Thoughts on how to clean up Monk a bit

[SpeckledBurd]

Frankly, cleaning up Monk in 4.0 is a bit of a chore because of how completely and totally the devs failed to actually clean up the job with the action rework. We still have seven actions on our hotbar that are hyper situational or actually useless. So before we even get into the new items in Monk's kit, let's actually fix some of the old ones.

The Fist Stances
Frankly, these pretty much make up the core of Monk's terrible design decisions in Stormblood, they based 2/3's of Monk's new actions and one of our two traits on a series of stances that could basically be folded into a trait for 5% extra damage to actions and it would change nothing about how the job plays. You always want to be in Fists of Fire, as a DPS, that's just a fact. The only thing Stormblood did to change them was to remove the one reason you had to leave Fists of Fire by changing weakness. I would propose removing Fists of Wind and Fists of Earth and replacing them with Touch of Death (bring it back) and some kind of sub 20% health execution move (Like Suplex).

Arm of the Destroyer
Unreliable as a silence and too TP expensive for how much damage it actually does, even with Monk's huge number of stacking buffs. Boost its potency to 70 though and it's basically as worthwhile an AOE to use as Samurai's first AOE combo move or Ninja's Death Blossom.

One Ilm Punch
Still useless, the nondiminishing stun sounds interesting on paper, but with stuns being taken off most DPS cooldowns when will you ever need this? And if you actually will need this, how will you use it? The stun has the same issue Arm of the Destroyer has of being Form Locked, meaning you can only use it 33% of the time rather than whenever you actually need it. The solution? Remove it. There's no point to it, it's exactly as useless now as it was in ARR and Heavensward. Replace it with a ranged GCD like Piercing Talon, Throwing Dagger, or Enpi.

Purification
Monk now has incredible TP sustain, even without Riddle of Fire's slowdown we come out even in single target. So do we really need a second TP regen? Not really. I'd scrap this and give us an AOE chakra attack with moderate damage (180-200 seems fair for this), rather than clinging to it.

Perfect Balance
Blood of the Dragon is on a 30 second cooldown. Enochian is on a 30 second cooldown. These are both persistent buffs that are as critical to the class that they're on as Greased Lightning is to Monk? So why is the ability that grants Monk GREASED LIGHTNING 3 STILL ON A 180 SECOND COOLDOWN? I understand that Monk is able to restore it's stacks by just attacking, but at this point there's just no excuse. We still get fucked by phase changes because Riddle of Earth is terrible for maintaining stacks outside of very niche circumstances. Reduce this to a 60 second cooldown, it's not hard. This also makes Tornado Kick slightly more usable overall outside of times when the boss jumps.

With these changes, Monk should now have a mostly functional kit to build off of.

Stormblood Actions and Traits

Deep Meditation
I largely don't have an issue with this Trait. The only change I would make would be to have it proc based off of specific moves in our Rotation (True Strike or Bootshine perhaps). This keeps Monk's DPS consistent rather than being subject to the whim of RNG.

Riddle of Fire
With Forms scrapped, there's no need to build on them with the new actions, so we don't even have to call this Riddle of Fire any longer. I'm also very much not a fan of the slowdown from Riddle of Fire, I think it goes against the foundation of the Job to eliminate our haste. Instead, I would propose making us go faster without actually reducing our GCD further by changing this to Hundred Fists, which would reduce the damage of outgoing Weaponskiills, Auto Attacks, and oGCDs by 40% but hits each of them twice for an actual gain of 20%. I'm aware that this interacts strangely with dots because of how snap-shotting works, so it could also just be a haste like what Hamon used during the level 70 Monk quest.

Riddle of Earth

I'm not going to split hairs about it, this action is terrible. As a DPS there's really no point for a Monk to need a damage reduction, getting hit to refresh Greased Lightning is stupid fix to the problem of Monk hitting phase changes and it makes Tornado Kick inherently more situational in the few instances it might end up working. It can still be defensive in nature, I don't really have any problem with Monk being a defense oriented DPS frankly. Potentially it could be a Chakra spending action that gives all party members in the immediate area a shield worth 10% of Monk's HP or something similar.

Tackle Mastery
Again, terrible. Building on the Fist Stances in Stormblood was a terrible idea. I'd change this to something that actually emphasizes parts of Monk that sees use or to make something that doesn't see use marginally more usable. For example, Tornado Kick Mastery or Positional Mastery. Tornado Kick Mastery could just reduce the amount of Greased Lightning used by Tornado Kick to a single stack, allowing it to be used before snap punch for a small gain and Positional Mastery could give monk a minor stacking buff for every hit positional to minorly expand upon the class.

Brotherhood
I really like this concept, but it has the issue of making Monk very party composition reliant for both it's party synergy and it's own personal DPS. I'd just make it a general outgoing damage buff instead of Physical Damage exclusive and allow chakra generation to proc from spells. The proc chance for chakra generation can be reduced to 15-20% to counterbalance the number that would produce.