Adding Stances

[Lodi]

this is not even a real estimate on "healer drought"
especially when it changes so frequently between healer,tank and even DPS in need for alliance and expert
all my roulette right now are Tank besides ones i mentioned which are dps

I'm not saying there is a healer drought , I am saying healers are a lot more often in demand than they used to. I remember back in SB, it was tanks all day, with alliance raid always being the exception. Now? It goes back and forth between healers and tanks. It doesn't mean there are no more healers, it means the proportion of healers is lower than it used to be.

Perhaps it has something to do with the lack of a new healer, very controversial changes, obvious lack of communication, and countless threads asking to restore SB skills? I dunno.

You just need to take a look at parsers for objective data (Granted they will only tell you what players do and not what they enjoy) . You can see how many healing spells and how many damaging spells we use.
Exhorbitant amounts of damage single-target spells in Savage and AoE spells in roulettes in comparison to healing, almost three times as much.

It can't be denied that when it comes to button pressing, healers use their damage spells much more often than healing.

So then, if players use a part of their kit much more often (and still clear bosses and dungeons), why would you not expand on that part of the kit? Why would you deliberately shrink it, making it less interesting.

I assume SE simplified the damage spells as to not have them interfere with healing but they forgot to make healing more of a requirement. This we could see even before ShB release. Lot's of healers raised the alarm when they saw the removal of so many damaging spells.
They thought that healing requierements would then be increased to compensate for that.

But then we saw Titania's fight from the demo and it was clear the devs didn't actually reduce healing downtime.

Ah yes, I remember when people justified the pruning by "you won't even have the time to dps, duh!". Yeah no, I never spent to much time pressing 1.
I mean, we can even outdamage tanks on sunny days.

Hell, even the role quests are 75% about doing nothing but spam 1. And pretending Repose is useful.


To return to the original topic, I'd love a milder version of Cleric stance or something like SB Darkside. A toggleable stance that increases damage but reduces healing or MP regen. Just a small thing like this would make healers a bit more interesting without skill-gating more casual players.

[Samsta]

What is wrong with keeping the job floor the same and raising the ceiling? Some people here are scared shitless of adding more complexity and nuance to whm. I liked old cleric stance, I wish we would still have it, on the contrary of making the job "more complex" I feel in lot of cases it made it actually easier, since people understood that if you weren't in cleric stance, there was simply no point in doing dps, it was just waste of mana, so in an intensive healing periods, you couldn't really dps at all, unlike now where that extra glare is the new way optimizing your damage and on the opposite side, being on cleric stance made your heals super weak, so you didn't have to "combine" healing and dealing dps at all times like you do now. I dunno if others feel the same. Despite all this, adding it back would definitely raise the ceiling of playing the job optimally, and I don't understand how that affects players who don't wanna do that.

[AphraelAmarantha]

So what I am reading from people’s responses is that clearing a dungeon requires a certain level of competence.

So isn’t it just common sense that if you want to clear a dungeon in a reasonable amount of time that the healer also needs to be outputting dps?

[Billythepancake]

So what I am reading from people’s responses is that clearing a dungeon requires a certain level of competence.

So isn’t it just common sense that if you want to clear a dungeon in a reasonable amount of time that the healer also needs to be outputting dps?

DPS, yes, they do not, however, need to be playing optimally. So long as the healer is not sitting with their thumb up their bums, then there isn't anything to complain about.

[Saefinn]

So what I am reading from people’s responses is that clearing a dungeon requires a certain level of competence.

So isn’t it just common sense that if you want to clear a dungeon in a reasonable amount of time that the healer also needs to be outputting dps?

Not always. Healer DPS is preferred, but the loss of DPS from a healer wouldn't put it into the realms of unreasonable amount of time.

Some hold the view that healers should not DPS in dungeons, those people rejoiced at healer changes before realising they didn't mean less DPSing. We had a thread here not that long ago arguing it. But I have come across some who don't like doing it or are not confident in their abilities to pull it off, some of these people aren't healer mains too and aren't as used to it.

[Wawachume]

To add, one of the things that put me off when trying a number of dungeons in WoW, it felt there was no pacing and people would rush through so quickly I didn’t know what was going on. So it could go completely the other way where too fast is dull.

I had kind of a similar experience with WoW dungeons. It was like there weren't any mechanics or anything; it was just:

BANG BANG BANG BANG BANG BANG BANG!
<pokes head above rubble cautiously>
"...did we win?"

I liked old cleric stance, I wish we would still have it, on the contrary of making the job "more complex" I feel in lot of cases it made it actually easier, since people understood that if you weren't in cleric stance, there was simply no point in doing dps, it was just waste of mana, so in an intensive healing periods, you couldn't really dps at all

This is actually another reason I disliked cleric stance---when you weren't using it, it made things too simple.

Fights were all, "Heal...wait...wait...twiddle thumbs...heal...wait...wait...Are you bored? Then press this button to risk disaster!" D:

Cleric stance was good at satisfying the people who wanted a complex rotation as well as those who wanted a simple one. But it didn't necessarily do much for the people who wanted a complex rotation, but weren't quite sure how to get there. The gap between simple and complex was just a little too intimidating.

you didn't have to "combine" healing and dealing dps at all times like you do now.

This is interesting to me, because I actually find it more burdensome that way. In addition to healing and DPSing, you have to worry about separating them.

[Samsta]

This is actually another reason I disliked cleric stance---when you weren't using it, it made things too simple.

Fights were all, "Heal...wait...wait...twiddle thumbs...heal...wait...wait...Are you bored? Then press this button to risk disaster!" D:

Cleric stance was good at satisfying the people who wanted a complex rotation as well as those who wanted a simple one. But it didn't necessarily do much for the people who wanted a complex rotation, but weren't quite sure how to get there. The gap between simple and complex was just a little too intimidating.

Well when you knew the fights there were little that could go wrong when you knew when to use it. Separating healing and doing damage was certainly different, I wouldn't necessarily call it burdensome but it was definitely more risky and allowed better healers to to stand out from others. All in all it made the role feel more "clear", as your default state (not in cleric stance) was only for healing, when you knew the fights you gradually began to do more and more damage. Now it's just spam glare and when you have to heal you heal, like I said it has the element of avoiding gcd healing as much as possible now to get that extra glare in at all times and it's a different kind of optimization, the kind that brought the ceiling down and brought bad and good players closer together. However the old cleric stance also made it so that amidst rough healing phases you weren't expected to dps at all, so when you healed you only healed and when you dealt damage you only dealt damage, there wasn't this pressure to spam damage all the time and I gotta say I enjoyed it more.

[Saefinn]

For me, I just liked being able to weave in and out. As you say, it was more definite with your intentions of what you're doing, and it's the risk that makes it hard, yet in some ways, if you're in the mindset of healing then you're healing, you're less likely to try and weave DPS spells. Meaning you'd Cleric if you were sure about it. I think if there were to add it back in, I think there would be some tweaks, maybe make it less clunky for some? Perhaps my saying "old cleric stance" was a bit misleading, because I'd rather healing drop and damage boost instead of swapping INT and MND around, what I meant of course was for it to be an actual stance rather than a temporary buff as it was in SB.

I guess for some Cleric Stance did feel it flowed so well or the risk was too great. But having fluidity on SCH now, I'm of the mind I'd rather clunky and fun than fluid and dull - not to say fluidity shouldn't be a goal, I just think "fun" is the priority. And the other issue was people forgetting to turn it off and now that we have job gauges, I wonder how much of a difference something strong and visual as a cue could make to that kind of problem.

I had kind of a similar experience with WoW dungeons. It was like there weren't any mechanics or anything; it was just:

BANG BANG BANG BANG BANG BANG BANG!
<pokes head above rubble cautiously>
"...did we win?"

It's why I ended up liking FFXIV much better. Even in speed runs, the pace feels so much better and when you DF something, speed runs are rare. And now they're rarer because most dungeon design now is paced to avoid any 'true' kinda speed runs. But in WoW, it was rare to feel like I was experiencing the dungeon or really doing much. I mean, I guess it's where these two MMO's differ and I think it's fine, because I get people like the idea of a grind being super quick to maximise rewards. But there was a lot with WoW that didn't work for me and a lot of FFXIV that worked for me. I just hope the lines don't blur too much between the two MMO's, because I think XIV has great stuff to stand out from WoW. Job/class diversity was one of them.

I originally come from an FFXI background, so I downsized a lot of job complexity by migrating here, but I felt they had the balance right because FFXIV is not the same type of MMO as FFXI and the battles are paced very differently.

[Wawachume]

I think part of my problem could be my own neurological issues. I get the feeling my right brain works, not necessarily better, but much faster than the left. Which I know is true for everyone, but I mean the difference is bigger for me.

That could be why I find it easier to constantly switch between healing and DPS than to mode-switch between cleric and non-cleric stances---because the latter requires you to organize actions into a particular sequence, and linear thinking is the function of the left brain. (This is also why I'm worse at DPS than healing, because "rotation" is weird for me.)

That could also be why I found cleric stance stressful. I've never quite understood people who say they know when bosses are about to use particular abilities, because I feel like it's always a surprise to me. If you asked me when Boss A casts Ability B, I would have no idea. But actually, if they suddenly cast an unscheduled spell, I think I'd be shocked. So it's like I know, but not on a conscious level?

I think if they added back cleric stance, there's some chance I'd be constantly thinking, "This is so stressful; I have no idea when to use this ability, so I'm just doing it all randomly," while actually pressing the button at the right times. O.o

I think if there were to add it back in, I think there would be some tweaks, maybe make it less clunky for some? Perhaps my saying "old cleric stance" was a bit misleading, because I'd rather healing drop and damage boost instead of swapping INT and MND around, what I meant of course was for it to be an actual stance rather than a temporary buff as it was in SB.

Which would also make it less punishing DPS-wise not to use the stance, because they could control how big the damage/healing modifiers were instead of it just being "heal with 0 mind" or "DPS with 0 int".

[Rivinhal]

Which would also make it less punishing DPS-wise not to use the stance, because they could control how big the damage/healing modifiers were instead of it just being "heal with 0 mind" or "DPS with 0 int".

Exactly!

Cleric Stance could easily be reworked to be way less all-or-nothing, but to allow for more intricate play. It's all comes down to balancing it correctly...
You don't want it to be so powerful that's it's necessary to use, but you don't want it to be so weak that no one bothers with it.

There's a very fine line there, but I think it could be done. And I also believe it could help make the job that much more interesting.