I honestly suspect they did this on accident and once they realized the mistake, they pretended it was intentional and rolled it back before it mattered.
The same team in the same patch also made formless dragon kick.
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I personally don’t think about where I am in a rotation that way. Monk was and still is a class you just press a button to refresh buff (or fill ball in DT) when you need. There’s not really any instance where I’ve had to remember a full gcd rotation. The supposed length of this rotation also doesn’t remotely affect your burst windows at all.
For me, the problem with the removal of buffs comes with any reason to press solar in even bursts (outside of kill time to get another phantom rush). Right now our standard burst is just spamming opo GCDs (outside of specific kill times) since there’s no thinking required to refresh our buffs around (or during) our burst