Adding Stances

[Saefinn]

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.

Hmm, I think there is a fair point here and I think this is maybe the hardest part to get around. The game's design doesn't really give much room for alternative playstyles, at least if you're looking to play effectively.

Ultimately yes, it'd be the more complicated version of gameplay that's end up being the marker of a good player, particularly at the end game. So it'd not necessarily solve the goal I set out to do. As much as it'd be nice to achieve.

But with all that in mind, I think if there still remains a concern that healers are less approachable to the inexperience or those lacking confidence, I think the approach still works, just it wouldn't be taken seriously when it comes to proper endgame content.

So instead of making the job simple, ease the journey to learning it. I'd have argued that levelling it would suffice, because you are eased into your abilities and the difficulty & complexity of dungeons is progressive, but with people using jump potions and jumping into content, they don't get that (though I argue that people who jump potion should get familiar with the first before they attempt anything high level).

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.

I'd say fair enough. It was technically a WHM ability. But I know not everybody liked Cleric Stance, I liked that there was a risk & reward to using it.

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.

This is kinda how I wanted to see faerie use evolve. Eos had abilities that aided your healing a lot, but Selene was a lot more utility focused. I'm all for better faerie use. They have since watered it down, because we only get Eos's abilities. I used to micromanage the heck out of my faeries back in 2.0.