Your Stance on Cleric Stance

[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.