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

[Saccharin]

No, Cleric Stance is there to allow Healers to meet the DpS requirements of Solo content without being forced to party like they are in other MMOs. Healers stance dancing in duties is the result of unintended emergent gameplay.

That's not quite accurate.

Some MMOs just have one caster stat and both heals and damage spells are based on that.

Some MMOs have separate stats for healer spells like FF14 but their damage and healing spells scale off the same stat.

These mean that they dont need a special stance to do some damage while questing.

FF14 has two stats and all casting damage scales from one stat and all healing spells scale from that. This is in theory ideal since it means that healers can't be effective damage dealers. (Well..) It however poses one problem: how do healers do adequate damage while levelling outside, or downtime in instances. The solution: cleric stance. No matter what your class you have all four stats and these are usually known as base stats; these increase slightly while you level. During levelling when you have poor gear your base stats usually are more than enough. It's not until higher gear levels that you gear for your main stat and that means your main stat it's significantly higher than the others.

Take paladins for example: they use conjuror as their job support class. Now if you take cure you can do reasonable heals at lower levels and that's because it uses your base stats. When you gear up the mind component stays the same so with gear you'll have much more health so each heal will cover less of your overall health leaving it useless.

A similar thing happens for healers. As you level up and gear for mind you're damage spells will do proportionately less damage to mobs that are the same level but your heals will obviously increase. Cleric Stance introduces a give and take approach; it gives you the intellect, for damage, but it reduces your mind so you dont heal as much. This is accomplished by swapping the stats around - we can't have healers doing lot's of damage and heals! The 10% extra damage is probably to discourage healers to carry a dps gear set around.

[Ultimatecalibur]

That's not quite accurate.

Some MMOs just have one caster stat and both heals and damage spells are based on that.

Some MMOs have separate stats for healer spells like FF14 but their damage and healing spells scale off the same stat.

These mean that they dont need a special stance to do some damage while questing.

But in some (not all, but enough) MMOs, healer damage potential can be so bad that to complete tasks that Tanks and DpS can normally complete solo they need to party with others or they can not complete it in a timely manor.

We are looking at two sides of the same coin. We pretty much agree on the purpose of Cleric stance: Healers need to be effective in Solo content, but not so effective that they can perform equally to DpS in party content.

My "unintended emergent gameplay" point was about the fact that the Dev team did not expect Healers to "Stance Dance" with Cleric Stance in order to increase their DpS while doing a party content. Players realized that could do so and then ran with it.

Take paladins for example: they use conjuror as their job support class. Now if you take cure you can do reasonable heals at lower levels and that's because it uses your base stats. When you gear up the mind component stays the same so with gear you'll have much more health so each heal will cover less of your overall health leaving it useless.

Uhm, the major reason Paladin heals from Cures fall off so fast is because the magic damage on swords starts lower and scales far slower. (Weathered Shortsword starts at 4 Magic Damage and Almace scales to 53 Magic Damage while a Weathered Cane starts a 8 Magic Damage and Majestas ends up at 105 Magic Damage) That, combined with lack of Mind on Paladin gear, means that the gap between the amounts healed by a single Cure widens incredibly as ilevels increase. An i210 Paladin's Cure heals around as much as that of a naked White Mage using an i55 Weapon.