Quote Originally Posted by Wawachume View Post
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.