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

[Valence]

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.

Cleric stance, if we're talking about healers, was removed after HW (and only existed as a 10% damage buff role action in SB), so there was no stance dancing in ultimates.
Healers also didn't have any accuracy on their gear in HW and that's why it was such a pain to kit them for damage because all of your materia slots went for accuracy on prog gear iirc or close to it.

[IOwn92FCHouses]

Cleric stance, if we're talking about healers, was removed after HW (and only existed as a 10% damage buff role action in SB), so there was no stance dancing in ultimates.
Healers also didn't have any accuracy on their gear in HW and that's why it was such a pain to kit them for damage because all of your materia slots went for accuracy on prog gear iirc or close to it.

I was more referring to tank stance dancing when referring to the time period. No idea why I thought tank stance dancing. The period where they gave healers gear with accuracy as a 3rd substat was in ARR. You can still see the small amount of "Direct Hit" on the gear. That's what I was referring to there, I just misremembered the expansion because I'm slow today. Am example can be seen here: https://na.finalfantasyxiv.com/lodes...m/3854ade519a/

[CCheshire]

I'm glad SE removed CS as it was terrible, and I started healing right away after that positive change.

[Kozh]

I miss stances in general.

Same
I had fun with tank stances. Even if it's simple, at least it provides extra fun in dungeon. Though honestly I missed aggro management in general.

[Enjuden]

The stances were widely considered useless outside of Cleric Stance, which I don't know anyone who even liked CS dancing. I don't know why we're romanticizing a mechanic that players did not use outside of story content, and even then it was rare.

[Jeeqbit]

The stances were widely considered useless outside of Cleric Stance, which I don't know anyone who even liked CS dancing. I don't know why we're romanticizing a mechanic that players did not use outside of story content, and even then it was rare.

Tank stances weren't considered useless. One of them was for generating enmity and reducing incoming damage, while the other was for doing damage, and stance dancing was extremely common. It was also common for the off tanks to use their damage stance and the main tank to want to generate enmity and damage reduction.

I struggle to believe you that I was the only one using Cleric Stance to deal damage.

[Valence]

Due to tank stance being firmly an enmity stance today, it's a common misconception that old tank stances were first an enmity stance. Sure they did provide x1.7 on aggro generation (+70%), which was a safety net to keep up with DPS classes in a vacuum, but they also provided +20% mitigation which was their real value especially for casuals in dungeons (now under tank mastery). Meanwhile the aggro combos generated between 6x and 8x enmity (Flash on its own generated 1200 potency of enmity per cast, so approximately 10 times the potency of most basic AoEs). Anybody could perfectly keep enmity as a tank by just spamming the aggro combo.

That's also why a lot of casual players with bad gear and/or lesser skills would regularly fail to keep aggro even with their stance on, because they didn't manage the aggro combos properly.

[0blivion]

Yeah. I learned Dark Knight when stances still mattered and it was a blast, even though I died plenty of times in cruel and unfortunate ways (read: The Vault). It's less romanticizing and more that, despite thinking there is enough casual content, this would be a much better way to enhance the depth of dungeon gameplay than vomiting targeted circle AoEs at you. When I healed, my friends would tell me to hold off on healing them too early during pulls for the risk of generating too much aggro. (Unrelatedly, I miss SCH's DOTs and its control over the faeries. You used to be able to manually trigger Embrace and target your player of choice, often with a macro. I miss those days.


And it's not just casual content. Some Savage fights had aggro resets in there, requiring the tanks to sufficiently rebuild enmity and the healers to not generate too much enmity with healing while that happens. That's fun, and it adds depth.

[Raikai]

...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.

Cleric Stance could return as a solo tool.

We have the tech already, Blue Mages have a spell called Basic Instinct that buffs their solo damage, but is not available if you're in a party.

[MayuAmakura]

Because people complain it's easy and square knows if they cater to those style of players, they will be happy. After all, those same people will stand afk in limsa and complain how content is hard. Just looking back at some previous games and you notice the spike in difficulty and how tank must manage aggro, healers must be aware to not pull with massive healings, dps must be afraid of big threat or use spells to reduce it. Just shows a nice gameplay where each player must think of their actions. Here we have nothing of that.