The cast time on Stoneskin II

[Destous]

If Stoneskin 2 would be castable in combat noone would even try to get an AST mainhealer (best example A6S between the bosses...it would be too OP). It is a balance thing isn't it? As SCH or AST you have 8 seperate casts I don't get why they even gave WHM this advantage... or they couldve made it for all classes the moment Granite Skin was removed -.-

Honestly, yes, all the healer classes should have access to SSII. It's not often that I get a group without a WHM, but waiting for a SCH and AST to fumble around casting SS in the whole party is a huge time sink, and can't be any fun for the SCH and AST. It's supposed to be a convenient spell, but 5s of cast time is anything but convenient.

[JackFross]

Yes, but how many of those skills you mentioned are inherently locked out of being cast during combat?

If this could be cast in combat, it would make sense to have a cast time. All these "lolsofunny" posts about adlo crits or summoning pets hold no relevance to the discussion. SSII can't be cast in combat. There's no room for abuse. It just has an annoyingly long cast time that could easily be shorter, if not instant.

None of them are inherently locked out of use in battle, no, but a good majority of them are implicitly locked out of being used in-battle without significant drawbacks.
1. Chakra is on the GCD. You can't gain stacks mid-fight without sacrificing offense.
2. Casting Huton mid-fight is a dps loss, since Armor Crush exists now.
3. A Machinist cannot do a 5-ammo opener, even when RS comes back again, unless they stand still and only press off-gcd skills for the following 30-40s while waiting for Reload to refresh its CD without using any of the ammo.
4. Foe Requiem can only be used mid-fight by sacrificing ~2 gcds of damage.

Not locked out by skill requirements, but locked out by skill requirements.

Honestly, yes, all the healer classes should have access to SSII. It's not often that I get a group without a WHM, but waiting for a SCH and AST to fumble around casting SS in the whole party is a huge time sink, and can't be any fun for the SCH and AST. It's supposed to be a convenient spell, but 5s of cast time is anything but convenient.

You just said:
"It is so inconvenient to wait for a SCH or AST to cast 8 Stoneskins on the party when no WHM is present."
Followed immediately by:
"Cutting that time down by 75% is not convenient."

Excuse me for not following this logic. Stoneskin is a WHM skill which is unnecessary in almost every instance in the game. As I have said before and will now say again, you only use Stoneskin on the party before an encounter so it absorbs some of the pain from the first raid-wide AoE skill, thus allowing both healers to DPS for longer without needing to pause and heal the raid as hard. And that's cool, but completely unnecessary, especially when it's a pug WHM who does 0 DPS anyway and casts SS2 because "casting SS2 is what I need to do" or a pair of AST/SCH where the AST isn't DPSing anyway (because my dps is based on the cards I give!) and then still feel the need to SS the entire party.

It's illogical, unnecessary, and pointless. It's already a skill designed for convenience. It only exists on White Mage, because White Mage is a Conjurer, whose roots are in the natural elements - wind, water, and earth. They have Stoneskin - an earth elemental spell - so it stands to reason they'd be the only one able to cast it.

The bottom line, though, yet again, is that Stoneskin on the party is optional and it is a convenience to that optional spell to be able to cast it on the party at once before a pull. The only reason that any of the arguments made ("Every Job should have access to it" / "It's not usable in-battle so why the cast time") only hold any weight if said effect granted by said spell were necessary and undeniably useful in all circumstances which it just flat out is not.

Like - people wanting the cast time removed are just embodying the #WhitePeopleProblems or #FirstWorldProblems hashtags right now. I have this great skill that makes it easier to apply this optional status to my team, but it's not good enough because it takes more than zero time to use. Basically, get over yourself and cast the spell. Or don't. Or use Swiftcast because the cast is too long for you. Either way, it's totally fine and does not warrant change.

[Nekotee]

On my case I like SS2 as it is now because it help me finding which whm is bad and which tank i will kill

Any Swift ss2 is labelled as bad whm from the beginning for me except if they show me that they are able to handle thing perfectly (aka not being cure spam OR medica2 spam...)
-> i can count less than 10 good whm

Any tank that do not wait for my own ss2 that I pre-cast by sprinting in front of the boss room will have a hard time
More or less i will let him die to 5% hp or less and bene his face and waiting for his complaining(if the pack is really small i won't even bother bene and kill him then tank

To be clear... there is a LOT of bot heal, and only a few true white mage