Quote Originally Posted by Lesan View Post
One of the issues with Cleric Stance that I, personally, had, was the fact that Healer Stance dancing was, compared to any other 'Stance Dance' in the game, unfair. By design, without it, DPS Skills would be wasted MP, while otherwise, with it enabled, Healing skills would be wasted MP.

Bard and Machinist lock out SOME of their skills, when they don't use their Caster Stance. But they still scale off the same abilities, they just do not perform at full.
The same goes for Tanks, especially noticeable so on the Warrior, they still scale off the same Attributes, and, with a few exceptions, still have access to most of their toolkit at a useable performance.
The current Cleric Stance, however, is basically comparable to a Warrior whose 'Damage Taken' would be fixed to '100%' when in Deliverance, even when stacking every single defensive cooldown, while use of Defiance would turn the 'Attack Power' Stat into a flat, nondamaging Enmity value that then gets further multiplicated with Enmity Modifiers. It invalidates one half of the Skillset, to boost the other half.

Actually, I think 'Cleric Stance' is one of the first skills that can get ditched outside of explicit speedrunning or hyper-optimized static group play. The same, in 2-Healer content, goes for Protect and Esuna, 1 Healer each can bring it, done. Especially with the apparent abolishment of the 30s wait between Job/Class/Skill Changes.
The difference is that healer dps is painfully simplistic and healers weren't designed with dpsing in mind. It was more tacked on to the side to allow for soloing. Tank classes were designed with intentional dps rotations and with he expectation that they would be dpsing. The very reason cleric stance existed was to allow healers to solo. Yoshi P was pretty clear that healers dpsing in instanced content wasn't intentional design.

This seems to have changed, at least from the change to cleric stance. The issue is that none of the other design has been changed to accommodate it. All they have done is made healer dps more simple and frankly as a result more boring. If healers are meant to dps they should have their dps as a core aspect of their design, not an afterthought tacked onto the side of their healer design.