What if: Stances were removed?

[Jas710]

A possibly radical idea. What would the game be like if all "stances" were non-existent?

Currently, we see the following almost on a daily basis:

"Oh sorry, I forgot to turn on Defiance / Deliverance / Shield Oath / Sword Oath / Diurnal / Nocturnal / Cleric / Fists of Fire / yada yada yada...."

If these stance modes were removed and were all simultaneously "active" in the background so to speak, would that make playing the associated roles more fun?

Pros and Cons?

[Lambdafish]

Tank gameplay would become incredibly dull. Just saying...

[Duelle]

Tank gameplay would become incredibly dull. Just saying...

Dull to you, maybe. I wouldn't mind it at all.

Healers would be less annoying to play if their damage-dealing spells scaled off the Mind stat instead of Intelligence, allowing Cleric Stance to be removed with no dps loss.

The problem there is that you'd have to either nerf damage output from Stone/Aero/etc or increase raid damage taken so that healers focus more on healing to sort of even things out. Because you're otherwise removing the trade off to Cleric Stance but not replacing it with anything else.

[magnanimousCynic]

Ignoring the fact that this is incredibly overpowered and makes certain classes downright broken, this just screams laziness. Half of these stances are set and forget.

I'll ask OP this instead; how do you balance AST who can, with your idea, simultaneously give HoTs and Shielding?

[Dzian]

Ignoring the fact that this is incredibly overpowered and makes certain classes downright broken, this just screams laziness. Half of these stances are set and forget.

The Set and forget ones could easily be scrapped. they don't really add anything to the gameplay of a job.

monk for example turn on fists of fire and forget about it entirely. there's never a need to switch to wind or earth so they could easily remove all of the fists stances and just give monk a flat damage increase and it wouldn't change the job at all.

ninja would be much the same put on a kiss and forget about it for the rest of the day. only time you ever need to swap is you actually need to stun or silence something which hasn't really happened ever since like t1 t2 and maybe requelling mist in weeping city..... so losing those stances wouldn't really break ninjas at all either. all it'd do is lose access to either a stun or a silence but as none of them are ever actually needed cos content is lol easy. its no big loss.

other stances though like ast sects and defiance deliverance change how jobs work and play a much bigger part in that job removing them would break joibs... paladins oaths also but to a lesser degree. the oath you're in doesn't really change the way you play your job you're basically just swapping damage reduction for more auto attack. nothing you do really changes from one stance to the other,

if you're going to keep the stances though they need to be a lot more involved than just set and forget. cos that really adds nothing to the jobs.

[Canadane]

Sounds boring and uninteresting.
I like the idea of changing playstyle on the fly, and if anything we need more stances with more branches of gameplay style.

[Rufalus]

Healers would be less annoying to play if their damage-dealing spells scaled off the Mind stat instead of Intelligence, allowing Cleric Stance to be removed with no dps loss.

[Neela]

Healers would be less annoying to play if their damage-dealing spells scaled off the Mind stat instead of Intelligence, allowing Cleric Stance to be removed with no dps loss.

and that is what SE just don't want xD

havent Yoshi just said a while ago that healer and tanks should be more focused to their base task? why should i play smn/blm if Ast/Whm would out damage me easily with holy and gravity by throwing aoe heals and hots at the same time? for me personally SE should remove cleric at all... but thats just me ^^

[Klamor]

I'd personally prefer them to simply be toggles...

As in, there's never a time as a Paladin or Warrior that I'm not in either Shield Oath/Defiance or Sword Oath/Deliverance. Just put them on the same button to be toggled on or off. On could be Shield/Defiance, and Off would then be Sword/Deliverance. Dark Knight all ready has this as both Darkside and Grit are either On or Off, with really no middle ground of neither one, nor the other. I understand it works differently with Dark Knight as in they can be Darkside-on/Grit-off, Darkside-on/Grit-on, or both off, for the times between pulls, OT-ing, etc... but then you look at Astrologian, or other Healers.

You're either in Cleric Stance, or you're not. You're either in Diurnal, or you're in Nocturnal; there's really no reason why, when both are available level-wise, you'd ever not be in one or the other.

Even with NIN, you're either using Kiss of the Wasp, or Kiss of the Viper... never neither, unless level sync takes them off and you forget to reapply it. Lazy? Maybe. Much simpler and less bothersome, definitely.