If tank damage is now based on VIT, why do healers still have Cleric Stance?

Well I'd go for a 3sec ocd instead of 5..

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Originally Posted by Kitano123

Vit doesnt increase mitigation only health pool, there are no attacks in the game that require full vit HP so a tank without any str acc is wasting potential dps. Unless you have a terrible healer, full vit is pointless.

You'll find most raiding tanks will have at least a few str acc and will swap stances when necesary. Its the optimal way to play.

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Oh there are. Tanks just use moves which prevent them from dying to... prevent them from dying. If these skills didn't exist (e.g. Holmgang still had the same effect as 2.0 Holmgang) you can bet people will be wearing VIT to survive attacks.

See though now you won't have strength you gonna have to learn how to be a VIT tank.

Almost sounds like you guys have no clue because you give excuses why strength is better.

We'll see once its patched out how well you all do sorry if I come off sounding like whatever you wanna call me, just saying good luck.

Cleric stance may as well be a gear swap macro. We could wear all blm gear and basically still do our job, if not better with different stats... i just dont see a reason for it. At the very least they could eliminate the cooldown to eliminate risk but ultimately... it becomes an annoyance more so than anything.

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Originally Posted by Zeonx

See though now you won't have strength you gonna have to learn how to be a VIT tank.

Almost sounds like you guys have no clue because you give excuses why strength is better.

We'll see once its patched out how well you all do sorry if I come off sounding like whatever you wanna call me, just saying good luck.

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people were calling you ignorant because you are being ignorant. as it stands right now prioritizing strength over vit is better because you do more dmg, and self heals scale with strength. heals like clemency, second wind, and equilibrium all use strength or main stat(dex in the case of nin/brd).
one more thing; every story you have ever told on these forums involves your cousin. im not saying they dont exist, but the way you put them on a throne makes me wonder.

after some testing, i lost 1k off of equilibrium and 400 off second wind by not having strength acc on. pretty much all wep skills lost 3-400 on dmg.
also, there is no "learning" required in being a vit tank. the main difference is having more health and dealing less dmg. thats it.

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Originally Posted by Zeonx

See though now you won't have strength you gonna have to learn how to be a VIT tank.

Almost sounds like you guys have no clue because you give excuses why strength is better.

We'll see once its patched out how well you all do sorry if I come off sounding like whatever you wanna call me, just saying good luck.

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You do know that Tanks who excel in using STR "now" will still be amazing tanks who excel using the new Vit stat weights too? Lmao.
Gurl I think you just like stirring at the moment.

The idea behind this change is because tanks are putting on STR/dps gear to tank, when they should be using their designated sets. Cleric stance is an unrelated mechanic; healers don't put on INT gear in order to do better healing.

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Originally Posted by Dalvy

The idea behind this change is because tanks are putting on STR/dps gear to tank, when they should be using their designated sets. Cleric stance is an unrelated mechanic; healers don't put on INT gear in order to do better healing.

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We could start the gravy train of what was the point of slaying gear to begin with.

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Originally Posted by Zeonx

See though now you won't have strength you gonna have to learn how to be a VIT tank.

Almost sounds like you guys have no clue because you give excuses why strength is better.

We'll see once its patched out how well you all do sorry if I come off sounding like whatever you wanna call me, just saying good luck.

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There is nothing to learn, you simply do what you have been doing as str tank except you now have more health.

Also, all the top raiders use str tanks. The reason for that is because they are better then vit tanks. Claiming you know better is claiming you are better then world first raiders.

Let me give you a scenario where str is better.

You are doing ravana ex as a scholar and one of your tanks is a dark knight. The dark knight uses full vit and uses living dead for the final liberation preys. Now you have 10 sconds to get his ass back up to 22k hp before he dies. Unfortunately your co-healer died because he was busy standing in fire. You will likely fail at topping off the dark knight and he dies.
Same scenario with the dark knight using full str means he only has 16k hp. This allows you to top him off before his living dead times out.
Not only did the dark knight not die, he also did 200 more dps, resulting in barely breaking the warlord shell, since most dps had weakness and sucked.
This results in winning the fight!

(I've been doing ravana ex to much)

While we're on the boat on healer dps, what they say does not nessescarly reflect on what actually happened. They've admitted that savage dps checks were so overturned yet even Ilvl didn't help (so your typical group would have to get dps from elsewhere, specifically the tanks and healers)

On the tank aspect, I'll say it again; vitality as of now does absolutely nothing but increase hp. It does not interact with strength (like how mind does with cleric stance and the stat inversion), there's no potency that scales with hp value (while there are self healing potencies that directly scale off attack power, like strength), it doesn't increase the amount of healing taken so they're just gonna heal more. And just to top it off, it'll actually work against things like living dead or certain mechanics that require you to be healed to full hp ( such as doom from wp heroic)

This is just another turning of the wheel of letting Final Fantasy 14 become bland game number 3452938475983. If I wanted to play a game that was bland and had as little rpg elements as possible I would play a first person shooter. Multiple gear selections and gauging what was BIS and aquisition of said items use to be fun. But the trap that every modern mmo is falling into is replacing fun with simplistic number balancing. Yes I agree as long as they stick to the holy trinity format ff 14 is around then tanks should do as little dps as possible along with healers since that is not their job but all of that comes at the cost of fun in mechanics.

At this rate they should remove bonus stat points on level up completely and just tie them all to job crystals. They're shoehorning every job into 1 stat and 1 stat only. Let's be real, how many people actually stat anything other than their "main" stat? Piety is largely useless because gear has ass loads of it, and outside of raiding you rarely run dry if you have any idea what you're doing.

I won't even accept the "arcanist has 2 jobs and NEEDS to choose" argument either. If they just lump the bonus stats into job crystals that problem will be alleviated.

Those who agree with the OP say "oh but there's a difference between tank and cleric stance because Cleric Stance adds risk and fun to the game and switching to DPS stance as a tank does nothing like that!", but that's only true when you and your healer outgear the content by a lot.
If you DON'T go do a large pull in a 145 dungeon in 210 gear but in actual 145-160 gear, you'll notice that, yes, dropping tank stance WILL make you as sturdy as cheap toiletpaper and one single GCD of the monsters you aggro'd will pretty much instantly kill you.
So don't go talking about how "risk and fun" are not there with tank's dps stance just because you outgear everything enough to never need to go back into tank stance anymore.
As a healer, when I outgear content enough, I also don't ever have to switch out of Cleric Stance, you know? So don't act as if there is such a huge difference between both role's stance dancing.

(That said, I'm also sad about the change because, while it makes sense and was overdue for a long time, it also takes away one of the last possibilities to CHOOSE which build you want to go for.)

It always strikes me as odd the conjurer spells are INT base but the class and job are MND base. It's like they are using black magic skills to do damage.

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Originally Posted by Fatestorm

My point is more, does anyone feel like the *spirit* of what they did with folding all of Tank damage into VIT, compared with the existence of this mechanic for Healers, is something of a double standard? I sorta do.

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I seriously doubt that SE designed cleric stance to enable 'stance dancing' in dungeon instances.

You, the healer, need to advance through the MSQ and FATEs just like everyone else in order to level. You are at a decided disadvantage when it comes to dealing damage, since you've been putting your points into a non-combat attribute. To accommodate the leveling experience, you can run around in the world without a damage penalty by using cleric stance.

Paladins also suffer a damage penalty. It is mitigated by the fact that they can outlast an enemy they are fighting because of their vitality and armor.

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Originally Posted by FoxyAreku

That...is not even close to accurate. Healer DPS in groups unitended? Really? You can't honestly think something so ridiculous, can you?

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Yes, I can say that, because it has been said as such in various interviews with the Dev team. Healers DpSing in ARR content caught them off-guard. Level 50 Healer gear originally did not have accuracy on it as they did not expect healers to be make attacks and require accuracy to hit things. It was only added to i100 to i130 gear after healers started complaining about missing during Coil.

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Healers have always been intended to do damage in ALL aspects of the game. They didn't give every healer class a new, higher potency filler move in heavensward for it to not be used. (Not to mention Aero III, Assize's ridiculous damage potential, etc..)

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The healers received those new DpS moves to keep up with HW open world mob hp levels while soloing. The Dev team did not want the damage gap between DpS, Tanks and Healers to be so great as to force people to party in the open world while leveling.

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And before someone jumps down my throat...intended=/=required.

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Yes, intended does not mean required, but it does mean planned for.
Unintended does not mean bad nor unacceptable either. Healer DpS in party content was not planned for, but the Dev team accepted it and for the most part have not nerfed it. (Healer DpS in Cleric Stance was deemed unacceptable in PvP so Cleric Stance was disabled in PvP content)

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Originally Posted by DPZ2

I seriously doubt that SE designed cleric stance to enable 'stance dancing' in dungeon instances.

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I also seriously doubt that SE gave us so many DPS spells to 'solo' content.

If SE didn't expect people to use cleric stance to stance dance in dungeons and do DPS then they are without a doubt the dumbest developers ever.

Edit: can already tell this thread is going to turn into another - Healers should DPS/ Healers shouldn't do DPS.

I don't understand that question and how it relates with cleric stance. The change to tank's calculation does not affect their stances. This was done in order tank to avoid using STR accss and put all their points into STR and play as DPS thing that they were never supposed to do. They will get the same dmg output since STR will count less for DPS now so they can focus on being real tanks without fear that they will hinder their dps. Stances are something different. Stances and tank dps calculation formula are completely unrelated.

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Originally Posted by CorbinDallas

At this rate they should remove bonus stat points on level up completely and just tie them all to job crystals. They're shoehorning every job into 1 stat and 1 stat only. Let's be real, how many people actually stat anything other than their "main" stat? Piety is largely useless because gear has ass loads of it, and outside of raiding you rarely run dry if you have any idea what you're doing.

I won't even accept the "arcanist has 2 jobs and NEEDS to choose" argument either. If they just lump the bonus stats into job crystals that problem will be alleviated.

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To be fair, stats outside of raiding don't matter so the point about piety is moot.

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Originally Posted by Andrea

I also seriously doubt that SE gave us so many DPS spells to 'solo' content.

If SE didn't expect people to use cleric stance to stance dance in dungeons and do DPS then they are without a doubt the dumbest developers ever.

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Ummmm.. the entire 1-60 questing experience is one huge set of DPS tests. Without DPS spells, you could not level. Period. Of course they gave CNJ/WHM damage spells for this solo content.

That clever players found a use for this stance in dungeon instances was not intentional, but it is what it is. I have no opinion in the quarrel about its use.

If SE didn't intend for Cleric Stance to be used in instances then they have horrible playtesters - all they'd need to do was enter Sastasha as CNJ. We also had speedruns of WP that maximized healer DPS even when PLD's enmity generation was complete garbage (ty Cover). Small adjustments were made to healer DPS, but nothing that outright stopped you from doing it, and those adjustments were mainly AOE related such as the infamous Holy nerf(s). If SE did want to stop it, they had 2 years to do so. If it wasn't intended for 2.0 they were definitely okay with keeping it in.

They have released a job (AST) with stances not battle changable so they would have made adjustments to cleric stance if they didn't want players using it while in combat. And don't throw the obvious "but it was an established playstyle and they can't change it" because they saw bard as unacceptable and changed fixed its playstyle in the expansion.

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Originally Posted by Ranzan

It always strikes me as odd the conjurer spells are INT base but the class and job are MND base. It's like they are using black magic skills to do damage.

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int = magic attack power
mind = magic heal power

If it hurt, it need int. Very simple to remember

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Originally Posted by UBERHAXED

They have released a job (AST) with stances not battle changable so they would have made adjustments to cleric stance if they didn't want players using it while in combat. And don't throw the obvious "but it was an established playstyle and they can't change it" because they saw bard as unacceptable and changed fixed its playstyle in the expansion.

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Deliberately disable Cleric Stance while in an instance? There will be a great wailing and gnashing of teeth. Followed by some sheepish looks and a determination to figure things out.

Eventually, there will be a new paradigm. And a number of forum threads complaining "SE broke healers" ...

They already disabled CS in PVP for balance. I think they would have done it already for PVE if they thought it was a problem.

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Originally Posted by DPZ2

Ummmm.. the entire 1-60 questing experience is one huge set of DPS tests. Without DPS spells, you could not level. Period. Of course they gave CNJ/WHM damage spells for this solo content.

That clever players found a use for this stance in dungeon instances was not intentional, but it is what it is. I have no opinion in the quarrel about its use.

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There are no high DPS checks in story content. If SE didn't intend healers to do good DPS, they would have stopped at Stone and just let them slowly kill anything while healing themselves. The fact that healer got super strong aoe spells like Holy, Aero III, Assize, Gravity, Bane etc., along with more DPS skills after 50 and Cleric Stance being usable in combat clearly shows that healers were intended to be able to contribute significant DPS in both solo and group content. SE might not absolutely require healer DPS to clear content, but healers were definitely intended to be able to contribute a lot in dungeons if you'd just look at the skills.

you're talking about a skill vs a stat.... pretty invalid argument when you consider tanks lose a good % of their attack power if they are in tank stance vs an offense stance.

This change to vit is because tanks are supposed to be tanks, not under performing dps. The way people were choosing to play them due to dps checks was not inline with what devs wanted hence this change.

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Originally Posted by Launched

There are no high DPS checks in story content. If SE didn't intend healers to do good DPS, they would have stopped at Stone and just let them slowly kill anything while healing themselves. The fact that healer got super strong aoe spells like Holy, Aero III, Assize, Gravity, Bane etc., along with more DPS skills after 50 and Cleric Stance being usable in combat clearly shows that healers were intended to be able to contribute significant DPS in both solo and group content. SE might not absolutely require healer DPS to clear content, but healers were definitely intended to be able to contribute a lot in dungeons if you'd just look at the skills.

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Methinks you have not tried killing mobs above level 30 just using stone 1 and heals. You are likely to run out of mp before the thing dies. And that's just trash mobs in the open. The instances are much harder (i.e. intended for DPS classes to no breeze through pressing one button). Also might be worth nothing that Bane is not a healer skill, it happened to be there not to waste a job slot for summoner (but they did so anyway with tri-bind (then called tri-disaster), sigh...). There are instances in the story where you need to use AoE any way, so scholar being out of luck would be bad.

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Originally Posted by UBERHAXED

Methinks you have not tried killing mobs above level 30 just using stone 1 and heals. You are likely to run out of mp before the thing dies. And that's just trash mobs in the open. The instances are much harder (i.e. intended for DPS classes to no breeze through pressing one button). Also might be worth nothing that Bane is not a healer skill, it happened to be there not to waste a job slot for summoner (but they did so anyway with tri-bind (then called tri-disaster), sigh...). There are instances in the story where you need to use AoE any way, so scholar being out of luck would be bad.

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WHM has 8 dps skills, SCH 10. Why do they need so many DPS skills if they were never intended to do DPS in duties? Surely half of that would have been enough and then they could of given us more spells that would have helped in duties? The place where 99% of this game takes place?

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Originally Posted by SpookyGhost

If SE did want to stop it, they had 2 years to do so. If it wasn't intended for 2.0 they were definitely okay with keeping it in.

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I don't think anyone would argue that. They're fine with the way healers DPS now and aren't changing anything (whereas they are apparently not fine with the way tanks forgo Fending accessories and are making changes). That's ultimately what was meant by it being an "unintended, emergent" thing. They seem to have naively assumed that the playerbase wouldn't DPS much in content on healer—this is likely in part due to the fact that they seem to playtest material on jobs the testers do not normally play (they talked about this in a preview or interview regarding the dungeons added in 3.1), which is a rather way narrow way to do it, of course. They should ideally test both with career players for various roles and those who are uncomfortable.

I suspect they will always prefer for content to be tuned toward the lower end of the spectrum for tanks and healers, though, as that has the effect of lowering the barrier for entry for those classes in terms of player responsibility. Tanks and healers both generally have more to pay attention to than DPS do (though it does vary in some content), and I suspect that's part of the reason tank and healer shortages are not as bad as they are in other similar games such as WoW—which isn't to say there aren't shortages, of course, just that they could be worse.

With the way both roles are set up now, there's a fairly low-skill floor that needs to be met for most content (current Savage notwithstanding), but rather high skill ceilings that involve pushing DPS to the utmost, especially when both roles are pushing DPS in the same party. They're probably okay with that in general (and they assume world-first class players will be pushing as hard as they can to do that, too).

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Originally Posted by Andrea

WHM has 8 dps skills, SCH 10. Why do they need so many DPS skills if they were never intended to do DPS in duties? Surely half of that would have been enough and then they could of given us more spells that would have helped in duties? The place where 99% of this game takes place?

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Methinks either you quoted the wrong person or have poor reading comprehension skills.

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Originally Posted by Asmodai

Yoshida: Yes. Since all DPS jobs will be increasing up through level 60, it makes sense to have the white mage's DPS extend by a proportional amount as well. For development, such as with Bahamut's Coils, the development team assumes what the item level should be for general equipment on players when they clear a raid. They sum up the basic DPS for four DPS and tanks at that assumed item level and cut that by about 10-15% for the minimum clear DPS. Healer DPS is not taken into account when this is set.

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Healer DPS is certainly required for most clears, even when at target ilevel. This is because many players can not get 90% DPS efficiency out of their class due to a variety of reasons in raids. As much as I would love to see the need for mandatory healer DPS to be removed, I do not expect nor see it in the future.

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Originally Posted by UBERHAXED

quoted the wrong person

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you would be correct

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Originally Posted by Hyperia

As much as I would love to see the need for mandatory healer DPS to be removed, I do not expect nor see it in the future.

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Healer DPS wasn't necessary for all of Coil except at low item levels. It's only since Alexander Savage that it became basically mandatory, and they've already said they're going back to a SCOB/FCOB level of difficulty for Midas (Savage), so healer DPS likely won't be required except during earlier stages of progression, as it was in the past.

All I can say is thank the Twelve for CS. I don't know what I would do without it. This game isn't like GW (one example that comes to mind) where even though you have 50+ skills you can only ever bring 8 into combat. That made builds fun, varied how you played in every instance, encouraged experimentation with skill combinations etc. Here we have them all. If I had to just go around casting Cure, Cure II, Regen as needed and then sometimes some of the cooldowns like Tetra, Bene etc, I'd be bored out of my mind. Stance dancing, and an expectation of it (at least I expect it of myself) keeps it more interesting. Its possible CS was originally thought of that way, ie, the developers thought only a few would ever really use it consistently. I know when I first started I was scared to death of it.

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Originally Posted by Alahra

I don't think anyone would argue that. They're fine with the way healers DPS now and aren't changing anything (whereas they are apparently not fine with the way tanks forgo Fending accessories and are making changes). That's ultimately what was meant by it being an "unintended, emergent" thing.

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Bingo! That is exactly what I meant.

My perspective is that Healer DpS is "Nice but not Necessary." Healers heal and any damage they put out is a bonus. I will never complain about a Healer DpSing unless I die. (and even then I will be asking what I did wrong as a tank first)

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They seem to have naively assumed that the playerbase wouldn't DPS much on content in healer—this is likely in part due to the fact that they seem to playtest material on jobs the testers do not normally play (they talked about this in a preview or interview regarding the dungeons added in 3.1), which is a rather way narrow way to do it, of course. They should ideally test both with career players for various roles and those who are uncomfortable.

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An incredibly large number of devs tend to get blinded by their own knowledge of how they intended things to work and can quite often miss how players do or see things. Even Devs very experienced with certain classes can miss possibilities and problems players catch since they know how everything is "supposed" to work and might miss how things "really" work.

The interview you are referring to was actually talking about how they were expanding/changing their playtesting methods. The example being "going in with a player who had not fully mastered tanking in non-perfect gear and having the DpS who was in perfect gear go full throttle." In many ways they were admitting they needed to change how they did things previously.

Because then dealing damage as a healer would be completely braindead. To deal damage as a tank you still have to stance dance.

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Originally Posted by Ultimatecalibur

An incredibly large number of devs tend to get blinded by their own knowledge of how they intended things to work and can quite often miss how players do or see things. Even Devs very experienced with certain classes can miss possibilities and problems players catch since they know how everything is "supposed" to work and might miss how things "really" work.

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Square-Enix in particular was awful about this kind of thing in FFXI, so I'm not particularly surprised they haven't gotten better about it (since there is/was significant overlap between the teams for the two games). I've actually always been rather curious about how they intended NIN to play, as they came out and said we were doing things with it that they didn't anticipate (but for the life of me I can't figure out any other way it could have been played).

This thread should have just been a discussion over clerics stance, a good majority of conversation about clerics stance has been swamped with comparison between it and the upcoming tank changes. There have been clerics stance threads in the past but times change and so do opinions.

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Originally Posted by Alahra

Square-Enix in particular was awful about this kind of thing in FFXI, so I'm not particularly surprised they haven't gotten better about it (since there is/was significant overlap between the teams for the two games). I've actually always been rather curious about how they intended NIN to play, as they came out and said we were doing things with it that they didn't anticipate (but for the life of me I can't figure out any other way it could have been played).

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I think they were treating the Ninjutsu as a 2 second cast time pseudo-GCD action rather than the oGCD cooldown players use it as.