#1 - April 9, 2012, 7:30 p.m.
2. Having to run around to pick up the spheres at all seem a little silly. And while not exactly a waste of time, since they give us chi, it does take time, and the chance of missing an orb somewhere on larger pulls is pretty big. This prevents chain pulling and instead of spending time looting (with the aoe looting) we instead have to spend time picking up chi speres.
So my suggestion, in light of having these orbs absorbed automatically would completely negate the point in having them, is to give us an ability that simply absorbs all our nearby orbs (and only ours) within a certain range. Something like "consume chi" or similar. Using this ability would immediately consume all chi orbs nearby, nomatter how many there are, or how much chi we already have (so you would still have to use it strategically). Would have to trigger the GCD at minimum, plus possibly have its own cooldown, to help avoid being overpowered. But could possibly have an attached talent or glyph that makes excess orbs (that would put us above 4 chi) restore energy or health or something similar. (something similar to "absorb planet" in Solar 2 is what I'm thinking of)
Think of a 25 man raid... especially with the current state of the raid finder... it'd not be unlikely to have 5-7 monks in the raid at once. Now imagine a decent size trash pull, and each mob spawning 2-3 orbs per monk.... that quickly becomes a lot of orbs and a lot of monks running around trying to collect their orbs. It is not reasonable that a group of any size has to wait, because the one class has to run around collecting their main resource. In a more extreme example, monks getting excluded from raids that wish to go fast, because they have to keep running around collecting orbs, would not be entirely unlikely (given the attitude of some players these days).
