Quote Originally Posted by Milkbeard View Post
So for those who want cleric stance back, you really don't.
Man, come on, don't J Allen Brack me.

Yep, I'll play the "villain" on this topic — I want Cleric Stance back. No caveats, no buts. If the developers suddenly put Cleric Stance right back in the game, exactly as it was in ARR/HW, it would not bother me at all.

I liked Cleric Stance. I thought it made healing in FFXIV more fun.

I personally feel like Cleric Stance is being cartoonishly-vilified by most of FFXIV's community, now that it's all far-away and in hindsight.

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I was playing in the Cleric Stance era, and in my own experiences, Cleric just wasn't that big of a problem. Dungeons, Normal Raids, and Alliance Raids didn't constantly wipe because Healers were in Cleric. If someone wasn't feeling confident about DPSing, or the encounter seemed too risky / unfamiliar / spicy, then Healers would just... stay out of Cleric.

There's a tendency to exaggerate and portray "less dedicated" / "more casual" players as complete idiots who can't do anything correct, but in my actual experiences, most people playing Healers had no problem utilising Cleric correctly. And if someone wasn't using Cleric correctly, it was almost-invariably due to being too cautious, and not entering Cleric as much as they could have. Which didn't even feel that bad back then, because Healing from Healers actually mattered a lot more, so if your Healer was being cautious, it was like... "OK, no problem, that's fine, just keep the HP bars up".

And I also think that it's overexaggerated that Healers were being bullied about Cleric uptime or something. I cannot personally remember a single moment in any content outside Savage and maybe some EXs when I ever saw anyone even care whether one or more Healers were in Cleric or not, as long as the Party wasn't wiping to healable damage.

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Actually, thinking about it now, Cleric Stance was one of the first things about FFXIV that stuck-out to me as a new player. It was interesting and a new sort of mechanic to me, and it made Healing actually work differently from how it felt in other MMOs.

In fact, FFXIV used to be full of strange and interesting differences in its design and play-feel like that, and it was a large part of what made me become interested in the game past the free trial, and stay-on as a dedicated player.

The successive changes that Mr. Yoshida has pushed-for since Stormblood to "broaden appeal" have, for me, served to water-down, genericise, and dilute FFXIV's gameplay design more and more, and at this point, if you put me in a test environment where the player-units had FFXIV's Job mechanics, except everything was reskinned with generic models purchased off an Unreal Engine asset-store, I might be hard-pressed to correctly identify which game I'm even playing.

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As far as the statements about how supposedly-unpleasant it was to have to deal with Cleric, I personally didn't view Cleric as an "inconvenience" — I viewed it as a mechanic.

A mechanic that was just like any other mechanic that is part of how Jobs and Roles functioned, like Enochian or Blood of the Dragon.

So I just learned how and when to use it. And it felt good to get better at encounters, and become more confident and bold about when to safely enter Cleric to deal some more damage. There was a sense of definite "skill progression" as I repeated encounters more and more, and it also made even Dungeons feel a lot more engaging to learn and practise the mechanics and patterns.

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As for Cleric clock-blocking you from DPSing... I don't know what to say, really.

I mean, I did "switch between DPS and Healing Spells freely", because the cooldown on Cleric was 5 seconds, and even in ARR/HW, FFXIV's healing pace was lethargic compared to other games.

So tales of switching to Cleric, and then everyone DYING HORRIBLY AHHHHH because you can't heal because you're strapped in Cleric Jail, seem perplexing and greatly-exaggerated to me.

At worst, you might sweat slightly for ~1 GCD before you just toggled Cleric back off and Cure 2 or Lustrate or something. Maybe burn a Swiftcast if something really weird happened.

Honestly, dancing into Cleric to reapply DOTs, then swapping back out to reapply Regen or something, was an enjoyable rhythm to me. And again, it felt actually-distinct, rather than just "What if we made WoW, but the server responsiveness was really bad?"

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And as for gear and stats... I personally found the INT/MND split interesting.

I liked that different stats actually did different things, and it felt cool to "shift" between Help Mode and Death Mode, even at the numeric level.

There was a tangible power-reward for using that shift intelligently, and it felt cool to gradually watch content clear faster and faster as I became more confident about when to Cleric.

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Actually, I don't even see how Cleric would be a problem with FFXIV's modern design — everything has only become more hyper-scripted and meticulously-plotted. Dedicated EX, Savage, and Ultimate Healers could probably map-out down to the exact GCD exactly when they would toggle Cleric Stance on and off.

Especially because, there is already barely-any need for "spontaneous emergency healing" in current FFXIV, so there would be little risk of being caught inside Cleric at the wrong time, unless you're completely YOLO'ing a Savage floor with no plan whatsoever... which would probably cause you not to succeed anyway, with or without Cleric Stance in the game?

And even if you did "mess up" your Cleric timing, it's just not very common in FFXIV to encounter cases where a maximum possible delay of 5s would actually cause a wipe, because you would both need the timing of incoming damage-waves to be that precise, and also to have activated Cleric literally right before the designated mechanic occurred. Otherwise, you'd have a delay before Healing of less than 5s, because Cleric was already cooling-down by some amount.

To be honest, Cleric's 5s CD is actually incredibly-forgiving in a game that has scripted and paced-out damage as precisely as FFXIV does.

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...So yeah, you're totally welcome to personally dislike Cleric Stance as a mechanic, we all have different play-sensibilities.

But lecturing me about what I "actually want" is... pretty inaccurate, regarding this topic.