First off, I'm exhausted and kind of sick, so I apologize if any typos in here will make my words unclear. Chances are I've even forgot a "not" or added one too many...

(All untagged quotes are to Kalise, and from the same post.)

Quote Originally Posted by Kalise View Post
You can say "Oh but they're just the foundation for X, Y and Z" but how am I supposed to know what X, Y and Z could be if all you've given is a rehash of current stances just with more words and no more actual meaning.
If you're going to insist that I accept your purposely reducing or removing mechanics is necessary for future mechanics (essentially, that an X that is known and could be easily reworked to be highly lucrative as a base for A, B, and C must be removed to make room for an unknown Y), shouldn't you at least keep the same open mind towards those you're talking with?

There's no inherent mechanic there that I want to exploit.
Except, there is. And unless you didn't mean "imply" just there, I not only implied it, but I gave express examples.

And none of these fine details I've insisted on have been without purpose or larger vision. This all goes back to how Mahrze and I were discussing how Monk would be more interesting if it had burst periods owed to decisions it makes between main CDs, more alike to a brawler who can own mid-fights rather than just following the peak and lulls gameplay we see from so many jobs.

You talk about an "Ignite" mechanic, but how will that function? Do you mean like a literal copy/paste of WoW's Fire Mage Ignite mechanic? Where every skill can build up a DoT that stacks and then you can use Conflag to get huge burst damage based on that DoT? (Or if you want to go old school, no Conflag, just a DoT from crits, no stacking and only the highest damage one sticks I.e. Pyroblast)
Given that until it could do that there was nothing separating Ignite from any other DoT, thus giving me no reason to call it "Ignite" instead of just "a DoT", and any reference made to Ignite since it became its own thing has been to exactly that interaction, yes, I meant that interaction. I used that particular term because you had likewise used that particular term on threads I frequented in the past. Since at this point I was responding only to you and Mahrze, I used a term you had used previously for the sake of convenience.

YOU were implying that stance swapping en masse would be a possibility.
This, on the other hand, has no set contextual meaning. Correct me if I'm misinterpreting, but I'm going to assume that you mean that all stances would 'significant' (metric pending) see use over a given a fight. If so, yes, and I continue to stand by that. The other meaning that I would guess is possible -- that one could make the stance-decision en masse, i.e. to choose one stance for an entirity of a fight, would only be possible up to a certain performance level, nearish to peak if choosing between just Fire or just Wind in a fight that has little damage to absorb usefully, but a fair a bit worse if sticking to Earth full time in a fight that likewise has little damage to absorb usefully.

YOU implied that "making them only a stick shift for speeds will end up with a Cataclysm-era Warrior debacle (whereby every skill was just macro-bound to a stance-change)"
I did not only imply, it; I expressly stated it. And I stand by that statement.

YOU'RE the one who was trying to use "Oh but people will be swapping stances all the time" as a basis for an argument.
I said with the direction I intended, people would have reason to change stances both as part of macrorotation and in-fight events (e.g. raid damage, wanting to rush a Shoulder Tackle charge, etc.), with more frequent swaps at the highest levels of play but not such that they're required to get near enough peak performance outside of those highest levels.
You then equated this to the current situation, which is far, far more restricted that what I've suggested because:
  1. FoF's only value is bound to a Couerl reapplication via GL4 rather than having inherent value outside of merely movement speed,
  2. There is no speed at which double-weaving becomes possible again for the majority of Monk players now that RoF's slowdown has been trimmed, thus removing the room to swap to a situational stance and back, which largely denies Monks the ability to stance-swap in the periods that could most make use of stance-swapping,
  3. there is a larger difference than I've suggested between dominant stances outside of their situations for use, thus cutting a clear difference between the dominant and situational stance rather than allowing for a second stance to be close enough,
  4. there is no lasting impact of any stance, especially given the inability to replace the dominant stance in any given GCD outside of its niche, nor any synergy between stances, thus limiting their ability to play into macrorotation.
Between these factors, the two situations become very different. You have conflated two things that, in the weight of something as fine as "optimal play" (a perspective had insisted on at the time) are day and night.

Now all of a sudden you're now actually considering the reality of the situation that would alleviate that concern, after being presented with the fact that a SkS + Damage shift stance dance is already available in the game and is not utilized, due to the fact that simply having stances that change SkS/Damage doesn't mean that they're necessarily able to be swapped that freely when optimizing.
Damage multiplicity and limited opportunity during periods of oGCD burst would not alleviate the concern of Cata-style stance-dancing if stanced no longer affected oGCDs, since the limitations from the current context would then be absent in your suggested system, with but one equally negative exception.

FoF at present requires oGCDs to pay off its attack speed cost. It therefore has a necessary resource conflict with the exact same things that would make it viable. The more oGCDs to be used over its (extremely restricted) period of available use, thus giving it any bonus, the less time it has to swap to FoF and then back to FoW without wasting more potency over time from its attack speed lost between Couerl skills than it gains in damage multiplicity. Over the periods in which FoF is usable, you already have nearly an oGCD for every GCD. Unless your version of stance-dancing comes with enough added APM that every GCD's ability gap is a valuable resource that puts the stance-changes at conflict in every GCD, not just once every 30, 60, 90, or 120 seconds when it aligns with raid buffs and Demolish, the contexts differ drastically. You cannot conflate the two.

It would work somewhat during, say, a TA, if TA was still a powerful 10 second effect, because that would be short enough to face the same resource conflicts. Remember that the current window for stance-dancing, regardless of CDs, is under 8 seconds long, and it needs the conflicts that short window caused to not be "forced". This same need for resource conflict in order not to oblige constant stance-dancing would apply even if FoF's effect were not to apply to oGCDs at all (and thus only really buff Leaden Fist, True Strike, and Demolish). In fact, having removed any stance effects from oGCDs, the GCDs for which the gaps are already filled by oGCDs would be the only ones in which you are not forced to stance-dance. Sadly, though, unless swapping from a low enough speed to double-weave to a higher-speed one, you literally could not stance-swap without badly clipping. It'd be a "forced" decision, and yet also from which you are barred from whenever an oGCD is present. Consider -- though I imagine you'd change the RNG nature regardless to make it a non-issue, at present -- that would mean Chakra could cap just before Demolish, forcing you to be able to swap to FoF in time without wasting a potential Chakra by not using TFC immediately. I'm not sure there'd be anything worse than that -- being "forced" to swap multiple times per rotation only to be unable to do that if literally anything comes up in the way.

I did not say what I did because of a lack of forethought. I'm not refusing your suggestion just because it differs from my own. Each of the things you've suggested to me, I myself have thought of at some point between ARR and HW, liked them, considered what I could do with them, realized "Oh wait, I missed some crucial again", went back to the drawing board, and started again. What I arrived at is simply many iterations later than those same initial thoughts. There will probably some small error with my latest iteration on improving stances, too, but it at least going to be much smaller than that of each iteration before it, such as when I considered solely weaponskill-affecting stances and all the ways I could restrict that without it feeling gimmicky or went back to balancing around oGCDs but still longed for more impact on macrorotation and better building block for an identity for each stance. (Heck, I spent far longer than I'd like to admit considering how I could limit the the weaponskills-only variant of swaps without jacking up MNK's APM only to realize I didn't need to if I just made the effects of each stance have more lingering and potentially synergetic effects.)

So, let me explain again. You can balance around the inclusion of oGCDs and get a macrorotationally "forced" choiced (albeit likely of little gap) based around your oGCDs, or you can balance around GCDs alone and (unless you give Monk about 45% more APM to introduce sufficient resource conflict) get far more intrusively forced choices because of how potency-per-GCD varies. I use quotes around "forced" because these will likely, again, be a concern only at the highest levels of play.

The first can be actually be quite good. (My point before was only that it'd be just as "forced" as, or technically, slightly more actually than, what I had brought up earlier.)

Stance-swaps to a low-speed-high-damage stance balanced around oGCD usage would be "obligatory" with your oGCDs and with raid buffs so long as they're not too out of sync with your rotation. That sync issue could potentially make earlier swaps viable to a very limited degree, but would more likely just change whether you clip or delay Demolish and lead the raid buff with a clipped Twin Snakes or a double-True, depending on your dominant stance, which would still be a thing. As always, it'd just be a matter of which fits stance in more relative potency. If you run enough SkS to fit a hit Twin Snakes just before 15s raid buffs to immediately Demolish and then end on yet another (clipped) Demolish during those buffs (where you have no better no-clip option for it), you'd roll full speed unless you could generate another TFC. Similarly, if PB were changed to end in multi-form, high-speed-low-damage could see real use for getting out an extra DK or LF and at enough SkS one would likely change to FoF with the final PB GCD (on a LF). There's a decent bit of meat here; it needs some retuning, perhaps for Wind to grant its value in ways other than a tacked on GL that'd require a Couerl skill for any effective swap, and for Earth not to be utter crap, but otherwise it's quite functional, if a tad dull in itself.

Compare that to the weaponskill-effects-only version we've more recently discussed. I just mentioned its issues so I won't go over them again, but suffice to say it's not ideal either -- in fact, much less so than balancing around oGCDs as well. Perhaps there is still a way to save them, but I have not yet thought of it, or at least I know of no way without using limitations that could come off as a bit convoluted and/or arbitrary.

A more ideal version, by contrast, would require synergies between the effects of the stances, not just varying values per GCD or ability gap. A more ideal version would set a theme for each stance beyond just haste vs. damage, especially between Wind and Fire. Those themes could then play into further skills like stance-dependent direct-damage, mixed-utility-damage, or buff-period abilities. And, finally, a more ideal version wouldn't want to remove the contexts of a particular fight from the equation. That's why I went with, say, the Ignite mechanic, which can build waves of speed a la Beta-hype-version-TFC through increased passive resource growth (off the relative potency generated by that ramping DoT damage) or build towards a nuke to capitalize on burst phases -- two distinct uses that add to and work alongside Monk's existing macrorotation instead of leaving it solely driven by EF, RoF, and PB -- and could source some interesting skill interactions later. That's also why I considered the ability to rush CDs important to Wind and why I made Earth potentially so strong, albeit not quite as a dominant or mainstay stance (unless one would otherwise miss all their positionals outside of Bootshine).

One doesn't need to ask for preposterous dreams to be aiming for a higher bar.
When you stop conflating vastly different circumstances, I'll trust you a fair bit more on what is and what is not preposterous.

For now, though, you've gone out of your way to make simple suggestions far more complicated than they need be and insisted on contextual details while being unwilling to give any of your own and ignoring most of those given to you (yes, I screwed up once in kind). You also have not remotely applied the same rigor you expect from others to your suggestions that you've used to slight those of others. However much our stances may differ in general, with me being less willing to move the bar further and further to what I consider bad design just because it's an ongoing trend and you being more willing to accept and work around that, what you've written to me here seems far more "reductive" than it does "realistic".

I'm frankly a bit tired of talking about stances at this point and, if only try something else as to get us outside this muck, would prefer to talk about things outside the fundamentals and work backwards from those endgoals or further points of interest, but if you want to have an honest conversation about what likely will or will not work in those fundamentals, and why, I'm very much cool with that. We've had heated arguments before, though the previous one (in regards to... Stagger, systems iirc(?) ended peaceably enough, I believe), but I've always respected your intelligence in these things. I've just been a bit angered that you've continually conflated things that have drastically different contexts or have insisted that I implied things that are directly in contrast with what I've expressly stated and have continually stood behind. I apologize for where I've, in anger, doubtless done the same to you and therefore caused your anger in return.