Thread: How should Monk 4.0 have been done?

If I may, I have one more question for you guys:
- How could we make Fists stances satisfying for you?

That is to say, having some sort of shared opportunity system between damage mitigation, damage increase, and movement speed increase, or any three such bonuses...

Again, I personally love Fist weaving, especially now that the opportunity cost has heavily decreased, but I could see others as feeling the same way towards truly (or within 1 GCD) cost-free stance-dancing that many, say, WoW Warriors did in Cataclysm where every skill had a sort of obligatory stance attached to it, so it ended up keystroke bloat. In this case it'd at least be situational, but I could see where the obvious advantages of having to swap to Wind/Earth just to swap back to Fists of Fire a GCD later could become tiresome for others.

So how could any elementally-based shared resource system like that be made interesting?

Could we exchange the Fists for oGCD skills that consume a shared granular resource, replacing the % damage bonus of GL with those? Could we have them interact in different ways with core mechanics like Chakra or Greased Lighting? Spread their advantages via skills like Mantra? (Or heck, even just oGCDing immediately after or during an Arm of the Destroyer to create an Aura Pulse, sharing a portion of your Wind/Earth/Fire benefits with the raid.)

Additionally, how could the Fist stances be made rotationally significant (especially without easily creating a new fixed rotation as RoF will)? By giving each some sort of movement and long-term damage benefits (e.g. Earth greatly reduced knockback and reduces status effect duration and/or potency caused in addition to making GL fade more slowly--if it were changed to a more granular system; Wind increasing attack and ability refresh speeds in addition to movement speed, and maybe even generating additional damage on the next attack based on movement speed (stacking with Sprint), which now ramps up with downtime; and Fire buffing something else atop damage)?
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Edit: Sorry for my lateness in getting back to everyone. I have read through everything, but I'm just not sure how much reflection I can offer by which to continue the conversation.

Oh, one thing I absolutely have to mention real quick though:

@lyndwyrm

I love your Elemental Gauge idea. I had also pondered the idea of combining the Fists, Chakra, and GL concept to some degree but I'd worried over how exactly to do that. In the end I've run my spitball solution ideas using a general idea for granular Chakra (mana converts to Chakra with any effective output action, be that damage dealing, buffing others, healing, or mitigating) and then diversifying Fist interactions both with Chakra as a whole, ability variance, and some new dynamic abilities, but I'm definitely reconsidering that older idea now; it just seems to tie in GL far more neatly.

I'd like to see your own take on the "aura pulse" idea if you've toyed around with it a bit further since your second post. So far for me it's just been tied into the idea of generating Light and Dark Chakra within oneself, allies, and enemies, and then being able to either (essentially) explode, reabsorb, or disperse these Chakra over the area of the effect, moving inward or outward from the Monk. I'd love to hear what you plan to do with the variance to how Chakra is consumed based on stance. (At present, I'm just using ally/enemy-embedded Chakra as centers for certain Fists effects, such as being able to use Riddle of Wind or some manner of new Wind-stance Release skill to launch a flurry of Shoulder Tackles from every light-enfused ally towards a given target, or sort of "shadow/flash step" behind a enemy of the opposite Chakra as self during Fists of Wind. Gimmicky shit like that shouldn't add any bloat (just replacing the dynamic skill for Wind if possible when otherwise out of range), and amounts merely to added damage or mobility, but it a properly showy but Monk-ish fashion.)

@Blacktestament

Even when technically viable on paper, people don't seem to be attracted to during-uptime use of Tornado Kick unless it's essentially so powerful as to be used on cooldown. In other words, I guess the situational aspect isn't panning out? At the same time though several others I've heard over the other Monk threads have mentioned that they don't want to see skills that would devalue Perfect Balance, especially if more narrowly tied to mechanics (e.g. only focused on giving GL stacks, rather than counter-rotations, DoT spreads, AoE spam potential, etc.). Would it be less worthwhile to simply reduce Perfect Balance to a 90 second CD than add this new kick?

Alternatively, I wonder if it might be interesting to do something more with the idea of Tornado Kick? Let's just take the two titles thus far: Tornado, Shatter... maybe a third could be something like Daybreak or Dawn or Rising Sun (nope, WoW took that) Kick. Could we maybe do something to integrate the Fists there in a way that could give you varying situational to rotational usage of an attractive ability (or set thereof with a shared resource cost)?

EDIT 2:
Thanks for the movement speed data, lyndwyrm! I guess I'd been working off the assumption of Beta tooltips and hearsay for so long my senses had gotten out of whack. I always figured the movement speed buff was faster than that.