How MUCH healing can non-Healers do?

[Renathras]

It was still a DPS tool regardless of optimization though. It might not have seen much usage in Raids but it was sure used everywhere else. Hell, I remember a run of Halitali where the WHM kept Cleric Stance on for most of the run without issue, despite repeated pleas from the Tank to turn it off. 2nd Coil was also when I found my 1st static way back when and they actively encouraged Cleric Stance usage as much as possible when I played with them, even on my WHM. I couldn't have it on 24/7 like SCH could but finding those moments of levity that let me squeeze in at least my Aero spells was the fun part. If we're only going to consider Raids in regards to Cleric Stance, you might as well not count any of WHM's DPS skills since the overwhelming majority of WHM's time in Coils was spent just healing, even with skills like Convalance, Divine Seal and practically every job that used TP having access to Mantra to help supplement heals.

Again, as I said:

"HIGHLY dependent on player, content, and era."

I didn't run into a single WHM in Cleric in 4 mans when I was leveling PLD in 2.5. Cleric Stance has been said - and I agree - to be the single most rose tinted goggles ability in all of MMO history. At the time, FAR less people used it than people insist now did so. As I said above, it really came into prominent use in HW, not ARR, and I'm comparing EW to ARR, not EW to HW. I also noted that for high end players in 2nd Coil Savage - which was some of the most difficult content for an era produced in the game's history, to the point it wasn't even exactly a pushover at level 70, and could still be difficult at level 80 - it was used, but at the time, that was literally only like 1-3% of the entire playerbase.

I'm not saying no one did it, but I'm saying the average player did not, and even many above average players did not, and that's why I minimize it. Yes, people COULD, but MOST PEOPLE did not. Again, look at most of the period videos of players running content recorded at that time and WHMs are most of the time not in Cleric at all, and if they use it, it's often only a brief dip in and out.

Again, SCH was a different case, because Lustrate was broken under Cleric and in 8 man content, you often had a WHM doing the heavy lifting on healing so as the SCH in the party, you were more focused on damage and spot healing what the WHM couldn't cover.

We're not "only going to consider raids". And even if we were; again, only the top end players in the most difficult content were doing the "stance dancing" rose tinted goggles convince people everyone was doing.

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The reality is, WHM's kit in ARR and WHM's kit in EW are approximately the same in terms of overall DPS buttons. The main distinctions between them are that ARR WHM had to refresh Aero 1 more often, which resulted in, on average, about 9 non-Stone GCDss per minute, or 3 more GCDs per minute than EW's non-Glares. And they also had to use GCD heals that weren't Lilies, breaking up the Stonespam more. EW WHM, by contrast, has around 6 planned non-Glare GCDs per minute (2x Dia, 4x Afflatus). In the oGCD department, Fluid Aura was 3x as frequent as Assize (though, again, that doesn't affect Stone/Glarespam at all).

This is a relatively small overall change compared to literally any of the other Healers (SGE aside) over their tenure in the game.

Just FYI SCH had Miasma 2 in ARR as well, it wasn't a HW addition, also for ARR, SCH had Bio (18), Miasma (hardcast, 24), Bio 2 (hardcast, 30). At least, so says WaybackMachine (note the top saying the version of the page is from 2013)

Wow I didn't realise how dog the potencies were on things back then. 20 for Miasma 2 spam? 80 for Ruin? Really? Guess they were all-in on the 'put your DOTs up and spread them' playstyle

Oh nice. Was Miasma 2 really in from 2.0? I thought it was later than that, but I'm probably thinking something else...

And yeah, Potency inflation is real. Also balance passes, I guess? And they also reworked how magic Potencies worked at some point, I think..?

Potencies were pretty much all dog until Stormblood, where the potency creep slowly began. And didn't they only recently fix the different scaling between spell and melee potencies? So spells were extra dog in ARR because they scaled differently.

Fell Cleave was 500 potency in HW, Fire IV was 280.

Yeah, this. I'm not sure when they did it, though. Was it in 6.0, or was it RECENTLY recently, like 6.2 or 6.3?

Fire 4 was also buffed by 80% invisibly due to the Astral Fire 3 effect, so it was more like 500 (calculator says 504), but yeh there were some odd inconsistencies caused by the phys/magic split calculations

Crazy to think that 'capstone 2min big damage skill' Dragonfire Dive was like 300 potency, and now we have 'capstone 2min big damage skills' like Ogi or Plentiful Harvest. Hell, Communio isn't even '2min' it's 'every time you enshroud', same with RDM combos you get like 5 of those per 2mins, they really should have dropped all the potency values to more reasonable amounts when they did the statsquish

Agreed on that.

It never ceases to amaze me how MMOs get insane stat scaling, do a squish...then don't learn the lesson and keep the ilevel/stat inflation so they have the same problem in AT MOST two expansions (often less than that) and have to do it all over again when they COULD just tone things T-F down a bit since they're already doing a squish.