You know, I don't miss cleric stance, but... (thinking about pre-ShB stuff)

...maybe I do miss cleric stance. Cleric stance was a trashfire because it did require a lot of personal responsibility from the other party members, but I s2g we had less curebots back then. Sure, there was still the average person doing single target cure III, but the epidemic of healers only doing triple digit damage in high level content wasn't quite there yet. I think the fact that aggro combo got removed is a double edged sword - it reduced button bloat, but they could've consolidated it into the DMG combo by using a toggle.

Diversion and LD made aggro management a group activity, and while I don't miss it cuz Savage had forced aggro resets back then, it did make leveling dungeons more interesting. It's like... a lot of the gameplay was designed to have less friction in PF. That's not bad, but that's why people who do less damage than the LB get dragged over the finish line of content they really shouldn't be in, and then they cause issues on the higher floors.

So... Idk, man, rework healers or at least remove Cure I and Benefic or let them upgrade. Yikes.

Yeah. I don't know if people really grasp that aggro was actually something the whole party had to work around. Everything built aggro quickly.

Tanks also had an aggro stance and a DPS stance. It was usually best to start off in aggro stance and then swap to DPS as the former nerfed your damage output. But everyone was expected to manage their personal aggro so the tank always kept the heat. The Archer skill, Quelling Strikes, was required for Black Mages, because of how fast one could out-aggro both tanks if they weren't in their aggro stance. Everyone had ways to personally manage it.

It's funny that the sentiment that tanking being dumbed down has never been as loud as it has been for healers because tanks still have interesting DPS skills.

FFXIV (much like Retail WoW) are modern games and threat management is a design of the past when combat used to me slower and more methodical. I 100% guarantee you that with today's battle design being full DDR and DPS running further ahead of the tank to pull it will result in a mess to re-educate people to play slower, to wait for tanks to build up threat before they can attack and so on.

There's still FFXI and WoW Classic for those types of mechanics, but personally I don't think there's a place for threat management in FFXIV anymore.


As for stances in general, I don't mind if stance gameplay comes back in some form, but is stance juggling in a dungeon something players might enjoy nowadays? (genuine question as I haven't played FFXIV when stances were still a thing, and in Classic WoW you don't really want to go off defensive when tanking as Prot Warrior)

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by XtremePrime

FFXIV (much like Retail WoW) are modern games and threat management is a design of the past when combat used to me slower and more methodical. I 100% guarantee you that with today's battle design being full DDR and DPS running further ahead of the tank to pull it will result in a mess to re-educate people to play slower, to wait for tanks to build up threat before they can attack and so on.

There's still FFXI and WoW Classic for those types of mechanics, but personally I don't think there's a place for threat management in FFXIV anymore.


As for stances in general, I don't mind if stance gameplay comes back in some form, but is stance juggling in a dungeon something players might enjoy nowadays? (genuine question as I haven't played FFXIV when stances were still a thing, and in Classic WoW you don't really want to go off defensive when tanking as Prot Warrior)

---

Well, to be honest, I am the DPS (and healer) that pulls stuff ahead of tanks 'cause ever since they removed aggro management from the game, I've been bored as hell in dungeons. With friends, we used to try and speedclear dungeons by minmaxing around tank stance amd cleric stance. I started playing near the end of Stormblood, so I learnt how to tank as my second job after SCH, and then immediately had all of the fun tank stuff removed, lol (and all of SCH's job identity).

I think the average 'modern' MMO player would probably not appreciate it, but I think it would make casual content (everything up to and including Extreme/Unreal/maybe Chaotic) a lot more engaging, I guess? Obviously, it was also a source of friction when you had a 'weak link' with you, but that's no different from today. And it was very much a 'play stupid games, win stupid prizes' situation, so DPS that didn't use LD/Diversion faced the consequences of their actions lol.

I feel like people were cure bots even then. And we've certainly always had "shield healers" who actually spam Adlo constantly and maintain 100% uptime on it. I think that all stances were either you use damage stance 99.99% of the time or you don't use it at all, there was that level of split. Don't get me wrong, tanks didn't heal themselves all on their own back then and things really hurt so Adlo was more useful, but still, I never needed to go quite that far.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by XtremePrime

FFXIV (much like Retail WoW) are modern games and threat management is a design of the past when combat used to me slower and more methodical. I 100% guarantee you that with today's battle design being full DDR and DPS running further ahead of the tank to pull it will result in a mess to re-educate people to play slower, to wait for tanks to build up threat before they can attack and so on.

---

It was never like that in the first place. Nobody needed to wait for you to build threat. In fact, you could simply keep tank stance on the entire time and have no trouble with threat. The problem is, keeping tank stance on or using threat combo reduced your outgoing damage, so the 50% of "damage obsessed" players would want to turn off tank stance ASAP. As such, they would either keep stance on for 1 enmity combo, or find clever ways to get aggro without using it at all - such as a lower DPS tank pulling, using self-heals while pulling, or shirk and having other jobs use enmity control/share abilities.

The issue with threat management was simply that a lot of people do not understand the concept. Everyone knows what a damage dealer is, because they just attack stuff. Easy to grasp. Everyone knows what a healer is, because almost every game genre has med packs or potions of some sort to restore HP. But how do you explain to people what a tank is if they've never run into the concept? To solve this problem, they made it so you turn tank stance on and then behave like a DPS, and now simply behaving like a DPS will achieve the bare minimum tasks involved in tanking most things.

Quote:

---

but is stance juggling in a dungeon something players might enjoy nowadays? (genuine question as I haven't played FFXIV when stances were still a thing, and in Classic WoW you don't really want to go off defensive when tanking as Prot Warrior)

---

Absolutely 100%. Stance juggling was my joy and the thing that made dungeons fun for me before Shadowbringers. The dungeons themselves were boring, so optimizing my damage in ways that clearly weren't intended and trying to reduce my use of tank stance was the only fun to be had given dungeons are zzz. It was really hard to lose them, but I knew it had to be done because as I said, a lot of new players don't understand what a tank even is and how it differs from a DPS.

And Cleric Stance juggling on healers was extremely fun because it's a risk-reward system and if you did it right without failing it felt good. There will always be people who don't find it fun and ultimately SE will always listen to the people who want it to be easier and more trivial.

I miss stances in general.

I agree that they need to add something to make combat more interesting when you're not fighting a giant wall boss in a trial, dungeon hallway trash has never been more brainless and boring. I'll accept stances.

Couldn't it just be that the game was also balanced without healer dps really accounted for and curebots weren't as noticeable back then?

Also modern healers are expected to have much higher dps uptime with the oGCD bloat and free weave windows so I assume we're also much more aware of it nowadays.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Azurarok

Couldn't it just be that the game was also balanced without healer dps really accounted for and curebots weren't as noticeable back then?

Also modern healers are expected to have much higher dps uptime with the oGCD bloat and free weave windows so I assume we're also much more aware of it nowadays.

---

UCOB came out at the same time stance dancing still existed. Healer dps was expected and required at this point in the game, and A3S would have been even more unclearable if it wasn't tuned to include healer dps. Fuck, they GAVE HEALERS ACCURACY GEAR because they knew healers would be doing damage back on HW. Like, they tacked on accuracy as an extra substat on some gear. Just so it wouldn't be miss city.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Azurarok

Couldn't it just be that the game was also balanced without healer dps really accounted for and curebots weren't as noticeable back then?

Also modern healers are expected to have much higher dps uptime with the oGCD bloat and free weave windows so I assume we're also much more aware of it nowadays.

---

The lack of awareness was more likely to be among new or casual players. Same as it is now, where someone just plays and doesn't have enough social circles to tell them it's more than just casting cure spells and doesn't read anything.

But it was also less likely that you'd discover it yourself. Cleric Stance was from Conjurer and had to be cross-classed. So if you only played Astrologian, or didn't engage with the cross-class system, then you might never have worked out that Cleric Stance existed. This is where the social connections and conversations of an MMO help a lot.

In the high-end content scene, though, healer DPS was definitely a thing. It goes back to ARR, where people couldn't help but notice there were healers in raids that were just literally standing there waiting until they needed to heal, when they could be doing damage. In Heavensward, any serious healer was actually prepared to contribute damage. I do remember that it became common for one healer to focus on it more though and kinda push the healing burden on their co-healer, but I've never been a healer main so that was just what I saw some of them saying.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by IOwn92FCHouses

UCOB came out at the same time stance dancing still existed. Healer dps was expected and required at this point in the game, and A3S would have been even more unclearable if it wasn't tuned to include healer dps. Fuck, they GAVE HEALERS ACCURACY GEAR because they knew healers would be doing damage back on HW. Like, they tacked on accuracy as an extra substat on some gear. Just so it wouldn't be miss city.

---

Cleric stance, if we're talking about healers, was removed after HW (and only existed as a 10% damage buff role action in SB), so there was no stance dancing in ultimates.
Healers also didn't have any accuracy on their gear in HW and that's why it was such a pain to kit them for damage because all of your materia slots went for accuracy on prog gear iirc or close to it.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Valence

Cleric stance, if we're talking about healers, was removed after HW (and only existed as a 10% damage buff role action in SB), so there was no stance dancing in ultimates.
Healers also didn't have any accuracy on their gear in HW and that's why it was such a pain to kit them for damage because all of your materia slots went for accuracy on prog gear iirc or close to it.

---

I was more referring to tank stance dancing when referring to the time period. No idea why I thought tank stance dancing. The period where they gave healers gear with accuracy as a 3rd substat was in ARR. You can still see the small amount of "Direct Hit" on the gear. That's what I was referring to there, I just misremembered the expansion because I'm slow today. Am example can be seen here: https://na.finalfantasyxiv.com/lodes...m/3854ade519a/

I'm glad SE removed CS as it was terrible, and I started healing right away after that positive change.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Atreus

I miss stances in general.

---

Same :(
I had fun with tank stances. Even if it's simple, at least it provides extra fun in dungeon. Though honestly I missed aggro management in general.

The stances were widely considered useless outside of Cleric Stance, which I don't know anyone who even liked CS dancing. I don't know why we're romanticizing a mechanic that players did not use outside of story content, and even then it was rare.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Enjuden

The stances were widely considered useless outside of Cleric Stance, which I don't know anyone who even liked CS dancing. I don't know why we're romanticizing a mechanic that players did not use outside of story content, and even then it was rare.

---

Tank stances weren't considered useless. One of them was for generating enmity and reducing incoming damage, while the other was for doing damage, and stance dancing was extremely common. It was also common for the off tanks to use their damage stance and the main tank to want to generate enmity and damage reduction.

I struggle to believe you that I was the only one using Cleric Stance to deal damage.

Due to tank stance being firmly an enmity stance today, it's a common misconception that old tank stances were first an enmity stance. Sure they did provide x1.7 on aggro generation (+70%), which was a safety net to keep up with DPS classes in a vacuum, but they also provided +20% mitigation which was their real value especially for casuals in dungeons (now under tank mastery). Meanwhile the aggro combos generated between 6x and 8x enmity (Flash on its own generated 1200 potency of enmity per cast, so approximately 10 times the potency of most basic AoEs). Anybody could perfectly keep enmity as a tank by just spamming the aggro combo.

That's also why a lot of casual players with bad gear and/or lesser skills would regularly fail to keep aggro even with their stance on, because they didn't manage the aggro combos properly.

Yeah. I learned Dark Knight when stances still mattered and it was a blast, even though I died plenty of times in cruel and unfortunate ways (read: The Vault). It's less romanticizing and more that, despite thinking there is enough casual content, this would be a much better way to enhance the depth of dungeon gameplay than vomiting targeted circle AoEs at you. When I healed, my friends would tell me to hold off on healing them too early during pulls for the risk of generating too much aggro. (Unrelatedly, I miss SCH's DOTs and its control over the faeries. You used to be able to manually trigger Embrace and target your player of choice, often with a macro. I miss those days.


And it's not just casual content. Some Savage fights had aggro resets in there, requiring the tanks to sufficiently rebuild enmity and the healers to not generate too much enmity with healing while that happens. That's fun, and it adds depth.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by 0blivion

...maybe I do miss cleric stance. Cleric stance was a trashfire because it did require a lot of personal responsibility from the other party members, but I s2g we had less curebots back then. Sure, there was still the average person doing single target cure III, but the epidemic of healers only doing triple digit damage in high level content wasn't quite there yet. I think the fact that aggro combo got removed is a double edged sword - it reduced button bloat, but they could've consolidated it into the DMG combo by using a toggle.

Diversion and LD made aggro management a group activity, and while I don't miss it cuz Savage had forced aggro resets back then, it did make leveling dungeons more interesting. It's like... a lot of the gameplay was designed to have less friction in PF. That's not bad, but that's why people who do less damage than the LB get dragged over the finish line of content they really shouldn't be in, and then they cause issues on the higher floors.

So... Idk, man, rework healers or at least remove Cure I and Benefic or let them upgrade. Yikes.

---

Cleric Stance could return as a solo tool.

We have the tech already, Blue Mages have a spell called Basic Instinct that buffs their solo damage, but is not available if you're in a party.

Because people complain it's easy and square knows if they cater to those style of players, they will be happy. After all, those same people will stand afk in limsa and complain how content is hard. Just looking back at some previous games and you notice the spike in difficulty and how tank must manage aggro, healers must be aware to not pull with massive healings, dps must be afraid of big threat or use spells to reduce it. Just shows a nice gameplay where each player must think of their actions. Here we have nothing of that.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Jeeqbit

Tank stances weren't considered useless. One of them was for generating enmity and reducing incoming damage, while the other was for doing damage, and stance dancing was extremely common. It was also common for the off tanks to use their damage stance and the main tank to want to generate enmity and damage reduction.

I struggle to believe you that I was the only one using Cleric Stance to deal damage.

---

It wasn't common at all. I've ran that content for hundreds of hours back then, the tanks never bothered to use tank stance. It simply wasn't needed if you used strength accessories. There was nothing in the game that did enough damage to matter on that, where the only exception to the rule is week 1 Gordias. BTW, Gordias week 1 was mathematically impossible to clear and outscaled players, so you couldn't even tank the damage with Vit accessories regardless.

Not to mention you lost threat to dps unless you were actively trolling and only did the aggro combo in tank stance. As for why on that, you lost 15% damage with the stance on. You will hit enrage with the thing on unless you outgeared the content. Once Shirk came into play in Stormblood, it was considered entirely useless for obvious reasons.

I struggle to believe your reading comprehension was so poor that you somehow misread Cleric Stance wasn't used. "The stances were widely considered useless outside of Cleric Stance." Where in that sentence did you somehow grasp Cleric Stance wasn't used?

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Enjuden

It wasn't common at all. I've ran that content for hundreds of hours back then, the tanks never bothered to use tank stance. It simply wasn't needed if you used strength accessories. There was nothing in the game that did enough damage to matter on that, where the only exception to the rule is week 1 Gordias. BTW, Gordias week 1 was mathematically impossible to clear and outscaled players, so you couldn't even tank the damage with Vit accessories regardless.

Not to mention you lost threat to dps unless you were actively trolling and only did the aggro combo in tank stance. As for why on that, you lost 15% damage with the stance on. You will hit enrage with the thing on unless you outgeared the content. Once Shirk came into play in Stormblood, it was considered entirely useless for obvious reasons.

I struggle to believe your reading comprehension was so poor that you somehow misread Cleric Stance wasn't used. "The stances were widely considered useless outside of Cleric Stance." Where in that sentence did you somehow grasp Cleric Stance wasn't used?

---

You are mistaken. Stance dancing was normal due to the mitigation the stance offered. Massive pulls in dungeons without a WHM to holy spam stun (prior to the Diminishing Returns added to it due to the broken stun locking) most definitely were helped by using the stance since SCH could not reliably "oh ****" button you back to full.

Trying to think back on raids and I am still struggling to think of a time in ARR and HW where stance dancing for tanks was not the norm.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Enjuden

It wasn't common at all. I've ran that content for hundreds of hours back then, the tanks never bothered to use tank stance. It simply wasn't needed if you used strength accessories.

---

It was like a 50% split at best. A lot of casual players "believed" in using exclusively tank stance, whereas the "raider" and "DPS" type players were more interested in using exclusively DPS stance as much as possible. At least in Stormblood, when Savage was easier to do due to cross-world PF, I even saw this split where some Savage PFers just used tank stance the whole time.

Quote:

---

I struggle to believe your reading comprehension was so poor that you somehow misread Cleric Stance wasn't used. "The stances were widely considered useless outside of Cleric Stance." Where in that sentence did you somehow grasp Cleric Stance wasn't used?

---

"I don't know why we're romanticizing a mechanic that players did not use outside of story content, and even then it was rare."

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Shipp

Trying to think back on raids and I am still struggling to think of a time in ARR and HW where stance dancing for tanks was not the norm.

---

It was normal for WAR due to Unleashed allowing you to ignore the damage reduction of Defiance if I remember correctly. You'd usually open with WAR as the MT due to that since the WAR wouldn't lose any DPS to build up aggro, then you could tank swap if needed.
But otherwise, at least in HW and onward, tank raiders would just run content in dps stance because vs all bosses the added mitigation wasn't needed. You could open the fight in tank stance to build up aggro though, people did that especially without a WAR as mentioned above. It was in dungeons or even extreme with more casual players that you'd see people sit in tank stance or stance dance. Dungeons because mitigation wasn't a joke in some pulls, and also because you had to adjust to the people you'd get in the party, whether it was the healer unable to follow and/or the dps not killing things fast enough.

Ah Scholar for me was peak with CS, controlling Selene/EOS as I see fit with embrace, 6 or so dots with cross class Thunder and Aero, protect and stone skin, co-healing with my WHM friend meaning they did a lot of it lol it was fun even though CS was janky and risk/reward attached to it, don’t miss the keepers Hymn change of stats. The silliness of protect wars at start of a raid/dungeon etc. I suppose i like the button nature busy nature of the game, job interaction and enmity it just felt satisfying. The game has moved on and that’s fine too and i continue to play dps now as for me healers got dull and the job interplay of trinity, enmity changes and removal of dots took away some of that joy for me.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Valence

It was normal for WAR due to Unleashed allowing you to ignore the damage reduction of Defiance if I remember correctly. You'd usually open with WAR as the MT due to that since the WAR wouldn't lose any DPS to build up aggro, then you could tank swap if needed.
But otherwise, at least in HW and onward, tank raiders would just run content in dps stance because vs all bosses the added mitigation wasn't needed. You could open the fight in tank stance to build up aggro though, people did that especially without a WAR as mentioned above. It was in dungeons or even extreme with more casual players that you'd see people sit in tank stance or stance dance. Dungeons because mitigation wasn't a joke in some pulls, and also because you had to adjust to the people you'd get in the party, whether it was the healer unable to follow and/or the dps not killing things fast enough.

---

I had quit towards the end of HW, so that may very well be the case for that time period forward.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Valence

It was normal for WAR due to Unleashed allowing you to ignore the damage reduction of Defiance if I remember correctly. You'd usually open with WAR as the MT due to that since the WAR wouldn't lose any DPS to build up aggro, then you could tank swap if needed.

---

I knew of WARs that did this in HW for sure. In Stormblood I'd get the WARs to open savage fights.

Quote:

---

You could open the fight in tank stance to build up aggro though, people did that especially without a WAR as mentioned above.

---

I did this on PLD. I opened a fight in tank stance and did 1 enmity combo, then switched. In Stormblood, I found that I needed to do 3 enmity combos before switching to prevent losing aggro. Sometimes I could get away with less enmity combos if the party wasn't good or was making great use of enmity-reduction abilities, but it varied greatly depending on the party.

Quote:

---

It was in dungeons or even extreme with more casual players that you'd see people sit in tank stance or stance dance. Dungeons because mitigation wasn't a joke in some pulls

---

Personally I used tank stance the entire time for trash. PLD didn't have much AoE in HW and then in Stormblood, Bloodbath was given to the DPS instead.

To me, this is what stance dancing was but it was something to think about and keep track of, whereas there is nothing to think about now.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by XtremePrime

FFXIV (much like Retail WoW) are modern games and threat management is a design of the past when combat used to me slower and more methodical. I 100% guarantee you that with today's battle design being full DDR and DPS running further ahead of the tank to pull it will result in a mess to re-educate people to play slower, to wait for tanks to build up threat before they can attack and so on.

There's still FFXI and WoW Classic for those types of mechanics, but personally I don't think there's a place for threat management in FFXIV anymore.


As for stances in general, I don't mind if stance gameplay comes back in some form, but is stance juggling in a dungeon something players might enjoy nowadays? (genuine question as I haven't played FFXIV when stances were still a thing, and in Classic WoW you don't really want to go off defensive when tanking as Prot Warrior)

---

I mean that would be fine if FF14 didn't insist on slowing down dungeons with so many invisible walls. Mass pulling Braylox Hard is fun.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Jeeqbit

I did this on PLD. I opened a fight in tank stance and did 1 enmity combo, then switched. In Stormblood, I found that I needed to do 3 enmity combos before switching to prevent losing aggro. Sometimes I could get away with less enmity combos if the party wasn't good or was making great use of enmity-reduction abilities, but it varied greatly depending on the party.

---

Yeah Paladin had a bit of trouble keeping up with sudden big bursts of DPS damage. During O12S M/F prog I had to swap to the light party of the DRK as a MCH for the re opener after M/F split, else the PLD wouldn't be able to keep up with the burst aggro generation even with Quelling up. But I guess it was one of the most extreme pairings you could find back then: the most sustain oriented tank and the craziest burst damage dps job competing for aggro on resource ready re-openers (aka bursting immediately without pre heating)... That's an illustration of what I liked about it, you had to talk to your team mates and adjust things around because every job had their pros and cons to play around, much like MCH/SMN were unable to kill their adds in time in O7S because their filler damage was too low, that kind of stuff.