What I would like to see in future monk!

[wereotter]

Just locking specific moves behind the fist stances sounds like keeping them around as unnecessary bloat IMO, especially if it's going to lock skills from a new subsystem like Blitzes (I'm assuming there'd be some button input requirement there). Further it would just be annoying if they don't fundamentally change from what they are now and we had to slow down from GL4 to go into fire stance, or lose 10% damage and speed to go into earth stance.

Making a single stance the AOE stance also just strikes me as trying to keep the fist stances around just to keep them. Monk has an AOE loop independent of the stances already, there's no reason to tie Monk AOE unless you're only goal is to keep the Fist Stances for the sake of keeping them.

The Fist Stances should go, there's no point in keeping them around because they might have potential if that potential is never realized. I'll even go so far to say that the fist stances actively detract from the job's development at this point by continuing to get traits that do nothing, when traits could easily be added to other aspects of the job that also have potential.

You're assuming that they keep everything the same and only implement additions of this system that is so roughly conceptualized by me, that it's not even clear how they would add it. So if the job gets a total revamp, then there's no reason to assume that GL4 is still tied to fists of wind, especially if your OGCD moves are dictated by your fist stance. If this type of system is added as a button input (which is also like the system another person suggested in copying Zell's limit break) then either GL has to go, or its timer could to be frozen when you go into entering your combo.

People want fist stances to mean something, and there's only really a couple ways you can do this. You can make the different stances do different things that are viable in different situations, which is how they approached the Ifrit/Garuda situation on summoner, or you can force the monk to cycle through their stances akin to bard songs. The latter really does just have stances maintained for the sake of keeping them while the former does at least give some rationalization of keeping them.

If there are better uses or things that the stances can do, I'm all in favor of it. But I do think that there needs to be something to make them viable rather than just deleting them entirely.