PSA - Cleric Stance and vote kicking

[Zojha]

In any content other than the hardest, and even then, but I'll excuse players for that, there will be time. There's just no way around this. There is not enough incoming damage to require you to heal often.

And that's why all of SE's efforts to try and fight the DPS meta are and will be futile.

And on a side note: In the infamous content design interview, he implicitly asks DPS to please overgear the content to achieve the assumed item level and then bring 85-90% of their theoretical dummy potential in the live fight so that tanks only need to do their aggro combo and healers can poke their nose during pauses. That's bluntly asking DPS to please carry terribad healers and tanks. One should not expect DPS to just take that sort of bullshit.

[Naunet]

Once again Arrius. The problem with healer DPS isn't just about shaving minutes off of a dungeon run. Its about contribution. If the tank and DPS are pressing a button every GCD while you're standing there doing nothing for 10+ seconds because nobody needs healing, you're being lazy and not putting in as much effort as the others.

While I do tend to dps in dungeons in this game, I just wanted to respond to this...

I can guarantee you that even if I am not healing, I am alert and present in the instance. I must always keep an eye on people's health pools. I'm on the look-out for wandering pats. I'm preparing to both dodge AoEs and heal the dps who inevitably stand in them. When the class is capable of it, I'm maintaining up-time on buffs as much as possible. For tanks I'm familiar with, I facilitate pulls to keep things moving. This is how it works in any other MMO. A healer may appear to be just standing around, but that doesn't mean the healer is just twiddling their thumbs and watching Netflix. If they are, you'll know soon enough when people start dying. Healing requires constant attention even if it does not require constant button presses, and I think it's a bit silly to measure someone's contribution to the group based on how many buttons they press.

It's a bit unfortunate that they don't have some sort of system that allows us to do both at once as tanks do. Tanks contribute to dps as part of generating aggro. What if we could contribute to healing as we cast offensive abilities or added to dps with healing abilities? A damage shield/healing shield type of system could do something like this.

This should only happen in the form of a single job - a la Chloromancer in Rift.

[Sebazy]

This should only happen in the form of a single job - a la Chloromancer in Rift.

This, it's kind of a shame that SE didn't have the courage to take one of the 3 healer jobs and totally go left of field with it. As long as it's entertaining to play and viable for typical play, it's not the end of the world if it's not 'meta' as long as it's not broken beyond adjustment.

[Ama_Hamada]

In the case of severity to performance though, I'd argue it's much more prevalent to healers lol. Losing a bit of DPS as a DPS isn't typically going to mean life or death for nearly all situations, unlike significantly hindered heals in high damage situations. Probably one of those things where it's far more work than necessary because the current way of things is good enough. Faster (and less chance for bugs) to just change cleric's use.

Does it matter? Why not fix the coding instead on picking on one ability?

[Welsper59]

Why should i walk on eggshells? My words are true, you've admitted it, getting caught up on a particular wording is doing nothing for the state of the game. You are coddling and tip toeing like saying the wrong thing is going to turn someone off from healing all together... have you considered maybe it should? If telling people to play their job (especially now that they have a foolproof safety net set up at the expense of an already low skill ceiling) is enough to make someone stop healing so be it. Its a role that certainly could use some fat trimming as it seems to attract people looking for an easy ride as opposed to people who have an actual passion for it.

But go on, continue your "I'm looking out for the little guys" spiel. Protecting them from the truth has helped so much already.

Damn, you take your gaming a little more seriously than the "little guys" you're referring to, as well as people like me. You might call my specific way of looking at that "coddling", but I call that "not being a sociopath". Maybe it's just me, but I don't take a little inefficiency by other players to be a sin against humanity. If simply letting someone play how they want isn't suddenly making a 10min venture turn into 1hr, I don't think there's really anything to get so upset over. For the most part, we're talking about EZ mode dungeons/raids in DF here. The sort of crap that all jobs fall asleep to. Hell, the most exciting part about them is the bad players lol.

Your reference to "passion" speaks of the player, not the role. It's the equivalent of a BRD/MCH that uses group buffs effectively (or ever at all), tanks that actually tank, healers that actually heal (I can go on a rant about that one), etc. The idea of trimming the role because of little annoyances you find of other player does more harm than good, despite them doing their primary role. Again, that's said in the context that said player isn't causing wipes or an unreasonably slow progression. I do agree in a different way though, that DPS-only healers need to be trimmed though. I've run into far too many of those types. The ones who would rather a raid wipe than them even putting out a single heal (not even for themselves).

Does it matter? Why not fix the coding instead on picking on one ability?

Because it's a business with deadlines. I'm assuming it's a matter that would (probably) require gutting a bit of the system that's why, to some degree. A lot of times that involves QA, and given our track record in general for MMOs, it's not perfect upon release. It's just a matter of priorities really, and finding what path will fix a problem to some degree, without messing up everything else. More work fixing new problems that appeared because of a new fix is one of the worst things devs have to deal with. You just wouldn't know how far the rabbit hole goes at that point. It'd be nice to fix the source problem, but I don't think anyone really sees that as a needed thing.

[Gemina]

No one said that. People are saying you're more likely to get kicked for not using your DPS abilities now, since the cleric stance excuse is out of the picture.

Cleric stance is one of MANY reasons why healers won't DPS:

http://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/t...ople-don-t-dps.

The healer forum was pretty much unanimous on removing/adjusting cleric would do nothing to get healers to DPS.

[SlogDog]

-Its just a game, bro
-feelings over facts
-bad players keep things interesting, i like inefficiency

Noted. Thanks for your 'input'.

[Sebazy]

Cleric stance is one of MANY reasons why healers won't DPS:

http://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/t...ople-don-t-dps.

The healer forum was pretty much unanimous on removing/adjusting cleric would do nothing to get healers to DPS.

Just to chime in on this before I go to sleep zzzzz

I think this is going to raise the skill floor on healer DPS significantly, whilst I'm rather gungho in roulettes, I'm *very* cautious in savage, far too much so really. Stormblood's changes will make it a lot easier for me to get a significantly higher uptime on my dots early in progression where previous I was likely too focused on absorbing what I was seeing and learning the flow of the encounter.

But otherwise, yeah, those that were against DPSing full stop are still going to be just as militant about it as before, there's a good number of examples in several threads =(

[Welsper59]

Noted. Thanks for your 'input'.

Well, you certainly do a good job of asserting my "sociopath" comment. Hope it helped?

[Bourne_Endeavor]

While I do tend to dps in dungeons in this game, I just wanted to respond to this...

I can guarantee you that even if I am not healing, I am alert and present in the instance. I must always keep an eye on people's health pools. I'm on the look-out for wandering pats. I'm preparing to both dodge AoEs and heal the dps who inevitably stand in them. When the class is capable of it, I'm maintaining up-time on buffs as much as possible. For tanks I'm familiar with, I facilitate pulls to keep things moving. This is how it works in any other MMO. A healer may appear to be just standing around, but that doesn't mean the healer is just twiddling their thumbs and watching Netflix. If they are, you'll know soon enough when people start dying. Healing requires constant attention even if it does not require constant button presses, and I think it's a bit silly to measure someone's contribution to the group based on how many buttons they press.

Operative words being: Any other MMO. Healing in FFXIV simply does not necessitate that type of acute awareness. In dungeons, if you aren't actively DPSing, you are next to useless. People have posted videos where they literally did nothing 80% of the full run. There just isn't enough outgoing damage in this game and until that changes, healers are essentially hybrids.