An idea to make monk stances more useful

[wereotter]

So I was playing last night and it really struck me just how powerful monk auto attacks are. I knew this before, but it never really sunk in entirely. I also had the realization that perhaps tackle mastery was introduced as a result of the community stating that we wanted a use for the different stances. After some thinking I came up with this concept as a way to adjust the job to make all three stances more viable.

First off, potencies on Off Global Cooldowns will need to be adjusted as follows, and I'll explain why below.

Steel Peak: Potency increased from 150 to 160
Howling Fist: Potency increased from 210 to 220
Elixir Field: Potency increased from 220 to 230
Forbidden Chakra: Potency increased from 250 to 265

Now the adjustments to fists stances:
Firsts of Fire: Increases damage dealt by weapon skills by 2%, further increases damage dealt by weapon skills by an additional 1% for each stack of greased lightning.

This skill is a slight nerf to make maintaining greased lightning more valuable, and the adjustments to the off global cool downs are to reflect the fact that they no longer gain the benefit from fists of fire. They all just have an approximately 5% increase in base potency.

Fists of Wind: Decreases auto attack delay by 5% and increases auto attack potency by 4%, further increases auto attack potency by 2% for each stack of greased lightning.

The actual base numbers may need to be adjusted to make this workable, but the idea here is that you have one stance to increase raw potency of weapon skills, and one stance to increase auto attacks. If implemented correctly, you'd and up going back and forth between the two stances throughout an encounter, using fists of fire during riddle of fire for raw damage output, but spending more time in fists of wind, while maybe weaving a stance change to fists of fire to apply demolish before going back to fists of wind.

Fists of Earth I would think could be left as is. Even though it's a niche skill, having the ability to mitigate damage you would take can be useful.

[Fhyrr]

I somewhat disagree with these changes but I understand and definitly merit the intention and the way you intend to implement it. There is a thread started recently offering a couple of very nice ideas that promote alternating between Fist Stances through their Riddle counterpart - which imo is what they need to invest in if they want us to use different stances --- Riddle effects and duration, and which situations they SIGNIFICANTLY apply in.

While an interesting reshuffling of numbers, it would still force us to predominantly use one or the other, depending on Riddle of Fire being up, or the raw mathmatics of their passive bonuses making one superior to the other. Moreso, there is some micro management between two stances just for a DoT, which can get clunky unfortunatly (mind you, I'd be eager to test these out)

But then again, it is the same concept of Fist stance swapping as other threads try to build upon; so definitly a more well thought situation than what we have at this moment. It surely makes the actual Fist Stances more interesting, but at this point I believe the true 'fix' to the situation is in the actual Riddles - though changes in both would be very interesting!

[wereotter]

I saw that one pop up after I had posted this, which is good that many people are looking for solutions to the problem of Fists of Wind being absolutely useless. The speed "buff" is barely noticeable and is slower than peloton, sprint, and even a ninja's base speed increase.

I, for my part, don't think that a riddle of wind is the right solution as it just adds even more buttons to the job, something we don't really need until they remove actually useless skills (One Ilm Punch, I'm looking directly at you) but wouldn't be opposed to that kind of solution as well. Mostly I just want more of a reason to use a stance other than Fists of Fire. As is it feels like that's just a "did I apply my stance" checkbox, much like putting on a poison as a ninja was up to this expansion.

[Kabooa]

I think instead the 'Fist' stances should be incorporated as weaponskills that utilize MP. Monk has some points where Demolish can clip / drop and having a singular out-of-stance weaponskill would be useful here, without it being a DoT effect. Adding in the MP cost allows them to be impactful without risking them being spammed.

To spitball some examples -

Fist of Fire
25% of Monk's MP
Effect: Strike the enemy for X potency. For the next 12 seconds, Couerl Stance attacks also generate 1 Chakra.

Fist of Wind
25% of Monk's MP
Effect: Strike enemy for X potency. Grants Greased Lightning. For the next 12 seconds, Greased Lightning duration does not decrease.

Fist of Earth
25% of Monk's MP
Effect: Strike enemy for X potency. For the next 12 seconds, your weaponskills deal damage in a small area around you.