Adding Stances

[Saefinn]

After some of the recent discussions here, I thought a little more detail about how I feel we can address some of the issues we've got. One of the issues is over job complexity. I feel the simple answer to this is: stance it baby.

We could split said stances between two principles:
- Pure healing focus. This could run off of the existing balance/setup. It stays approachable for new and inexperienced players as well as those who're less confident healers. It'd also be beneficial to progression or learning groups. They'd still contribute the same level of DPS as they do now as well. So hypothetically, we don't actually lose anything from the current design.

- Raid-wide focus. Take a hit to healing but the pay off is that there are other benefits to the party/raid. There would be more juggling involved and you'd have to work more to compensate the loss of healing potential. The handicap may help things be more engaging.

But we already have the ground work for this. I think this could be embraced more.

Scholar:
Selene.

Make her more useful. Also give her a version of Seraph different to Eos. Selene and her Seraph don't get healing abilities. They get buffs and debuffs. We get Fey Wind back, but I think we could get away with adding more. Maybe some of the debuffs we used to have in 2.0.

White Mage:
Old Cleric Stance.

Sacrifice healing potency in favour of damage potency. WHM can then be the "selfish DPS" equivalent of healers. Let them nuke harder. If SCH and AST in my suggestions are getting a boost in other areas that can provide extra rDPS, then I see no harm in buffing WHM damage. I think it'd be appropriate too as the sibling of Black Mage, who is a selfish DPS with some boom boom. And there comes a little extra satisfication from more powerful holies and stronger Assizes. Maybe give back a couple of extra DPS skills in the process.


Astrologian
Nocturnal Sect.

Nocturnal Sect is currently the weakest of the two sects and is harder to play well versus Diurnal Sect.

But instead of buffing Nocturnal Sect to bring it into line with Diurnal, why don't we add a benefit instead? Better potency for cards and divination. Maybe reduce the cooldown on neutral sect when in Nocturnal to help compensate for the lack of stance dancing possible on AST. And I think it'd also help move away from some of the hybrid mentality that AST either fills in a SCH's shoes or a WHM's shoes, which I think is outdated given WHM & SCH don't have the same relationship they used to.


I think this way we can have a combination of what 2 different camps want. Granted you won't be able to please everybody with it. But at least we can A) offer approachability and a more forgiving game play. Whilst B) addressing downtime to push better use of the tools provided, whilst also being rewarded for it.

[FusionSamurai]

Old cleric was removed for a reason. It made healing more complicated and made it a lot more intimidating for new players.

If you make cards better in nocturnal, literally nobody will ever go Diurnal. That adds a new late of frustration when playing with Scholars as Galvanize and Nocturnal Field do not stack.

They removed a lot of the stances for a reason.

[Saefinn]

Old cleric was removed for a reason. It made healing more complicated and made it a lot more intimidating for new players.

That's the thing. New players wouldn't -have- to use Cleric Stance. Nor have they ever -had- to use it. Sure it can make runs go quicker. But when somebody is new and learning their role then it is generally okay for the person to not be playing their job optimally. This is already the case of tanks and DPS. Tanks who don't maximise their pulls or DPS who don't maximise their DPS. That's because there's always a learning curve. This would be the point of having "stances" in general, it'd be perfectly okay for somebody who is inexperienced or learning to not use the more raid friendly of stances.

The problem with Cleric I recall from back in the day was that people would forget to turn it off and then we'd yell at healers to turn it off. Like Paladins who forgot Shield Oats. Heck, we still have that problem with tanks, I've had tanks forget their tank stance recently. But that's just human error. Some people are using a similar argument to say that healers shouldn't DPS at all in their downtime because of the handful of healers they've got who went too far and people died.

If you make cards better in nocturnal, literally nobody will ever go Diurnal. That adds a new late of frustration when playing with Scholars as Galvanize and Nocturnal Field do not stack.

I'll be fair and said I did not consider that limitation. Yet at the same time, what about a SCH/SCH set up where Galvanize and Galvanize don't stack?

At least in a SCH/AST set up they have the option to swap sects.




But the thing is, we have a problem.
On the one hand, jobs need to be approachable for new players to learn. So that it isn't intimidating to those who lack experience or confidence
On the other hand, experienced healers miss some of the complexity and challenge that may come with healing.

And there needs to be some level of compromise to meet in the middle. Or we say "lets make it complicated" or "let's make it simple" and you're leaving out a lot of people in making that choice and it feels in 5.0 they took this approach (with 4.0 building up to it).
My other suggestion I've posted before was "tiered" roles, so an easy healer, a moderate healer and a hard healer. Arguably that can come with its own limitations too.

But I think stances make sense in that you can cater to both approaches. However, there of course needs to be reason to use either.

So if AST's prefer the idea of Di/Noct being equally as useful in the same sort of way just one is more DoT focused or Shield focused because that's what works best. Then AST could still have the option to sacrifice HPS for better cards, it doesn't have to be tied to the Di/Noct sect. I thought it'd be more interesting that way, but there are people who've played AST a lot more than me. I've mostly been a Scholar main.

[Rivinhal]

Old cleric was removed for a reason. It made healing more complicated and made it a lot more intimidating for new players.

They removed a lot of the stances for a reason.

That's kind of a terrible reason though. New players aren't allergic to complexity... I'm a new player myself, but didn't some of the changes in 5.0 partially result from people complaining that healing was too easy?
Personally, I feel that the more mechanics that differentiate the jobs and make them unique, the better. The healing jobs all feel awfully similar atm. Maybe they really diverge at higher levels, but even at level 50 they all feel like the same class with minor differences.

[Silver-Strider]

I don't see Cleric Stance ever returning for WHM. I can see SE combining the SB version of Cleric Stance with Presence of Mind to have it increase WHM's damage/SpS all in 1 convenient package than adding in a mechanic that, while fun for some, wasn't without issue either. Glare mages scare me enough as is that I don't want them to go even more DPS crazy and forget to turn off CS when they actually have to heal.

For SCH, I can actually think of 2 Stance Ideas that could work though. Making E-Tactics into a Stance that removes SCH's shielding for just flat out heals and turning Selene into the Noct version of Eos for more mitigation. Adding utility to Seraph, such as Fey Wind, would make Seraph actually feel more powerful, which I feel it needs to be because it just doesn't really feel necessary the majority of the time.

AST has a lot more problems than just Noct sect, which just needs to have the same cost on their abilities as Diurnal sect abilities IMO. Something that AST does need desperately is MP management outside of Lucid Dreaming and Light Speed such as adding a small MP restore on Earthly Star or Celestial Opposition. Then, they need to increase the duration of Divination to 30 seconds to make it actually worth building up 3 seals for as right now, the contribution its providing just isn't good enough to justify AST in raids; Seals also need less RNG associated with them so I suggest that Redraw changes the card you currently have into a guaranteed new seal and that Unplay be changed into Inversion that changes the Card but not the Seal type (So Balance can be changed into Bole, Ewer into Arrow, etc.) Finally, buff Collective Unconsciousness to 150 cure potency so its actually useful because 50 is pitiful.

[Wawachume]

Honestly, I kind of hated cleric stance during Heavensward. If I ever pressed the cleric stance button, that meant it was 7.5 seconds before I could heal someone. Granted, it doesn't sound so bad now---maybe I've gotten better, and besides, it'd be more like 5 seconds today because there are more instant-casts---but at the time it was terrifying.

My solution was to just never use cleric stance, which a) made me feel kind of useless, and b) was discouraging because I wasn't able to use the job's full toolkit.

Other complexity-adding mechanics, like DoT-management, never bothered me because I could learn them gradually. As I got used to things, the uptime on my DoTs increased. But there was never an all-or-nothing, take-the-plunge moment like with cleric stance.

I also just kind of hate stance-dancing.

That said, I'm not totally opposed to them bringing it back just for white mage, as long as they didn't also do something that made me hate scholar, while leaving astrologian the way it is now. As long as I have one I like.

I'm just saying, cleric stance was never a mechanic I personally enjoyed.

[Verlyn]

Personally, I feel that the more mechanics that differentiate the jobs and make them unique, the better. The healing jobs all feel awfully similar atm. Maybe they really diverge at higher levels, but even at level 50 they all feel like the same class with minor differences.

They get somewhat more diverse at higher levels, but never enough that it proves that statement wrong. All three of my healer bars are set up more or less equivalently, and while I was doing it I was going "OK, so this is WHM's MP management cooldown... This is AST's MP management cooldown... So this must be their barrier... this is their equivalent to Seraph..." It definitely isn't 1-1, but it's a pretty sad state.

[Rivinhal]

For SCH, I can actually think of 2 Stance Ideas that could work though. Making E-Tactics into a Stance that removes SCH's shielding for just flat out heals and turning Selene into the Noct version of Eos for more mitigation.

I considered a similar idea, but personally I'm hoping they push for more class uniqueness and allowing another job to swap freely between healing/shielding sorta works against that.

Perhaps they could bind certain Fae abilities to Eos, and others to Selene and decrease pet cast time. If they did this, it could create a gameplay style where you have to swap between the fairies on the fly to cast certain fae abilities. That could be interesting.
I recognize this isn't really a stance, but a real stance could be implemented (as you suggested) that isn't tied to the pets.

They get somewhat more diverse at higher levels, but never enough that it proves that statement wrong. All three of my healer bars are set up more or less equivalently, and while I was doing it I was going "OK, so this is WHM's MP management cooldown... This is AST's MP management cooldown... So this must be their barrier... this is their equivalent to Seraph..." It definitely isn't 1-1, but it's a pretty sad state.

Yeah. They each have their own non-equivalent abilities that stand out. But those are few and far between. In comparison they all seem to have the same base set of equivalent abilities. That's fine and I understand why, but I dislike that they've removed more unique class-based abilities and mechanics as it only results in each job feeling less unique and more similar to one another.

[ForteNightshade]

That's the thing. New players wouldn't -have- to use Cleric Stance. Nor have they ever -had- to use it. Sure it can make runs go quicker. But when somebody is new and learning their role then it is generally okay for the person to not be playing their job optimally. This is already the case of tanks and DPS. Tanks who don't maximise their pulls or DPS who don't maximise their DPS. That's because there's always a learning curve. This would be the point of having "stances" in general, it'd be perfectly okay for somebody who is inexperienced or learning to not use the more raid friendly of stances.

The problem with Cleric I recall from back in the day was that people would forget to turn it off and then we'd yell at healers to turn it off. Like Paladins who forgot Shield Oats. Heck, we still have that problem with tanks, I've had tanks forget their tank stance recently. But that's just human error. Some people are using a similar argument to say that healers shouldn't DPS at all in their downtime because of the handful of healers they've got who went too far and people died.

It wouldn't matter though. For one, this game doesn't require enough healing to warrant a "pure healing" stance. And even if it did, you would be expected to learn how to heal in your "Raid-Focus" variant because it provides a party buff. Look no further than tank stance. Even in prog, tanks were dropping it upwards of 50-70% of the time; completely after a handful of pulls or once they cleared. Those who kept it up consistently were considered bad tanks. Any system where you trade damage for mitigation or healing is doomed to fail in this game because of how damage focused everything is.

[Wawachume]

All three of my healer bars are set up more or less equivalently, and while I was doing it I was going "OK, so this is WHM's MP management cooldown... This is AST's MP management cooldown... So this must be their barrier... this is their equivalent to Seraph..." It definitely isn't 1-1, but it's a pretty sad state.

I'm in the same situation. And it's not the case with any other role. Part of it is just that healers and tanks need certain skills in order to function, but even tanks don't seem to be homogenized to quite this degree.

I considered a similar idea, but personally I'm hoping they push for more class uniqueness and allowing another job to swap freely between healing/shielding sorta works against that.

I also have issues with a shields-vs-heals division within a job, because I think it's really hard to balance across different content. Either the shield stance is too powerful in raids, or the heals stance is too powerful in dungeons. The second way is basically how astrologian is now, where there's just no reason to use nocturnal stance in a dungeon.

Perhaps they could bind certain Fae abilities to Eos, and others to Selene and decrease pet cast time. If they did this, it could create a gameplay style where you have to swap between the fairies on the fly to cast certain fae abilities. That could be interesting.

I wouldn't like it. Any kind of mode-switching just isn't my favorite mechanic.

(I don't necessarily object to stance changes outside of combat, though.)