Should Cleric Stance be disabled in party instances?

[dragonseth07]

Wonder what that means?

It means he's glad he wasn't in that group with you. Your unwillingness to play your class to its full effectiveness hinders the group.

It works the same for any class: if you don't play it well because you don't want to, you are a burden. Ice Mages? I kick them. Bards who don't sing? Sorry, get out of my instance. Healer's who don't DPS are the same.

If all you want to do is heal, this game is not for you. It is not built for that. WoW is, however, and I suggest trying it. Legion is good.

[HPDelron]

If all you want to do is heal, this game is not for you. It is not built for that. WoW is, however, and I suggest trying it. Legion is good.

That might be all well and good, but the game lies to you about that. Even in their most recent novice hall training exercises healer-DPS is pitched as a nicety, a small aside a "good if you can, no biggie if you can't" kind of thing. If you put forward a dynamic where:

Tanks, Tank mostly.
DPS, DPS mostly.
Healers, DPS mostly.


Healers are the only ones not doing what they say on the tin. It is probably fair to that is the dynamic in dungeon content, I spend far more time in cleric's than not in expert/60 roulette. That is also by far the most common kind of content people run and what will define "end game" for the majority of the player base. There are a lot of "Healers" not being asked to do a whole lot of the thing the game told they're primarily there to do.

Presumably if they had wanted to primarily DPS they'd have rolled something with a red icon. It's hardly their fault the game lied to them.

[Normalizer]

I don't think anything should be done to cleric stance, but monsters need to do more damage. It's ridiculous that some lower level dungeons are more heal intensive than lv60 dungeons. I would go so far as to say that DPSing 95% of the time is BORING. I want to heal people. I picked a healer because I like healing and supporting people. I hope there is someone else out there who feels the way I do. You all just sound like you want to be damage dealers.

Someone already pointed out part of the reasons we have too much time to dps is because we overgeared dungeons by a lot on release. I suggest getting yourself a bare minimum gear set and use it whenever you want to go to dungeon and heal more than dps. It is however not really fair for the ones get in the dungeon with you through DF though.

For me if i want to heal a lot i normally queue up for Odin trial DF when i'm bored :P

[dragonseth07]

Sylphie is a not-so-subtle way to show people that Healer DPS is important. She's an annoying brat who is constantly saying "All I want to do is heal". The subtlety is apparently too strong.

[HPDelron]

Sylphie is a not-so-subtle way to show people that Healer DPS is important. She's an annoying brat who is constantly saying "All I want to do is heal". The subtlety is apparently too strong.

Those statements are made in response to the activities of study, communion and general chores. Ones that specifically needed to be done to make the act of healing safer. If it's supposed to be a statement on how healers should primarily focus on DPS it's both extremely roundabout and muddy as metaphor. Even if it was a rather elegant and clear one I'm not sure events-as-metaphor in skippable story cut scenes is the best way to drive home core game play principles. Doubly so if you're contradicting it with other more directly play related sources.

[dragonseth07]

Those statements are made in response to the activities of study, communion and general chores. Ones that specifically needed to be done to make the act of healing safer. If it's supposed to be a statement on how healers should primarily focus on DPS it's both extremely roundabout and muddy as metaphor. Even if it was a rather elegant and clear one I'm not sure events-as-metaphor in skippable story cut scenes is the best way to drive home core game play principles. Doubly so if you're contradicting it with other more directly play related sources.

You know? That's fair. Point conceded.

SE needs to decide whether they want Healer DPS to be important or not. The game feels very confused about that.

[FunkyBunch]

You know? That's fair. Point conceded.

SE needs to decide whether they want Healer DPS to be important or not. The game feels very confused about that.

PEOPLE are confused about that. The fact that the game is designed around doing something all the time is not confusing. People (read ONLY SOME HEALERS) just want to be confused to justify not doing things some of the time.

The fact that there are cooldowns and visible timers on your skills so you know when you cast what, is a pretty strong hint to just do something when nothing is cooling down. Coupled with the fact that every other class is always doing something all of the time, again, strongly points to that Healers should also be doing something all of the time.

[Allyrion]

PEOPLE are confused about that.

That's not entirely true. In one of the live letters back in ARR, the decks said they didn't expect healers to dps and were surprised to see high level FC doing so. They didn't want to remove the play style after seeing them do well but they said they would not design dps checks around it since it wasn't their original design.

That's the last I heard of this topic, but it was clear enough that the game wasn't designed around the hybrid playstyle we\\'ve come to expect. They may choose to embrace it with the coming expac or drop it.

Personally, if going with the former then I'd like more synergy with DPSing and healing. Like granting a stacking buff to your next healing spell for each damage spell cast. Something not a usable, limited due to CS's cd and not overtly powerful/necessary. Just something that offsets switching, adds some interesting mechanic to be aware of and ties back to your primary role.

If they decide to drop the playstyle, then Healers should gain more utility and mechanics to keep them busy while they focus on the party. Also more (incremental) damage and weaker healing so that real healing rotations could form. But it would definitely need more mechanics or it would be fairly boring to just spam the same spells.

[Khalithar]

It's ridiculous that some lower level dungeons are more heal intensive than lv60 dungeons. I would go so far as to say that DPSing 95% of the time is BORING. I want to heal people. I picked a healer because I like healing and supporting people. I hope there is someone else out there who feels the way I do. You all just sound like you want to be damage dealers.

I will say that I believe your feelings on the matter are perfectly fair and this perfectly valid feedback to have. Part of the reason healers (such as the SCH friend I named in my post earlier) can get away with dpsing 95% of the time is because the game and the content allows them to. The reason why we say you should be using cleric is that in the dungeon content (which is where the cleric stance complaints seems to be the most common) is because there is very little risk. I see your Main Class thing says you're a SCH, I don't know if you saw my post above but a friend of mine has macros for all her spells and Eos is able to handle nearly all the damage on the tank by herself because every spell my friend casts causes Eos to heal the tank.

So the more she does dps the more healing she puts out and she rarely ever needs to swap out of cleric even on the largest pulls. I pull everything, she does an adlo, goes cleric, and goes to town while Eos keeps me up. If I get low, she'll pop out of cleric, cast a lustrate or two to top me off, adlo me again, and go right back in to cleric and with Eos spamming heals on me she rarely needs to swap out of cleric as a result.

You can do a similar thing with whm/ast. Top off the tank, throw a HoT on them, go Cleric and go to town. Also I feel obligated to mention, Holy functions as an AoE stun, by going cleric and using Holy, you are not only dealing damage but also stunlocking the trash mobs and preventing the tank from taking any damage. Throw in an Assize as well and it's GG.

Do you see what I'm getting at here? I totally respect you want to be able to just heal and again, I believe your feedback is a perfectly valid one. However, the dungeon content at 60 just doesn't need someone to heal only.

The fact that there are cooldowns and visible timers on your skills so you know when you cast what, is a pretty strong hint to just do something when nothing is cooling down. Coupled with the fact that every other class is always doing something all of the time, again, strongly points to that Healers should also be doing something all of the time.

Also this.

[Lmcgyver]

I don't think anything should be done to cleric stance, but monsters need to do more damage. It's ridiculous that some lower level dungeons are more heal intensive than lv60 dungeons. I would go so far as to say that DPSing 95% of the time is BORING. I want to heal people. I picked a healer because I like healing and supporting people. I hope there is someone else out there who feels the way I do. You all just sound like you want to be damage dealers.

This is mostly on account of overgearing. Leveling dungeons have an effective iLvl cap of 1-6 iLvls above their duty level. End game dungeons have caps 40, 50, 60, sometimes even more, over the iLvl they were intended for. This means that not only are tanks taking less damage (higher armor stat), healers are outputting far stronger heals than needed. I personally just wish that SE would cap the iLvl to whatever iLvl the gear that drops from the duty is; that'd mean tanks take more damage whilst healers output less healing and have to compensate by actually spending time healing. The dungeons are actually a fair difficulty when you barely qualify for them.