You know, I don't miss cleric stance, but... (thinking about pre-ShB stuff)

[0blivion]

...maybe I do miss cleric stance. Cleric stance was a trashfire because it did require a lot of personal responsibility from the other party members, but I s2g we had less curebots back then. Sure, there was still the average person doing single target cure III, but the epidemic of healers only doing triple digit damage in high level content wasn't quite there yet. I think the fact that aggro combo got removed is a double edged sword - it reduced button bloat, but they could've consolidated it into the DMG combo by using a toggle.

Diversion and LD made aggro management a group activity, and while I don't miss it cuz Savage had forced aggro resets back then, it did make leveling dungeons more interesting. It's like... a lot of the gameplay was designed to have less friction in PF. That's not bad, but that's why people who do less damage than the LB get dragged over the finish line of content they really shouldn't be in, and then they cause issues on the higher floors.

So... Idk, man, rework healers or at least remove Cure I and Benefic or let them upgrade. Yikes.

[RedLolly]

Yeah. I don't know if people really grasp that aggro was actually something the whole party had to work around. Everything built aggro quickly.

Tanks also had an aggro stance and a DPS stance. It was usually best to start off in aggro stance and then swap to DPS as the former nerfed your damage output. But everyone was expected to manage their personal aggro so the tank always kept the heat. The Archer skill, Quelling Strikes, was required for Black Mages, because of how fast one could out-aggro both tanks if they weren't in their aggro stance. Everyone had ways to personally manage it.

It's funny that the sentiment that tanking being dumbed down has never been as loud as it has been for healers because tanks still have interesting DPS skills.

[XtremePrime]

FFXIV (much like Retail WoW) are modern games and threat management is a design of the past when combat used to me slower and more methodical. I 100% guarantee you that with today's battle design being full DDR and DPS running further ahead of the tank to pull it will result in a mess to re-educate people to play slower, to wait for tanks to build up threat before they can attack and so on.

There's still FFXI and WoW Classic for those types of mechanics, but personally I don't think there's a place for threat management in FFXIV anymore.


As for stances in general, I don't mind if stance gameplay comes back in some form, but is stance juggling in a dungeon something players might enjoy nowadays? (genuine question as I haven't played FFXIV when stances were still a thing, and in Classic WoW you don't really want to go off defensive when tanking as Prot Warrior)

[0blivion]

FFXIV (much like Retail WoW) are modern games and threat management is a design of the past when combat used to me slower and more methodical. I 100% guarantee you that with today's battle design being full DDR and DPS running further ahead of the tank to pull it will result in a mess to re-educate people to play slower, to wait for tanks to build up threat before they can attack and so on.

There's still FFXI and WoW Classic for those types of mechanics, but personally I don't think there's a place for threat management in FFXIV anymore.


As for stances in general, I don't mind if stance gameplay comes back in some form, but is stance juggling in a dungeon something players might enjoy nowadays? (genuine question as I haven't played FFXIV when stances were still a thing, and in Classic WoW you don't really want to go off defensive when tanking as Prot Warrior)

Well, to be honest, I am the DPS (and healer) that pulls stuff ahead of tanks 'cause ever since they removed aggro management from the game, I've been bored as hell in dungeons. With friends, we used to try and speedclear dungeons by minmaxing around tank stance amd cleric stance. I started playing near the end of Stormblood, so I learnt how to tank as my second job after SCH, and then immediately had all of the fun tank stuff removed, lol (and all of SCH's job identity).

I think the average 'modern' MMO player would probably not appreciate it, but I think it would make casual content (everything up to and including Extreme/Unreal/maybe Chaotic) a lot more engaging, I guess? Obviously, it was also a source of friction when you had a 'weak link' with you, but that's no different from today. And it was very much a 'play stupid games, win stupid prizes' situation, so DPS that didn't use LD/Diversion faced the consequences of their actions lol.

[Jeeqbit]

I feel like people were cure bots even then. And we've certainly always had "shield healers" who actually spam Adlo constantly and maintain 100% uptime on it. I think that all stances were either you use damage stance 99.99% of the time or you don't use it at all, there was that level of split. Don't get me wrong, tanks didn't heal themselves all on their own back then and things really hurt so Adlo was more useful, but still, I never needed to go quite that far.

FFXIV (much like Retail WoW) are modern games and threat management is a design of the past when combat used to me slower and more methodical. I 100% guarantee you that with today's battle design being full DDR and DPS running further ahead of the tank to pull it will result in a mess to re-educate people to play slower, to wait for tanks to build up threat before they can attack and so on.

It was never like that in the first place. Nobody needed to wait for you to build threat. In fact, you could simply keep tank stance on the entire time and have no trouble with threat. The problem is, keeping tank stance on or using threat combo reduced your outgoing damage, so the 50% of "damage obsessed" players would want to turn off tank stance ASAP. As such, they would either keep stance on for 1 enmity combo, or find clever ways to get aggro without using it at all - such as a lower DPS tank pulling, using self-heals while pulling, or shirk and having other jobs use enmity control/share abilities.

The issue with threat management was simply that a lot of people do not understand the concept. Everyone knows what a damage dealer is, because they just attack stuff. Easy to grasp. Everyone knows what a healer is, because almost every game genre has med packs or potions of some sort to restore HP. But how do you explain to people what a tank is if they've never run into the concept? To solve this problem, they made it so you turn tank stance on and then behave like a DPS, and now simply behaving like a DPS will achieve the bare minimum tasks involved in tanking most things.

but is stance juggling in a dungeon something players might enjoy nowadays? (genuine question as I haven't played FFXIV when stances were still a thing, and in Classic WoW you don't really want to go off defensive when tanking as Prot Warrior)

Absolutely 100%. Stance juggling was my joy and the thing that made dungeons fun for me before Shadowbringers. The dungeons themselves were boring, so optimizing my damage in ways that clearly weren't intended and trying to reduce my use of tank stance was the only fun to be had given dungeons are zzz. It was really hard to lose them, but I knew it had to be done because as I said, a lot of new players don't understand what a tank even is and how it differs from a DPS.

And Cleric Stance juggling on healers was extremely fun because it's a risk-reward system and if you did it right without failing it felt good. There will always be people who don't find it fun and ultimately SE will always listen to the people who want it to be easier and more trivial.

[Atreus]

I miss stances in general.

[NegativeS]

I agree that they need to add something to make combat more interesting when you're not fighting a giant wall boss in a trial, dungeon hallway trash has never been more brainless and boring. I'll accept stances.

[Azurarok]

Couldn't it just be that the game was also balanced without healer dps really accounted for and curebots weren't as noticeable back then?

Also modern healers are expected to have much higher dps uptime with the oGCD bloat and free weave windows so I assume we're also much more aware of it nowadays.

[IOwn92FCHouses]

Couldn't it just be that the game was also balanced without healer dps really accounted for and curebots weren't as noticeable back then?

Also modern healers are expected to have much higher dps uptime with the oGCD bloat and free weave windows so I assume we're also much more aware of it nowadays.

UCOB came out at the same time stance dancing still existed. Healer dps was expected and required at this point in the game, and A3S would have been even more unclearable if it wasn't tuned to include healer dps. Fuck, they GAVE HEALERS ACCURACY GEAR because they knew healers would be doing damage back on HW. Like, they tacked on accuracy as an extra substat on some gear. Just so it wouldn't be miss city.

[Jeeqbit]

Couldn't it just be that the game was also balanced without healer dps really accounted for and curebots weren't as noticeable back then?

Also modern healers are expected to have much higher dps uptime with the oGCD bloat and free weave windows so I assume we're also much more aware of it nowadays.

The lack of awareness was more likely to be among new or casual players. Same as it is now, where someone just plays and doesn't have enough social circles to tell them it's more than just casting cure spells and doesn't read anything.

But it was also less likely that you'd discover it yourself. Cleric Stance was from Conjurer and had to be cross-classed. So if you only played Astrologian, or didn't engage with the cross-class system, then you might never have worked out that Cleric Stance existed. This is where the social connections and conversations of an MMO help a lot.

In the high-end content scene, though, healer DPS was definitely a thing. It goes back to ARR, where people couldn't help but notice there were healers in raids that were just literally standing there waiting until they needed to heal, when they could be doing damage. In Heavensward, any serious healer was actually prepared to contribute damage. I do remember that it became common for one healer to focus on it more though and kinda push the healing burden on their co-healer, but I've never been a healer main so that was just what I saw some of them saying.