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Introduction

The goal of this guide is to help players understand the fundamentals of high-level Monk play. This guide is tailored towards players who are aiming to improve their performance in Savage raids, but I will try to keep things simple enough that newer players can also utilize this guide as a resource. For additional help and information, please visit The Balance Discord server and stop by the Monk channels.

Monk Abilities:

For Monk, one “rotation” consists of cycling through each of your three forms once (i.e., Boot/True/Snap, DK/TS/Demo, etc.)

GCDs

Bootshine (Boot): Delivers an attack with a potency of 140. Opo-opo Form Bonus: Critical damage if dealt from a target’s rear.

Losing the positional bonus from this is the most detrimental out of all your weaponskills. Remember that your first Bootshine outside of Perfect Balance is stanceless, so there is a chance that it will not be a critical hit. Bootshine will be used at least every other rotation where DK doesn’t need to be refreshed. If your Chakra stacks are at 4 and you know the boss will be phasing soon, you can forgo your DK refresh and try to get that last stack and squeeze in that extra FC before the boss becomes untargetable. Bootshine and DK are the only two skills you can hit on accident out of stance.

True Strike (True): Delivers an attack with a potency of 140. 180 when executed from a target’s rear.

Your hardest hitting GCD in terms of potency (without DoTs). In your opener, your 5th PB GCD is preferred to be True Strike over Bootshine since you have a very high Crit chance under raid buffs + IR. Used usually after Bootshine in your non-DK/TS rotation. Even if you cannot land the rear positional, True Strike has the same potency as a full potency Twin Snakes, so there is no reason to not use it when you don’t need to refresh Twin Snakes.

Snap Punch (Snap): Delivers an attack with a potency of 130. 170 when executed from a target’s flank. Additional Effect: Grants Greased Lightning.

Your hardest hitting Flank GCD. Refreshes GL3. This is most often the move you will want to end on before a phase transition, as in almost all cases Demolish DoT ticks will not damage the boss when they are untargetable. Used when Demolish does not need to be refreshed.

Dragon Kick (DK): Delivers an attack with a potency of 100. 140 when executed from a target’s flank. Opo-opo Form Bonus: Reduces target’s blunt resistance by 10%. Duration: 15s.

DK will not apply the blunt resistance down debuff if you are stanceless. The debuff applied from DK has a small delay before showing up on the enemy, so do not use your oGCDs immediately after you apply DK, or you risk losing out on potency. Bootshine and DK are the only two skills you can hit on accident out of stance.

Twin Snakes (TS): Delivers an attack with a potency of 100. 130 when executed from a target’s flank. Additional Effect: Increases damage by 10%. Duration: 15s.

Similar to DK, the debuff will have a small delay before being applied to the enemy. Make sure to not use oGCDs until you see the debuff show up, or you risk not getting the extra potency.

Demolish (Demo): Delivers an attack with a potency of 30. 70 when executed from a target’s rear. Additional Effect: Damage over time. Potency: 50. Duration: 18s. Additional Effect: Grants Greased Lightning.

Your bread and butter DoT. In most scenarios, you are applying this every 3rd rotation. The DoT lasts 18s, which means you will have 9 GCDs between each Demolish, which is exactly 3 rotations, given that your GCD recast is around 2.0s. DoT ticks in this game register every server tick (3.0s). Re-apply Demolish when the timer is <2.0s so that you do not waste a tick.

One of the most common mistakes is reapplying Demolish too early and wasting DoT ticks. Demolish does more damage than Snap Punch after 3 ticks, which is usually when the timer is at ~8s or less. Use this information to know when it is better to end on Demolish or Snap Punch when dealing with a phase change where the boss becomes untargetable.
When dealing with multiple targets in fights, make sure that you apply Demolish on enemies that will survive at least 9.0s. Prioritize on keeping a clean refresh on the boss during add phases if he is targetable. Keep in mind when using RoF and TK, you will be clipping Demolish in certain situations as it is an increase for your DPS.

Rockbreaker (RB): Delivers an attack with a potency of 130 to all enemies in a cone before you. Additional Effect: Grants Greased Lightning.

This is a great AoE skill that many players do not take advantage of during add phases. On two targets, one RB cast will be 260 potency, versus the 170 of Snap Punch. You should always aim to use Rockbreaker when you do not have to apply or refresh Demolish. It is still an expensive skill in terms of TP, but you have much less issues with TP in Stormblood compared to Heavensward. RB also has a frontal conal AoE; you will want to target the furthest enemy and position yourself correctly to ensure you are able to hit everything. This is more difficult with larger sized enemies.When fighting multiple enemies, it is important to make sure you keep DK and TS up on your primary target.

Situational GCDs

Arm of the Destroyer (AotD): Delivers an attack with a potency of 50 to all nearby targets. Opo-opo Form Bonus: Silence. Duration: 1s.

This skill shines the most when there are a ton of adds to hit, such as in O3S. However, with PB being reduced to 60s, you will always opt to use PB + RB when you can in cases where there are 5+ targets to hit. It is still decent in dungeons where you don’t have PB up. The silence can come in useful in O7S during Ultros when he is casting Stoneskin.

One Ilm Punch: Delivers an attack with a potency of 120. Additional Effect: Stun. Duration: 1s. Stun is impervious to stun nullifying effects.

There are no fights currently that require stuns, so this skill is not currently useful. In any future fights that require things to be stunned, this will prove to be a fairly reliable stun.

Meditation: Opens a chakra. Up to five chakra can be opened at once. Recast: 1.2s. Shares a recast timer with all other weaponskills.

You will want to use this when you are forced to disconnect from the boss, or when the boss is untargetable. You can use it to buffer your GCD when you are dealing with a mechanic. Do not sacrifice GCD uptime to manually charge your stacks.

Form Shift: Shifts your current form to the next in the sequence. If no form is being used when executed, you will move into the opo-opo form.

Used in the prepull to setup your opener. You can also use this setup your Coeurl stance during long phase transitions, so that you can immediately refresh GL3 with Demolish once the boss becomes targetable. Avoid using this when the boss is targetable.

oGCDs

The Forbidden Chakra (FC): Delivers an attack with a potency of 250. Can only be executed while under the effect of the Fifth Chakra. The five chakras close upon execution. Recast: 5s.

This skill has changed the most drastically from Heavensward. Every GCD you hold this skill equates to a potentially lost stack from your passive, so I would avoid holding onto your FC, unless you have a burst window coming soon. Keep in mind that you will gain stacks very quickly under Brotherhood and you will want to use FC the moment you get one to avoid losing any potential stacks gained under the BH window. Similar to Bloodletter, you will want to spam-queue your FC button in advance between GCDs to ensure you don’t miss any potential resets. The animation of FC is much shorter compared to in 3.X, so you will be able to easily double weave this even if it comes up late into your GCD cooldown.

Elixir Field (EF): Delivers an attack with a potency of 220 to all nearby enemies. Recast: 30s.

The CD of this is 30s, so you should have it available for every IR and RoF. This means you will need to more or less keep it off CD, or you will desync from buff windows. While this skill is amazing for adds, I would not hold it for more than 5s-10s, to avoid desync from your buff windows. Optimizing your EFs for add phases requires consistent usage through the fight, and some trial and error based on how fast things die.

Shoulder Tackle (ST): Rushes target and delivers an attack with a potency of 100. Additional Effect: Stun. Duration: 2s. Cannot be executed while bound.

Mastery of the fight is essential in order to optimize usage of this skill.

You will be using this to recover from TK outside of RoF windows every 30s when this skill is being used optimally. The tricky part of this skill is that there are mechanics in certain fights that would want you to save this as a gap closer instead of using it on CD. This means you will have to tailor strats to avoid having to use it as a gap closer, or adjusting your rotation so that you are not doing TK during that part of your rotation.

Howling Fist (HF): Delivers an attack with a potency of 210 to all enemies in a straight line before you. Recast: 60s.

This skill should line up with every IR you have, since they share the same CD. Under every IR window you will should have EF and HF. This is your only skill with real range on it, so you might be able to get creative in terms of hitting multiple targets in certain encounters in the future.

Steel Peak (SP): Delivers an attack with a potency of 150. Recast: 40s.

This is your only oGCD that is not a multiple of 30s. The 40s CD makes it somewhat awkward to line up. Below is the timeline I generally try to follow:

~15s (opener)
~55s (naked)
~103s (delayed for RoF/BH)
~143s (tail end of 2nd trick)
~190s (used in 180s reopener) → it will repeat from here

Tornado Kick (TK): Delivers an attack with a potency of 330. Can only be executed while under the effect of Greased Lightning III. Effect fades upon execution. Recast: 10s.

Good TK usage requires having Perfect Balance and/or Wind Tackle + Riddle of Wind available to recover GL stacks quickly.

Please read over Damelia’s guide on the general concepts of TK and how to approach using it effectively.

TK usage has been found to be most effective under your RoF windows. You need to be able to execute a clean 9 GCD RoF and use TK immediately after the 9th GCD. This requires you to be knowledgeable about the best setups for these situations and have a very good understanding about raid buff alignment and PB recovery in order to utilize effectively.

TK can also be used in conjunction with Riddle of Wind to manipulate your GCD recast time, which will allow for you to go slower in order to enter optimal buff windows at the correct GCD. In the most optimal rotation, you will be using TK with every wind tackle, and inside every IR and RoF window.

Focus on the setup that lets you use RoF before Demolish. This will be your go-to setup:

Opo-opo > Raptor (RoF) > Demo > Opo-opo > Raptor > Snap > Opo-opo > Raptor > Demo > Opo-opo > Raptor (TK) > Snap (PB) > Snap > Snap > DK > Twin > Demo > Boot > True > Snap > …

There are many cases in which delaying your buffs to enter this desired RoF setup can be detrimental to buff alignment with the rest of your group, along with your personal CDs. During progression or when you have not fully mapped out the fight, you will need to be flexible with on-the-fly RoF setups by understanding the core fundamentals of a 9 GCD RoF TK. Since you want to use buffs when they come off cooldown, you can essentially enter into a 9 GCD RoF and end with TK before any weaponskill. The key is to recognize when you will need to press TK, and if your next GCD is not naturally Snap, you will need to weave TK + PB so you can use Snap Snap Snap/Demo DK Twin as your 5 recovery PB sequence. This will work for any setup.   

You can of course use TK right before long downtime sequences and transitions. Be sure to explore all of your options in keeping GL3 beforehand.

Please visit this guide to learn more about optimizing TK.

Attached below are some setups that have been calculated using Jahaudant’s simulator that gives you an idea of what setups are are better than others. Refer to this infographic to help read the chart.

Utility oGCDs

Perfect Balance (PB): Allows execution of weaponskills which require a certain form, without being in that form. Duration: 10s. Recast: 60s.

When used as a DPS cooldown, you will be pairing PB after your RoF+TK sequence. Depending on how you set your RoF up will determine which GCDs you are pressing under PB. Use PB as late into your GCD as possible to avoid losing out on the 5th GCD. You can always fallback on PB as recovery tool if you end up losing GL3 due to mechanics, or dying. Your 5 recovery GCD PB sequence should usually be Snap Snap Demo DK Twin, then go into Boot True Snap.

Purification: Restores 300 TP. Can only be executed while under the effect of the Fifth Chakra. The five chakras close upon execution. Recast: 120s.

With the changes to TP usage, you will probably never need to use this in raid unless you lose TP to mechanics or die. Useful in dungeons when the overall DPS is low and mobs take forever to die. It also drops your enmity, which is nice when your tank dies.

Riddle of Earth: Grants Fists of Earth. Also grants Earth’s Reply if damage is taken while active. Duration: 30s. Additional Effect: Extends Greased Lightning duration to maximum. Earth’s Reply Bonus: Reduces damage taken by 10%. Duration: 30s. Both Riddle of Earth and Earth’s Reply are canceled if Fists of Earth ends.

The primary use for this skill is to maintain GL3 during mechanics that force you to have downtime. RoE is an extremely powerful tool for surviving mechanics when you are recovering from deaths/mistakes. Remember that if you are in RoF and choose to use RoE, you will lose out on your RoF buff, which is a big loss (but it’s better than dying).

Mantra: Increases HP recovery via healing magic by 20% for self and nearby party members. Duration: 15s. Recast: 90s.

Most commonly you will just throw this up during heavy raid AoE phases of fights during progression. Only buffs heals done via healing magic, not abilities. It will depend on the skill of your healers to fully use this to its highest potential.

Sprint: Increases movement speed. Duration: 10s. Recast: 60s.

There are many applications of using Sprint that will give you more leeway in keeping uptime on the boss without dying to mechanics. It has a pretty short CD, so learn to use this for specific mechanics that are risky or otherwise undoable without losing uptime without it.

Fist Stances

Fists of Fire (FoF): Increases damage dealt by 5%.

This should always be on unless you need to use RoE/FoE for a mechanic. Make sure to switch back to this ASAP after you survive the hit. Your ST icon will change based on which stance you are in, so if your ST is blue, then you know you have turned it off on accident.

Fists of Earth (FoE): Reduces damage taken by 10%.

Most of the time you will just use RoE if you want to be in Earth stance. You can still manually use this if you think survival is questionable and your RoE is on CD.

Fists of Wind / Wind Tackle: Increases movement speed.

As long as you have Riddle of Wind available, you can use TK to manipulate your GCD speed so that you are able to enter RoF at the most optimal GCD. This serves a similar role to how Fracture was used in 3.0. Please note that this is very advanced concept and requires you to have the entire fight mapped out in order to use optimally. In the worst case, using TK with RoW is roughly DPS neutral.

Role Actions

Since you are able to have all role actions assigned now, the only one that does not currently have any use is probably Crutch. All of the other skills are useful in some way and you will want to be flexible in having enough hotkey space to have all of them assigned.

Basic Fundamentals:

Newer players who are struggling to do more damage often lose sight of these core fundamentals. All advanced optimizations are pointless if you are not consistent and can’t execute the basics at a high level.

1. Build and maintain Greased Lightning III (GL3). This is your highest priority.
2. Keep your GCD spinning. Do not delay your GCD for positionals.
3. Apply Dragon Kick and Twin Snake debuffs; do not let them drop before you refresh them.
4. Keep Demolish ticking on your primary target, do not let it drop for more than 1 second but do not refresh it before there are 1-2 seconds remaining. This will not always be the case when you are under Riddle of Fire.
5. Try to line up your off global cooldowns (oGCDs) with your buffs – everything is a multiple of 30s (besides Steel Peak) so they will naturally lineup well over the course of the fight.
6. Work to have a comprehensive understanding of the encounter. Know how the boss will move and turn based on the mechanic/phase it is in. Without this, you will not be able to output DPS at a high level.
7. Avoid disconnecting from the boss as much as possible; try to maintain 100% uptime.
8. All of your core weaponskills have positional requirements for the full potency. Your goal should be always to land at least 95% of them in an encounter. In 99.9% of cases do not delay your global cooldowns (GCD) to try and get a positional. It is important to keep your GCDs rolling when you are starting off.
9. Understand the basic fundamentals of using Tornado Kick — please refer to this guide.

Openers:

In all non-TK openers, you should activate sprint at about 15s before your pull, unless you are planning to use Shoulder Tackle to reach the boss. It is rarely optimal to use Shoulder Tackle first unless the phasing of the boss lines up for it very well. You will gain more potency from using Shoulder Tackle optimally under buff windows than getting an extra unbuffed one on the start of the pull.

Since you will be pulling the boss without Shoulder Tackle for some fights, you will want to make sure that you can consistently hit the boss as early as possible without pulling early. It is critical to start your 1st GCD off as consistently as possible, as many mechanics require you to be at a precise point in your GCD rotation to execute cleanly.

In your opening sequence, you will always want to establish GL3 first, then apply your DK and TS debuffs, and then unload your oGCD sequence. It is strongly preferred that you can get 5 GCDs inside your PB. It is imperative that you delay the cast of your PB until at least half of your GCD has elapsed, or else you risk not being able to get a 5th GCD in under PB. You should be in the habit of doing this regardless of what your SkS is because it gives you the most room for error in case something goes wrong.

Aya’s Double TK opener: http://ffxivrotations.com/1n5u

Here is a video example of the opener into a 5 minute rotation.

This your bread and butter opener that allows for you to take full advantage of TK’s strength in your opener — it has the highest DPS in spreadsheet calculation (and is optimized for triple melee compositions). In addition, this sequence setup allows for you to enter and maintain consistent RoF windows at the best GCD and on cooldown, which allows for you to play for very precise kill times. You can learn more about the looping rotation here.

The second Forbidden Chakra you see in this opener is where to expect one on average to come up again (in an 8 man raid).

Beginner’s Raid Opener: http://ffxivrotations.com/1diy

This is the standard non-TK variant opener was popular before 4.2. You will need to have relatively low ping (<70ms) to not heavily clip GCDs while executing it. You are applying Brotherhood on the 5th GCD in unison with Trick Attack. There are no benefits to using this opener if you can master the ones that utilize TK.

Buff Usage and Alignment:

Using your Buffs at the correct times is one of the most critical aspects of getting high DPS. Buffs in FFXIV stack multiplicatively, so when used together under the same window they become much stronger than when used alone. I cannot stress enough that coordinating buffs is a team effort, and requires mechanical consistency and awareness from all of your team members. Team composition also comes into effect for this regard.

For both RoF and IR, you will most of the time want to delay its cast until you are at least halfway into the cooldown of your GCD. This is because if you use it too early after a GCD, you risk losing the final GCD  that is supposed to be buffed from its duration. However, there are times where you will want to weave it earlier if you are trying to fit a certain amount of oGCDs in before a phase transition or before the boss dies.

Most buffs in the game are typically 60s, 90s, 120s, and 180s. This means that aside from your opener, in most cases you will only be able to align everything (but 120s) together at 180s. If the fight is longer than 6 or 9 minutes, you will have more opportunities to align everything under your ‘180s’ window, which is the highest spike. 60s and 120s will sync up together through the fight naturally, and same with 90s and 180s. Typically, there are also 60s, 90s, and 120s windows you will want to take advantage of.  It is important to understand the CDs of your teammates. This way you can plan out what buffs should be going out at which times, and when it would be optimal to hold GCDs so that they align together for a final burst phase, given that you will not lose a cast from holding it.

For example, if you are expecting a kill time of under 6 minutes, then you will only have 2 usages of 180s and 3 usages of 120s. It will be important to ensure the final usage of those skills are used at the best time possible as holding them will be fine if the boss dies before 6 minutes since you would not lose out on a cast.

Riddle of Fire (RoF): Increases damage dealt by 30% while increasing weaponskill recast time by 15%. Also grants Fists of Fire. Duration: 20s. Recast: 90s. Riddle of Fire is canceled if Fists of Fire ends.

This is your most powerful buff window. You will want to use RoF ideally before your Bootshine ideally, or before a True Strike as your second best option. Some people like to use it before a Demolish and will clip into it to refresh a second Demolish before RoF ends — this is also fine, assuming you are clipping at 6s or lower. In later tiers when SkS can become higher, it may be possible to do a natural refresh on Demolish under your RoF window. RoF has a 90s CD, which means it will line up with every Brotherhood, which is very nice. You should always use these two skills in unison. You should have EF and ST available under every RoF window. HF should be available during every other. Delay your 3rd SP to get it under your 2nd RoF, it should only be held 3-5s or so. Since 90s is not a very good timing window with most of the other buffs that benefit Monk; you will alternate between weak and strong RoF windows.

Internal Release (IR): Increases critical hit rate by 30%. Duration: 15s. Recast: 60s.

You will want to use this right before True Strike. This way, you will only have one Bootshine under your IR window instead of two, and also under two True Strikes. In general, it is fine to do this anytime that is not before a Bootshine. Since its CD is 60s, IR lines up very nicely with almost every raid buff, with the most important being Trick Attack. You should have IR with every single TA, and along with that you should have EF, HF and ST for sure. Keep in mind that aligning your IR to cover the entirety of TA is more important that aligning it optimally with your GCD sequence. Hitting these 60s windows are very important to hit to maintain optimal DPS. IR will also be up for every 120s and 180s CD so it is important to maintain consistent usage to have them available under all raid buff windows.

Brotherhood (BH): Increases physical damage dealt by nearby party members by 5%. Also grants a 30% chance of opening a chakra when party members under the effect of Brotherhood execute a weaponskill. Duration: 15s. Recast: 90s.

With the 4.2 patch Monks are finally able to benefit from their own BH buff, which is very nice. BH always be used in conjunction with RoF. Any FCs gained under BH should be used immediately. You will start to get a feel of when to expect FCs to come up under your BH windows the more you and your team practice and become consistent in a fight — do your best to not waste any potential Chakras that could be gained.

Group Composition:

You do not need an exceptional team composition, or even a good one, to perform at the 75th-95th percentile level if you are playing the fight well at an individual level. Do not blame your team composition if you cannot achieve 75th percentile or greater — you only have yourself to blame up until you are pushing past 95th percentile.

For speedruns, ideally you will want to have DRG/NIN/BRD as your 3 other DPS, also have AST, SCH, WAR, and PLD/DRK. This composition provides the most amount of raid buffs that are beneficial to physical damage dealers.The 3 melee composition heavily caters to the MNK, which means that the composition will not succeed unless the MNK player is very capable.

Uptime and Positionals:

The key to having high DPS on Monk is to perfect your fundamentals. Every small mistake you make, whether it be a lost GCD or a lost positional will add up over the course of the encounter. Every 3 or so lost positionals is the same as losing a GCD. Your goal is perfecting every small optimization for each mechanic that occurs during the fight — once you can do so, you will be able to execute an extremely clean run, which will invariably lead to high DPS.

Individual optimization of each mechanic involves understanding the timing of when the damage goes out whether based on timer, cast bar, or animation.

Leaving at the latest possible time to avoid damage and coming in at the earliest possible time after the mechanic is the most critical rule for having high dps as a melee. Your ultimate goal in every fight is to be able to deal with the mechanics in such a way that you have 100% uptime — no lost GCDs, no lost auto attacks and ideally no lost positionals. Every mechanic in each encounter must be thought about within these constraints if you are aiming to push your DPS to the highest level. In order to see what is possible and what is not, you will have to take risks and go out of your comfort zone to push the limits of your uptime. Obviously, you will die in many of these cases but through trial and error you will be able to find what works best for you in each mechanic. Do not be content with how you are handing a mechanic unless you have achieved both 100% uptime and positionals.

Every Monk should aim to have the cleanest run possible — the pursuit of perfection.

In order to do this, you will need to be very experienced in the encounter, and know exactly when and how to deal with each mechanic given your situation. The tools at your disposal will always be Shoulder Tackle, Sprint, and most importantly of all, your brain.

Many mechanics not only take individual optimization, but also team coordination. How the boss is faced and positioned through the encounter mostly falls on your tanks, and it is a team effort to ensure that all mechanics can be dealt with in such a way that minimizes boss movement and ensures highest uptime for everyone. For newer players and teams, this is not something that will happen overnight and will take a ton of practice to improve upon. A good strategy is useless without consistent and clean execution.

Best in Slot Gearsets:

General rules to follow when gearing::

• If deciding between two pieces of gear that are the same item level, go for the one that has more Critical Hit.
• Pick the weapon that has the highest Weapon Damage
• Try to have somewhere between roughly 700 and 1350 skill speed.

Note: It is important to realize that substat optimization will only factor about 1-2% of your overall DPS potential. A common mistake that I see many players doing is spending the majority of their time trying to optimize substats when they could be focusing instead on execution of the fight, which influences 98% of your performance.

These gearsets have been calculated courtesy of Jahaudant. When you are still progressing through fights, do not focus too much on optimizing your substats. Perfect melds and substats are not required at all in order to clear content. In general, it is best to aim for the highest item level until you have cleared and have the fights on farm.

All gearsets are within 0.50% DPS of each other, so it is best to go for the SkS that suits your playstyle. As a general rule of thumb, the higher your latency to the server, the lower SkS you will want to play at.

http://ffxiv.ariyala.com/17BGK | 2.07 | 770
http://ffxiv.ariyala.com/17BD8 | 2.06 | 819
http://ffxiv.ariyala.com/17BDG | 2.05 | 883
http://ffxiv.ariyala.com/17BDP | 2.04 | 969
http://ffxiv.ariyala.com/17BDV | 2.03 | 1049
http://ffxiv.ariyala.com/17BH1 | 2.00 | 1288

General Advice:

1. Do not be afraid to make mistakes and die. You will need to push your limits to know what you can and cannot get away with for each mechanic. Being complacent with just being able to clear the fight is a poor mentality if you are seeking to improve.

1. Recognize the goals of your group, and be aware of the overall mindset of your raid members. Communicate with your teammates to make sure they are on the same page for what you want to accomplish during raid time.

1. Sub-stat optimization will only roughly affect your DPS by 1-2%. Do not spend the majority of your time trying to figure out what sub-stats are the best when you can spend time practicing and figuring out how to execute cleanly, which influences at 98% of your performance.

1. Own up to your mistakes. You will never get better if you don’t admit to doing anything wrong.

1. Record your own gameplay so that you are able to review it after raid is done. There are many things that you can identify that may not be apparent when you are focusing on the fight. Learn to use FFLogs as an analysis tool to compare your runs to others.

1. Encounters in this game are scripted. You will need to be consistent so that you have a baseline GCD map of the fight, and from there you are able to adjust and refine. You cannot optimize your DPS if you are unable to consistently be at the same GCD at the same part of the fight every time.

1. Practice. Repetition is key to being able to perform at a consistent level. When you are able to perfectly do your rotation without much thinking, then you are able to allocate more brain power to identify parts in actual fights that you could optimize better for.
   
   
2. Monk is all about polishing and refining the basics. You don’t need to do anything special besides clean execution of the basic fundamentals of Monk to get good numbers. Don’t think about stuff like fancy PB/TK optimizations until you are already consistently hitting 95th+ percentile in your runs.

FFLogs & Self Analysis:

Courtesy of Aya Liz

This part of the guide will be of interest to you after you’ve actually set foot into a raid or extreme primal fight and have a log on fflogs to show for it. Topics touched upon here will concern you for the remainder of your time playing Monk and in the long run, you may find yourself spending more time digging through logs than actually playing monk in your quest to do more damage.

FFlogs has a vast amount of information for you, both from analyzing your own performance and comparing it to what differences there are in your play compared to someone performing better. The only limitation is your willingness to invest the time to gather and interpret the data available.

Without further ado, let’s get to work with an example. I’ll be comparing an O6S log of the second character of our beloved guide author Tiff to one of my own and talk about some points of interest when looking at logs. If you’d like to do the same, simply head to any log on FFLogs, click Compare on the top right and follow the instruction to compare two reports.

In my case, the result is this comparison link.

I went ahead and clipped the end of the fight to 8:01 since one of the two fights ends there. You can look at certain periods of the fight by clicking and dragging on the damage graph.

On the damage done tab, some differences become apparent at a glance. Doing a little bit of addition, we can see that I got 8 more GCDs than Tiff, a handful extra uses of oGCDs as well as a small amount of auto attacks that becomes a little more significant in context since I was using the crafted weapon with 2.64s delay while Tiff had a Byakko weapon with 2.56s delay (note that as time goes on, most monks will likely be using 2.56 delay weapons since only the crafted has a different delay so keep that in mind if you’re not sure what weapon someone has). By all accounts, there appears to be a difference in uptime on the boss that’s worth investigating here.

In the 8 minutes of this fight we are looking at, there are two main suspects for losing uptime: being inefficient in handling the paint mechanics and getting marked for the black clouds that chase DPS about five minutes into the fight. Switching to the casts tab in timelines view and scrolling through the fight, it’s fairly easy to confirm the latter – an almost 10 seconds long gap between GCDs lines up right with the black clouds five minutes into the fight on Tiff’s timeline:

As for paint, Tiff enters the airplane early at around 3:55 in the fight spending just over 8 seconds between GCDs while that same mechanic was done with just short of 4 seconds passing between GCDs on my log. While the black clouds are simply bad luck that would need special strategies like getting a cover from the PLD to circumvent, extra downtime while doing painting mechanics is player error that can be improved in future runs after it has been identified like I just did here.

The general idea remains the same for any fight you want to analyze a log of – if you notice another player with higher uptime on the boss in the form of extra auto attacks or multiple GCDs, you proceed by identifying downtime periods on your log, associating them with mechanics during that time period and thinking of ways to avoid that downtime in the future and then putting that into action.

Now that auto attacks and GCDs are sorted out, it’s time for oGCDs, buffs and debuffs. The buffs and debuffs tabs on a log will, amongst other things, provide you with information on how long your dragon kick (blunt resistance down), twin snakes and demolish were up. Dragon Kick and Twin Snakes should generally show uptime percentages close to what percent of the fight is uninterrupted melee uptime with small breaks at best, seeing small gaps in their uptime in parts of the fight where nothing is keeping you from hitting the boss is typically an indication of having made a wrong choice in your rotation as seen here.

Demolish uptime will generally be a couple percent lower than Dragon Kick and Twin Snakes since it’ll drop every so often in your rotation. Finding your Demolish uptime significantly lower than that is another indication of potentially suboptimal GCD choices.

One of the most common ways to lose out on damage is missing uses of oGCDs. You can determine the maximum amount of uses you can get out of an oGCD skill for a given fight duration with FLOOR((Fight duration – time of first use)/Cooldown+1). On fights where downtime lines up with times you could be using an oGCD, this number will generally not be possible to achieve and referencing the oGCD use counts of high performing Monks may be more useful.

Applying the above formula to our O6S example, we’re left with up to 16 uses of Shoulder Tackle and Elixir Field, 8 uses of Internal Release and Howling Fist, 12 uses of Steel Peak and 6 uses of Brotherhood and Riddle of Fire. Comparing those numbers to the amounts shown in the casts tab, we can see that I could have gotten one more shoulder tackle while Tiff was short 1 Howling Fist, 1 Elixir Field, 5 Shoulder Tackles, 3 Steel Peaks and 1 use of Brotherhood/Riddle of Fire. It’s worth noting that holding Brotherhood and Riddle of Fire for Tiff here is not a necessarily a misplay since the maximum amount for uses of those is 6 in both the 8 minutes of the fight we are looking at and also for his actual kill time of 9 minutes so holding it to line it up with raid buffs towards the end of the fight does not cost him a use of those buffs, keep that in mind whenever analyzing logs for a duration other than the full duration of the fight. However, the multiple lost uses of damage oGCDs here is a large loss in potency and is one of the most frequent mistakes found in lower percentile logs.

This concludes my overview of the process of identifying common mistakes in Monk logs. Having no visible mistakes on all metrics I touched on will already roughly put you in line with the performance of top performing monks and you can start looking into minor optimization decisions such as trying to gain potency from additional Perfect Balance uses.

On a final note, here’s some assorted information you may find useful in your endeavor to improve your play through fflogs:

• There is currently no way to check if a positional was hit on FFLogs other than checking the damage numbers on individual hits.
• Should you find your amount of GCDs used to be comparable to other monks but some auto attacks went missing, you may have a bad habit of standing at max melee range frequently – max melee range for skills is longer than it is for auto attacks so you may be accidently missing autos despite thinking you’re in range.
• Greased Lightning in the buffs tab is calculated manually on FFLogs’ side since it is not a status effect ingame and is as such subject to inaccuracies compared to what actually took place. For instance, Riddle of Earth’s Greased Lightning refreshes are currently not considered and may show up as you dropping it on FFLogs.
• Familiarizing yourself with more of FFLogs’ features will increase the scope of information you can gather. For example, watching the replay will help you understand the group’s movement and queries/pins are immensely useful for checking what skills you used during certain buffs, a guide can be found here.

That’s it from my side, I hope I’ve helped you be able to find your way around FFLogs to identify and improve sources of lost damage in your play.

~Aya

These are the steps you should take when looking to transition from clearing the fight on a weekly basis to working on improving your performance. Thanks to Aya for providing his insight.

Closing Thoughts

The goal of this guide was to give a detailed overview of the Monk job and introduce you to advanced concepts that are used in optimization. You should now be armed with the tools to self-diagnose your own gameplay and identify how to improve.

I hope that after reading this guide you will be motivated to experiment and try some of these concepts yourself and eventually develop your own sense of how to approach a fight with optimization in mind.

Shoutouts

Thanks to everyone over at The Balance, a fun and active community where everyone is seeking to learn and improve to be better players — this guide is was made with players like you guys in mind.

Acknowledgement to Aya Liz for helping explain how to use FFLogs but at the cost of bullying Uwu Xd’s weekly clears.

Thanks to Soo Han for the RoF infographic.

Shoutout to <Lit> FC members for being cool cats.

All mathwork and calculations are thanks to Jahaudant, among various other :blobwizards: of the FFXIV theorycrafting community.

Special thanks to all the Monk veterans who have shared their experiences and knowledge, which I could not have written this guide without.