The removal of GL is a solution designed for people who weren't playing the job much in the first place and didn't like the mechanic. That's pretty much it.

It's straight up not a very good rework, and I don't know why I bothered expecting anything out of the developers at this point. We still have the elemental fists taking up space in our kit. At least before there was a reason to switch between fire and wind (such as when we had to ramp up again after a cutscene, or during our opener). Now we're back to sitting in one stance pretty much forever, and wind has been reduced to a joke speed increase that doesn't actually address the long standing issue of Monk's lack of disengage/leap away mechanic that other DPS enjoy.

Anatman still exists, is still worthless. The "utility" it offers is trash, and it basically no place in our kit and doesn't really deserve to be on our bars. And it was already bad BEFORE, MNK players had to stretch hard enough to pull muscles to justify working it into openers, and then they told us we were using this awful button WRONG and made it harder to use in that fashion!

Six Sided Star is one of the worst capstone skills in the game in terms of what it adds to the job. We're still going to be hitting the same combos over and over.

We have utility in terms of providing a raid buff for everyone now, which again makes me wonder why, exactly, SE believes the job is so underplayed. It certainly wasn't our lack of utility, otherwise SAMs wouldn't be getting the light of day in the eyes of most ultra double hardcore players!

For two expansions straight, SE has demonstrated they still don't really understand what they want MNKs to even be. Are we supposed to be a selfish DPS for technically oriented players? Do they want us to bring utility to justify our place in a group? My fear now is that they cut back on those potency buffs they gave our buttons because now we have "utility."

Killing GL as part of our job's mechanics was the easy way out. It's them acknowledging that lengthy cutscenes and breaks in fight was a problem for the job specifically, but rather than retooling one of the buttons they gave us, of THREE, that were intended to help us preserve the buff, they just threw it out the window entirely.

I'll be sticking with any other DPS at this point.