We may get changes to cleric stance and esuna

This was posted on Reddit from the JP blog. Can anyone here translate it? Just curious what it actually says.

https://www.reddit.com/r/ffxiv/comme...evealed_on_jp/

http://na.finalfantasyxiv.com/pr/blog/

Updated with the English version.

Those are both really obvious candidates for the role skill system.

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Originally Posted by dragonseth07

Those are both really obvious candidates for the role skill system.

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and stoneskin.

All I'll say is, if SE dumbs the system down to 'bring up the bottom' so to speak, I'm going to be severely disinclined to continue subscribing even occasionally. There's little enough skill involved in combat as-is; it cannot be reduced.

That's not to say I'm automatically opposed to skill consolidation or a role-based system. I'm not. I think it could actually make the game easier to learn, while deepening the amount of required skill to master it. The devil is in the details, though. We'll have to wait and see, I guess.

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Originally Posted by Vhailor

All I'll say is, if SE dumbs the system down to 'bring up the bottom' so to speak, I'm going to be severely disinclined to continue subscribing even occasionally. There's little enough skill involved in combat as-is; it cannot be reduced.

That's not to say I'm automatically opposed to skill consolidation or a role-based system. I'm not. I think it could actually make the game easier to learn, while deepening the amount of required skill to master it. The devil is in the details, though. We'll have to wait and see, I guess.

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Cleric Stance and Esuna are so hard, i know.

Personally, i think they're shooting for more QoL changes, Cleric stance switching is more annoying than it needs to be (sometimes not responsive at all), and I wouldn't be mad if Esuna wasn't on the GCD. Though i will say that with heavensward, a lot of our more fun rotations became more of a juggle for maintaining some sort of buff, and they became unnecessarily complex because of that juggle, which was really punishing on people who simply are unable to multitask efficiently.

I have always preferred rotations that were based more on reacting to a given situations rather than following a cycle, and it's why i gravitated towards healers in this game, despite a long history of DPSing in other games.

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Originally Posted by Vhailor

All I'll say is, if SE dumbs the system down to 'bring up the bottom' so to speak, I'm going to be severely disinclined to continue subscribing even occasionally. There's little enough skill involved in combat as-is; it cannot be reduced.

That's not to say I'm automatically opposed to skill consolidation or a role-based system. I'm not. I think it could actually make the game easier to learn, while deepening the amount of required skill to master it. The devil is in the details, though. We'll have to wait and see, I guess.

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It's less them "dumbing down" combat, and more them making cross-class skills more accessible(Let me tell you how much I hate getting Provoke!) and reducing bloat, as the game requires like 3-4 full hotbars for some jobs. It's not "Let's dumb down Esuna", it's "every healer needs Esuna, maybe we should just put that in the role skill pool".

WHM Esuna has a 20% chance that it costs 0 Mana. Will they remove this when it's a role skill? Or will the other healers get this effect too?

Esuna is such a negligible cost, and during raids you maybe have to cast it a few times if the fight even requires it all. 95% of effects other than Prey can't be removed anyway.

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Originally Posted by Tint

WHM Esuna has a 20% chance that it costs 0 Mana. Will they remove this when it's a role skill? Or will the other healers get this effect too?

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It'll probably just stay as is. Why would it be removed? Esuna still exists. Why would other healers get it if they don't already?

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Originally Posted by Tint

WHM Esuna has a 20% chance that it costs 0 Mana. Will they remove this when it's a role skill? Or will the other healers get this effect too?

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Wouldn't be upset if, say, each healer got a different trait to make Esuna behave differently.

SCH - Adds a Barrier around the target absorbing damage equal to the duration of the debuff x Y%.
AST - Adds a random Card Effect to the target for half the duration of the removed debuff.
WHM - Esuna now affects the entire Party, but is subject to the Global Cooldown.

Yeah I know the WHM one feels a bit stronger than the others, but let's be honest, they need some love right now. Solidifying them as Group Healers might be the way to go. Could see a similar set of Traits for other Cross-Class skills as well, and with each healer having a different trait to have a different effect, it diversifies the healers and gives them more identity.

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Originally Posted by Averax

Cleric Stance and Esuna are so hard, i know.

Personally, i think they're shooting for more QoL changes, Cleric stance switching is more annoying than it needs to be (sometimes not responsive at all), and I wouldn't be mad if Esuna wasn't on the GCD. Though i will say that with heavensward, a lot of our more fun rotations became more of a juggle for maintaining some sort of buff, and they became unnecessarily complex because of that juggle, which was really punishing on people who simply are unable to multitask efficiently.

I have always preferred rotations that were based more on reacting to a given situations rather than following a cycle, and it's why i gravitated towards healers in this game, despite a long history of DPSing in other games.

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ogcd esuna as a sch will be nice to stop the annoying war macros.

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Originally Posted by Vexander

Yeah I know the WHM one feels a bit stronger than the others, but let's be honest, they need some love right now.

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HOLY

I may be just tad bias, and apologies for it, but this is like the first time WHM hasn't been meta in forever. And I'm pretty okay with the holy spammers taking a backseat until 4.0. Besides, we won't know how 4.0 shakes up class balance- but in terms of role skills, I don't think the traits really need to be altered, other than "bonus to X" being the role skill instead of "Leeches" or whatever it is now. The presence alone is indicative of difference between classes.

I would imagine that role skills can still be affected by traits, but who knows? SCH has a better Esuna too (in that they can use Selene to augment theirs) and AST can make theirs super fast, so it's going to be fun to balance everything. Especially as most of the key healer role skills directly pull from WHM's pool.

One tiny change to Cleric Stance (which surely can't keep that name as a true 'role' skill anyway) should be making it more obvious how you use it in groups. Nearly every new CNJ has that moment where they mistakenly put it on in a party to heal because 'cleric' sounds like a healer buff to anyone not used to D&D, and then everyone dies because their healing sucks. That's just annoying, and nothing to do with skill ceilings at endgame. It's not even easy to check the tooltip if you aren't using a mouse. Clunky, messy design.

Not making people on pads resort to macros to physically squash everything into their interface doesn't mean dumbing down the battle system - on the contrary, they can potentially make fights require more varied play without destroying half of the playerbase who cannot physically reach all of the abillities. Merging useless old abilities which should never have been separate in the first place also has no effect on player skill, just on time spent moving junk around out of combat.

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Originally Posted by Vexander

Wouldn't be upset if, say, each healer got a different trait to make Esuna behave differently.

SCH - Adds a Barrier around the target absorbing damage equal to the duration of the debuff x Y%.
AST - Adds a random Card Effect to the target for half the duration of the removed debuff.
WHM - Esuna now affects the entire Party, but is subject to the Global Cooldown.

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One reason I feel this might be bad is I'd assume this would override any current card buff the target may already have.

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Originally Posted by Serilda

One tiny change to Cleric Stance (which surely can't keep that name as a true 'role' skill anyway) should be making it more obvious how you use it in groups. Nearly every new CNJ has that moment where they mistakenly put it on in a party to heal because 'cleric' sounds like a healer buff to anyone not used to D&D, and then everyone dies because their healing sucks. That's just annoying, and nothing to do with skill ceilings at endgame. It's not even easy to check the tooltip if you aren't using a mouse. Clunky, messy design.

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Really I don't know why we don't have a healer that has Ampador City Hard's boss design of a "Reversal" buff that makes cures hurt stuff. Otherwise, "KILL MODE" for Cleric Stance doesn't sound very healery either, which might've been the reason for it's name in the first place. Though really, we could spitball good Cleric Stance rename ideas all day.

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Originally Posted by Serilda

Merging useless old abilities which should never have been separate in the first place also has no effect on player skill, just on time spent moving junk around out of combat.

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Really looking forward to Rend Mind and Dismantle being one skill. Like, a lot. I hate those two being both separate and on the same shared 90 second cooldown.

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Originally Posted by Meui

One reason I feel this might be bad is I'd assume this would override any current card buff the target may already have.

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Good point. Hadn't really considered that, and I would hope that WOULDN'T be the case. If anything make it so card buffs don't overlap. So if the entire party has Balance and you Esuna the tank, they could have Spire/Ewer/Spear/Arrow/Bole as a second card effect. I mean, the effect wouldn't realistically last very long since most debuffs you remove are anywhere from 5 seconds (pacification on warriors) to 30 seconds or so. It'd be kind of like having two ASTs in the same group; their card effects don't overlap unless they're the same card, no? You can have, say, Balance and Arrow/Spear at the same time.

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Originally Posted by Atlaworks

HOLY

I may be just tad bias, and apologies for it, but this is like the first time WHM hasn't been meta in forever. And I'm pretty okay with the holy spammers taking a backseat until 4.0. Besides, we won't know how 4.0 shakes up class balance- but in terms of role skills, I don't think the traits really need to be altered, other than "bonus to X" being the role skill instead of "Leeches" or whatever it is now. The presence alone is indicative of difference between classes.

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Don't you think its a bit satirical to say this is the first time WHM hasn't been meta in forever, when before Heavensward you only HAD White Mage and Scholar, and Scholar was desired for its DPS as well? Honestly, WHM wasn't bumped from the meta until AST came along and was buffed to compete with the other two. Once it could compete, WHM became irrelevant.

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Originally Posted by Vexander

Don't you think its a bit satirical to say this is the first time WHM hasn't been meta in forever, when before Heavensward you only HAD White Mage and Scholar, and Scholar was desired for its DPS as well? Honestly, WHM wasn't bumped from the meta until AST came along and was buffed to compete with the other two. Once it could compete, WHM became irrelevant.

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Not really. WHM was more prevalent than SCH in four-mans due to holy spam all the way from 2.0 to 3.4 or so really. In 8-mans, ideal party comp for healers is always gonna be "One with big numbers" and "One with shield thingies". And AST being in the meta was laughable for the first half of Heavensward.

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Originally Posted by Atlaworks

Really I don't know why we don't have a healer that has Ampador City Hard's boss design of a "Reversal" buff that makes cures hurt stuff. Otherwise, "KILL MODE" for Cleric Stance doesn't sound very healery either, which might've been the reason for it's name in the first place. Though really, we could spitball good Cleric Stance rename ideas all day.

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I think the 'Japanese' name (Crusade Stance) is slightly clearer but pretty much anything that doesn't rely on people counterintuitively associating 'cleric' with 'harbinger of destruction' would work. Or for the ultimate in obviousness, have it toggle two different stances with clear aims as that's an easy mechanic for anyone to understand, like mutually exclusive, uh, Retribution (DPS) and Absolution (healing) stances with suitably obvious icons. I know it's been used before with other jobs (and with healers themselves via AST), but maybe that's because it's a good system.

Getting something like Reverse or even Reflect would be awesome.

Call me a White Mage fanboy at this point, but I would prefer it if White Mage had Crusader Stance and AST/SCH continued with the MND/INT swap version. I feel like both of those classes DPS well enough as is, they don't need their heals transformed into DPS spells.

WHMs don't need any buffs other than one or two raid buff utilities and better mana regeneration. I'm worried they'll overbuff WHM.

Currently WHM already has the best single AND multi-target DPS. It already has the most potent raw healing. It has the best burst DPS and healing. AST and SCH can't even come close to WHM in terms of DPS **if we ignore mana**.

So why is WHM slightly less valued in the meta? It doesn't bring good raid utility and have some issues with its mana. Fix both and WHM will already be overpowered.

Cure3 alone makes WHM a strong candidate in A11S/A12S.

The only way to remove Cleric stance for those who don't like it is to make healing intense, always. And it's not, not enough, reason why healers go DPS (and not sitting afk), 'cause optimization and having something to do all the time - pushing your job at its limit is where you find the pleasure to play it. It's like that for every game out there, even different ones such Overwatch, Mercy has to boost DPS - or doing DPS herself - when party HPs are capped and other healers have different stuff they can do as well. 'Healing only' is a no-go absolutely, unless you really need to push it every moment for the whole raids / contents and I am sure the average FFXIV player is not ready (or even interested) for that. So leaving casuals chilling in low-tier contents and not using Cleric stance while letting the hardcore players (but more like regular, I'd say, cause someone sitting afk during battle is the not regular one) doing that in raids is what you want, deffo.

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Originally Posted by Yun_Tsuri

The only way to remove Cleric stance for those who don't like it is to make healing intense, always. And it's not, not enough, reason why healers go DPS (and not sitting afk), 'cause optimization and having something to do all the time - pushing your job at its limit is where you find the pleasure to play it. It's like that for every game out there,

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Many healers cant even heal as it stands now please dont make it even worse than it is now

Would like to see each healer get more of their own stance system, and cleric stance not become a healer default just for variation sake. Of course going that route will be more challenging to balance though lol

I like the calm lands look, wonder how big that area of the game will be :3 (not the dungeon but the related zone).. Also is it just me or does the shield lob animation look larger? Like the Spirals and stuff. Could be I'm not used to seeing it at that angle though, or they tweaked it for the fun of it on their own side - like what might have happened to Titan Egi.

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Originally Posted by Averax

Cleric Stance and Esuna are so hard, i know.

Personally, i think they're shooting for more QoL changes, Cleric stance switching is more annoying than it needs to be (sometimes not responsive at all), and I wouldn't be mad if Esuna wasn't on the GCD.

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Moving skills such as Esuna off the GCD, and essentially slimming down the GCD skills to primary damage dealing or damag healing skills would have the effect of masking the GCD because you would have a few more off GCD skills to weave in. Between the impact of skill/spell speed and an increase in off GCD skill use, the combat system might feel a bit faster without modifying the underlying GCD itself - which I believe they have indicated that they cannot and will not do. If they did change the GCD they'd have to rebalance the entire game, I don't see that happening. But QoL improvements and moving a few utility skills to off GCD would help make things feel faster during play - IMHO.

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Originally Posted by bswpayton

Many healers cant even heal as it stands now please dont make it even worse than it is now

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Ahaha, you have a point.

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Originally Posted by Vhailor

All I'll say is, if SE dumbs the system down to 'bring up the bottom' so to speak, I'm going to be severely disinclined to continue subscribing even occasionally. There's little enough skill involved in combat as-is; it cannot be reduced.

That's not to say I'm automatically opposed to skill consolidation or a role-based system. I'm not. I think it could actually make the game easier to learn, while deepening the amount of required skill to master it. The devil is in the details, though. We'll have to wait and see, I guess.

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I love the phrase "skill to master" used by players of videogames. High level engineering, medical practice, Olympic athletics, those are skills to be mastered. This is pushing buttons in a set pattern learned from the internet within a precision window of 1 second. When I hear people complain about "removing skill" I can't help but laugh at the self important absurdity of it.

It would be nice if cleric became a toggle, or if there was some more animation effects for different stances. I like cleric stance, I like planning my actions ahead of time, but I do see a lot of healers who seem to struggle with cleric because they're afraid of having it on or off at the right time.

It would be cool if they went the whole hog on healer dps, and that atleast one of the healers had two actual stances and a system similar to war, as opposed to just stance on or off.

But it is still a skill? there are very obviously people who are 'skilled' at the game, how else do you expect us to talk about this? It's not being self important, it's a description of the subject at hand?

After all, as unimportant as yo-yoing is, you can still be skilled at it. Just because your skill doesn't have practical applications doesn't make it not a skill.

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Originally Posted by Buff_Mama

It would be nice if cleric became a toggle, or if there was some more animation effects for different stances. I like cleric stance, I like planning my actions ahead of time, but I do see a lot of healers who seem to struggle with cleric because they're afraid of having it on or off at the right time.

It would be cool if they went the whole hog on healer dps, and that atleast one of the healers had two actual stances and a system similar to war, as opposed to just stance on or off.

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That's how you end up with a party of one warrior and seven white mages.

I think of simply it. Making esuna for all healers available at an early level (ie. Under lvl 10). And perhaps removing the cooldown on cleric stance or readjustment to it completely.

I wouldn't be entirely surprised if Exalted Detriment, Leeches and Esuna were all merged into a single cross role ability. As for Cleric, I still have my suspicions they'll remove it in favour of scaling healer DPS through mind, with obvious adjustments made elsewhere to offset the sharp damage increase that would entail. If not, this could just been them moving Cleric over to the cross role section.

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Originally Posted by Shougun

Would like to see each healer get more of their own stance system, and cleric stance not become a healer default just for variation sake. Of course going that route will be more challenging to balance though lol

I like the calm lands look, wonder how big that area of the game will be :3 (not the dungeon but the related zone).. Also is it just me or does the shield lob animation look larger? Like the Spirals and stuff. Could be I'm not used to seeing it at that angle though, or they tweaked it for the fun of it on their own side - like what might have happened to Titan Egi.

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Unfortunately, there is just no way to properly balance this. Whichever healer gets designated "the healer" (i.e. cannot do damage) becomes an immediate dead job upon reaching Savage. I mean, look at White Mage currently. No one values it's raw healing over Astro's balance because everything has a threshold. If all three healers/tanks can heal or mitigate through the checks respectively, it boils down to which does the most damage.

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Originally Posted by Bourne_Endeavor

Unfortunately, there is just no way to properly balance this. Whichever healer gets designated "the healer" (i.e. cannot do damage) becomes an immediate dead job upon reaching Savage. I mean, look at White Mage currently. No one values it's raw healing over Astro's balance because everything has a threshold. If all three healers/tanks can heal or mitigate through the checks respectively, it boils down to which does the most damage.

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Yup. The developers have designed themselves into a corner and it's going to take some real creativity to get out of it.

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Originally Posted by Bourne_Endeavor

Unfortunately, there is just no way to properly balance this. Whichever healer gets designated "the healer" (i.e. cannot do damage) becomes an immediate dead job upon reaching Savage. I mean, look at White Mage currently. No one values it's raw healing over Astro's balance because everything has a threshold. If all three healers/tanks can heal or mitigate through the checks respectively, it boils down to which does the most damage.

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Out of curiosity would you suggest all tank stances be made the same then?

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Originally Posted by Shougun

Out of curiosity would you suggest all tank stances be made the same then?

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Yes and no. While I think they ought to have a unique feel to them, all of them should be off the GCD. Warrior stance dances feels completely seamless whereas Dark Knight's cumbersome. That all said, it isn't necessarily the core abilities that are the issue but the overall philosophy. You cannot have a specialized job with heavily scripted fights, at least not with how the devs want everything to do everything. Right now, Paladin gets left out more often than not because Dark Knight just does most things better. If they want to continue this route, then there needs to be clear drawbacks. Say a boss does huge raid-wide damage. A Scholar/Astro comp should have to stop DPSing and seriously prep/heal through it whereas a White Mage could more easily handle things but lacks elsewhere. Basically, if they want specialized jobs, they have to actually be specialists. The fact Astro can heal at nearly the same level as WHM defeats its purpose completely.

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Originally Posted by bswpayton

Many healers cant even heal as it stands now please dont make it even worse than it is now

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Most of the time when I see healing fails in the DF, its from healer's not taking off Cleric Stance. Or taking it off too late.

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Originally Posted by Averax

Cleric Stance and Esuna are so hard, i know.

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They aren't, but it would be easy for SE to simplify them even further (for example, by removing the cooldown timer after Cleric's Stance is activated).

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Originally Posted by Atlaworks

It's less them "dumbing down" combat, and more them making cross-class skills more accessible(Let me tell you how much I hate getting Provoke!) and reducing bloat, as the game requires like 3-4 full hotbars for some jobs. It's not "Let's dumb down Esuna", it's "every healer needs Esuna, maybe we should just put that in the role skill pool".

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I'm not so sure I agree. There are conflicting statements on this. Some of what has come out of SE reinforces the idea that it's just skill consolidation, which is A-OK (provided jobs still maintain a distinct identity, which I'm not so worried about). On the other hand, there has also been word floating out, IIRC, that the development team is looking to shrink the gap between the AAA players and everyone else. Given how little detail has been provided, it's hard to know for sure what their plans are, hence my statement.

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Originally Posted by ErikMynhier

I love the phrase "skill to master" used by players of videogames. High level engineering, medical practice, Olympic athletics, those are skills to be mastered. This is pushing buttons in a set pattern learned from the internet within a precision window of 1 second. When I hear people complain about "removing skill" I can't help but laugh at the self important absurdity of it.

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I don't think this is an appropriate analogy. There are countless activities that humans engage in, and virtually all of them require skill to master. Riding a bike is a skill to master, for example, as is driving. So is playing chess, or sketching, or playing music, or what have you. In fact, to turn your own example against you - playing the piano involves pushing buttons in a set pattern that you can learn from the internet. The precision window is naturally narrower, but that's the only difference. Are you prepared to "laugh at the self important absurdity" of a pianist claiming their profession requires skill?

What you're actually doing is distinguishing between important or difficult skills, and trivial skills. They're all skills, though, and they all take a certain amount of time and experience to master. If you want to see this applied to FFXIV's case, go sit a non-gamer in front of a computer, and start them off with a new character. The experience will be eye-opening.

What is truly self-important and absurd, though, is you standing on a soapbox trying to make fun of my opinion, all because I used a phrase that is clearly a pet peeve for you.

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Originally Posted by Vhailor

All I'll say is, if SE dumbs the system down to 'bring up the bottom' so to speak, I'm going to be severely disinclined to continue subscribing even occasionally. There's little enough skill involved in combat as-is; it cannot be reduced.

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You might be in for a bad time then XD One of the goals of the battle changes is to close the "skill gap" between players. >.> Personally i do not mind this since an incredibly sub optimal player can add considerable time to a dungeon run etc. I am curious how they intend to achieve this though, I mean how do you raise the bottom line without affecting the top? (more of a rhetoric question :P I am guessing they will "increase" the contribution from the baselines like GCD skills and auto attacks while reducing the contribution of oGCDs and long CD skills, though Ill admit idk how i feel about this possibility >.>)

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Originally Posted by Gumbercules

You might be in for a bad time then XD One of the goals of the battle changes is to close the "skill gap" between players. >.> Personally i do not mind this since an incredibly sub optimal player can add considerable time to a dungeon run etc. I am curious how they intend to achieve this though, I mean how do you raise the bottom line without affecting the top? (more of a rhetoric question :P I am guessing they will "increase" the contribution from the baselines like GCD skills and auto attacks while reducing the contribution of oGCDs and long CD skills, though Ill admit idk how i feel about this possibility >.>)

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I'm expecting to be in for a bad time, honestly. I'm hoping 4.0 won't take this step, but if it does, I've plenty of other games to play =)

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Originally Posted by Vhailor

I'm expecting to be in for a bad time, honestly. I'm hoping 4.0 won't take this step, but if it does, I've plenty of other games to play =)

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my example imo is what I consider the most "overreaching" example though, when they were talking about closing the gap they also brought up UI changes to make it easier to keep track of buffs. So it could just mean they want to make it easier to keep track of things like greased lighting houton etc. Things of that sort i wouldn't mind in the least. (namely cuz my eyesight isn't that great) They did also mention changes o enochian though, and I suspect that might be more along the lines of making enochian a "passive" to where it is always on with another mechanic taking its current spot for an upkeep CD. So in this case, fire 4 rotation becomes the new baseline for example, while still having a similar playstyle to "reward" those that maintain the new upkeep move.

Overall though, I personally do not mind them closing the gap a bit, since imo in the long run it benefits "all" at the cost of, at worst, some bruised egos.

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Originally Posted by Gumbercules

I am curious how they intend to achieve this though, I mean how do you raise the bottom line without affecting the top?

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You don't exactly lose anything or gain anything here. If the system is just being redesigned to feature skills every class needs due to fights requiring certain skills, then no skill is truly increased, however, if class skills are being combined then yes there will be a slight skill increase, but that would only really help melee classes out as it would make the typical 1,2,3 combo a thing of the past, it could also help healers by adding stoneskin and protect into one defensive buff. But that is based off my interpretation of the "new system." Plus I wouldn't worry about overall player performance being massively jumped up, with the changes this also hypothetically brings new rotations, plus added 4.0 skills to weave in, new classes, and new fights, it's not like out the door people are going to be world first caliber. There is going to be a lot that needs to digested before any real answers come to light if there was any real negative or positive increase.