Bring Cleric stance back

[IDontPetLalas]

Gods no. Cleric Stance can stay in the grave SE put it in. While I have no problem with stance dancing, Cleric Stance itself was clunky and often more trouble than it was worth. Due to server ticks it would often times refuse to turn off when you needed it to go off, and as others pointed out it ate up gcd which made healing during times when things go south insane. All it did was give the illusion of difficulty due to having to work around a poorly designed concept. I'd rather SE raise the amount of group and tank damage taken to scale better with all the self healing that classes have now to make healers actually heave to heal.

this is assuming that cleric stance has to be done exactly as it was before. there is no reason that it has to be implemented exactly as before. i would point out that the recent SCH rework, or even the way that shielding in general is a good example of why people shouldn't just assume that nothing can change. the past is very useful to learn from and improve from.

[TaleraRistain]

this is assuming that cleric stance has to be done exactly as it was before. there is no reason that it has to be implemented exactly as before. i would point out that the recent SCH rework, or even the way that shielding in general is a good example of why people shouldn't just assume that nothing can change. the past is very useful to learn from and improve from.

We had another version after the original was removed that was a temporary damage buff and was a role skill and it was kind of pointless as well. It didn't survive the last rework of role skills. I'd rather they either boost the potency of our damage or as Vrankyl suggested, raise damage taken to scale better with the self-heals available to non-healer roles.

[Bacent]

It's in Bozja for anyone to try out a bit if they want to see it first hand as a Lost Action.

Personally I'd rather them not bring back Cleric Stance, just due to it causing a bit more aggro in parties I was in. 'Why don't you DPS you're doing nothing!' 'I don't want to use it because I forgot I have it on and we wipe!'

Sure players need to get used to their toolkits a bit, but it honestly caused more annoyance than not, personally speaking.

[LisSquid]

I would rather they look into giving healers a dps rotation. Nothing fancy, but a good 1-2-3 and a spender. Make Bloodlily not a dps loss, etc etc

[Nizzi]

Not sure what Cleric Stance would accomplish at this point in time with their commitment to the mindless and boring gameplay of glare/broil/malefic/dosis spam. I'd much rather have something engaging to deal with in downtime than something that hurts my ability to heal.

[Shibi]

I understand they removed it for balancing purposes, but I think it would be cool if healers can get the cleric stance back. However, for said balancing purposes. It would work similarly to BLU basic instinct where it only boosts the damage outside instances & Parties.
Same for tank stance. It can boost the tanks' damage outside instances & parties but once they join one the damage increase will be gone.

(Bolding is mine, as most people are skipping this part, he only wants it solo-overworld)

No thanks. We want to reduce the number of dead buttons in instances, not add to them. Overworld damage is just fine. If more is needed, choco can help, and if more still, switching to a DPS class gets the job done.

[Divinemights]

Instead of bring back a removed ability, perhaps it is better to re-examine FF14's current party formation and increase to 5 instead of 4?
I mean, FF11 a light party was 5: 1 tank, 2 pure DD, one DD/Support and Healer.
Maybe it is a good time to revisit that formation and put BRD/RDM/DNC/MCH to the DD/Support Role?
Healer and Tank then don't need to worry about dps and focus on damage mitigation and MP management?

[Packetdancer]

Cleric Stance from back then was a stance you could toggle on and off like tank stance. What it did was swap your MND with INT. Back then Healers damaging spells scaled with INT while their equip gave them MND.

To elaborate on this... specifically, as Atreides notes, healing potency was calculated as a function of Mind (as it is now), but damage potency for all magic was calculated as a function of Intelligence (as it is for casters now, but not healers). This was relevant not just because of Cleric Stance but because back then we had the ability to meld materia that could actually alter base stats like Mind, Dexterity, Intelligence, etc. Meaning you could make a gear-set that had some INT on it (and thus do higher damage without sacrificing healing) or meld MND materia (to have some real healing oomph but no damage unless you went into Cleric Stance).

When we shifted to a situation where healer damage potency was calculated off of MND instead of INT... much as I enjoyed stance-dancing as a concept, it no longer had any use; you used the same stat for both, so... what would it do? Swap MND for MND?

Though now that I'm thinking back... if I remember right, wasn't there a chunk of time where SCH used SMN's gear (since it was all ACN gear), which favored INT over MND? Which meant that for WHM while Cleric Stance being on meant you'd swapped your (higher) MND for your (lower) INT, making you do more damage in exchange for weaker healing... for SCH at that point it was the inverse, where (being for ACN) the gear had higher INT than MND, and Cleric Stance being on made you heal stronger, and Cleric Stance being off meant you were doing more damage?

I grant I might be misremembering; I didn't play SCH until well after that point, so I remember Cleric Stance mostly for the way it worked for WHM in 2.x.

[ puts that "it's been 87 years..." meme image here ]

[Vrankyl]

this is assuming that cleric stance has to be done exactly as it was before. there is no reason that it has to be implemented exactly as before. i would point out that the recent SCH rework, or even the way that shielding in general is a good example of why people shouldn't just assume that nothing can change. the past is very useful to learn from and improve from.

Even if it changed it wouldn't fix the problem with healers, it would just once more create an illusion of difficulty to silence a portion of the complainers. The problem is that damage is not high enough for healers to fully engage with their kits, which is how their kits are designed. Instead they are forced with the smallest portion of their kit only, which is the most boring portion of 1 button spam. So there are three possible fixes from where I am standing. 1) Enhance healer's DPS kit to make it more intricate and engaging. Granted, this will have the downside of increasing button bloat for healers. 2) Increase the amount of damage that people take in instances to require healers to utilize their entire kit instead of sleeping through any fight that isn't EX or higher. This would be the preferred fix imo. 3) Do away with the holy trinity altogether and opt for a system more like Guild Wars 2 where everyone can do a little bit of everything in different ways. This is the least likely option, but still an option.

[Packetdancer]

It's in Bozja for anyone to try out a bit if they want to see it first hand as a Lost Action.

Much as I love Lost Seraph Strike (and loved it even more with the pre-nerf Thin Air, since along with Lost Chainspell, if you had Misery up and Assize off cooldown and Presence of Mind ready to go, you could do an absolutely unreal amount of damage -- to the point that I frequently ripped aggro away from tanks with that burst in Delubrum Reginae), the Cleric Stance it gives you isn't quite the same thing.

Though conceptually, yes, it's similar inasmuch as it gives you a damage buff and a healing debuff, but it's not outright swapping two base stats. It's also only for a very brief window (rather than a toggled stance), and it's paired with a gap-closer.

Interestingly, I think part of why I've come to love sage is that you have something that, while it isn't stance dancing per se, feels a tiny bit similar. Namely, the fact that I can weave a Kardia in amongst normal attacks to shift my Kardion healing status among the party to top off whoever's a bit wounded, without having to spend an Addersgall charge and throw a bunch of overhealing at them. DRG is down a little bit of health? No problem, I'll shift Kardion from the tank over to them. BRD got Dropsy in P2S? Well, I'll shield them first, but then I'll shift Kardion over to them as well and let my damage help keep them topped up. They're good? Shift Kardion back to the main tank. Etc.

It's not quite stance-dancing, but shifting the Kardion around that way mid-fight feels at least a little like it to me, somehow.

I would rather they look into giving healers a dps rotation. Nothing fancy, but a good 1-2-3 and a spender. Make Bloodlily not a dps loss, etc etc

It hurts my soul that the blood lily is not only still a DPS loss, but it's become a bigger DPS loss than it used to be. The lily mechanic has so much interesting potential.

Like, make it so the blood lily does 4 Glare III's worth of damage (so it's at least DPS neutral), and maybe make an option to 'eat' the lily and regain two normal lilies. (So that, like Sage's Rhizomata, WHM has a way to replenish their healing resource in a pinch... albeit at the cost of giving up that 'banked' 4 GCDs of damage.) Or just... something.