When and when not to Cleric Stance

[Cynfael]

As others said, you do it when you anticipate not needing to heal life-threatening damage for several seconds. Setting this up through application of shields, HoTs, and/or stuns can help extend your DPS uptime.

Once you get the hang of it, your mental flowchart wil kick in, and you'll find yourself automatically toggling on CS whenever you know you can get away with it. As SCH, CS is like a default stance to which I revert whenever direct heals are unnecessary. Always Be Casting unless your MP situation has become desperate (i.e. virtually never unless you had to spam rez for some reason).

Even on AST I follow the same protocol except that I spend more GCDs actively healing. Essential Dignity gives me an ace in the hole when it's up so that I can push extra DPS and still get caught up on tank healing quickly and without excessive MP consumption.

[Jonnycbad]

The most annoying thing ever as a SCH is the short 2s window of waiting for bio's icon to appear before hitting bane. It feels like an eternity. Because usually after Bane is when I swap off CS. But i'm like ADD with trying to tag a hoard with full dots before healing because it is significant damage.

[416to305]

It depends on your job as others have said. As WHM I typically will pop Regen on the tank at the start of a pull, especially on a speed run and then flip to CS, and depending on the mob size, do a presence of mind to speed things up then spam Holy. Love seeing those mobs blow down because of me. If it's a large pull, or I see the tank taking lots of damage to the point I need to hit a Cure/Cure II before I can even enter CS, then I sometimes will do a Medica II to add a secondary Regen, and then same thing spam Holy. If it's a really large pull or tank taking big damage, I'll use Divine Seal first to boost that potency, then pop Regen and flip into CS. For bosses I frequently will hit CS to keep my DoTs up like Aero III, Aero II. As others have mentioned, the 6 second cooldown isn't really an issue since you can get out of it fairly quickly. Worst case there's Benediction which restores 100% of HP instantly even if you have CS on. As you mentioned though, low level dungeons are easy to heal so it's not a big issue. You'll notice higher up though the difference, as every so often you'll think why is this guy so hard to heal, only to realize you forgot CS on.