shining example of a rework, its not a great rework. I would barely even call it a rework if i am honest.
It goes beyond the mechanical aspect of the job, which, arguably, is kind of not as fun. The job is the only one without a unique LB or running animation, it has useless skills that are at capstone levels and outside of some exceptions the weapon design is really dull, almost SAM dull.
And i say all of that with heavy heart, its literally the only job i play since ARR and i cleared ultimates and savage raids, so it its not just the 'casual' content.
I honestly think that for a mechanical and artistic stand point they have no idea what to do with MNK. It took 3 xpacs to make TK usable (Outside of TK rotation in SB), Bh is still by far one of the worst conceived skills in the game, well maybe not as much now as its just a buff and chakra overflow is still trash. Btw why is Bs still a god awful looking skill? Anatman does nothing, SsS is even more pointless now. Enlightment and TFC tied to the same resource is incredible dumb, there is no reason for that. Why is it that there is no new core skills? I mean DRG has them why cant we? We are already stealing form other jobs designs, if MNK is to be a petry dish of ideas at least put some cool looking shit in it.
Ahh well a bit of a rant, either way, i hope that there are some interesting changes to MNK tool-kit or at least visuals in the new patch.
@@Asako_Gaming I really don't see a positional-focused ever being a thing again with how fights are designed
@@minatoEd monk does have a unique running animation and it just inherinted the old LB like pally and BLM
@@hamptonwooster The running part is actually wrong. MNK running animation is the exact same as every other job when they have sheated their weapons, including crafting and gathering jobs, even when they have their weapons(tools really) on hand. (In case it wasnt obvious i meant sprinting animation)
As for the LB that is true, however you are missing a few things. Unlike BLM, which was the only caster(actually i completly forgot that SMN existed, point is still the same though), we had 3 melees with the same LB (MNK, DRG AND NIN), no reason not to improve or change that. Now arguably, you can say that is more cost efficient to not change it, and it would be true, but it still feels lazy.
When it comes to job guides I have a few regular favorites CC I like to go to but your Vs series are my FAVORITE and I always look forward to them. Great job man!!!
Ninja, Samurai, Reaper are easily my favorite classes.
As beginner FFXIV player, for me this video is perhaps one of coolest and really descriptive about skill rotations of different physical jobs in nice visual way + the explanations added
Thank you so much for posting this! I was looking for a new melee DPS class to max out (only one that's 90 is Ninja) and I saw your other Versus videos and thought the other day "if only Mr Happy had a melee Versus" and it couldn't have been better timing!
Decided to go with Samurai in the end after watching this video :)
It's worth noting that on reaper enshroud skills don't have positionals, despite their unenshrouded versions having them.
I can't imagine positional requirements working with the rapid fire method in which you're executing them.
Before I noticed that I always used true north before enshroud so I didn't have to worry about it
@@anthonydelfino6171 my first thought upon actually messing around with Enshroud after unlocking it was “with this GCD there’s no way in hell these have positionals.” And sure enough, that was the case.
Correct. Enshroud is RPR’s “atatatatatatata”.
Monk is where it deserves to be after all these years of being ignored by the devs 😭
Damn double dragoon
I'm gonna say it because no one else will.
The winner IS the class you should play. If you play anything else you're bad.
Really surprising to me that the rest all came in second. Would have loved to hear which of the 5 needs quality of life improvements, even if you still think they all perform well
That said thank you again for your detailed analysis videos. As someone that plays a little bit of every job it helps to be a refresher of specific mechanics that I might be forgetting about playing casually
I out of the five, the only ones I play at the high levels are DRG, SAM, and RPR. I think DRG is the only one that needs some QoL, which might be addressed in the upcoming rework. The animation locking is still a pain alongside the double weaving not always responding as fluidly as it should (I don't notice this as much with my other jobs except DRK to a lesser extent).
At most I think that SAM's issues Shoha I and II should be combined into one button (arguably the same can be said for Shinten/Kyuten and Guren/Senei).
@@Skyztamer No. Please. Stop advocating for the combination of weapon skills, it just further dilutes the classes
@@Skyztamer That's why you don't double weave with a jump attack. Otherwise it's just getting used to the animations and not being stupid with your timings. I really hate that they're reworking the job soon because I actually really enjoy it right now.
@@liyifenn - Most of the time, combining weapon skills is done to make the job more playable for controller players, which Yoshi-P very much wants to continue supporting, while still being able to add in new abilities and redesigned rotations to keep the jobs from growing too stale.
I dunno about the other melee, but as a NIN main, the only QOL improvement I really want is for the server to actually read my Mudra inputs 100% of the time. It REALLY sucks to mess up the combo of Mudra and I don't think there's an easy solution without completely scrapping the unique design of the job.
Other than that, it's hard to complain about the job anymore - especially after they addressed our 6.0 complaints. We can still do decent damage when forced to disengage from melee, have insane mobility, have a defensive button that only MNK can really beat, plus we boost the raid's damage during the 2-minute burst window...
I'd honestly only ask for more raid utility. MNK and RPR both have ways to help keep the raid alive, but NIN still rides entirely on the popularity of Mug's debuff for raid utility.
I still want for Phantom Kamaitachi to be an oGCD (especially because of how pet potency works), but it's not really a big deal until 7.0 when we might get more buttons to play with.
18:34 small correction here, phantom kamaitachi no longer uses a stack of bunshin when used
Ninja also has 3 positionals, just that 1 of them is on trick
I've played them all, and I thought that Reaper would be my 2nd main through the expansion (PLD is my 1st), but MNK has ended up being my favorite of the melee dps. It's been a while since that's been the case, but I really like the state Monk is in right now.
Interesting I'm leveling everything and ended up really liking PLD, so it's my Main now. Do like Reaper as melee. Now lvling SAM which I like cause of BIG DMG. So maybe I'll like Monk more...? Still need to start lvling it. Hate DRG which is strange seeing as it's a strict rotation like PLD, but to much weaving for my liking and no star diver in burst. Ninja I like, but the work learning opener and rotation is hard when in unfamiliar content.
@@Blazingbeard When it comes to the Melee jobs, it really just comes down to which rotation you enjoy the most. Do you want minimal Off Global attacks but a very fast global cooldown? That's Monk. Ninja is all about maximizing your burst window. Dragoon has a fixed rotation with lots of off globals. Samurai has BIG hits and proper use of their buffs keeps their off burst time minimized. Finally, Reaper builds their two gauges and kinda feels like a hybrid Monk / Dragoon.
Personally, I enjoy Monk the most and Ninja the least. Samurai and Reaper are tied 2 and 3 with Dragoon at 4 because its easy to get their long combos interrupted and their buff is awkward to use. But again, that's all personal preference.
@@diamondmagus thanks for this. I know it's personality preference. But as I like PLD and OP likes it too with Monk as 2nd. So I inferred that I might like Monk too. So now I'm leveling it. See if I like it.
Very glad Monk got a rework for Endwalker. Got it up to level 50 because I love punchy bois, but in ShadowBringers, every skill had a positional attached to it which was way too overwhelming for me. Now Monk was my first level 90 melee and I love it's freedom and simplicity, my go to job for lower level content
My recommendation for anyone starting out on melee for the first time is to start with Samurai to get comfortable with positionals, personal mit, and a looping rotation. I find samurai to be very straightforward in the looping rotation and with so many buttons to press, it can really make someone feel comfortable on the role. after that, moving to monk is an easier transition since they share gear, have a similar gcd, and positionals are similar.
I found it confusing during the quest unlock, and randomly mashed buttons as I had no idea what they did. Plus most beginners to melee don't have access to samurai and start the game in ARR with lancer and pubilist. They can pick up rogue at 15 as the earliest next one. I started as marauder and seitched to rogue and ended up staying with ninja to the end of Shb and loved it over the years. It kept getting better and better. But I switched to whm for EW and second rdm now and have yet to take ninja past 80.
I've been waiting forever for this one!! Thank you, Mr Happy!
Keep the title, dragoon shares the same gear as reaper so I see no problems with it
Endwalker monk really feels like the devs apologizing for the last few years, lmao
Can’t stand the new monk. Thought it was perfect when we got gl4.
EW monk feels like the devs telling me to fuck off as they delete my main job
@@manbearpigsereal Monk has been my main DPS since ARR. Not a fan of the new one but I still stick by it. I also main PLD as my tank, and it is currently perfect to play. I guess I better enjoy my last month of a good job before Yoshi destroys this one too.
I'd rather they just release new jobs instead of completely reworking jobs. I'd rather have the choice of what I want to play.
For me Yoshi has currently killed MNK, MCH, DRK and soon PLD. I wish I could believe he would do a good job but his track history says otherwise.
TRUE
@@Asako_Gaming that's an opinion that's for sure
I don't wanna sound mean to my brothers and sisters in arms who main dragoon as a Lallafel but something about that combo in itself looks and sounds so weird, I really don't know what it is as I can take lallafel players seriously when they main any other job but as a Dragoon they just look hilarious/ridiculous to me
The density makes us hit like a bullet XD
@@kaitohiroyuki122 A bullet with a toothpick tied to it.
@@SapphireDragon357 that's even more dangerous lmao
@@SapphireDragon357 "look at what they need to mimic a fraction of our power."
While it is fun to rank them based on their level 90 gameplay, most people will have to experience them at their base level so here's my ranking of the jobs that I have personally tried (sorry Monkey and Weeb users, I haven't had the time to pick those up) and how they feel as you level them. None of them are at level 90 because I am a poor sprout who just stopped at Endwalker to help some people on Discord to catch up, but it is something that bugs me about the game.
• *Dragoon* - A
Fun to play as, fun to backflip; and while the only torture is not having an AoE attack early on, I think this job has one of the more fun rotations as you level it. Plus, you get to fight Nidhogg the intended way.
The only changes I would (obviously) make are to provide a weaker AoE attack near level 15 and replace it with the proper attack at 40 using traits or something. The animation locks are dangerous, but not tedious.
• *Reaper* - B
It might just be the edge, but this job is so fun to play as you level it. Once you get Enshroud, though, it becomes hard to do
Dotons extra splash damage also goes off with ninjas aoe spells.
New to the game
Currently playing dragoon, I'm enjoying it so far.
wanted to give an update to this, phantom kamaitachi doesnt consume a bunshin stack anymore it has its own buff
It’s funny I love Ninja _because_ it’s “boring” between its bursts. IMO dps jobs in FFXIV are a bit too fast paced and button heavy, to me it’s too hard on most dps to properly do a rotation and do raid mechanics. I’m a healer main tho so maybe that’s why.
personally the classes that are boring between burst windows are perfect for me, with ninja all I really gotta do is hit my opener and then just focus on avoiding damage until trick attack cooldown goes under 20. Its very manageable vs like samurai where you need to be following a constant rotation which can get tricky during certain fights and dealing with mechanics
i agree with you on boring rotations between bursts, but imo Samurai... slowly but surely ended up being my more comfortable melee dps to use. At some point you're not really thinking about how what buttons you're pressing, but really just the Higanbana dot uptime. the EW changes certainly made the class a hell lot more flexible to play around with the cooldowns, too!
Though... Kaiten, my beloved, I miss you
Very well explained! I must agree that monk is the best all around DPS. Although very close in some aspect, If I need to order them by strengths for the different DPS jobs I would go with something like this:
MNK DRG NIN SAM RPR
Burst Speed 4 1 5 3 2
Personal dps 3 1 2 5 4
Defence 3 1 4 2 5
Mobility 5 2 4 1 3
Raid Buffs 4 5 3 1 2
Total Points 19 10 18 12 16
I'd argue reaper for first place defensively and ninja for second over monk. 3 charges of 20% mitigation sounds pretty good, and mantra sounds neat, but there's some important factors. For mitigating single hits, shields are vastly superior to damage reduction. Let's say a monk player has 1000 HP and a raid wide attack is going to damage the party for 200 damage. 20% on a raid wide is fairly reasonable. The monk presses Riddle of Earth, which, assuming no other defensives are active, is going to reduce damage taken by 20% of 200, or 40 damage. Meanwhile, a Ninja who presses Shade Shift shields themselves for 20% of their HP, which is 200, meaning they take 0 damage from the attack, and there is no diminishing returns on shielding. The cooldown is a question, of course, but so is the duration. A Ninja's Shade shift lasts for a whopping 20 seconds, compared to a paltry 6 second per charge of Riddle of Earth if used during uptime. Shade shift lasts long enough to cover multiple hits if there is shield remaining. Now, with a cooldown of 120 seconds, Monk can fit in 4 Riddle of Earth usages per shade shift. Going back to our earlier example, that would be 40x4, or 160 damage reduction if used perfectly 4 times. That's lower than Ninja, and it was spread out over multiple abilities. With how raidwide damage and healing work in this game, it's often better to block significant damage from a big attack than it is to block small amounts over time, especially when diminishing returns get involved. Still, monk has Mantra as an additional cooldown. The problem with Mantra is that it only increases the healing of spells, aka GCDs. Most healers don't want to use GCDs to heal, with the exceptions of White Mage's lilies and Scholar's Deployment Tactics. With good coordination, it can help when a WHM is spamming lilies or provide more (Probably overkill tbh) burst shielding from a scholar, but that's kind of it.
Ninja presses one button and gigachads through a big mechanic every 2 minutes, which gets even better the more downtime a fight has, such as the new ultimate. Reaper also has a shield which is quite good with its short CD and aoe regen. If utilized correctly, can let healers move oGCDs to more deadly mechanics later in the fight, and possibly reduce the amount of GCD heals needed, increasing group dps.
Thanks for coming to my ted talk.
@@Bravadorado My consideration for defence was to be used for something unavoidable in a raid scenario, as it is always better to avoid something that can be avoided entirely. In case with ninja, it has a lots of movement options which is better for surviving overall. Depending on the fight mechanics Shade Shift may not always be usable for consistency sake, but it is a strong defensive ability like The blackest night. Haven't considered the Armor value for the different melee classes so it may shift my scores again.
Ninja here, it does seem intimidating but you level from 10 so you get these abilities slowly and can learn as you go. Not like Samurai or Reaper where you're just thrown into the deep-end with lots of skills right off the bat.
I've been a samurai main for years, but losing Kaiten was rough. Kenki as a system has been made almost completely superfluous, since functionally all it does now is meter out how frequently you can spam Shinten. There's no thought or planning going into when to spend it, since Ikishoten is on the same timer as Seinei/Guren, so you simply use those together and burn all other kenki on Shinten. Kaiten's absence in the rotation is keenly felt, and it makes the whole thing just feel bad.
They claim they axed Kaiten to combat button bloat, but they kept Shoha and Shoha II separate??? Make it make sense.
It's not missed at all
Especially considering the development told us to try it with an open mind and let them know how we felt about the changes,, only to be met with deafening silence when everyone and their mother was like "please for the love of all that is holy give it back"
Also "button bloat" the got rid of merciful eyes too ;_; could have made ikishoten turn into both namakiris at lvl 90 like gunbreakers combo
It's not button bloat they were trying to fix, the actual translation was action bloat. I still want kaiten back tho
I had tried every melee job (including Reaper) before looking at Monk. I honestly thought to myself that the only melee I'd enjoy was tanking and the occasional Red Mage/Sage flirtations with the front line.
When I finally gave Monk a try, what I thought would annoy me turned out to be it's best feature. As a monk, you *can't* mess up your 3-hit combo. You can't use a Raptor skill or Coeurl skill without the requisite form (powers exempting). One of my largest DPS losses, and a true annoyance for me as a player, was fat-fingering the wrong button in a rotation because I was too focused on avoiding that AoE on the ground.
Now, while I haven't hit 90 yet, my monk zips around the battlefield nailing positionals with ease and abusing True North like a short CD power stim. I have fun in melee now.
The moral? The community gives the best advice when they say "try everything". Something will eventually click. :)
Just a note, Mrhappy, I thought this video didn't exist because it wasn't in the playlist. Happy to be wrong, but I was real sad when I finished the last one.
Some might see cast times on a melee as a downside. But really, they're just there for anticipation to beeg number.
Been waiting for this to finally start a melee dps for the job quest
I always see it as a “Good Problem To Have” when all the jobs perform relatively similar. So you can exercise as much freedom of choice. Great selling on the game. RPR & DRG are my mains though 🙂
The things that got me to to a healthy baseline for monk was just throwing out a dragon kick and a twin snakes when I felt like I was lost rotation wise.
I like reaper, dragoon, for simple and easy combos. Samurai is cool but overwhelming for me, and haven't raise ninja and monk because less interesting, maybe one day
Samurai is insanely easy. Use your dot to determine burst windows and keep that dot up. No kaiten so just use your gauge if you want but save some for 2 minute windows. Start on the balance discord for openers and read up on burst windows and it's really easy.
I've played Samurai ever since I started the game back in Stormblood. My absolute favorite job. But for someone like me the "convert sen into 10 kenki each" skill I never use. Like I get why, but why should I use it when I can just keep going and get a Setsugeka instead. Heck the button isn't even on my hotbar cause it's that useless to me. (Bring back Kaiten Squeenix senpai)
For endgame, if you don't use hagakure (the skill that converts sen to kenki), then you will naturally misalign all of your burst from raid buffs. This then nets you a loss of damage; having all your hard hitting attacks under raid buffs is significantly better than an extra midare. Now, you can use alternatives fillers that does not use hagakure, but hagakure fillers typically will be dps increase over these alternatives. Also hagakure allows you to correct mistakes in your rotation to realign yourself back. For example, let's say you accidentally did 2 combos for the red sen back to back. Now you are behind 3 gcds within your rotation. You can now do a 3 gcd filler with Hagakure to force yourself back into your loop. Obviously, none of this really matters for any content that is not endgame. Heck with how far in the patch we are, we have enough gear to compensate for "unoptimal" rotations. So, play however you want.
@@sinh8583 Based comment
@@sinh8583 I'm too smooth brain to do the filler combo shenanigans but I still parse purple in savage lol so I can live with playing unoptimally
I don't think Phantom Kamaitachi consumes a stack anymore...
It did in 6.0, but not anymore.
And most importantly, it's a ranged skill, which also wasn't mentioned.
Ninja still has three positional attacks too, adding when you said dragoon is the only with three. Trick Attack still has a rear potency increase.
Technically yes but you go to flank only once every 30s to press Armour Crush and then you just chill at the rear and Trick is every minute. With two True North charges you should have decent uptime on the positionals. Dragoon has to change positional between two gcd and you do it every 4th and 5th gcd so it's quite a difference in the movement requirement between those two jobs.
@@Noctornus yes, some jobs change for positional more frequently than others. Just people tend to forget that trick does have a positional potency increase, as Happy seemed to when saying dragoon was the only job that had three positional skills.
Similarly monk is changing over to the rear every 8 GCD despite only having two, so it moves just a little less frequently these days to hit those than dragoon does despite having fewer positionals than ninjas. It wasn't a call out because you have to move for them, just more a reminder that you do want to be mindful of that move on ninja
@@anthonydelfino6171 At least you don't have to hit the positional for the debuff to apply, it's "just" a potency loss :D
Honestly? With the recent patch the melees are just SO close to eachother, like you mentioned at the end, that it really just feels up to complete and utter preference. Personally I'd put ninja at the top, due to being able to perform the best in situations with a lot of downtime (correct me if this has changed since the release of DSR), which truthfully puts it massively ahead in fights like ultimates. I think coupling NIN with a resource building job might be the best way to play DSR due to NIN's high damage during high downtime parts lets a RPR (or other gauge job) build full gauge for full uptime parts like Nidhogg and the end.
That's my argument for why I find NIN to be A BIT stronger than the rest. But as you said, that's just in one situation. The others excel in other situations.
I never got interested in ninja, but since EW I have absolutely loved it and has been the only job I REALLY click with. It flows really well and when you hit that 150k hyosho in opener/ odd burtst it is a massive dopamine hit
you mention at 25:18 that positionals affect Kenki gain, but this was removed with Endwalker. Kenki gain is static now, the weaponskill's direct potency is reduced if you don't meet the positional requirement.
Yeah I noticed that too. The weapon skill’s potency isn’t necessarily reduced if you don’t hit a positional, it just does normal combo potency. Hitting a positional grants bonus potency (of 50 I believe)
@@WenzRact It's better this way as it prevents the rotation going out of sync.
@@Asako_Gaming It's an ogcd, if you went out of sync/overcapped 999/1000 times that was on you. Even with Kaiten being a 2nd usage of Kenki.
@@saysay8920 Not always, if you missed a positional previously it could cost you an ogcd which could and did cause you to lose some of your burst during your burst window. Now every pull should be the exact same with you having the same resources every time. Which is what they are going for, they are adding consistency to jobs.
Cool video but you're using outdated info in a few places.
1. Phantom Kamaitachi doesn't consume a Bunshin stack anymore.
2. Samurai no longer gets increased Kenki gains on hitting his positionals, just increased damage.
You could chalk it up to the video being a long time in the making, but while PK was changed in the middle of the expansion, the Kenki gains on positionals aren't a thing since Shadowbringers.
Idk about monk.
Every time I enter a trial or raid with a reaper in the party all us Dancers fight over the reapers. This is of course if the jobs have about the same ilvl.
Probably bcuz its the easiest melee job imo so It Is very likely that a Reaper Will make full use of its kit and therefore also full use of the dancer's utility. Not a lot of people play monk and among those who do lots of them are still learning the job so they might struggle a bit in Making use of the Monk's whole potential. So yeah most of the time buffing a Reaper or samurai Is the safest option
Reaper's downtime problems are made worse with the sole fact that the job is resource negative even with full uptime. At bare minimum it should be resource neutral, ideally resource positive if the game design insists on downtime, because it has by far the most damage baked in to its resource generation compared to every other job in the game. If it were up to me I would:
1) Scrap Death's Design. It's a boring GCD tax that just eats in to your burst windows and resource spenders and its 2 uses per minute alone drop your Soul generation hard. Replace its functionality with Death Warrant from PvP (or just a Wildfire copy).
2) Decouple the 50 Shroud from Plentiful Harvest and make that a separate resource generation skill like Barrel Stabilizer or Bloodfest. This lets you distribute your Shroud as you please in fights with downtime prep.
3) Add Shroud Gauge to Harvest Moon and put a cooldown on Soulsow. 10-20 gauge is plenty. You'll only get this once per fight with full uptime and with downtime you're only "catching up" with it because you typically lose up to 10 or so GCDs in a downtime section.
And my boy monk takes the crown, the only thing it needs to be the perfect job is to have a ranged attack for either downtime or dungeons but it hasn't been a problem for me since thunderclap arrived
Holy moly, someone who pronounces the reaper skills correctly. My ears are blessed!
I suffer whenever I get hit by lag with NIN. If I could reliably hit the mudra without lag screwing me I'd be all over the job. DRG feels bad for similar reasons thanks to the animation locks so I'm curious if the rework is gonna fix that.
SAM I'm generally happy with, though I wish they combined the shoha skills into one button instead of getting rid of kaiten. In fact there are a couple of skills they could have made into AOE with fall off type skills to reduce button bloat... but everyone knows this and has been talking about this since they removed kaiten.
MNK and RPR are just very fun all round, but not for me.
Out of all the melee DPS I’ve tried, SAM is the only one I’ve really enjoyed.
finally monk recognition
I mained Monk since ARR and the removal of positional's, removed my "focus" to play the job, they kept my focus and while Blitzes are very damn good, i miss the need to move around.
i struggle to enjoy any of the melee now, Monk does feel nice with the raw speed but i guess im still annoyed at yet more dumbing down instead of encouraging people to actually pay attention to what they are doing.
really hope they just axe away reaper's debuff, i hate applying it. especially in dungeons, i wouldnt hate it so much of it maybe got refreshed when you use gibbet/gallows/guillotine? i just hate stopping my rotation to just, re-apply the debuff.i also kinda wish using communio gave you soul sow so you had a way to recharge it outside of downtime/phase transitions.
Lali ho o/ Just started watching. Rooting for my main monk. But ninja and Sam are doing good too eh
I might add another pro for Ninja that it has very flexible range, make it able to peel-off and still bursting. Now that you have Phantom Kamaitachi that barely a dps loss when you're cucked out of melee range so it's a decent job for learning the fight while still do decent dps.
For Samurai, positional don't effect resource generation anymore, iai jutsu has craaaaazy range now, and you can slide cast iai jutsu at a bit past half way cast so there's hardly any problem for mobility.
I'm interested in Monk.
As a controller player, how does Monk compare to Samurai and Reaper? I play and enjoy both of those jobs, and I believe I can play them both to good levels. Is Monk significantly harder? Would I be staring at my hotbar a lot?
Also controller player, monk is easy peasy. Hardly any ogcds to crowd your bar
As a monk player, i can say you'll be staring at your buff/dot more than your hotbar, a key thing about monk is to never let your buff and your dot drop so you'll be adjusting your rotation to make sure they don't. It's an easy job to pick up with a lot of flexibility to adapt to the fight at hand.
I'd say Monk is harder than Reaper but easier than Samurai. Reaper is pretty plain outside of burst window and Samurai has 3 ressource to keep track of, Monk need you to keep track of where you are in your rotation to know what skill to pull next but the ressource management is pretty easy, chakra are basically fire when it's ready if you don't have another ogcd to pop (A downside of Monk's fast gcd is that you can't double weaver without clipping your gcd) and perfect balance is just alternating between two combos depending if you have nadis open or not.
Monk is harder than reaper, and its debatable if its harder than SAM. Monk has a more complex burst phase but is less punishing if you mess up. Sam's rotation is less complicated but is also stricter. I play monk on controller and don't need to stare at my hotbar too much, but having your buffs visible is very important for this job so you will be looking at that a lot. It's a lower action count job so it's very nice on controller.
I play on a controller and have been a main on monk since 2015. The job is pretty comfortable once you can get it set up right, and like with any job, have the muscle memory to know what buttons to push to do what skill.
I would argue at this point it's probably one of the easiest jobs in the game (though do take in mind the years of experience I have on it) It no longer has a positional requirement on every weaponskill. It just has some personal buffs to watch for and a dot to track on the enemy, but that's not terribly unlike samurai and dragoon.
Also the job uses up far fewer buttons than any of the other melee jobs, so there's not as much to learn. The only real learning curve will come with knowing how to get your nadis, and that the opener of the job isn't entirely intuitive if you want to get phantom rush to fall in the two minute burst windows.
Let me just emphasize the “NINJA IS REALLY BORING BETWEEN BURSTS” part one more time. The job needs more love than Dragoon as far as I’m concerned. Animation locking is one thing, being outright boring is a whole other. All the new Endwalker changes have just felt overall really bad save for maybe Hollow Nozuchi and that’s literally just passive.
Yeah, it does. I get that they need to rework dragoon so they can expand it in the future, but DRG feels really good, and enticed me away from NIN this expansion. DRG always has a lot to do; NIN, not so much.
Monk shares the same problem. When they gutted the job of its positional requirements, it really highlighted how hollow the job is.
I feel like when i look at act, because it shows adps by default, it will have samurai usually shit all over everyone in dps by a few thousands of dps. My static has one that's been tryharding a bit and he is just unparalelled. Even in all pug runs i had with him.
Personally dragoon would be my favorite melee if it didn't have so many buffs to manage. I'm fine with a group buff and a combo buff, but dragoon has 3 more on top of that, and it just feels like it's too much. I also personally miss the mirage dive they changed and then walked back. But overall, it just feels a bit too clunky to me, even if some people find the buff maintenance fun. We'll see if the rework cleans things up a bit.
I like how they changed Monk, but goodness is it boring to level, having only one meaningful change after level 50.
It's great that you get PB at 50 and it does literally nothing. A slight potency buff in your combo and that's it until 60. Then at 60 nothing changes. You have your entire rotation that you will use at 90 outside of oGCDs. Personally I want Shadowbringers launch Monk back.
@@Asako_Gaming I want Shadow Bringers end Summoner back so I feel ya.
I think RPR deserves the #2 spot mainly due to its group healing, with honorable mention to its flexible positionals and higher potency on its ranged attack.
Nice work! Thanks for sharing!
surprised you didn't mention this when talking about reaper's awkward burst window but their raid buff goes out sooner than everyone else's meaning it falls off before the end of burst phase for many other jobs, making them a giant pain to play with
There’s an adjustment where rpr will begin their burst with arcane circle at 6 seconds instead of 9, only at the first 2 minute mark. That’ll allow it to line up with everyone else’s buffs who are about 2 gcds behind
I’m happy to see this out. Tbh love reaper but now That I’ve maimed everything but monk I’m hype 4 this. And I wonder who will win
I always thought Monk should use Meditate in a situation where you are out of range to build stacks until you get back in range.
Or is that not worth it?
better to use six sided star then get back in range before the longer gcd cooldown is over so you can start attacking normally again. Meditate is better when the boss is straight up untargetable
-> Use SSS
-> If you're still out of range, form shift
-> If you're still outside of range, meditate for chakras
-> If you're still outside of range, anatman because why not?
-> If you're still outside of range, PAIN
Only problem I have with SAM is that its animations (in its basic rotation) are a little slow and clunky -- maybe it only seems that way bc the skills themselves don't seem very flashy as opposed to, say, MNK or RPR. I haven't gotten very far with it (highest lvl is 65?), but I do like it more as time goes on. The alt that has it is stuck in HW patches atm, so I don't really have much use for Kenki yet besides the jump back and gap closer skills. That AoE that uses 25 kenki you get at 62 is sitting on my hotbar taunting me at this point. At of all DPS I've leveled, only RPR is at 90 and I absolutely love it. It's nice, flashy, and quick with great aesthetics. I used to love DRG more, but I haven't gotten the hang of its rotation yet! It was my first class ever so I really want to love it. MNK and NIN are great--MNK I'm still getting used to even tho it's my fav after RPR, but NIN is 3rd. It took awhile for me to try it bc a friend was pulling a lot of bias against it (they've had a lot of bad luck with jerks playing NIN) and they were my only exposure to it, but that's changed. Again, love the video, and this was definitely something I needed. Gonna try a few things on MNK the next time I get on, I'm still struggling with moon and sun rotation.
Is the game in its best balanced state right now among melee deeps?
for showing off imo show the jobs from the side (not always from top / behind).., can see the animations better from the side (like on dummies).., but you used the "jobs trailers" to show off animations, makes sense to to show how they feel when playing (above / behind view) too
...that said love watching your "VS" vids, and they are informative (all important stuff are packed in there + extras)
Dragoon is love. Dragoon is life.
Monk is the hardest job to optimize at the maximum level out of all the melee. My best to worst would be:
Sam/Ninja, RPR, MNK, DRG
Wah its finally here! As mnk main I have waited forever for this :)
I'm feeling like RPR is going to be getting some reworks. If not in one of the upcoming patches, then at least by 7.0
Deaths Design is clunky and doesn't blend well into the kit, and the awkwardness mentioned in the cons.
In concept it flows and works well, but it could use some smoothing out to let it flow more naturally and feel more refined in it's design.
Gonna say it again for the people in the back GOOD BARD>BAD SAMURAI
1:09 heheh I see what you did there Happs... Whether you intended to or not. 😂
As of patch 6.28, Melee are in the best place they've ever been. The balance is nigh on perfect and the difference between one and another is minimal at best. It truly is a time when you can choose which is your favourite to play and enjoy playing it
Meanwhile mch and rdm players are crying in a corner lol I'm glad melee are close now after those rpr buffs last patch but damn se give those jobs some love lol
@@slimfastsubaru2043 Plus this raid series has melees falling asleep at their keyboards. Still doing top dps though.
Mantra and riddle are basically the reason I swapped to monk back during p3s. The DPS is really nice, but the defensive aspects put in some serious work with prog and PF groups.
Now if only brotherhood would stop popping after my weave windows...
Me: Stop saying jibbet!
Also me: Wait...*looks up the word "gibbet". Sees pronounciation as "jibbet"*
*walks up to the mirror and points at self*
Me: Stop saying "gibbet" (hard g sound)
When Reaper was revealed I knew it was gonna be my main until something else caught my interest down the line. Though I'm not a fan of edgy things that wasn't really a factor for me. The pretty colors and fun gameplay loop was awesome. I was a ninja main but a big cat man didn't seem right for roleplay purposes so I played Gunbreaker for a long while, though I really don't like playing tank at all. So when Reaper was shown mainly as a Hrothgar I knew I had to switch.
Happy you made a mistake when explaining Nin's Phantom Kamitichi it doesnt use a bushin ready stack it was changed in 6.2 i believe it has its own seperate buff now as can be see in your vid
I guess this is mostly max level as lots of those dragoon skills I did not recognize.
yesss, LF to this for ages
yeah i can never decide between monk and reaper. i wanna focus on just one damage dealer.
maybe i'll wait for the new expansion with the 2 new damage jobs
Whenever I see people say SAM is a difficult job I always get confused, how is pressing 9 keys in order complicated? This comes from someone who mastered the Ninja opening in a day.
I'd honestly recommend Samurai has a starter job for any new player simply because while it has one of the lowest skill floors imo, the skill ceiling is equally as high and there is SO much potential for optimisation.
I would recommend reaper tbh
4:30 correct me if I'm wrong but doesn't the potency of fang and claw or wheeling thrust increase if one is used before the other, raising its potency to be tied at the highest damage in dragoons gcd skills?
You *do* get a 100 potency boost on whichever of Fang and Claw or Wheeling Thrust is the fifth hit of your combo, but heaven's thrust is 80 more potency. It's still correct to use Life Surge on the fifth hit if you have both Dragon's Sight and Lance Charge active and can hit the positional, but only so long as you don't lose a usage on Heaven's Thrust with any buffs.
@@combowinter thanks for the clarification, I must have done the numbers wrong on my leveling journey
I just have to say one thing about Monk's mechanics.
Nadis nuts
They've basically been maasacring my poor Samurai since Stormblood, imo. Not the damage or effectiveness, but the fun factor. If went from having am extremely flexible, fun rotation to a slow, plodding static rotation in the last two expansions.
When compared to the other jobs it just lacks the "fun" factor now.
As a DRG main i kinda disagree with "simple combos", you have many things to do between these, you have use your jump between, you have to position yourself behind or on the side of the boss to do more damage, you have to learn how to efficiently use life of dragon to not waste dps and more. Like buffs, you have to keep them sometimes to adjust with Samourai combos and don't use them on CD.
What is the best dps class
I'm surprised happy didn't mention what happens to reapers if they die right before their 2 min. It feels really bad to lose an entire shroud window because you lost the 50 gauge. Huge dps loss
Literally any job has their dps (and the parties) go into the shitter if they die right before 2min currently
@@bicks4436 Meh, Ninja and samurai are pretty ok between Mug, Meisui, Ikishoten, and Shisui. All they lose is some ogcd gauge. Reapers though, as mentioned, lose the entire first half of their burst frantically trying to gauge up and get that second half in.
Monks lose their seals. If you die you're fucked lol
@@slimfastsubaru2043 Yeah monks have to start the whole rotation over with double lunar, or put Phantom Rush on the 1m. It's hard to fix, but only if they die during the wrong minute. Same problem with SMN; if they die between Bahamut and Phoenix, suddenly it's the Bahamuts on the 1m and Phoenix during 2m buff windows, and that's impossible to fix unless they intentionally die again.
@@SapphireDragon357 though for summoner, if not for the weakness debuff, dying and getting phoenix on the 2 minute window is actually a DPS increase over being in bahamut for it. Phoenix phase has about 100 more potency when you execute all the skills than bahamut does during that same time.
Honestly, I love that I get to chill between burst phases on Nin.
Seriously, don't understand the hatred of a little down time
true, when I was new to savages, i suck at doing mechanics while also doing my job rotations but ninja's downtime gave me a breath time so i could fully focus on the mechanics and remembering what is the next mechanic while doing the basic rotation + bhavacakra.