Monk Needs a Complete Rework

[SpeckledBurd]

Any real rework of Monk ought to just ditch the elemental fists entirely instead of trying to pretend they are relevant to the identity of the job for one more year. They have been, and still are (even in reworks proposed in the thread) absolute trash buttons that have existed in perpetuity while other buttons have been removed or replaced with crappier OGCDs that either fail to properly replace what was lost, or are simply a fancier animation to do more or less the same basic thing but worse (I'm looking at YOU, Enlightenment. Give back Howling Fist and never again give us another button reliant on inconsistent resource generation, there isn't another job in the game, period, that has to deal with that sort of nonsense to this degree.)

If this were a completely different style of game with a completely different style of combat, I would find the idea of switching fist stances for varying benefits intriguing. But as things stand, with the way encounters are designed and carefully choreographed, leaving the Fists in there is the button bloat the developers claim they were worried about and claimed they were dealing with when they stripped the job of its OGCDs from HW to SB, and now to ShB.

Agreed. Some people think that there's potential in the Fist Stances to be... something, and maybe there is. But at this point after three expansions where they have been unable to fix the very fundamental yet very basic problem of there being one Fist Stance you actually want to use 99.9% of the time and the other two having no compelling reason to use them outside of extreme edge cases, I frankly could care less. Whatever potential is in the Fist Stance's doesn't matter if its never actualized, and there are other aspects of Monk's kit that have potential that could be brought out in a trait or by changing the action's effect such as positionals or forms. The Fist Stances are preventing that by existing because they continue to receive Traits that do basically nothing.