Cleric Stance Discussion - Is it needed?

[Thunda_Cat_SMASH]

Cleric is a blight on the game and deserves to be nuked from orbit to destroy it's poisoning influence. If the devs want healers to contribute dps, then make them have an actual rotation that's fun and engaging instead of an AFK slogfest. Hell, DO SOMETHING to make healers fun to play while actually having a different playstyle to tanks and dps.

[Kallera]

Most jobs have tools to compensate or players eventually learn when not to use certain cooldowns for those down periods. Learning when to not use things in accordance to the fight is also part of learning any given fight. This is also where sites like FFlogs becomes increasingly handy to compare against other players. You can see when they use what at any given point in a fight to help optimize your own play.

I think there is just too little wiggle room for my taste, from my perspective.

[JunseiKei]

There will always be wiggle room, lest you get another monster like Gordias Savage or Ramuh EX/ Bismarck EX (for those that have forgotten or joined after the content was relevant, these had pretty strict DPS checks for the current gear- not even talking minimal ilevel).

[Elleia]

...ideally, Healers would simply be improved by giving them more support tools OTHER than healing.

I posted this somewhere else: Imagine if SCH had a vulnerability soil that boosts everyone else's damage, WHM Stone landed a vulnerability on the target and AST was able to give everyone a haste or damage buff, and all these would require their own meta-games to sustain.

More support tools would be nice, but I'd like them to do something more interesting than a "set and forget" kind of thing, like how AST's card are now. For example, stone putting up a vuln buff doesn't really change the playstyle or help with downtime at all - WHMs will just have to DPS as they do now to keep the debuff up. I can't remember where somebody mentioned it but I liked the idea of channeled buffs. Filling downtime with a channeled move that buffs the party's dps or speed would be interesting. Of course, with aoes and dodging, the cooldown would have to be fairly short (similar to the current cleric stance, even) so that you can channel your buffs whenever heals aren't needed.

[Adire]

I posted this somewhere else: Imagine if SCH had a vulnerability soil that boosts everyone else's damage, WHM Stone landed a vulnerability on the target and AST was able to give everyone a haste or damage buff, and all these would require their own meta-games to sustain.

If all of this is on top of removing cleric stance, I'd have to oppose it. If the DDs suck, the healer giving them 10% haste or 10% more damage really isn't going to help anything. A good healer that DPSes can somewhat offset bad DD damage with cleric stance, they would not be able to with just support buffs.

Though I guess it would encourage people to kick bad DDs more and maybe get them to stop being bad or apathetic or lazy. That would be nice.

[Ayer2015]

I don't think many Healers who don't want to DPS realise how much worse their predicament would become if this change were to happen, because now they have absolutely no excuse for not contributing DPS, thus making the Healer DPS Meta pretty much guaranteed across the board.

They keep saying they want to close the skill gap. DPS scaled off MND would do just that.
Given we see Ice BLMs, you will come across healers refusing to dps regardless.

[Keikun]

I wish they remove that ASAP.

[Shori]

I'd feel OK if in 4.0 some spells were replaced to use the MND stat if I were playing AST or SCH, however this is unlikely to work for WHM whos skills are lengthy to cast and are purely for WHM and so very much requires the cleric stance to contribute to the party.

Any half-decent healer knows that healing is priority. But when you are just burning your way through old content you'd get very bored if you had no decent way to contribute.

[Alistaire]

I don't think many Healers who don't want to DPS realise how much worse their predicament would become if this change were to happen, because now they have absolutely no excuse for not contributing DPS, thus making the Healer DPS Meta pretty much guaranteed across the board.

Look, stop calling this a meta. This doesn't happen because players decided to play the game a different way; the game is designed to give healers room to dps outside of raids, and even sometimes then.

[Ogulbuk]

More support tools would be nice, but I'd like them to do something more interesting than a "set and forget" kind of thing, like how AST's card are now.

I was giving quick examples that would require little redesign. SCH already have exclusive soil effects, that's why I mention a vulnerability soil for them. It could be also tied to Aetherflow, making you have to evaluate if it's use would be better at the time than use of Lustrate or Sacred Soil.

WHM could get Dia (in XI, that spell lowers defense and adds light dot) tweaked to work with this game's effect. It could have some synergy with healing, something that encourages a bit more thought than just tossing it at the foe.

I got to admit I am not familiar with AST at all. And these again are just examples, im sure there are tons other mechanics that could be used as support tools.