We may get changes to cleric stance and esuna

[Shougun]

Unfortunately, there is just no way to properly balance this. Whichever healer gets designated "the healer" (i.e. cannot do damage) becomes an immediate dead job upon reaching Savage. I mean, look at White Mage currently. No one values it's raw healing over Astro's balance because everything has a threshold. If all three healers/tanks can heal or mitigate through the checks respectively, it boils down to which does the most damage.

Out of curiosity would you suggest all tank stances be made the same then?

[Bourne_Endeavor]

Out of curiosity would you suggest all tank stances be made the same then?

Yes and no. While I think they ought to have a unique feel to them, all of them should be off the GCD. Warrior stance dances feels completely seamless whereas Dark Knight's cumbersome. That all said, it isn't necessarily the core abilities that are the issue but the overall philosophy. You cannot have a specialized job with heavily scripted fights, at least not with how the devs want everything to do everything. Right now, Paladin gets left out more often than not because Dark Knight just does most things better. If they want to continue this route, then there needs to be clear drawbacks. Say a boss does huge raid-wide damage. A Scholar/Astro comp should have to stop DPSing and seriously prep/heal through it whereas a White Mage could more easily handle things but lacks elsewhere. Basically, if they want specialized jobs, they have to actually be specialists. The fact Astro can heal at nearly the same level as WHM defeats its purpose completely.

[Shougun]

Yes and no.

Okay, so why can that logic not be applied to healers? I agree with the concerns you raised and I strongly hinted at them when I said making things different it definitely raise more challenges but as you said the unique feel is nice (while the through-put capability should be similar/same). Of course complete homogeneous design would make the game fair, so I'm not saying the same stance is bad balance just that if you liked tank stance unique feel why would you deny it on healer? It's not like I suggested massive differences (I made no specific example actually lol), I'm just not impressed if all the healers all get the same button to switch up into DPS mode.

Also a random aside, I believe cleric stance should punish your damage not your healing if you mess up.. just a principle of the job being a healer. Many possible ways to do this but the end result being if you heal your healing does regular healing but your character's damage or mana suffers for messing up. Like going into cleric costs mana, leaving it refunds mana, if you cast a healing spell it would not refund the mana and will drop the buff. Or casting a healing spell gives you a short damage debuff (or healing spells cost more on a whole when on, would very likely lead to a lot of 0 mana healers in dungeons when they're new to their job though :P). Only suggested because if the skill becomes group wide I believe it should be more forgiving to doing your primary directive, and punish a secondary or some other mechanic that says "whoops" but not "LOL 200 hp cure, you suck and your party will wipe because you tried to DD " haha.

Edit: Talrean's idea is interesting, astral healer stacks. Might increase the skill cap too much but what if the stacks didn't fall off instantly if you turned off the stance? (So then you could turn it back on again and continue from where you left off, of course people who could stack dance would be rewarded but maybe then the cooldown can be kept low and it doesn't have to give you freebies either).