IiPunch - Monk Guide

It's only 9 delay less than Godhands.

Speaking of Verethragna, they should make AM apply to both fists for RME ontop of whatever buff they give MNK. I'd be willing to bet it'd make MNK a lot more competitive as a DD.

Eh, I don't think this is as big a deal as you're making it out to be. All MNK weapon choices end up slightly overcapping delay if you have capped magical haste. It's a minimal impact on TP/hit though, and is partly made up for over time just through the lower delay/more frequent attack rounds.

As a practical matter, just don't use additional MA gear when you're getting capped haste, and build around the TP/hit you do get as part of that weapon. I just think of it as part of the weapon. The bigger deals that will make the decision for you are surely the (1) the AM effect (Empy or Mythic) or Store TP on Aeonic, and (2) weapon damage and other stats. You can also be a little thankful for lower delay when you run into situations where you aren't getting full haste buffs for whatever reason (get hit with slow/dispel, don't have optimal buffing setup, etc.)

Kenkonken (obviously not a MNK concern) is the only H2H weapon that is really a special case, since it has a whopping MA-50 on the weapon itself. That WILL leave you severely overcapped on delay if you're getting capped magical haste, so it actually changes what buffs you will want to the point that it's generally better to ONLY get ~30% Magical Haste (i.e. Haste II or equivalent, Haste I + MG, etc.) You can then hit delay cap with MA gear (need ~40 MA in gear, which is easily doable with options like Mache Earrings, JSE cape, Hizamaru+1 head, Cirque Necklace, etc.).


FWIW, total delay (H2H universal base 480 delay + weapon delay) at capped magical haste shown below for MNK's ultimate weapons. Assuming no additional MA gear, just the MA from trait (-200) and gift (-10 from 1200+ gift).

Weapon (delay)	Minimum Delay	Actual Delay
Verethragna (+51)	106.2	100.3125
Godhands (+60)	108	103.125
Spharai (+86)	113.2	111.25
Glanzfaust (+96)	115.2	114.375

I'm aware of all that and you're both reading way too into what I said. I'm saying that a simple comparison between the two would overestimate Verethragna's relative strength if overcapping delay reduction is not being considered. That is all. No where did I say by how much, lol

But nobody's really comparing anything based on theoretical stats with an assumption of no overcapped delay. People are aware that TP/hit is a consideration, and yeah... a lower delay weapon will end up getting slightly less TP/hit due to the game mechanics.

Honestly I think it's a minor enough point that it's almost able to be ignored - we all get that there are just differences in TP/hit between different weapons. The key takeaway for any practical use is just not to use more MA gear when you're at cap.

I think I have a few pieces upgraded to 119 from a while ago, but what AF/Relic/Empy pieces are needed?

Really only the Empyrean body. Ones that are worth looking into are:

AF
Head - Acc+ for Focus (I don't know if it's only on activation or if it needs to be full time...)
Body - Chakra
Hands - Boost (do people even use it anymore? I don't use boost. Also irrelevant when capped attack)

Relic
Body - Extra Formless Strikes duration
Hands - Chakra
Legs - Extra HF duration
Feet - More HP from Mantra

Empyrean looks mostly bad except the Body.

Except for Empy body, all of the useful pieces are JA/macro gear and only need to be used with the JA (not kept on).

Empy:
- Body is an Impetus up piece, though arguably/situationally not worth it due to the bonus resetting after a missed attack. Does need to remain equipped to get the bonus, but you can take it off and put it back on (e.g. WS in something else). Might get better with H2H changes (or any potential changes to Impetus)
- Feet for Footwork bonus. AFAIK, since the footwork change these increase the KA proc rate while footwork is up, and I don't think they need to remain equipped. This piece used to suck when footwork sucked, but now it's a pretty good ability. Maybe the best reforge piece now from a DPS perspective?

Relic:
- Gloves for Chakra
- Body for Formless Strikes duration (don't need 119)
- Legs for Hundred Fists duration (don't need 119)
- Feet for Mantra HP bonus (don't need 119)

AF:
- Body for Chakra
- Head for Focus
- Boots for Dodge (if you care)
- Hands for lolBoost (if you care)

Is Boost worth using anymore? I thought consensus had been "no" for quite a while.

I'd say probably not.

Unless you want MAXIMUM CHI BLAST, guys.

(no, Boost is not worth using any more)

So mostly Relic body/legs/maybe feet (but not all the way to 119) and AF head 119.

Does anyone know if the bonus from boost goes through every hit for a multihit WS? I cannot imagine that it does, but I don't know that for sure.

Unrelated bit. If H2H receives a large bonus, how effective might Empy AM3 and Hundred Fists be? I know that Hundred Fists breaks the delay cap, but I don't know if there is some kind of other cap it runs into. I don't know that much about Monk, honestly. If there isn't a maximum cap, gearing for Martial Arts with what you might consider good gear anyway can push your delay down to 68.75 with Hundred Fists up. That's absurdly fast, a minimum of 51 swings per fist during Hundred fists. To bad AM3 only procs on the main hand.

Boost is ok in those situations where you want a small buff before engaging and stuff like that, but if u're attack capped it's pointless.

Empy legs are pretty solid actually. If you're gearing up MNK and have gil/mats to spare they're an excellent option, you'd be surprised how well they can perform. Clearly there's better stuff of course.

And I thought the footwork enhancement on feet was just increased attack on kick attacks when Footwork is up?
There's a similar bonus on Suzaku's Ruaun feet and I seem to remember neither of those boots did anything about the proc rate?
If you wanna go for builds focusing on KA then Empy legs + those feet from Hyppo NM in Woe Gates is the way to go.
But clearly Herc feet + Perf Samnuha is gonna perform better.

I remember (talking about 11+ years ago) people claiming Boost would affect a full attack round and not a single hit (next hit, wether it lands or misses).
I'm kinda skeptic about that and have never seen a test about it.

It should be easy to check if it works on a full attack round btw. If it does it's likely the same applies to all the hits of a WS.

Pretty much, but I'd toss the Chakra pieces in there too. If you don't care how much HP Chakra cures, not a big deal whether you upgrade em to 119 (or even past NQ AF or Relic+2). But you should still be carrying both pieces for the nice status removal effects they add to Chakra - Body allows it to remove Para (if the JA isn't paralyzed...), Hands remove Disease/Plague.

I'm at work but now I really want to play more with Empy feet. IIRC, Footwork after the change made it so it's just an increased rate of KA proc for 1min (something like KA rate +20%) - mainly cool for the extra TP. I could be mistaken, but I thought gear with "Footwork+" also changed at that point from being a damage thing to increasing KA proc rate even further. I might just be wrong though, and I'm definitely a bit out of practice on MNK.

Would like to see testing (maybe it was done ages ago) to see whether they:
1) affect KA rate, or if it's just additional KA DMG.
2) need to remain equipped or not to get the effect (whether it's proc rate or KA DMG, if they only need to be on at JA use, they're definitely worth using for Footwork)

I guess Shukuyu Sune-Ate (Escha Suzaku drop) are the same idea, so prob worth testing too.

Kick Attack is a little strange atm I think. Some of the equipment would add base damage, some would give extra KA%. My personal preference atm is if its KA+ then it's KA% and if it's Kick Attack Attack+ then it's +DMG.

Footwork change increases your KA% and add some +DMG to kick for 1min. I'm not too sure how much the boost is though. Even with Relic Aftermath, I could barely notice it anyways. The extra damage is very noticeable though. I remember seeing some kicks going over 1.5k.

I don't really want to put much much stock into KA gear outside of that 1min of footwork though. Given a choice I'd put KA% somewhere equal to or less than half of DA.

I think it's possible to test if Boost affecting the whole WS round or just the 1st hit.

Maybe War/Mnk Boost 10 times and Resolution?

Or maybe Mnk Boost 10 times and Howling Fist/Raging Fist and see if you can floor pDif?

For sure. I'm not advocating using KA stuff in a TP set. But if any Footwork gear modifies the JA itself upon use and doesn't need to be kept on at the time of each attack, that's definitely worth using.

Heard you like sets.

Low Accuracy	Some Accuracy	High Accuracy	Full Accuracy
ItemSet 347515	ItemSet 347516	ItemSet 347517	ItemSet 347518

Body/Hands are interchangable with Ryuo and Adhemar for max acc depending on what you want. Ryuo can get more STR and similar DEX, while Adhemar has significantly less STR for more DEX and multi strikes. You can also go for Path B and sacrifice accuracy for STR.

STR or DEX, Acc/Atk and WSD augments on Herc. You can switch for HQ abjurations earlier if you don't have high acc augments.

Low Accuracy	Some Accuracy	High Accuracy	Full Accuracy
ItemSet 347515	ItemSet 347516	ItemSet 347521	ItemSet 347522

Again, Ryuo body can be switch for Adhemar in Max Acc, or for Herculean Vest if you have enough accuracy. These sets assume not HQ abjurations exorbitant in price, hence why Rao +1 is still an option here.

Low Accuracy	Some Accuracy	High Accuracy	Full Accuracy
ItemSet 347523	ItemSet 347524	ItemSet 347525	ItemSet 347526

For people who haven't done Reisenjima yet/Haven't put a ton of effort into MNK... obviously normal gorget if no Fotia. Lower Accuracy sets with Adhemar assume Path B, can swap Ryuo for Adhemar Path A if you're dedicated enough to have 2 copies of each, otherwise Ryuo is fine.

Feel free to make criticisms of my set, been a long day and I may have forgotten that certain items exist.

Raging Fists probably gears similarly for the lower sets, maybe more Abjuration stuff in place of Herculean but I could see STR/Acc/Atk/TA augments working better.

No.
KA equipment in the leg slot increase the proc rate of KA (once per attack turn, can't proc on WS)
KA equipment in the feet slot increase the base damage of the Kicks.

What's ironic is that KA used to be that low chance proc once per attack round with an incredibly high damaging kick.
Now even with the best KA equipment, kicks do way less damage than your fists hahaha, they've been so lazy they never bothered to fix this :P


The old Footwork used to give a ~10% attack increase on kicks. New Footwork keeps this attack bonus, but differently from the old one, you can't see it any longer with /checkparam or Equipment menu.
It only applies to kicks of course, kinda like the KA Job Points category, won't see it in menus/checkparam.

Old Footwork used to give a ~10% att increase.
Tantra Gaiters made it ~13%, Tantra +1 made it ~15%.
It's likely to assume Bhikku makes it 17% and Bhikku+1 20%.
Shukuyu Sune-ate possibly make it 25%?

To receive this bonus with old Footwork you only had to equip the equipment during activation of the JA, I'm not sure if this is still the case (anybody wants to test?)


I performed a test some time ago in Abyssea Konschtat against Lizard (capped attack) to check Naked feet vs Bhikku+1 vs Shukuyu vs Sokushitsu .
Can still find my test many pages ago.
I equiopped the first stage H2H relic weapon (+1 damage, +999 delay) to make attack turns slower and be able to more easily discern between normal attacks and kick attacks.
In my test I didn't see any boost to the KA rate during Footwork, but then again that test was faulty because of several mistakes I made, so I'm not sure it leads to anything.
I asked for suggestions on different test scenarios but hardly anybody provided tips or directions and I kinda suck with this sort of math stuff so:

tl;dr => it would be really awesome if someone could go back and perform this test again.

Against mobs of the same level (check with Battlemod), with capped attack and with stage1 Relic weapon in hand, it should be really easy to discern between fists and kicks from the log, and with a sample large enough you should see differences in the KA activation rate.
Against mobs without capped attack instead it should be easy to see the difference in the att % bonus granted to kick attacks during footwork. Difference betweeen 10% (base) and supposed 20/25% should be big enough that you should immediately notice it even with a small sample, provided you're far from attack capped against the target.

Ideal testing for this would be a MNK who doesn't have any Footwork JP yet, because that increases KA base damage during Footwork making it a bit meassier to set things apart.

I'm not advocating it either because Perf Samnuha + well augmented Herc feet destroys it, but trust me Bhikku+1 legs/Sokushitsu is not teh ***.
If you already have that gear and are a returning MNK, that constitutes a really nice starting point as you work towards perf samnuha/herc or better options.

When I checked in the spreadsheet I was always surprised at how much better than expected that combination provided to be.

To sum up things that have been discussed lately and that haven't been thoroughly tested yet:

1) What's the KA activation rate % during Footwork?
2) Is it in addition to the base one or in place?
3) Do "Footwork" enhancing equipment provide an activation rate boost, or just a KA attack boost?
4) Does the attack bonus from "Boost" JA applies to the single next attack that hits/miss the target, or to the next full attack round?
5) Does it work on all hits of a WS or just the first one?

Job Point categories for Monk are somewhat strange.


Did SE patch Counterstance at some point to give a DEX->damage boost on Counterstance'd counters, similar to Sneak Attack, and JPs increase the mod by 40%?

Does Perfect Counter 20/20 just give a 20 VIT bonus when used?

Awesome sets!

Word on the street though is after the upcoming update this pair of nastiness is going to be the front runner in certain situations.

Thoughts? If so, how would it fit into the sets you've posted?

it fits the exact same way in which godhands fit, it just depends on how they buff MNK which we can't tell until the update.


also raging fists/howling fist is effectively useless with vere, IMO

Can Vereth's AM proc twice in the same attack round, for instance if you DA with the offhand?

It's been a while since I had my Verethragna (RIP Ramzus) but iirc Verethragna only works on the mainhand and I don't even remember if it on worked on multistrikes on the main hand. So, DA on the offhand wouldn't be able to trigger it as far as I know.

It doesn't work on multi-hits. You ODD/T once and you're done for the attack round.

Wow, that's worse than other 1H weapons.

Yep, hence why I think Verethragna is ***. Glanzfaust is probably still better even with triple damage.