Quote Originally Posted by Saefinn View Post
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.