The grand return of Cleric Stance, with a twist

[ForsakenRoe]

Rather than having the healing spell fizzle, wouldn't it be better to let it go through at 100% effectiveness, but cause Cleric Stance itself to fizzle and lock out for 10sec (or however long for balance)? That way, emergency healing with Cleric up doesn't get neutered at all, but it DOES prevent you from going back into Cleric as fast, costing you some damage. Floor is less affected by misplays (a 20% reduction at certain times may well be a death sentence, what with how spiky damage is at times), Ceiling is able to know when to turn Cleric off manually to prevent 'fizzles' and maintain optimal uptime of the buff

I genuinely don't think that people appreciate just how much incoming damage it would take to actually force us to heal all the time *AND* how much of a knife edge it would be actually sustaining our MP through that.

I just want anyone who asks this to go and do either P10S, and do Harrowing Hell there, or do P1 of TEA. Imagine that healing amount required, but that is now what EX roulette looks like too. That, is 'healing required in a way that means I need to heal all the time' and I don't expect it'd go over well with... well, most players, really.

[Renathras]

Funny, a "cleric stance" is implemented in other games and the sky doesn't fall.

Never played Aion. What kind of game is it? Is that ability forced on all healing classes or just one?

Are you sure about your assumptions there? I'll give you a chance to actually look at the math. You might want to take it before you make yourself look a little silly.

You're going to have to be more specific than that.

Are you saying that the removal of cleric is what directly caused tighter enrages? After all a narrower gap between the better and worse healers allows ‘fair’ enrages to be tuned significantly more precisely than when the healer contribution is much more variable.

/sigh

What are you on about this time?

Enrages were tuned to where healer DPS was included before the change, they were just badly tuned towards the higher end of the spectrum, making it impossible to clear without it.

Just make dungeons in a way that l need to heal all the time... I want to play healer, not a green dps.

100% agreed.

It's a nice idea, but have you thought through what that actually entails?

I know you like dropping this as a trump card, but have you EVER considered that people HAVE thought about it?

Weaker heals (especially AOEs and oGCDs), more frequent but smaller damage. It's not hard. You're smart enough to know that.

I just want anyone who asks this to go and do either P10S, and do Harrowing Hell there, or do P1 of TEA. Imagine that healing amount required, but that is now what EX roulette looks like too. That, is 'healing required in a way that means I need to heal all the time' and I don't expect it'd go over well with... well, most players, really.

As above: Your contention here is...what? That healer ability potencies are set in stone and cannot be altered? Because the only way this argument carries weight is if healer potencies cannot be changed at any time.

[fulminating]

/sigh

What are you on about this time?

Enrages were tuned to where healer DPS was included before the change, they were just badly tuned towards the higher end of the spectrum, making it impossible to clear without it.

Being numerate and mildly competent is a burden that I really wish others shared. Please stop derailing threads with misconstrued walls of text that have only a passing relationship with reality. Please at least have a broad understanding of how the game is - clear a tier, do an ultimate, do mine runs idgaf just try and learn or at least understand the broad strokes. I do not think you have ever fully thought through what you're asking, please consider the knock-on effects of say requiring high heal uptime dungeons.
Thank you.

[ForsakenRoe]

As above: Your contention here is...what? That healer ability potencies are set in stone and cannot be altered? Because the only way this argument carries weight is if healer potencies cannot be changed at any time.

People say that 'we should increase healing needed, I want to heal'. I am saying that, in order to actually pressure our healing kits to the point people are asking for (eg, 80% of the GCDs we use in a given fight are healing GCDs), a couple of examples that come to mind are those two. One's a whole phase of an ultimate (and it gets to around 50% GCD heal iirc, I can't check my old runs because I don't have the 'membership' for funny number site so I can't check the archived logs), and the other is a 20ish second phase of a Savage fight. What I can say about them though, is that we'd need MASSIVE adjustments to our kit for this to have any hope of working. The MP costs atm are too high. The accessibility of AOE throughput is too high. The power of OGCDs is too high. This is a lot of adjustments, which have to be tested against old content to make sure it's still clearable (because it was designed with current healing power in mind)

I'm not saying healer potencies are set in stone. Far from it. I'm just saying that because they are not, the amount of potency we'd have to remove to actually 'burden' the kit, or how much cooldowns would have to be added to things to gatekeep throughput, would be a lot more than people think. I'm all for copypasting Holy Priest and having every AOE heal be either complete garbage potency (Holy Nova without Rhapsody), or gated by, at minimum, a 10s CD. But I expect that being unable to spam Medica might make something like Harrowing Hell or Terminal Relativity or etc enrage sequences, slightly 'completely impossible to clear'. You say 'its not hard' like it's no big deal, but it very much would be a vast undertaking of rebalancing job outputs, doublechecking that old content can remain clearable, tuning CDs and MP costs. And unlike the suggestion of 'more damage tools' where any bonus potency can just be 'well, happy coincidence, current DPS checks are a microscopic fraction easier (because the bonus potency is that, a bonus, on top of the baseline the game was tuned around already)', 'less healing throughput' could potentially mean 'we can no longer keep up with this mechanic, so we MUST adjust the mechanic'. Because the plan is to make 'healing more required', it removes 'add more healing potency/accessibility' as a solution to an encounter/job-kit mismatch issue like that, because adding more throughput to the healer to keep up with the mechanic, just puts us back to where we are now. Instead, it forces the change to be on the side of the encounter, and that means having to do this check on every previous encounter

Now, a way to do this, and it'd stand a chance of actually working, would be to have damage profiles more like Barb EX. Having a CD on your AOE healing tools might not be as troublesome to keep up with, if the damage coming out is all small hits of 10k in fairly quick succession, rather than massive hits of 90% of your HP at a time. There's 3 main ways to burden healer kits, 'hit hard', 'hit fast' or 'prevent the healer from healing'. Barb used both 2 and 3, and while 2 is fun to deal with, I've heard that too much of option 3 can be annoying, especially in a proposed design that would be emphasising GCD healing, with it's cast times and all. I wouldn't mind it, I think 'know how to heal while keeping mobility' is one of the core skills for a healer to learn, knowing when you have enough time to stand in an orange, get a heal out, and still dodge the AOE. Barb's orange AOEs are a bit too fast for that at times, but there's several times where there's time to GCD heal, even though it looks very unsafe. Like not-Pantokrator

TLDR, let's increase EX roulette healing requirements to that of P1 of TEA, so that we really do use 80% of our GCDs on healing. And at the same time, SE can have a second build of the game, where we don't do that, so they can 'rollback' the change when the complaints of 'we had to vote abandon because the healing was too much to keep up with' come in. Or not, if it turns out I'm wrong then fine, it means a more engaging game for me to play

I do not think you have ever fully thought through what you're asking, please consider the knock-on effects of say requiring high heal uptime dungeons.

I'm trying to come up with a way to 'simulate' such an adjustment to the kit on WHM, and I'm not sure it's even possible. It'd be like, do a run of EX roulette, but you have to unbind every healing ability (including Assize), and use only Cure 1 and Rapture (20s CD). And even then, I reckon you'd keep up pretty easily because Cure 1 is still 500p. Our kits are just... so obscenely strong compared to EX roulette and other content of that level, SE's made it basically impossible to be a challenge. Even wall-to-wall pulls are nothing to a semi-competent tank, because of how much self-heal/mit they have nowadays.

The whole thing would have to be burned down and recreated, 'A Role Reborn' as it were, to fix it in this manner

[Sebazy]

What are you on about this time?

Enrages were tuned to where healer DPS was included before the change, they were just badly tuned towards the higher end of the spectrum, making it impossible to clear without it.

This is such a nothing burger of a statement. What does it even mean?

Gordias and Midas's DPS checks were a result of bad testing and balancing practices on SE's part. Creator and Deltascape came after SE addressed these issues and it showed in not only in how dialled down DPS requirements were but also in the overall complexity, length and pace. Lots of things changed for healers between HW and SB, yet Deltascape was business as normal following on from Creator. There are fights that have indeed had wild healer DPS requirements, but the main offender came much later in E8S and IMO that was primarily because healers had very little else to do other than DPS in that fight. Remember, this was a fight where the adds were the hardest part of the fight to heal. By far. No I'm not even kidding.

I know you like dropping this as a trump card, but have you EVER considered that people HAVE thought about it?

Weaker heals (especially AOEs and oGCDs), more frequent but smaller damage. It's not hard. You're smart enough to know that.

Look at what Eastwall is actually saying, not whatever interpretation you're trying to pull from it.

'Make dungeons in a way that I NEED TO HEAL ALL THE TIME'

We've had this before. Remember what AST had going into Gordias? They actually HAD TO HEAL ALL THE TIME. It was hard, actually it was very hard, so much so that healer mains like Fiery Tail and Infernele Infernis failed to ever kill A3S. And let me tell you, they had plenty of talent, coming very close to landing EU first for BCOB for example. If Fiery hadn't have been too stubborn to switch off AST back to WHM I'm absolutely confident they would have at least gotten A3S down.

Again, even if we hand wave away the issues of requiring huge healing uptime, there's also the fact that our resource system just doesn't accommodate for this volume of GCD healing. Look at PoVs of people progging E12S, the amount of GCD heals it expected out of the gates and how wild the MP usage was in that fight before you got things mapped out and gear levels went up.

It's a genuine shame that there's no way to go back and experience AST as a snapshot of that period in time. It's exactly what many ask for here and man, it was awful all told.

[benji42]

Honestly this sounds cool. I don't even think all the healers need it. I can imagine this ability would be really fun with the lily system! Switching into a mode that makes misery even more powerful would be very fun. Maybe you can even get a momentary healing bonus from not fizzling the stance? I think that would also fit well with the lily system. Plus, you could fizzle your lily on purpose and not loose any MP whilist leaving the stance. I think this would work really well in WHM's slow and methodical playstyle.

[Aravell]

I just want anyone who asks this to go and do either P10S, and do Harrowing Hell there, or do P1 of TEA. Imagine that healing amount required, but that is now what EX roulette looks like too. That, is 'healing required in a way that means I need to heal all the time' and I don't expect it'd go over well with... well, most players, really.

That kind of healing requirement doesn't even go over well with most raiders tbh. Look at Hand of Pain skip for TEA and tank LB3 Harrowing Hell for P10S, I can guarantee that no one would enjoy that kind of healing requirements all the time.

Also, I went back to check my TEA clear on the funny site since I recently did one, seems that p1 is only about 23% GCD heal with Hand of Pain skip, probably much higher if you have to heal the Cascade at the end.

EDIT: Seems that J Waves in TEA are about 62% GCD healing uptime, people are asking for more healing required in dungeons than for J Waves, that's very interesting.

[Post]

I'd dig a return of Cleric Stance like this or in some form for at least one healer. I suppose it's no surprise but I've missed it since it was made into a minor DPS cooldown in StB. I don't think it was a mistake; like most their changes they're pretty deliberate. I just don't think they think about how it all feels when they keep removing stuff to streamline every job but don't put in reasons for things to be streamlined.

I just want anyone who asks this to go and do either P10S, and do Harrowing Hell there, or do P1 of TEA. Imagine that healing amount required, but that is now what EX roulette looks like too. That, is 'healing required in a way that means I need to heal all the time' and I don't expect it'd go over well with... well, most players, really.

I think I hear your point, but I really do think they could start making trash harder to heal. I don't think expecting a tank to be able to solo heal themselves through wall to wall pulls is healthy for the fun of dungeons nor for getting new healers comfy with some pressure (keeping veterans entertained aside). Trash doesn't have to be as hard hitting as Savage Criterion, but that's actually the most pressed I've felt healing since like... t1 or Ifrit Ex. I found it fun.

Early early on, Dungeon trash could be expected to kill tanks. Brayflox Longstop , Qarn and its 100% max HP final stings, Stone Vigil and the multi-Aevis/Ice Sprite pulls... This continued only until they dialed things back in 2.2 after Amdapor Keep and Pharos Sirius were routinely too hard for random groups of entirely new players, but like, now the jobs are much easier to play and more powerful/group supportive. They could return things to that level and it probably wouldn't be as difficult, but it might make things like Harrowing Hell not blindside so many healers.

Heck, maybe if the occasional fight just began with a heavy healing check (instead of always ending with them), more healers would have opportunities to learn how to deal with high damage in less high-stakes settings.