Monk Rework just brought us back to 2.0 MNK but with no GL.

[wereotter]

What choice? It's FoF 99.99999% of the time, the other small % is using FoE for damage mitigation for the lols when you can't hit anything anyway. Just like with Ninja's venoms they should remove it and apply the damage boost across the job.

I'm not one for advocating dumbing down a job... but in this case I agree. The fist stances are largely useless and just a check to see if players are actually paying attention to their skills. The closest they ever had to making these stances mean anything was Stormblood having the be in the stances as part of using the riddles, and using wind tackle to get extra GL stacks so we could finally use Tornado Kick...

I can't see any way they can make the stances relevant, so just make them passive traits at the level you unlock them.

[IruruCece]

I'm not one for advocating dumbing down a job... but in this case I agree. The fist stances are largely useless and just a check to see if players are actually paying attention to their skills. The closest they ever had to making these stances mean anything was Stormblood having the be in the stances as part of using the riddles, and using wind tackle to get extra GL stacks so we could finally use Tornado Kick...

I can't see any way they can make the stances relevant, so just make them passive traits at the level you unlock them.

Don't even bother that much with them. Just take the fist stances out of the game and be done with them. Burn them out of the game and never mention them again, even as traits. They are that worthless.

Every expansion has rendered the dumb things as little more than One Stance You Sit On, and Two Others You Ignore Forever. The one time you actually did something remotely different with them in your rotation was, shockingly enough, Shadowbringers, where players would open in Fire, then sit in Wind until they lost GL and needed to re-open.

People will talk for a looooong while about how GL "added nothing" to the job, but I'm here to tell you that the elemental fists were far worse to the overall health of the job's kit than GL ever was. After repeated button culls and reintroductions under different names and icons, the Elemental Fists have somehow withstood the test of a time, offering nothing to nearly every other aspect of the job until the introduction of GL4... which now doesn't even matter. They are collectively a diseased boil on the arse of the entire kit. Let the earth they get buried under be seeded with all the salt in the world. I would rather have three OGCDs to use in their place.

[SpeckledBurd]

If the topic is Fist Stances, I've said it before: For all that there might be some sort of potential to do something with them that potential is meaningless if it's never manifested. We've had two expansions where they've added traits to them and those traits have always been worthless, and frankly I'd say that the "Riddle of" actions that were tied to them were just as bad as they were introduced in Stormblood, to the point where they were untied to the Fist Stances in Shadowbringers and have gone through multiple revisions. At this point I'd rather see the Fist Stances get deleted entirely so they stop wasting design space, because all they're doing now is stifling the job from growing in any other way by continuing to receive traits that contribute nothing to the job and shouldn't exist.r

Let them die and let the job grow. The job isn't improved by having a Tank or a Sprint Stance it never uses, there's no choice there. It wasn't improved by having the illusion of choice between Fists of Wind and Fists of Fire at the beginning of Shadowbringers either, because that's not a choice either. It's just something that will cause people who don't know better to make the wrong decision.