What happened to job inter-play? Was it any good?

[Gemina]

I do wonder what healer stance dancing would have looked like today if it still existed

In dungeons, literally no different that what healing looks like now. Only difference would be that healers would be doing more damage, and they would keep it up full time too. This is because Cleric Stance now would only affect healing magic, not abilities. Healers have way more oGCD heals now, and primarily use them to keep the tank/party healthy. Since they try not to use GCD heals, they would get an insane bonus to their offensive magic, while not suffering any consequences with their healing. WHM would be the exception to this, which means it could be an exclusive skill just for them and I bet it would receive a lot of positive reception for this as well.

I recently did a dungeon with a WAR and got disappointed when my earthly star went off but I had nothing to heal because the WAR healed themself to full.

WARs can basically benediction themselves every 17s, or something like that. You should still use Star for the damage. WAR is one of the worst designed jobs in the game right now unless the goal with WAR was to make healers completely redundant, in which case it is the best.

Given that later comments responded to this better than I could I'll just say this: It sucks hearing about jobs that my friends love slowly losing their liveliness as their unique traits are stripped away until they begin to look like a clone of other jobs. Job identity, at least for me, is very important because it can strongly play into character identity of a WoL. As an example- I don't think my character Ailbhe would become an astrologian if didn't play into his insecurity of not knowing the future or the assurance he could prevent the death of his loved ones. Astrologian has been losing this aspect for a time now as cards have became 1 kind of card in EW (damage up).
There is also the gameplay aspect that I feel other people have better expressed than I ever could.

Try to understand that this is subjective. There is homogenization across the game's jobs, sure, but this doesn't mean that if you played DNC for an entire expansion that you can just pick up DRG and be just as good with it. However, the likeness across many jobs does ease the transition of playing one job to the next. In terms of AST specifically, it is just fine as a healer. It's just the card mechanic that the dev team has difficulty circumventing the issues with. I won't lie, it's a horrible mechanic and I know the dev's would love to scrap it. They can't though because it is such a huge part of ASTs identity. It would be like taking away SCH's fairy, or mudra combinations from NIN. So we're just kind of stuck with whatever they cook up from one expansion to the next. I guarantee you that come 8.0, this mechanic will change entirely... again. But in terms of their healing capability, AST is a solid choice, with some niche tools at their disposal.

[Jeeqbit]

In dungeons, literally no different that what healing looks like now. Only difference would be that healers would be doing more damage, and they would keep it up full time too. This is because Cleric Stance only affected healing magic, not abilities.

This strikes me as an overly WHM-centric view, because of how Benediction is not based on Mind. The others have potencies, which means they are based on the raw healing output of (Weapon) Magic Damage and Healing Magic Potency (aka Mind). So if healer damage was to be based on Attack Magic Potency (aka INT) again and INT and MND were swapped, then the ability would get its strength through one of these methods:

• Purely (Weapon) Magic Damage
• (Weapon) Magic Damage and Healing Magic Potency (aka MND)
• (Weapon) Magic Damage and Attack Magic Potency (aka INT)

So my assumption is heal abilities would be based on #2. You would have no MND in Cleric Stance, so it would become based purely on (Weapon) Magic Damage.

If it were #3, the heals would be weaker outside Cleric Stance which wouldn't make any sense.

It seems extraordinarily unlikely that heal abilities don't involve your main stat, but really don't feel like testing it.

[Shurrikhan]

In dungeons, literally no different that what healing looks like now. Only difference would be that healers would be doing more damage, and they would keep it up full time too. This is because Cleric Stance now would only affect healing magic, not abilities.

Any damage increase Cleric Stance's modifier would have provided would have just been siphoned from the initial potencies themselves (e.g., a 300-potency Dosis III with +10% damage instead of 330-potency directly), and Cleric Stance absolutely did affect healing abilities due to the tremendous loss of Mind. Benediction and early Lustrate were simply outliers in that they didn't scale with their caster at all, to the point of categorically not even being healing abilities; as skills that gave their target a % of their max HP, they scaled only with the target's HP and even ignored healing-received debuffs like Infirmity while Lustrate-v.2 and Tetragrammaton would not. The 20% penalty was nothing compared to losing some 80% primary stat.
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Aside / to OP:
Cleric Stance was the equivalent of a sticky gearbox that people nostalgically mistake for the equivalent of uniquely having had gears (despite their still having them now, in choosing between offense and healing by choosing between attacks and heals).

In theory, Cleric Stance merely caused one to commit to offense for at least 2 GCDs at a time, up from 1. That's literally just 1 GCD more. Which is already not particularly worth the apm bloat* or making a trap of half one's kit at a time for.

* Note here that I'm not considering high APM inherently APM bloat. I'm solely considering an invasive and unvaried use of APM that precludes anything more interesting seeing space for use as "APM bloat".

In practice though, it punished Spell Speed (because any amount of SpS would cause a remainder, increasing the lock-in period effectingly to 3 GCDs or demanding brief wait, and that remainder could trip up skill-queuing with more than 70 or so ping), and especially punished ping (since that'd make each CS toggle clip where you would otherwise have been fine unless using it just after an instant cast, as all else had at least a 2s cast time) and packet loss (as it could immediately turn itself back on after toggling it off, again locking you in for another 5s).

There's also nothing that even the best rehauled designs of Cleric Stance as a role-wide stance-toggle that simple interactions between abilities could not already accomplish with more interest, more depth, more nuance, and less annoyance and arbitrary punishment.

As a unique mechanic that offers new nuances instead of simply restricting access to one half or the other of one's own kit, though, such as between Nocturnal and Diurnal Sect or SCH's Light and Dark Sect, stances could certainly see use on certain healers to net positive effect. They just wouldn't be anything like Cleric Stance.

You're both too negative. It was a great system of choices that allowed player expression.

It was far from great in practice or even general approach. In its most fundamental promise, it had potential. But, even the basic design philosophies were generally half-baked at best, especially once one separates "inter-role" from the simple and quickly-killed-off 1.x "jobs first" design (wherein roles themselves were far more fluid, with, for example, Pugilist and Lancer having as many avenues towards tanking-related features as would Gladiator and Marauder).

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For OP:

I'm not sure whether to what degree this should counter as "inter-play" but should at least count as coordination or complimentary play:

In ARR, especially during leveling, optimal play varied with party composition. Let's pretend we're level 38 and there's a pull of 3 mobs near a pull of 4 mobs, each of which can do decent damage to the tank (require Cure II spam and CDs for the tank to survive), and 4 of which have ranged spam and/or ranged specials.

*(Note that only Warrior has anything like Tank Stance at that level, and it's comparatively pathetic, and potencies and therefore outputs haven't yet been so inflated nor high-level traits baselined into their respective skills, such that Venomous Bite starts at 9s, Disembowel at 12s, etc., which tended to be more rotationally engaging but was certainly far weaker / tuned for use at their respective levels instead of at lv50+.)

I'll give a few different composition and how they'd vary optimal strategy. See the HB below:

PLD-WHM-DRG-DRG: Take the two packs separately. WHM pulls with DoTs, Regens the tank, then sleeps all but the focus target. PLD uses Flash only once for initial threat and mitigation, then all pound down the focus target down. DRGs alternate who Disembowels (as the damage buff was instead a raid-debuff at the time, rather than specific to the DRG) so the other can get higher appgcd via more Full Thrusts and reduced wasted Life Surge cooling. If the target has any specials with delay, the DRGs Leg Sweep it to cancel it, since PLD's Shield Bash costs a GCD. PLD uses Shield Bash only to prevent important buffs or to prevent self and melee from needing to run out. Because all are on the same target, the Paladin deals significant damage and Enmity both via Sword Oath. Because the targets are dying so quickly and incoming damage is so reduced via CC, no heals but Regen and a between-pull Cure II are necessary.

PLD-SMN-SCH-BLM: Two possible strategies. The first is to mass-pull, DoT all, use BLM's AoE Sleep, and then nuke down a single enemy at a time (starting with ranged) thereafter until Sleep is about to time out (then briefly AoE and refresh Sleep if necessary). The second is to pull all and split ranged and melee enemies, have only the BLM Quelling Strikes, and SMN and SCH (who deals more DoT damage than the SMN) kite melee mobs (since one could have up to 20s of Sprint at no cost only for Casters) while the Paladin takes the ranged, keeping them chasing melee near enough to the ranged for the BLM to cleave off of (generally requiring that SMN and SCH spin together).

WAR-SCH-MNK-BRD: Pre-shield. Pull all. Have Bard open and kite melee mobs until they're ripped off by Overpower, giving the SCH (who does not yet have any AoEs) enough time to DoT everything and Bane without the WAR dying. Bard uses the strong snares to kite around the Warrior despite the mere 12y range on Quick Nock (Wide Volley being unavailable until lv50, and less TP-efficient until getting a proc). WAR opens with Bloodbath (previously 25% of damage dealt) and Rampart and/or Vengeance as needed as soon as Overpower ends up takes melee off Bard. Monk focuses same target with non-AoEs as the Warrior is auto-ing. Before the second Bane goes up, WAR swaps to Defiance, and, just after the second Bane goes up, WAR pops Convalescence to survive taking all mobs now that Bloodbath, Rampart, and Vengeance are down. SCH heal-spams as everyone else cleans up. Another variation: Can aim Overpower (which was a cone at the time) as not to take melee off the Bard until they'd be immune to loss of movement speed.

[Gemina]

Any damage increase Cleric Stance's modifier would have provided would have just been siphoned from the initial potencies themselves (e.g., a 300-potency Dosis III with +10% damage instead of 330-potency directly), and Cleric Stance absolutely did affect healing abilities due to the tremendous loss of Mind. Benediction and early Lustrate were simply outliers in that they didn't scale with their caster at all, to the point of categorically not even being healing abilities; as skills that gave their target a % of their max HP, they scaled only with the target's HP and even ignored healing-received debuffs like Infirmity while Lustrate-v.2 and Tetragrammaton would not. The 20% penalty was nothing compared to losing some 80% primary stat.

I edited my post because I did not word it correctly. You captured the correction as what I meant to say was that Cleric Stance today would completely ignore healing abilities. Cleric Stance of old swapped MND and INT values, and back then when we had stat allocation points, it was very important for healers to allocate all of them towards MND in order to pump up their damage when they went into Cleric Stance and swapped the values. What this meant was that your offense was gimped when you were in the wrong stance. But it wasn't a damage increase vs a siphoning of potency increase where this was felt. It was felt because mobs dying slower isn't as noticeable as your tank dying faster. How much you decide to crunch the numbers based on values such as Potency and Spell Speed is irrelevant because you already knew that if you were not in Cleric Stance, your offensive magic was not hitting as hard. If this was negligible, then the healer debates back then wouldn't even have been a thing, and all healers could have just passively remained out of Cleric Stance as to not gimp their healing.

Cleric Stance today absolutely would not work that way, simply because INT is no longer factored into a healer's offense. In order for Cleric Stance to work similarly as it did in the past, the ability would deliberately have to increase damage while forsaking healing, ignoring the MND stat completely, which would very likely mean healing abilities would not be affected at all, only their spells.

[Shurrikhan]

I edited my post because I did not word it correctly. You captured the correction as what I meant to say was that Cleric Stance today would completely ignore healing abilities.

That would make the mechanic all the more pointless, though. And rather different (even further dumbed down) from what it was, as it previously had affected all but Benediction (from the point onward that Lustrate was made worthwhile on non-tanks as well by dealing healing potency instead of %HP).

If you make it not affect healing abilities, you remove the sole (even if tiny) aspect of decision-making it previously offered -- choosing whether to primarily attack or primarily heal with simultaneous damage-and-healing skills like Assize, Earthen Star, etc. and remove any pacesetting otherwise provided by oGCD CDs.

All that version of Cleric Stance would do, then, is punish the player for attacking fewer than 2 GCDs in a row or using an oGCD attack outside of that period... atop its past issues of packet loss- and Spell Speed-unfriendliness. You'd raise difficulty floor (or at least, annoyances) considerably for very little increase to difficult ceiling (if losing singular woven attacks can even be considered that).

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There's no reason for Cleric Stance to to follow the same procedure as before, when its context was hugely different due to attack spells and heals coming from different stats, instead of attempting to produce the same results (or what little among them could be considered net positives).

[Gemina]

That would make the mechanic all the more pointless, though. And rather different (even further dumbed down) from what it was, as it previously had affected all but Benediction (from the point onward that Lustrate was made worthwhile on non-tanks as well by dealing healing potency instead of %HP).

If you make it not affect healing abilities, you remove the sole (even if tiny) aspect of decision-making it previously offered -- choosing whether to primarily attack or primarily heal with simultaneous damage-and-healing skills like Assize, Earthen Star, etc. and remove any pacesetting otherwise provided by oGCD CDs.

All that version of Cleric Stance would do, then, is punish the player for attacking fewer than 2 GCDs in a row or using an oGCD attack outside of that period... atop its past issues of packet loss- and Spell Speed-unfriendliness. You'd raise difficulty floor (or at least, annoyances) considerably for very little increase to difficult ceiling (if losing singular woven attacks can even be considered that).

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There's no reason for Cleric Stance to to follow the same procedure as before, when its context was hugely different due to attack spells and heals coming from different stats, instead of attempting to produce the same results (or what little among them could be considered net positives).

This is precisely my point. That it would be pointless. I'm not advocating for the return of Cleric Stance in current content. Quite the opposite. The reason why I say healing abilities would be unaffected is because that is how abilities that increase healing via healing magic currently work. Abilities such as SCH's Protraction and WAR's Thrill of Battle do not increase the potency of oGCD heals, so the reverse would also have to be true. And because oGCD heals are so abundant across the healers with the exception of WHM whom still primarily uses the GCD to heal, WHM is really the only healer that stands to benefit/suffer from such a design.

I don't think it could work as a role skill, but as a WHM exclusive ability, I think there is some potential there. Because Benediction already ignores any kind of penalty to healing and it is on such a long cooldown, their only other ST oGCD heal is Tetra and while they are getting a second charge come DT, it will be post lv90 and it doesn't really change that their oGCD healing capability is still limited in comparison to the other healers. Other oGCD restorative abilities such as Asylum, Assize, and Bell simply assist the WHM remaining on the offensive. What I am thinking is that Cleric Stance on WHM will be married to the Lily mechanic and help make it more dynamic and impactful. Much like before, Cleric Stance being active would essentially be the default stance for WHM, turning it off only when afflatus skills/GCD heals are needed, and then making sure to get back into it in order to pump up their damage to Misery and other offensive skills.

This would give WHM an actual gimmick, and some individuality among the other healers. I am by no means saying this is how the job should play. I am only thinking outside the box and tossing around some ideas to help make the job less vanilla while keeping its identity intact.

[Jeeqbit]

In theory, Cleric Stance merely caused one to commit to offense for at least 2 GCDs at a time, up from 1. That's literally just 1 GCD more. Which is already not particularly worth the apm bloat* or making a trap of half one's kit at a time for.

It's a risk-reward thing though and that's what was fun about it. Risk-reward type stuff invites you to become good at it purely by "getting a feel" for the timing and learning the situations the risk is worth it and that it's not. Knowing there was a risk forced you to care about doing it right.

Cleric Stance today absolutely would not work that way, simply because INT is no longer factored into a healer's offense.

Well the implication of bringing back Cleric Stance as it was in Heavensward would be splitting damage/healing between INT/MND again. However, I think bringing it back as it was wouldn't fit with their current design philosophy in the slightest, because risk-reward systems have to be a minor difference like how positionals have become. Probably a modern version of Cleric Stance would have to buff damage by 1% in exchange for losing all of your Healing Magic Potency stat. This way, if someone didn't want to risk it, they'd only lose 1% damage, but it still rewards min-max gameplay.

The biggest division was always the "dps stance/cleric stance bad" and "tank stance/healer stance good" camps. The way Yoshi-P wanted the system to work, and the way players from other games wanted the system to work were at odds.

I don't honestly feel that they "wanted" it to work a particular way. I think it was all just a shot in the dark. They didn't really know what they were doing when making ARR, so they just tried to make mechanics that made logical sense for the lore of the class/job and holy trinity concept, while adding in all the mechanics from other FF games like silence, sleep, elemental stats, etc. But it was throwing mud at a wall and seeing what sticks and most of it didn't lol. But out of that came the things that stuck which they had mostly fine-tuned toward the final tier of Heavensward into Stormblood.

For example, melee DPS had things like Fist of Earth, Keen Flurry and Featherfoot. They made sense from a lore perspective and you could assume when designing the game that melee DPS would tank adds in boss fights, but given they weren't tanks it ended up being mud that they threw at a wall that didn't stick.

This is how we lost interesting emergent gameplay mechanics in fights as well. Players figure out the best way to minmax DPS when they were NOT supposed to be doing that

Yes, true, often players just flat out ignored intended concepts so SE was like "ok, we'll remove it then" and didn't replace it with anything. Sometimes ignoring the intended concepts was to the detriment of a party somewhat, like how being in a DPS stance on a tank might sometimes make tanks unnecessarily squishy and I'd feel a little guilty about that in some fights. Because some fights, if I'm honest, my damage wasn't worth making myself more squishy for, but I did it anyway because I wanted to do more damage and then the healer had to heal me.

Even an express "DPS Stance" , "Healer Stance", "Tank Stance" switch would do this, where entering multiplayer content forces these switches on, and when these switches are on, you are supposed to use tank or heal, not DPS.

I do wish they would do this for the MSQ. It can't be hard to do. The DPS checks have to be designed for a healer and the incoming damage has to be designed for a caster DPS. All of which makes MSQ duties a complete joke, especially when you have some item level growth.

I think that's where the question of DoT/HoT and other types of buffs matter, and we've largely lost most of them, due in part to how DoT ticks consume a lot of network bandwidth.

I didn't see this as a bandwidth thing. They just have phase changes in raids that affect DoT-centric rotation's DPS so they don't want this to be an issue anymore. Although they do have some issues with buff limits that have become apparent with the forced buff windows and especially large-scale raids like DRS.

[Shurrikhan]

It's a risk-reward thing though and that's what was fun about it.

For it to have been a risk, allies would have to die within 2 GCDs' time if not spam-healed by both healers, and those situations would need to not be easily predictable. Which... was virtually never the case for as long as Cleric Stance existed.

Probably a modern version of Cleric Stance would have to buff damage by 1% in exchange for losing all of your Healing Magic Potency stat. This way, if someone didn't want to risk it, they'd only lose 1% damage, but it still rewards min-max gameplay.

Given that even healer DoTs can make up a 10% DPS increase, it could easily go higher. I just still don't see why you'd want to bother. Until it has the potency (e.g., +15% dmg vs. +30% healing) to make a difference often enough to need frequent toggles and for those toggles to include some element of risk... it's just clunky bloat. And if you do make it see frequent use... it ends up filling up weave-space that could otherwise have been more varied per any other increase in APM (if that APM is the goal here).

Now, one could do a fair bit by reducing its CD to scale with GCD speed and by reducing its lock-in period to 1.5 GCDs or so... OR even by swapping it to a lock-out period (the CD begins on press but can be cancelled at any time so that you risk damage output by hitting it just before you'd need to swap it back off for a heal) --likely with a slightly longer CD like 2.5 GCDs-- but all that's still merely polishing a needless convolution with no net positives over alternate means of increasing APM in fitting manner for each healer job.

Sometimes ignoring the intended concepts was to the detriment of a party somewhat, like how being in a DPS stance on a tank might sometimes make tanks unnecessarily squishy and I'd feel a little guilty about that in some fights. Because some fights, if I'm honest, my damage wasn't worth making myself more squishy for, but I did it anyway because I wanted to do more damage and then the healer had to heal me.

I mean, if the healer had to lose more rPotency from having healed you that much extra than you put out, yourself, by dropping that mitigation, then tank stance would have been the right call, at least in those windows of highest damage intake. It just basically never was.

(Granted, that was in no small part because of how costly toggling tank stance was back then, making it near impossible to narrow tank stance uptime around just those moments of high incoming damage for any net rDPS gain given those costs. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ )