Your Stance on Cleric Stance

[Feyona]

I really don't want to be forced into a healer/dsp role. I enjoy healing, thats why I chose to play as a healer. I think people should be allowed to play the way they most enjoy. Cleric is fine for healers that want to dps a little, but now its being forced on healers to dps and heal. High end I find it too stressful, The last time I cleared as9 The tank took around 800k damage, I was heaing him at 95% active healing. I didn't feel I had the space to change to cleric and start dpsing. Yet I was asked to or it was implied that I should have. The other healer was running around with the gerators. I like being active all the time but I don't want things I'm not comfortable with forced on me. Just because so and so imba healer solo healed it last week and managed 1k dps at the same time.

[FunkyBunch]

I really don't want to be forced into a healer/dsp role.
SNIP I think people should be allowed to play the way they most enjoy.
Cleric is fine for healers that want to dps a little, but now its being forced on healers to dps and heal. High end I find it too stressful, The last time I cleared as9 The tank took around 800k damage, I was heaing him at 95% active healing. I didn't feel I had the space to change to cleric and start dpsing. Yet I was asked to or it was implied that I should have. The other healer was running around with the gerators. I like being active all the time but I don't want things I'm not comfortable with forced on me

It's literally just a 5 second cooldown. It's just a headspace thing that makes you think you can't do it or it's stressful. Players should be active all the time. That's the way the game is designed. If you're not active, you're just hurting everyone else and overhealing is the worst thing you can do.

This whole "play the way they most enjoy thing" is a terrible argument though. If I want to be an Ice Mage, I'm literally just being terrible but according to you, I should be able to do that and have everyone be fine with it. Also, we're not talking about Savage content here, we're talking about DF.

[HPDelron]

It's literally just a 5 second cooldown. It's just a headspace thing that makes you think you can't do it or it's stressful. Players should be active all the time. That's the way the game is designed. If you're not active, you're just hurting everyone else and overhealing is the worst thing you can do.

This whole "play the way they most enjoy thing" is a terrible argument though. If I want to be an Ice Mage, I'm literally just being terrible but according to you, I should be able to do that and have everyone be fine with it. Also, we're not talking about Savage content here, we're talking about DF.

There is a big difference in sentiment between "I'm a DPS player and would like to avoid using my primarily damage tools" and "I'm a healer player and would primarily like to use my healing tools". Sure both can be broadly grouped into "I want to play sub-optimally" but I think that's the wrong way to frame them.

In the "Ice Mage" example we have a DPS player who chose DPS, was given an interesting and broad kit of tools to that job that simply refuses to use them.

In the "Pure Healer" example we have a healer player who chose healing, was given an interesting and broad kit of tools do that job and is being told: Hold on, we don't really need you to do that very much. Please spend most of your time with 2 DoTs and 1 Nuke that don't even have any cool interactions. With them going in reaction "Wat?"

[FunkyBunch]

There is a big difference in sentiment between "I'm a DPS player and would like to avoid using my primarily damage tools" and "I'm a healer player and would primarily like to use my healing tools". Sure both can be broadly grouped into "I want to play sub-optimally" but I think that's the wrong way to frame them.

In the "Ice Mage" example we have a DPS player who chose DPS, was given an interesting and broad kit of tools to that job that simply refuses to use them.

In the "Pure Healer" example we have a healer player who chose healing, was given an interesting and broad kit of tools do that job and is being told: Hold on, we don't really need you to do that very much. Please spend most of your time with 2 DoTs and 1 Nuke that don't even have any cool interactions. With them going in reaction "Wat?"

Yeah, the problem is the "healer chose healing". The game is not designed for that. Healer is a terrible name for a healing DPS. Which is what they're really designed to be.
A "healer who chose healing" has a right to not like that the character is a healer DPS and be mad at the designers, but to not play half their class (as in the ice mage example) is bad. Just as bad as the ice mage.

[HPDelron]

Yeah, the problem is the "healer chose healing". The game is not designed for that. Healer is a terrible name for a healing DPS. Which is what they're really designed to be.
A "healer who chose healing" has a right to not like that the character is a healer DPS and be mad at the designers, but to not play half their class (as in the ice mage example) is bad. Just as bad as the ice mage.

Except they're not designed as "healing DPS". If that was the case they'd have varied and interesting DPS tools, not 2 DoTs and single nuke.

Look at Black Mage. They have their fire spells, ice spells and the respective astral/umbral modes that they need to switch back and forth between while up-keeping enoch, managing thundercloud procs, knowing where to drop their ley lines and so on. They've got this fully fleshed out kit and interesting kit for doing DPS.
Contrast WHM and particularly AST. They've got a few dots and a boring nuke. No interaction, nothing to manage. SCH approaches having something of DPS toolkit considering their Arcanist roots but even theirs is kind of flat and flaccid since every single job ability the get sans broil is a heal or support ability.

These designs scream up and down that DPSing is a distant secondary function. Nothing about how the game presents the classes, itemizes the gear or assembles parties implies that they're meant to be "healing dps". The whole paradigm seems to be a meta that has cropped up entirely out of the fact that monsters are effectively wielding feather dusters.

[Feyona]

It's literally just a 5 second cooldown. It's just a headspace thing that makes you think you can't do it or it's stressful. Players should be active all the time. That's the way the game is designed. If you're not active, you're just hurting everyone else and overhealing is the worst thing you can do.

This whole "play the way they most enjoy thing" is a terrible argument though. If I want to be an Ice Mage, I'm literally just being terrible but according to you, I should be able to do that and have everyone be fine with it. Also, we're not talking about Savage content here, we're talking about DF.

My mistake I thought the game was meant to be enjoyable. How would you enjoy the game if you were tgiven some healing spells and told you can only dps occasionally

[Cynfael]

Except they're not designed as "healing DPS". If that was the case they'd have varied and interesting DPS tools, not 2 DoTs and single nuke.

Look at Black Mage. They have their fire spells, ice spells and the respective astral/umbral modes that they need to switch back and forth between while up-keeping enoch, managing thundercloud procs, knowing where to drop their ley lines and so on. They've got this fully fleshed out kit and interesting kit for doing DPS. Contrast WHM and particularly AST. They've got a few dots and a boring nuke. No interaction, nothing to manage. SCH approaches having something of DPS toolkit considering their Arcanist roots but even theirs is kind of flat and flaccid since every single job ability the get sans broil is a heal or support ability.

These designs scream up and down that DPSing is a distant secondary function. Nothing about how the game presents the classes, itemizes the gear or assembles parties implies that they're meant to be "healing dps". The whole paradigm seems to be a meta that has cropped up entirely out of the fact that monsters are effectively wielding feather dusters.

BLM and SMN both actually have utility skills that help support the party in a pinch, and they can be powerful when used correctly and when the situation calls for such. However, like healers contributing DPS, virtually all content in the game CAN be done without undue difficulty if they neglect that aspect of their kit even when it makes sense to use it.

Healer DPS kits don't have the same degree of complexity as those of dedicated DPS jobs, but they're actually quite powerful, especially when it comes to AoE. The fact that all 3 healer jobs gained at least one DPS skill each beyond 50 is a good indicator that SE continues to recognize the desire of many healer players to keep using that part of their kits (let's be honest: not a single one of those DPS skills was actually a necessary addition for solo content except perhaps Gravity, which filled the AST's otherwise complete lack of Job-sourced AoE damage).

If they were to increase the healing requirement to the point where healers needed to heal almost all of the time, the balance would tip so far in the opposite extreme that we'd have a lot of players jumping ship from the healer role because the stress they seem to feel over an occasional expectation to DPS pales compared to the stress they would feel over encounters that kept them panic-healing nonstop. I say "panic-healing" because players who find Cleric Stance difficult to use are often reactionary healers who aren't in the habit of anticipating damage and timing their casts accordingly. Much safer to allow players to continue to choose between doing nothing and doing damage during downtime than to ruin a lot of casual players' fun by hugely ramping up their healing requirement.

[FunkyBunch]

Except they're not designed as "healing DPS". If that was the case they'd have varied and interesting DPS tools, not 2 DoTs and single nuke.

Umm, so you're telling me that:
Ruin/Broil, Bio, Miasma, Bio2, Miasma2, Shadowflare and Bane while juggling Cleric Stance is 2 Dots and a Nuke and is not interesting?

How is doing nothing more interesting than weaving in DOTs/Nukes and Cleric Stance while still keeping everyone alive? I don't understand that at all.
Because that's literally what you're asking for. Let's make Healer more boring, because I don't like to DPS.
The reason the Healer rotation is not complicated is because there's not a tonne of time to do both DPS and heal at later levels.
Do you want the Healer rotation to be more complicated?

EVERYTHING about the game says that Healer should be DPSing. They beat it into your head that you should always be doing something.

[HyperiusUltima]

EVERYTHING about the game says that Healer should be DPSing.

You should be, but there's always a time and a place for it. In general, people need to know certain things before they can apply DPS(aside from openers if it's safe to do so) since:

A) Your Tank is always under fire most of the time, be it a tank buster or a huge amount of damage(I'm looking at you Faust Z(Savage) >_>).
B) You have a 5s lockout on returning back to healing, meaning if you **** up and hit the button at the wrong time in the fight, you might've killed your tank on accident.

Also to note, the literal game context says that you may have time to add a bit of damage of your own, but healing is the main priority of the job(though everyone seems to be under the rule that SCH is 100% DPS due to Fairy with just slipping out of CS to add Indom or Shields at certain times).

But to be blunt, your train of thought is "Everything is about DPS" which I know evolved only due to Gordias, and escalated into Midas. What I hope is that Stormblood can fix what happened in Heavensward raiding with the rework SE had announced.

[HPDelron]

Umm, so you're telling me that:
Ruin/Broil, Bio, Miasma, Bio2, Miasma2, Shadowflare and Bane while juggling Cleric Stance is 2 Dots and a Nuke and is not interesting?

No. In fact I specifically said that SCH is the only one approaching having having a DPS kit. So I'm not sure why you'd call out the SCH toolkit here. I'll re-quote myself for clarity here.

...SCH approaches having something of DPS toolkit considering their Arcanist roots...

Certainly AST's kit is literally 2 DoTs and nuke (Combust 1+2 and Malefic 2) - note what my main is as specified here, while White Mage adds a 3rd DoT but otherwise has a similar toolkit available. Both spam a single nuke for AoE content (but that's kind of par for the course even with DPS classes that aren't casters, so we'll say at least there they have an even break).


Even if we don't argue the subjectivity of looking at kits, the designers themselves said they were surprised when they saw people widely utilizing healer DPS. They made an explicit statement they did not design for it. One may or may not enjoy what we have now, but it's certainly not what the classes were designed to do. If you don't want to take the simple evidence of healer tookits at face value for this we don't need it as we have the word of god. The people who designed the game said they did not design it for this. Either they're liars or you're just not in the right on this one.

(note that the issue of what classes were designed for is wholly separate from the devs being ok from divergence from that design not not making any changes to correct the surprise.)

BLM and SMN both actually have utility skills that help support the party in a pinch, and they can be powerful when used correctly and when the situation calls for such. However, like healers contributing DPS, virtually all content in the game CAN be done without undue difficulty if they neglect that aspect of their kit even when it makes sense to use it.
...
If they were to increase the healing requirement to the point where healers needed to heal almost all of the time, the balance would tip so far in the opposite extreme that we'd have a lot of players jumping ship from the healer role because the stress they seem to feel over an occasional expectation to DPS pales compared to the stress they would feel over encounters that kept them panic-healing nonstop. I say "panic-healing" because players who find Cleric Stance difficult to use are often reactionary healers who aren't in the habit of anticipating damage and timing their casts accordingly. Much safer to allow players to continue to choose between doing nothing and doing damage during downtime than to ruin a lot of casual players' fun by hugely ramping up their healing requirement.

Certainly you can't please all of the people all of the time. There are fair points to be made that the current situation works and a lot of people like. I wouldn't dare dispute any of that. However that doesn't really change that:

1) The game is clearly functioning differently than it how it was originally designed.
2) The game is functioning differently than the most intuitive interpretation of the tools provided would suggest.
3) The game is functioning differently than the provided in-game training text says it does.

For these reasons I feel that people who do want a more healing intensive game would not be totally off base in expecting one. I mean it's certainly possible that the train has left the station on this and there is no going back, they would after all alienate anyone who got into healers for the DPS & flexibilty. That's still not reason to dimiss anyone who dislikes the the current cleric's stance meta as simply lazy. It's certainly possible they're simply lazy but there's also whole spectrum of other reasons to dislike it.