Quote Originally Posted by SpeckledBurd View Post
Correct, because damage buffs are multiplicative Fists of Wind/GL4 is a flat 1.4x modifier on your potencies, while Fists of Fire is a 1.43x modifier. GL4 ends up being stronger over the course of the fight regardless because of how it buffs auto-attacks to be absurdly strong on Monk compared to other jobs.

The Fist Stances going away is something people thought would happen going into Stormblood and instead we got 4.0 Tackle Mastery, which was more an appeal at the Fist Stances doing something than actually making them useful. I can only assume the reason there's two traits is because the devs were still terrified of GL4 being too fast for players, so they left in Fists of Fire to give people a choice between playstyles. But it’s a false choice in the exact same way Tackle Mastery was. People will always choose the option that does the most damage in this game. Really it’s more telling to me that the devs continue to have no idea how people play this game, and its further evidence that the devs had no vision on what Shadowbringers Monk actually would be. It’s just removing the Fist Stances would actually involving changing Monk and they're deathly afraid of that to the point that it's the least played job in the game.
The irony is they lack this same fear when it comes to Machinist. It really does go to show how completely out-of-sync the dev team seems to be at times.