Controversioal Changes to Monk

[Sooru]

If we kept the stances in? Then merge fists into riddles.

Fists of Fire ---> Riddle of Fire (+5% damage + 20% damage = Broken...but awesome!)
Fists of Earth ---> Riddle of Earth (-10% damage taken + Positionals negated = keep combo and avoid damage)
Fists of Wind ----> Riddle of Wind (new skill) (+15% run speed + %20 evasion = need to get somewhere fast and avoid damage if possible)

Riddles now extend the bonuses to the entire party/raid. Riddles can no longer be stacked.

You effectively merge the stances into riddles and give more emphasis to riddle swapping to buff the party, kind of how strong Trick attack is and also the importance of timing your riddles.

Would this break the game...yup.

Would it be fun....YEP.

Will they do this....NOPE!

I agree with the merging of the fists into Riddles, but making them raid wide? No thanks, Monk would just become borderline mandatory on every high difficulty raid because of having access to so many party/raid wide buffs (Mantra 10% increase to healing actions, Brotherhood 5% damage increase and now 3 more?). Not only is Monk one of the better performing DPS jobs but with these changes it would also become one of the best supportive jobs available. And then they'd have to either make the raids more difficult which would only feed into the problem or nerf/rework Monk which would defeat the entire point of the changes in the first place.

I can imagine them doing a bard-ish thing for the fists.
Like, Fists of Fire increase your crit rate for the next 20s, earth makes it so that you charge a chakra when doing a positional correctly during the next 20s, wind increase your skill speed and run speed for 20s.
Not sure it would work well, but I can see them going that way, and push further into the proc-based design of chakra, and making MNK the proc-based melee.

While this would increase the speed of Chakra weaving and by default the speed of the job, which on the surface seems like the right direction, as long as the Chakra gauge is as shallow as it is currently (get 5 chakra, use oGCD damage skill gated behind chakra, repeat), it will not do anything other than to pump more damage into the job. I think the concept is a neat idea but it definitely needs more fleshing out.