Quote Originally Posted by Potta View Post
I'll put it another way. Imagine that tomorrow, in a hotfix, Turbine gave monks a new enhancement line. You could spend 9AP in it for +1hit and +1damage. Would you do it? No. Of course you wouldn't. It's a terrible investment. +1hit/damage is nice, but you can get a lot better for 9AP. That is however exactly what a Fire stance monk is doing by investing AP in his stance. What is he to do then? Use fire stance but not put AP into it? He could, but then the tradeoff for -2 Wisdom is looking a lot more lobsided if you aren't even getting a +4 stat boost out of it.

The smart thing to do would be to realise that Air is the best choice. When he needs Ki, he can swap into Fire stance for several seconds, fill himself up and switch back again. Ki does not decay that quickly. The +1 in GMoF allows me to go over 180 without it even starting to decay. If I find myself low now, I can also top up with Inner Focus on a fairly low cooldown. And failing all of that, I can decide, I'm a bit low on Ki, I can just not use abilities on this next mob. That can happen relatively often by the way, when you have so many mobs immune to your main ki abilities. Are you supposed to QP or Stun or ToD Constructs or Undead? Nope. They're punching bags to generate Ki. Furthermore, Air is the second best stance to generate Ki. I get the feeling when listening to Fire stance users that they have this impression of being in Air stance as being constantly Ki starved. It's not like that at all. It can be from time to time, but intelligent play and a little rationing goes a long way.

Water stance isn't as big of a mistake, but it still is one. ToD does similar damage in air stance after you factor in Doublestrikes. Stunning Fist DCs are so high now that +2 from water means almost nothing. QP DC is the only real benefit, and in that case you're looking at a 7% improvement compared to Air. For significantly less DPS. Not a worthwhile trade.
You say a 7% increase in DPS isn't worth it, but you laud the 10% extra double-strike? It really doesn't seem that much more to me. I used to use Air all the time, actually, but my toon isn't really built for raw DPS; her damage comes from insta-killing and stunning anything that moves. It works well for my playstyle.