What if: Stances were removed?

[Deathgiver]

Not going to address tank stance (I think they should stay to add depth) but going to mention cleric stance. The biggest issue with cleric stance is that it didn't scale with gear like pretty much every skill does. At 2.0 with ilvl 70 gear you could expect to do about 45% of max dps outside of cleric stance, and about 40% of max healing in cleric stance. At current levels its more like 13% of max dps out of cleric stance and 11% of max healing in cleric stance.

edit: If they made dps spells scale off mnd they could simply cut the potency of all dps spells in half, make the bonus for cleric stance 120% instead of 10%, and make the healing penalty 60% instead of 20%. No stat swaps and would effectively nerf healing output in cleric stance to the same levels as it was at i70. Not sure how it would work with cross class blizzard II though.

[Shurrikhan]

Not going to address tank stance (I think they should stay to add depth) but going to mention cleric stance. The biggest issue with cleric stance is that it didn't scale with gear like pretty much every skill does. At 2.0 with ilvl 70 gear you could expect to do about 45% of max dps outside of cleric stance, and about 40% of max healing in cleric stance. At current levels its more like 13% of max dps out of cleric stance and 11% of max healing in cleric stance.

edit: If they made dps spells scale off mnd they could simply cut the potency of all dps spells in half, make the bonus for cleric stance 120% instead of 10%, and make the healing penalty 60% instead of 20%. No stat swaps and would effectively nerf healing output in cleric stance to the same levels as it was at i70. Not sure how it would work with cross class blizzard II though.

That is technically because it scaled with gear. But then, keep in mind that only one of the two stats does; as you gear levels increased, so too then did the difference between your Mind stat (which increases) and your Intelligence stat (which does not), and therefore the difference in proportion. Now, given that there is no point at which Intelligence will ever be viable for healer, they easily could have instead removed the gear-to-effect difference over time by making it a simple toggle of 20% increased damage and 60% decreased healing while active, etc., while scaling healer-class offensive abilities off of Mind, but at a normally 16.67% reduced effectiveness.

In a way you could say the same for caster heals. At level 41, a Summoner was often a more efficient healer than a Scholar, because he could spend GCDs that would otherwise have been wasted on 80-potency ruin casts with equally stat-sourced 400 potency Physic casts, all while pumping out pet damage instead of one's own (i.e. the Scholar's) own heals becoming redundant in the light of his (dps-incapable) pet. But once Mind and Intelligence split, BLM and SMN Physics became laughably smaller and smaller. I'd be fine, too, with seeing those simply descale a bit with time, rather than hitting a hard point at which, say, a level 44's off-heals suddenly become weaker than a level 31's.

[Shurrikhan]

Stances are not the issue, its the implementation. As you mentioned, Cleric Stance, most tank stances and AST ones are necessary and well done because they add depth and a skill ceiling to the class. Removal of those would only cheapen the experience.

The main issues are stances which have no alternative (i.e. there is extremely situational or zero reason for keeping on/off), the Kisses could easily be removed and merged in to a trait with the utility merged in to Jugulate, the MNK stances are also redundant complexity as their impact is too low to warrant dancing.

This, for the most part. On one end you could get rid of the two poison types and simply have Jugulate as a silence and, say, Spinal Tap as a stun, and put them on a shared CD (as per MCH). On the other, you could make something out of those poisons. The only issue is that you'll have some people who'd rather not have to stance-dance to play optimally, and once it's an actual concern, that will occur. Sadly, we've no customization choices by which to forgo mechanics we'd rather not handle, mitigating the lost output.

I'd argue though that MNK's stances are a different issue entirely. It's not that they're not worth enough. It's that they cost too much. Animation locks are already something of an issue for any Monk with more than minimal skill speed and a fair distance from Montreal or any Level 3 route there. The Fists of animations are on the long side, activate slowly, and can take up valuable gaps between the GCDs. They simply need to be fixed, as to activate more quickly, be more easily clipped, and to have a scaled cooldown—aimed exactly 1 or just under 2 GCDs, rather than some variable fraction of them (starting at 1.2, but likely as low as 1.57 with high skill speed).