Lol, bud, I was making more of a joke out of it than anything.

Nerfing any class is not the solution and I'm well aware of that.

That post was semi my fault when me and another ranger got into an arguement over what I said to be can hit that number he took it as always hit that number.  Therefore he posted on the ranger forums to get everyone to laugh at me.

As a Dragon monk currently, to put my thoughts into bullet point form:


In general where the Dragon monk should be conceptually:
-We should be doing a lot more damage than a Harmonious in order to make up for our total loss of extra evasion and utility.
-Our AoEs need to not just be viable, but the best among melee fighters.


The current state of the stances:
Storm stance - Bugged in many ways, with low damage. It's only our default stance by virtue of the other two having no real use.
Dragon stance - Does nothing.
Stone stance - Nobody ever says, "This looks like a job for Stone stance"; because it has no role. The only reason people would switch to it is if they want to inch out every bit of added defense/mitigation they can get, even though stone stance's added mitigation won't make a noticeable impact on their survivability.


Changes needed to specific stances:

Storm Stance
-It should scale better with level.
-It should stack with secrets.
-It should do a lot more damage.
-It should proc the damage on every target you hit with an AoE.
-It shouldn't miss or fail to proc.
-It should provide an additional damage buff that only applies to AoE attacks, which would help increase our superiority as an AoE user compared with the other forms.

Stone stance.
-The AC buff is too low to make a noticeable impact in your ability to survive during most encounters. The impact of this stance is such that nobody says "Hmm, maybe stone stance would be best for this encounter".
-A damage shield should be added on top of the AC buff. The damage shield would absorb a percentage of the mob's attacks and return it back onto them.
It fits conceptually with the monk's main defensive stance being about AC and helping to kill multiple targets faster.
-Thus, the added mitigation provided with the damage shield on top of it helping to kill faster would make storm stance a more interesting and viable stance.
-The combined mitigation of the AC and damage shield should be significantly less than the total evasion gained by the Harmonious evasive stance, and the Harmonious evasive stance should be less than that gained from the Drunken evasive stance (currently Harmonious can gain more evasion than a Drunken for some reason).
With the Harmonious having 16% total evasion from their evasive stance, the Dragon damage shield could absorb 5% of incoming damage (returning it back to the attacker) and still only put the Dragon's total increased mitigation at 10%. That would put it on par with the current Drunken evasive stance of +10%, but we can all agree that is way too low for Drunken form and will have to be increased to at least 20% to be better than what the Harmonious evasive stance has to offer.
-The damage shield could start at 2.5% at level 15, and scale up every 5 levels to eventually be 5% at level 50.

Dragon stance.
-This is our neutral stance, the one that is suppose to offer little benefit but no downsides. As such, I don't think we'll ever see it replaced with something like an AoE enhancing stance (And storm stance could be fixed to serve this role anyway).
-The first possible improvement would be to fix it so it does as it describes; Give us a significant increase in health regeneration, both in combat and out of combat. But that in itself is not something I think will be very useful because we all know the in-combat health regeneration would be so miniscule as to be non-existent.
-But I favor two alternatives for making this stance useful.
1. Make it an enhancement of vitality based in-combat health regeneration and run speed. This would allow for Dragon monks, who max vitality and even get gear that buffs it, to make in-combat health regeneration fast enough that it becomes a viable means of increasing survivability when compared to if they had just dumped those points into constitution for added HP and resistances.
Originally this is what I thought the stance was meant to do, because I envisioned in-combat health regeneration and increased run speed from vitality being more monk-like than simply increasing his HP and resistances.
2. A more simple change would be to have the Dragon stance increase out of combat health and endurance regeneration, in addition to giving a slight run speed increase like 10%. This makes the stance useful as something to be in out of combat, not just for reducing downtime but also for getting to your next target faster.
This would be fitting for the Dragon monk as an offensive force that moves and strikes faster than other monks, because there is less downtime and travel time between fights.

I'm way too apathetic about my monk and Vanguard in general lately to chime in with anything that hasn't been said already. I just saw

"This looks like a job for Stone Stance."

and couldn't help laughing for 30 seconds straight. The thought of someone saying such a thing so eagerly is just hilarious...I can just see them switching to Dragon Stance afterward for downtime with a gleam in their eyes...

The sad thing is, stone stance used to be rather useful on EQ1...sad times...

This is the type of  three completely separate and useful style of stances I would want to see.    It fills each role we'd want to fill and does it in the nature of the drunken monk.  I think the hard numbers maybe a bit off after the avoidance nerf and what Sigil wants to see from static avoidance gains, but all and all they are very good ideas.

Most players envision revamping the stances to where each stance is equally useful, but it's worth noting that the devs clearly follow this pattern when it comes to the three stances of each form:
Offensive stance.
Neutral Stance (Very little benefit, but no downside).
Defensive stance.
And with the exception of Drunken Fist stance, all the Offensive/Defensive stances have a positive and negative associated with them.
So we may be more likely to see changes that stick to this framework.


My thoughts on Zend's ideas:
1. I don't see how a strait up large damage and accuracy increasing stance fits the Drunken concept. It is also something pretty powerful considering the other two form offensive stances have major drawbacks (Storm stance has one built in, but it currently doesn't function).
The current +damage and +hate stance is more fitting conceptually, even if it's not as useful having your aggro generation and defensive stances seperate. But then maybe you were intended to switch between them, and you weren't intended to have it as easy as tanks do (Only tanks have defensive stances with +aggro generation built into it).

2. I like your third stance concept of something that increases defensive target hate, but from a practical standpoint your line up does not include a neutral stance so getting this may not be likely.
An alternative to this stance would be to merge it with Drunken Fist, giving you a stance that gives +15% damage and +25% aggro to your defensive target. This would allow you to use it on either yourself or someone else.

3.  25-30% total evasion gain is the minimum Drunken defensive stance would need to be competitive, but getting any more than that seems very unlikely in light of the global evasion changes.
I also don't believe it's feasible to get such a large bonus without also getting a penalty somewhere. Even tanks don't get to use their defensive stance without some kind of significant penalty. The -10% accuracy should stay in place of aggro generation, the later of which would just be benefit stacked on benefit with no downside at all.

   You have to give this stance a + to aggro some how or it will be remain worthless other then sort of soloing stance.  Whats the point of avoiding 20% attacks or whatever, if the mob ends up on your healer because you miss with your attacks.

   I understand the way the devs are making the stances.  Two with larger bonuses but draw backs, and one neutral, but that does not mean that all three should be viable and have their own purpose.
   
   Drunken Mastery is our neutral stance.  It gives a marginal dps increase with auto attack haste, and a minor avoidance increase.  All this for no side effect.   If you leave this as the base you can tweak the other two as you see fit.

Example:

Drunken Fist:
+Damage (just like now)
-Avoidance or AC

Drunken Sway:
+Dodge / Parry
+Aggro
-Damage / accuracy and or -movement speed
It goes against the style of a drunken monk to lose damage or accuracy based on how the game / lore tells us we are suppose to fight, but sometimes you just don't have any other mechanics to balance with.

I also avoided putting in hard numbers to avoid nit picking percents and what not, that would really be up to the devs on how they want to balance.  These suggestions would make the stances viable for different roles the Drunken Monk would perform.