Should Cleric Stance be disabled in party instances?

[Shurrikhan]

Why would there be anything wrong with Cleric Stance in party instances? Do we WANT a healer to be useless 80+% of the time?

At that point, I'd feel obliged to trim out the healer entirely on any dungeon that we overgear enough to forgo it, or doesn't facilitate mass pulls anyways.

Exactly this. Healer DPS should be encouraged, not demanded.

I never said cleric stance should be removed (heck, I even mentioned that I use it a lot), and even less so the utility of each healer. I'm just stating that, as long as people are not dying, a healer is fulfilling their requirement to the party. Dealing damage and buffing the party and are the marks of a healer who is confident and able to multi-task, which you have to be able to expect some are not capable of doing for whatever real-life reason (there are people who are genuinely terrified of things going downhill when they swap to cleric).

Why shouldn't it? We demand that dps dodge and that tanks deal damage, so what is wrong with expecting that a healer be idle only insofar as is required for his mana? Heck, it's no different than if a dps just stopped attacking outright after having dealt x dps, or the tank didn't bother with more than a couple cooldowns ever. That's your output. The damage is just as much your toolkit as the heals. The healer has been the highest-output role in the game since 2.0. Why shouldn't it be maximized? I'm all for finally adding some cross-role synergy and requiring DPS to finally do something something extra, but we should always be looking to do more, not less. The purpose of the healer is the same as anything else: output. If someone dies, then the healer and to whatever degree that person's failure to dodge are to blame for the lost dps during death and across Weakness, but honestly if a DPS is doing some 20% of his or her theoretical dps, the healer's doing twice as much and would have to make a full cast to ressurect him, with only 30 seconds left in the fight, limited mana, and no need for that DPS in the remaining mechanics... you benefit your party more by ignoring the fallen and continuing to DPS.

Your "role" is fluid. There is no hard "pledge" to sacrifice your party's progress or output in order to keep everyone alive or resurrected as quickly as possible. You keep people alive in order to further party progress and output.

Mastering that concept, figuring out how to help your party to do its best through direct and indirect contribution is what makes healers fun for me, and I'd actually really like to see more of that. Imagine if you could use Aero to accelerate an allies movement speed for a brief moment as to stay in an AoE until the last possible moment to dodge it but still being able to safely do so by way of that movement buff. Or if you could use your earthen damage dealt to improve your following stoneskins, or even summon an LoSing earthen pillar with limited HP. It wouldn't be healing, but it would still be creative means for contribution, much like best weaving in our dps or allowing our tank to better weave in theirs is now.

[Lmcgyver]

I feel like I am being misunderstood here, so let me try and make it clear; my stance is that healer DPS is fine as long as it does not interfere with the primary objective of keeping the party alive and clearing the content.

-Snip-

If a healer is not confident in their ability to deal damage whilst keeping the party alive, then they should not be forced to do so. Sure, encourage them to do it, but never force them.
This is nothing to do with dodging/mitigation (that's a part of any role), tanks dealing damage (that's a natural part of keeping enmity) or with DPS meeting a 'quota' (their job is to kill the enemy as fast as they can; "dealing 'x' damage" is 100% of the health of all enemies). Healers and tanks dealing additional damage should be an appreciated bonus, and not a demanded requirement (except in savage raiding, where every bit counts; but for regular instances, it really doesn't matter).

EDIT: Anyway, I originally posted here in response to someone implying that it was not a healer's primary role to heal (because it is their primary role to heal). I did not come here to have an argument about whether or not a healer should be expected to DPS with arbitrary comparisons to what tanks and DPS are expected to be doing. If you think healers are required to DPS, well, I can't be bothered arguing with a difference of opinion any longer, especially seeing as it is not directly related to the topic at hand (namely disabling cleric stance in duties... which I vehemently disagree with).