Possible alteration to Cleric Stance

[Shurrikhan]

"In check" might not have been the best way to describe. However Accuracy is a good way to arbitrarily limit Healer DPS to a curve that satisfies the dev team.

That's also why I feel the Accuracy stat is here to stay - because of Healer DPS. It's an arbitrary limit that the Dev team can put without actually removing Cleric Stance from the game. Healer DPS has so much potential in this game due to the nature of Cleric Stance (you get enough INT to rival a BLM/SMN of equal ilvl), they want to try to control it so it's harder for healers to contribute damage. Of course if they make the accuracy requirement to stringent it'll just dissuade any healer from DPSing because it starts to become a waste of MP. We're not at that point yet but if we continue the current trend we'll probably hit that point in 3.4.

Having Cleric Stance have a accuracy bonus based on ilvl is a good way to work around that. Healer's will still need Accuracy but perhaps not to the magnitude we will most likely expect at 3.4. ATM it's not bad, but it has the potential to become absolutely terrible in the future and should be addressed at least in some capacity. Even if that address is "Please meld Accuracy onto your pieces" from the Dev team, I'd be happy because at least then I know what direction the Dev team is going with this trend.

I get that--it fills what merits the Devs seem to desire from it, if nothing else--and I too would have liked to simply heard something one way or the other from the Dev team to confirm their direction. It just seems a bit like a double-standard to have taken the option of focusing on eHP vs. damage dealt mostly away from tanks (for better or likely worse, parry is still a community running joke, so there's some negotiation there), but then have healers either sink secondary stats into improving Rain of Death dps (up to Barded-cap) and their heals... or simply improve no-Rain dps. Worse, it makes a weird balance between WHM and AST/SCH parity due to the presence or lack of direct damage (and thereby accuracy requirements) on DoTs. It just leaves a slight twinge of regret and faint confusion. Especially when messing with the damage-increasing multiplier itself would have the same effect...
...apart from starting off at a lower place and gradually scaling higher compared to others as raid tiers demand more accuracy...
...which leads me back to the textwall I placed earlier. I really don't like accuracy as it currently is. I mean, I would... it were more than just a gearing consideration and a raid dps diminisher... But... /sigh.

[JackFross]

Sorry, I was referring to its value within what I had proposed earlier, not as it currently is.

Ah, that's my bad, I should have paid more attention.

All I really have to add, though, is that Accuracy caps will never be optional for anyone who can miss. If you have even a slight chance to miss the boss due to a certain situation or position or anything, you are playing sub-optimally. You should never be relying on one skill to be used for a marginal gain in stats. Even a gain of 60 secondary stats is ~10 points of main stat, which is less than 1/3 of the (borderline-negligible) gains we get from Attribute Points.

/// And general concerns

I don't disagree with all the people parroting the same shit that's been tread in this thread again and again.

Accuracy isn't interesting or varied, but it's right now the only thing that makes gearing up anything more than braindead. I hate to repeat myself, so I won't. I explained this earlier.

As it stands, Accuracy is the only thing that makes gearing up interesting, challenging, and fun. If you remove that stat from the game, everything just becomes boring. You just slap on the highest dps piece and you're good, because, at the end of the day, this game is all about how much damage you can do to the target. Unless these secondaries are some fourth, fifth, or sixth way of boosting damage dealt in a meaningful way, they'll be widely ignored for the crit/det options.

And I have yet to see a single person propose how this statement is anything other than accurate. The only thought that goes into gearing up is "how will I maximize [favored stat] while meeting Accuracy?" - if you remove Accuracy without doing anything else, that statement becomes "I will maximize [favored stat!]"

So, like, if people wanna sit here and keep saying "get rid of accuracy" or "here's a way to make accuracy not matter" - provide me with some sort of example of what they could implement instead to actually keep choices of gear. Despite what everyone says about Accuracy limiting options, it is actually the reason that options exist in the first place. The main reason to choose one piece over another of equivalent item level is the accuracy on the two items. Sure, it results in one "best in slot" set that is definitively better on paper than any other set you could conceive, but uh, so what? What sorts of stats would you add where this would not be the case?

Or is the issue simply just that Accuracy is a poor choice for this, because it gimps Healers for no reason at all? (which is a fair criticism, and the very first post I made in this thread has me saying that all they need to do is put a 5% accuracy boost on Cleric Stance and they're golden)

[Shurrikhan]

And I have yet to see a single person propose how this statement is anything other than accurate. The only thought that goes into gearing up is "how will I maximize [favored stat] while meeting Accuracy?" - if you remove Accuracy without doing anything else, that statement becomes "I will maximize [favored stat!]"

So, like, if people wanna sit here and keep saying "get rid of accuracy" or "here's a way to make accuracy not matter" - provide me with some sort of example of what they could implement instead to actually keep choices of gear. Despite what everyone says about Accuracy limiting options, it is actually the reason that options exist in the first place. The main reason to choose one piece over another of equivalent item level is the accuracy on the two items. Sure, it results in one "best in slot" set that is definitively better on paper than any other set you could conceive, but uh, so what? What sorts of stats would you add where this would not be the case?

Or is the issue simply just that Accuracy is a poor choice for this, because it gimps Healers for no reason at all? (which is a fair criticism, and the very first post I made in this thread has me saying that all they need to do is put a 5% accuracy boost on Cleric Stance and they're golden)

This certainly isn't as solid an answer as you were hoping for, and it will largely be reiteration, but temporary (early/late game - low stats, high stats) weight-scaling imbalance between stats could go a fair way into interesting gearing or meaningful stat choice IF the secondary stats are abundant enough to actually reach very high amounts prior to the end of a given expansion, and if each stat can still be useful in both at low and high amounts.

For instance, in ARR critical strike was the preferred stat even by allegedly Det-high classes, to a point. Or, from the opposite perspective, even among Crit-high classes, Crit eventually gave way to Det and/or Speed. Even Bards' critical strike contribution tapered drastically enough that if Det had been even more of an intensely ideal for AAs, it would have been preferred over the holy River of Blood secondary stat at a certain point (though we never quite reached it). Skill Speed already has the complexity of having a few different usable plateaus, but some of these take drastic amounts of Skill Speed to reach, and the stat itself fairs poorly until it's gradually reducing the global by a greater and greater percent of the remainder (at which point its contribution is crippled by animation speed oversights, and partly by TP drain). In other words it had a linear value stat, a de-exponential relative value stat, and an exponential relative value stat. Though less obvious than missed attacks, that is a balance around which to build one's gear, each with equal or greater complexity than gearing for proper (least excess) accuracy. Some of the largest wasted opportunities we have now lie simply in Crit's "fix" and Speed's lack thereof.

Now, that's by no means a reason to remove accuracy. And if Accuracy were reduced as a percent of the total, the amounts saved (how little excess Accuracy one can have) would be that much less satisfying. I agree with you in that. I simply thought it expendible even so, IF, and only if, the other stats were at least balanced as to provide additional equilibrium to balance one's gearing around, noticeably, even now. That's why I included a few ways to fix the oversights on Skill Speed in my reply. (I didn't mean to ignore your post; I found it relevant to what you were asking.) It's also why I dislike what's been done with Critical Strike, in pairing the actual chance growth with increased crit bonus. The oversights to the first, and the overpowered fix to the second reduce the ideal gearing points we can aim for apart from finely cut accuracy. Crit even reduces the decision making on virtually every class to "how do I get the most Crit with the least of my shittiest stat", by being the highest weighted at any amount (after necessary speed plateaus).

(Granted, that find-the-Crit style gearing may be an equally enjoyable task to some; you have the "good" stat, and the "bad" stat(s), and maybe a mediocre one, too, and you want to maximize the "good"; the distinction is certainly stronger than if each stat were equally good, albeit with different ideal proportions and uses. I guess this too may come down to personal preferences.)

(To be honest, I could go either way on whether there is a noticeable best stat at a given level in other stats (whether each has a preferred relative amount to balance around), but at the very least I'd like to see each balanced against the others. Looking up a stat weight for my job is not interesting--all the less so when those stat weights are less dynamic. But at least having the choice of whether I want to go for an extended rotation or not (for indistinguishable outputs, or almost indistinguishable outputs correlatable with their required skill to perform), to have so many Bloodletters it's difficult to get every oGCD in before Internal Release ends or not, would feel damn good, given how little other avenues of customization there are. I like plateau-matching, but I also like the general freedom to customize.)

>> On topic: With all things as they are, I too would be quite happy with just a bonus 5% accuracy on Cleric Stance as well, if only because that'd at least leave them a few melds left to choose something else for coming into later Midas-S floors.

[Duelle]

Unfortunately, because of way Cleric Stances work you can't possible have an encounter so healing intensive that you're forced to heal every GCD. If you do that you're effectively going to run the healer out of MP in like 6-7 minutes without support like Mage's Ballad and thus making encounters exceedingly short at that point compared to the current 10-13 minute encounters we have (whether this is good or bad is up to the Dev team to decide).

The MP problem could be handled if a stat existed that boosted MP recovered in combat. That way your healing-intensive fights would make healers pace themselves. It'd make BRDs not as mandatory, and would lead to changing Ballad into a cooldown rather than a perpetuated effect along with a BRD DPS increase, but I'm fine with that.

It's an interesting trap the Dev team put themselves in when they made Cleric Stance. I've played quite a few MMOs in my past and FFXIV is the first MMO where a healer has the ability to have their main attack stat comparable to magical DPS and have similar restrictions and freedoms their magic wielding counterparts have too. It makes for interesting play as a healer while also making it a very difficult thing to balance from a development perspective. If you make Healer DPS too powerful, normal DPS will start to complain at the ease healer's get. It also allows for specific groups to clear content earlier than intended because of the amount of DPS a healer can provide over the course of a fight. If both healer's combined contribute 6-8% DPS total that's 6-8% DPS less the raid has to do to clear content. Since content isn't designed with healer DPS in mind, it almost feels like the dev team has to provide something arbitrary to try to keep healer DPS in check so content is cleared exceedingly fast which is a fine line to tread.

I've always been of the opinion Cleric Stance exists to help healers solo stuff like quests, FATEs and such. The penalties make it very clear it's not intended to be used during a raid, but I think player stubborness, oversights influencing player behavior (SCH), and content not conditioning people to fights that require constant healing with no time to DPS all led to this.

Something I see happening is raid content and gearing options will sort of continue to aim to make healer DPS inconvenient at best and outright threatening to the raid's success at worst.

Another avenue would be to have healer DPS provide some mechanical benefit to healers to further encourage healers to learn to weave in attack spells in between heals. Of course, this is something I feel better fits a brand new healer as a unique mechanic for them and would be squandered if this was implemented on WHM, SCH and AST.

Another alternative would be to remove Cleric Stance, have healer offensive spells scale with MND (they'd need to attach this to the SCH job stone to keep SMN from double-dipping) but at a lesser value than what's gained from INT (for the sake of simplicity, if 1 INT = 1 Magic Attack, 1 MND = .7 Magic Attack).

[HPDelron]

... provide me with some ...implement ..choices of gear.

Regardless of one's stance on accuracy this is an interesting question. At the most basic the issue is that all stats more or less boil down to output (HPS/DPS). Say, in addition to the current effect DET looked like this:

Determination: Increases the size of Area of Effect abilities.
SCH Trait: Determination increases the duration of Galvanize effects.
WHM Trait: Determination has double the normal effect on Tetragrammaton.
AST Trait: Chance when you use Royal Road to finish the cool down on Draw & Redraw increases with determination.

With similar treatments for other stats. Some already have this, like the crit and Adloquium interaction. Which isn't to say this exact example is what they should go for. Just that on a conceptual level the way one way to get stat variety is making them more just things that are plugged into a HPs formula.

[Ghishlain]

The MP problem could be handled if a stat existed that boosted MP recovered in combat. That way your healing-intensive fights would make healers pace themselves. It'd make BRDs not as mandatory, and would lead to changing Ballad into a cooldown rather than a perpetuated effect along with a BRD DPS increase, but I'm fine with that.

A players natural MP regeneration is approximately 2% of their max pool while in combat, thus increasing Piety does also increase the amount of MP a caster regains every server tick. You need 50MP to gain an additional 1MP/tick. For WHMs and ASTs that's approximately 7.73 Piety per 1 MP/tick and for SCHs that's approximately 8.07 Piety per 1 MP/tick. Of course this would mean stacking Piety but that's not too hard to do with the amount of PIE pieces there are in the current itemization.

Even so, at 15,000 MP a healer would be regaining 300 MP / tick (1,500 MP every 15 seconds). Casting Physick / Cure every GCD would be 442 MP/cast (2,652 MP every 15 seconds - less as an AST due to their 20% MP costs). This means a net loss of 1,152 MP every 15 seconds and thus a healer would go OOM basically in 195 seconds (3 minutes and 15 seconds) without any support from things like Shroud, Assize, Aetherflow, Ballad, Freecure, etc. Assize would give you 1,500 MP back so you're good to go for another 18-21 seconds or so and Shroud is another 3,535 MP which means you're good for another 45 seconds of intensive healing (not including Freecure or even use of Cure II if absolutely necessary, or AoE healing too).

Because of this, I don't find "Increasing healing intensity of a fight to limit Cleric Stance" a viable option from a development standpoint.

I've always been of the opinion Cleric Stance exists to help healers solo stuff like quests, FATEs and such. The penalties make it very clear it's not intended to be used during a raid, but I think player stubborness, oversights influencing player behavior (SCH), and content not conditioning people to fights that require constant healing with no time to DPS all led to this.

Something I see happening is raid content and gearing options will sort of continue to aim to make healer DPS inconvenient at best and outright threatening to the raid's success at worst.

Another avenue would be to have healer DPS provide some mechanical benefit to healers to further encourage healers to learn to weave in attack spells in between heals. Of course, this is something I feel better fits a brand new healer as a unique mechanic for them and would be squandered if this was implemented on WHM, SCH and AST.

Another alternative would be to remove Cleric Stance, have healer offensive spells scale with MND (they'd need to attach this to the SCH job stone to keep SMN from double-dipping) but at a lesser value than what's gained from INT (for the sake of simplicity, if 1 INT = 1 Magic Attack, 1 MND = .7 Magic Attack).

Yeah, I agree with the assessment that Cleric Stance was certainly a tool designed for solo content that has morphed / mutated into its current incarnation. I don't personally agree with removing Cleric Stance and having the attack spells based on MND because I feel there's a skill component involved with using Cleric Stance at appropriate times that would be lost if we shifted to a MND = Magic Attack Power (even at the ratio you suggested) But that's just my personal bias on that particular matter.

I do like the idea of a more DPS oriented healer role and would like to see that for say, a Dancer job if they introduce Dancer.

[Shurrikhan]

The MP problem could be handled if a stat existed that boosted MP recovered in combat. That way your healing-intensive fights would make healers pace themselves. It'd make BRDs not as mandatory, and would lead to changing Ballad into a cooldown rather than a perpetuated effect along with a BRD DPS increase, but I'm fine with that.

I've always been of the opinion Cleric Stance exists to help healers solo stuff like quests, FATEs and such. The penalties make it very clear it's not intended to be used during a raid, but I think player stubborness, oversights influencing player behavior (SCH), and content not conditioning people to fights that require constant healing with no time to DPS all led to this.

Something I see happening is raid content and gearing options will sort of continue to aim to make healer DPS inconvenient at best and outright threatening to the raid's success at worst.

Another avenue would be to have healer DPS provide some mechanical benefit to healers to further encourage healers to learn to weave in attack spells in between heals. Of course, this is something I feel better fits a brand new healer as a unique mechanic for them and would be squandered if this was implemented on WHM, SCH and AST.

1. Even in MMOs that have both MP-maximum and MP-regen boosting stats, there's almost always a very clear choice of which is preferable. If there are no class-derived preferences you base your eMaxMP on clear or heal-intensive phase time, and gear for only as much MP-max boost as needed. If anyone were ever annoyed by how excess accuracy varies from fight to fight, yet ilvl differences make it useless to swap out gear for a better acc balance, this would be utter hell by comparison. Though I'll agree that Ballad could probably take on a number of different forms while still being useful, and likely more interesting, depending especially on how healer mana considerations and/or gearing pans out.

2. Seeing as healer dps has been significant even as far back as 1.0 and even the massively trimmed 1.2, I cannot share that opinion. Tanks, dps, and healers have traditionally been fairly hybrid, in just about every iteration of FF, and in every iteration of FFXIV thus far. The removal of Cleric from PvP and Strength accessories as a significant option for tanks are the only real attempts SE has made to purposely move away from that.

3. I certainly hope not.

4. This would be neat. Though you can pretty well bet it's not going to be unique to a single healer. A mandatory DPS-weaving healer would either outpace the others when the timing works for it or plummet when it doesn't. That's like designing a fight that takes a 13 second break every 24 seconds, and then calling Monks balanced within it. Either it would need a huge amount of leniency or it would become a design consideration then-on as not to create imbalance between jobs. Add that mechanic/consideration to near-equal degree among all healers, and then rather than a cause for real complaint, it's merely something that they must all work around. They can still do this in different ways, they just, at least in so far as FFXIV has tried to maintain its balance, vary wildly in usefulness within or consequent to that mechanic (or lack thereof).

[Shurrikhan]

At the most basic the issue is that all stats more or less boil down to output (HPS/DPS). Say, in addition to the current effect DET looked like this:

Determination: Increases the size of Area of Effect abilities.
SCH Trait: Determination increases the duration of Galvanize effects.
WHM Trait: Determination has double the normal effect on Tetragrammaton.
AST Trait: Chance when you use Royal Road to finish the cool down on Draw & Redraw increases with determination.

...on a conceptual level the way one way to get stat variety is making them more just things that are plugged into a HPs formula.

So something like gearing for utility/burst/saving stats vs. general output stats? If any of these stats are going to be one's they'd have already preferred, it's not really going to add anything to the table, decision-wise, even if their outputs may become that much more noticeable.

/Imagining if several CDs all scaled with Spell Speed, for instance.

[Duelle]

1. Even in MMOs that have both MP-maximum and MP-regen boosting stats, there's almost always a very clear choice of which is preferable. If there are no class-derived preferences you base your eMaxMP on clear or heal-intensive phase time, and gear for only as much MP-max boost as needed. If anyone were ever annoyed by how excess accuracy varies from fight to fight, yet ilvl differences make it useless to swap out gear for a better acc balance, this would be utter hell by comparison. Though I'll agree that Ballad could probably take on a number of different forms while still being useful, and likely more interesting, depending especially on how healer mana considerations and/or gearing pans out.

What I was thinking more was using the item budget that would go into accuracy towards the MP5 equivalent on raid gear or tying MP regen to Piety. But yeah, I can see this would create a juggling act for healers.

2. Seeing as healer dps has been significant even as far back as 1.0 and even the massively trimmed 1.2, I cannot share that opinion. Tanks, dps, and healers have traditionally been fairly hybrid, in just about every iteration of FF, and in every iteration of FFXIV thus far. The removal of Cleric from PvP and Strength accessories as a significant option for tanks are the only real attempts SE has made to purposely move away from that.

I'll point to the very accuracy woes healers are going through right now. Action or inaction isn't indicative of much, though. I mean, the devs could easily go into 4.0 with a mechanic that punishes healers for DPSing in group content but not do anything at this very moment because that would create several problems.

3. I certainly hope not.

If the devs aim to tune raids around a certain level of damage, they need to minimize the effect of as many outliers as possible. The change to tank stats was one such attempt (whether it fully panned out or not is another story), and I know the spotlight would eventually fall on healers.

4. This would be neat. Though you can pretty well bet it's not going to be unique to a single healer. A mandatory DPS-weaving healer would either outpace the others when the timing works for it or plummet when it doesn't. That's like designing a fight that takes a 13 second break every 24 seconds, and then calling Monks balanced within it. Either it would need a huge amount of leniency or it would become a design consideration then-on as not to create imbalance between jobs. Add that mechanic/consideration to near-equal degree among all healers, and then rather than a cause for real complaint, it's merely something that they must all work around. They can still do this in different ways, they just, at least in so far as FFXIV has tried to maintain its balance, vary wildly in usefulness within or consequent to that mechanic (or lack thereof).

Weaving in DPS skills to maintain a buff is not exactly going to make or break an encounter fight. If the concern is using the DPS skills while in Cleric Stance, all you'd need to do is design the ability to lose its additional effects when in Cleric Stance or tying it to a stance that overrides Cleric Stance.

As an example, imagine if SCH's lv30 ability was a stance that changed the Bio and Miasma spell lines into HoTs, and Broil had a chance of making the next spell cast free but only while in that stance. In theory SCH wouldn't touch Cleric Stance because a) they'd need to be in their stance to have access to their healing spells and b) Broil's benefit can only be received while in that stance. It's a very basic example, but numbers-wise this hypothetical SCH's DPS wouldn't really make much of a difference to raid DPS, and would probably be along the lines of a non-Cleric Stance WHM throwing in Aero/Aero II in between heals.

[_slowpoke_]

And I have yet to see a single person propose how this statement is anything other than accurate.

You're entirely ignoring that basically everyone who wants Accuracy gone also wants a general stat overhaul (which is what I have explicitly said in my posts). Dropping Accuracy (and the ability to miss) right now without any other changes to the game would be obviously not well thought out. I don't know why people would assume that this makes sense, it's an obvious straw man argument. The earliest anything like this could reasonably happen is 4.0.

Despite what everyone says about Accuracy limiting options, it is actually the reason that options exist in the first place.

No, that's not how options work, I don't understand how you would even come to this conclusion. Accuracy forces you to use specific pieces of gear from our already very limited pool. Remove Accuracy from the equation, and you can suddenly freely choose which pieces of gear you want in whatever order you want, freely focus on your substat(s) of choice, and experiment a lot more with them - which is already what most healers do, and it doesn't make gearing less interesting. The ability to freely meld materia of our choice instead of being basically forced to meld Accuracy (thanks to the current hit cap situation) would even improve this further.

This is why I still vehemently disagree that Accuracy makes gearing up interesting, quite the contrary. It's an arbitrary and badly implemented limit to gearing choices. FFXIV is an almost exclusively vertical progression MMO by fundamental design (whether you like that or not), and a stat that prevents you from using new (and, sans Accuracy, better) items because it would put you under said arbitrary limit has no place in such a game.