Quote Originally Posted by Renathras View Post
They had this in ARR and HW (it was called Cleric Stance) and it was removed because it was something that on paper may look good but in practice meant a lot of wipes if the healer was in "DPS phase" when healing was needed. It works for a DPS because DPS Jobs don't have a second essential task. Their task is "Do damage". Tanks and healers each have a second essential task they must achieve for the party to succeed, which are mitigate damage (in theory, hold threat, but that's automatic at this point) for tanks and heal the party for healers. When BLM goes into Ice for several casts, it's not going to immediately cause the boss to enrage and wipe the party. If a healer is caught in damage stance (higher damage but lower healing) and the boss goes into a high damage phase OR some of your party members screw up and need emergency healing, people die and wipes happen.

They also used to have this with tanks (threat increase and damage reduction tank stances vs damage increase stances) which weren't AS detrimental (a tank in damage stance using CDs could get their defense high enough to still survive big hits), but were removed for a similar reason.

Because both of these things were in the game and removed because they were seen as bad (and incidentally generated a lot of toxicity), it's unlikely they'll be re-added. Balancing an essential task (survivability/healing) against another (damage) tends to not be good design in practice, even if it seems it could be on paper. Again, BLM in Ice stance (for 3-5 GCDs) isn't causing the party to wipe. Healer in damage stance during the wrong time can cause party wipes. I think that's the distinction there.
I mean, lets be honest, the history of optimization in this game has been so far tanks and healers doing anything in their power to circumvent their additional role as much as possible in favor of doing dps. DPS stance tanking was a common think back when it was a thing and we see how insanely high dps uptime is for healers, so at this point dps and healers are just roles that exchange complexities and button bloat in their dps rotation for additional responsibilities with a small uptime of having to engage with them, only that healers toolkits are not reflective of how much time they spend performing a dps role compared to their side-function. FF14 just has no dedicated healers on a level of wow, where a high percentage of your casts in traditional healer classes are focussed on healing the party, with distinct toolkits making performing this primary role distinct.