You're all missing one big important change with monk

[Bhearil]

The fist stances were a heritage from 1.0 where each one gave that element to your atacks making monks versatile cycling around the enemies elemental's weaknesses. When 2.0 arrived and elemental damage was virtually removed, fist stances became mere button bloat because the times you would be using anything other than Fire one were extremely niche and small. They eventually tried to fix it with no sucess (4th greased on wind stance as well as the horrendous elemental shoulder tackles system that opened a different can of worms) due to the game favoring damage over anything else as long as you dont die soin the end you stayed on the strongest one and then on EW they finally removed those for good

Removing bloat is not bad, problem is they dont give anything later, but fist stances since 2.0 were neither fun nor engaging but a permanent toogle you had always on barring some extremely niche cases where it was useful to swap to another from the damage one (Fire/Wind depending on the version),

As it was mentioned before there is a reason why the Fist stances are barely mentioned after they were removed

[SpeckledBurd]

As I've said before, for all that the Fist Stances might have had potential to be an interesting part of Monk's kit, that potential is meaningless if it was never actually implemented. In fact, The Fist Stances actually detracted from Monk's development by repeatedly receiving traits that functionally did nothing, instead of those traits being implemented in other parts of Monk's kit that also had potential.

[LeeAter]

Lucky for you, I did see your deleted comment, so it is intriguing why you have decided to delete it and not allow commentary on it? Though, switching to FoE to mitigate damage should be the absolute last resort, you would be better off using Second Wind/Bloodbath and staying in FoF. There was no issue with using RoE either, it had such a short cooldown and you didn't need that many positional ignoring stacks either. If its a dungeon fight where your tank and healer decided to have a nap, you would be better off killing the boss quicker, RoE again reduces damage and still allows you to keep full damage, which also benefits Bloodbath and Second Wind. You aren't going to be surviving any significant amount of time without a healer, FOE or not.

However, you have failed to address the core issue. How often did you actually use them? As I stated, the vast majority of Monks stayed in FoF 99% of the time, making it essentially a permanent damage buff. It was a filler action. If you had all 3 Fists and none of them provided a damage benefit, then you wouldn't see this issue. I have said in the past that, instead of removing them completely, you can have them as lesser Riddles, eg. Fists of Fire at level 40, gives a 5% damage increase for 20 seconds on a 60 second cooldown, then a trait at 68 that changes it to Riddle of Fire which increases the damage up to 15% and use similar concepts for the others.

At the end of the day, a buff that you do not have to manage which is uninteresting. The other fists never done anything of interest except Fists of Wind have the Tornado Kick rotation at the end of SB and being in FoW at the start of ShB, purely because it gave access to GL4. By keeping them, it just adds unused actions that could be used elsewhere.

I deleted the comment because I messed up and forgot to put your post as a quote on it, and you're Right about most people using fist of fire for 99% of the time, but it was a nice to be able to be a half tank if the tank went down up until the healer got them back up and healed again. I probably could have worded my post better to not sound like a jackassnand I apologize for that, I'm just not a big fan of getting rid of the uniqueness of each class which the game devs seem to be slowly doing.

[LeeAter]

A change I would have made instead of what they did would make each fist stance Abit different such as giving each skill a special effect depending on which stance you were in kinda like what Astro use to be. But it seems my way of thinking is completely opposite to what a majority of people want

[Awarewolf]

Shoulda kept Fist of Wind. How am I supposed to cruise around cities now. >_<

Yeah that’s all I miss. We will have to switch jobs in town lol.

Fist of Wind, Ninja passive: +10% run speed
Pelaton: +20% run speed
Sprint, Scholars new run speed buff: +30%.

Wait a second, didn’t they say something about Sprint lasting a minute in towns now?

[Powercow]

Wait a second, didn’t they say something about Sprint lasting a minute in towns now?

There's a free company buff thing (it replaced the one that reduced the duration of the Weakened debuff).

[IchiExorz]

I think the fist stances were a nice flavour to the class but mostly useless in combat.
Having a movement speed buff was nice to have but near useless in combat.
The Fists of Earth ability was nice during downtime to mitigate some damage.

It's not that i'm necessarily sad to see them go for the sake of button bloat but part of me wishes more classes had very niche flavour skills that are pointless in combat at worst and very situational at best.

[Sorzai]

I think the fist stances were a nice flavour to the class but mostly useless in combat.
Having a movement speed buff was nice to have but near useless in combat.
The Fists of Earth ability was nice during downtime to mitigate some damage.

It's not that i'm necessarily sad to see them go for the sake of button bloat but part of me wishes more classes had very niche flavour skills that are pointless in combat at worst and very situational at best.

They don't have to be so useful in combat, if the reason they removed it is because of button bloat, that's a load of bs because i find that these stances hold more meaning than having SSS or Anatman.
Having the different stances made the class fun, plus it made gives the feeling like one is more in control of their character. I mean Stance change to Fist of Earth + Riddle of Earth = got amazing damage mitigation which is SUPER satisfying. i'd honestly take Fist stances back than having bs like Riddle of Wind, Celestial Revolution? Steel Peak(Wtf? that's just Shoulder Tackle)?

[Mikey_R]

Steel Peak(Wtf? that's just Shoulder Tackle)?

I just checked, it is the old Steel Peak animation. Shoulder Tackle you rushed in and punched. Yes, it is backwards, yes, it was always something that people wanted changed as it seemed the animations were the wrong way round.

As for Fists, to add to that discussion. If you want to have the Fists back, you need to make it so that they do not provide any damage increase, otherwise, that will be the fist that will be used.

[IruruCece]

They don't have to be so useful in combat, if the reason they removed it is because of button bloat, that's a load of bs because i find that these stances hold more meaning than having SSS or Anatman.
Having the different stances made the class fun, plus it made gives the feeling like one is more in control of their character. I mean Stance change to Fist of Earth + Riddle of Earth = got amazing damage mitigation which is SUPER satisfying. i'd honestly take Fist stances back than having bs like Riddle of Wind, Celestial Revolution? Steel Peak(Wtf? that's just Shoulder Tackle)?

I'm not sure what makes anyone think Fist of the Earth provided "amazing" damage mitigation, ever, so I'm assuming it's a 2.0 thing that has been exaggerated in value over the years. It was never the case for me throughout HW, SB, or ShB. If you were ever in a position where a boss looked at you funny, especially in high-end content, you were getting splatted and FoE wasn't going to save you. Maybe it might have help during dungeons, but dungeons are barely more than linear theme parts that get pulled wall to wall, so again if you were the Monk caught in a group of 6-10 mobs (or heck, even just 2-3 really beefy bigbois) and the tank didn't rip aggro off you right away, you were definitely going to end up as crater meat. Even with self-healing in a large group, you weren't living long or at all at the center of attention.

The reality is that AT BEST the scenario described is an extreme edge case. 99.9999999 percent of the time, you'd sit in Fire non-stop in HW, you'd sit in Fire in SB, and for me it was ShB where we had the impetus to switch Fist stances mid-way through the opener (start in fire until GL3, switch to Wind to push to 4, stay in Wind forever/until boss does a cutscene that forces us to reopen because we lost GL rather than SE doing the needful and at least freezing these types of temporary buffs while the artists flexed a game engine at us).

There was nothing dynamic going on with Fist stances, and people had been complaining about that for a long time, even before I started to play. SE consistently failed to provide any real reason to actively switch between them the vast majority of the time. They were kept in because of design inertia, similar to how Tornado Kick used to strip away GL entirely for the longest time: "It's just how it is."