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

[UBERHAXED]

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?

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

[Hyperia]

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.

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.

[Andrea]

quoted the wrong person

you would be correct

[Alahra]

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.

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.

[AeraLure]

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.

[Ultimatecalibur]

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.

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)

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.

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.

[ZanzhizExaverion]

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

[Alahra]

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.

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).

[Mycow8me]

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.

[Ultimatecalibur]

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).

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.