Quote Originally Posted by Kalise View Post
Hopefully.
* Needing to go into Fists of Wind to access Riddle of Wind in order to get a Shoulder Tackle that generates a Greased Lightning. Why?

* Riddle of Fire reducing attack speed. Why?

* Tornado Kick eating Greased Lightning (Which is both Attack Speed and Damage). Why?

* Excruciatingly short durations on things like Greased Lightning, Twin Snakes and Dragon Kick that punish downtime heavily with no way to alleviate that. Why?

* Opo-Opo Stance not being baseline so you can't get the combo bonus on your first strike without using Form Shift. Why?

* Form Shift being a GCD action. Why?

* Riddle of Earth?!?!?
Taking Point by Point

1. I agree this is dumb, riddle of wind was changed to give greased lightning otherwise it was useless.
2. Its so you can weave more to maximise burst windows. With the way buff stacking works, having riddle of fire with other party buffs up makes you hit like an absolute truck, which imo is well worth the slowdown, especially when you weave more in that window thanks to brotherhood and cd's lining up
3. Tornado Kick was initially designed as a way to make down time not as punished. I.E. You tornado kick when you know your stacks are doomed and you get a neat dps gain out of it. Since its release, perfect balances' CD was reduced and riddle of wind now exists, so that in combination with aformentioned lining up of burst windows makes a monster DPS gain for monk.
4. The short durations on the buffs just encourage high uptime, which melees should be doing anyway, and in times you know you're going to lose the timers, youve got tornado kick
5. Dunno, I can't think of a reason not to just let you throw up dragon kick immediatly
6. Formshift as a gcd makes sense, as you'll only use it when things are untargetable anyway, and having it as an OGCD would introduce more complexity into the monk rotation, i.e skipping certain bits of the combo chain to recover stacks quicker.
7. Riddle of earth is great, boss becomes untargetable but theres still damage going out, pop riddle of earth and refresh your greased lightning. Loads of times when you can use it, biggest one that comes to me atm is o12s when the bosses split, you can use riddle of earth on the stack marker to maintain your stacks until they become targetable again.

The idea is monk has its own ways of dealing with downtime that they can optimise to minimise loss, using form shift and riddle of earth to make stacks stay longer and when thats set up meditate to gain more dps, its kit actually works together with itself very well.