Any real rework of Monk ought to just ditch the elemental fists entirely instead of trying to pretend they are relevant to the identity of the job for one more year. They have been, and still are (even in reworks proposed in the thread) absolute trash buttons that have existed in perpetuity while other buttons have been removed or replaced with crappier OGCDs that either fail to properly replace what was lost, or are simply a fancier animation to do more or less the same basic thing but worse (I'm looking at YOU, Enlightenment. Give back Howling Fist and never again give us another button reliant on inconsistent resource generation, there isn't another job in the game, period, that has to deal with that sort of nonsense to this degree.)

If this were a completely different style of game with a completely different style of combat, I would find the idea of switching fist stances for varying benefits intriguing. But as things stand, with the way encounters are designed and carefully choreographed, leaving the Fists in there is the button bloat the developers claim they were worried about and claimed they were dealing with when they stripped the job of its OGCDs from HW to SB, and now to ShB.

I would rather see a return of OGCDs to our bars in their place, and I would want them to interact with our rotations in some way. Let successful finishers do MORE than just trigger a status buff that makes the next button we press usable, strong, or both. Say a successful combo unlocks a modified form of an OGCD that we can "stock" so to speak, holding onto it for a proper burst phase, or to use throughout our opener. Something, anything more than just leaving our combo buttons to act as gates to the next step.

Having played some Gunbreaker recently, I love how it has a burst combo in the 70s that has the player hit one button, then hit a "trigger" button that changes depending on where you are in the combo. It's too simple for a dedicated DPS job, IMO, but that idea has more thought and care put into it than anything Monk has seen since 2.0. I think with some additional variance, a similar idea would be amazing for Monk, retaining the pure speed and aggression that has been the true identity of the job since inception, as opposed to elemental fists we've just sat in for the duration of a fight.