How MUCH healing can non-Healers do?

[Renathras]

It was still a DPS tool regardless of optimization though. It might not have seen much usage in Raids but it was sure used everywhere else. Hell, I remember a run of Halitali where the WHM kept Cleric Stance on for most of the run without issue, despite repeated pleas from the Tank to turn it off. 2nd Coil was also when I found my 1st static way back when and they actively encouraged Cleric Stance usage as much as possible when I played with them, even on my WHM. I couldn't have it on 24/7 like SCH could but finding those moments of levity that let me squeeze in at least my Aero spells was the fun part. If we're only going to consider Raids in regards to Cleric Stance, you might as well not count any of WHM's DPS skills since the overwhelming majority of WHM's time in Coils was spent just healing, even with skills like Convalance, Divine Seal and practically every job that used TP having access to Mantra to help supplement heals.

Again, as I said:

"HIGHLY dependent on player, content, and era."

I didn't run into a single WHM in Cleric in 4 mans when I was leveling PLD in 2.5. Cleric Stance has been said - and I agree - to be the single most rose tinted goggles ability in all of MMO history. At the time, FAR less people used it than people insist now did so. As I said above, it really came into prominent use in HW, not ARR, and I'm comparing EW to ARR, not EW to HW. I also noted that for high end players in 2nd Coil Savage - which was some of the most difficult content for an era produced in the game's history, to the point it wasn't even exactly a pushover at level 70, and could still be difficult at level 80 - it was used, but at the time, that was literally only like 1-3% of the entire playerbase.

I'm not saying no one did it, but I'm saying the average player did not, and even many above average players did not, and that's why I minimize it. Yes, people COULD, but MOST PEOPLE did not. Again, look at most of the period videos of players running content recorded at that time and WHMs are most of the time not in Cleric at all, and if they use it, it's often only a brief dip in and out.

Again, SCH was a different case, because Lustrate was broken under Cleric and in 8 man content, you often had a WHM doing the heavy lifting on healing so as the SCH in the party, you were more focused on damage and spot healing what the WHM couldn't cover.

We're not "only going to consider raids". And even if we were; again, only the top end players in the most difficult content were doing the "stance dancing" rose tinted goggles convince people everyone was doing.

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The reality is, WHM's kit in ARR and WHM's kit in EW are approximately the same in terms of overall DPS buttons. The main distinctions between them are that ARR WHM had to refresh Aero 1 more often, which resulted in, on average, about 9 non-Stone GCDss per minute, or 3 more GCDs per minute than EW's non-Glares. And they also had to use GCD heals that weren't Lilies, breaking up the Stonespam more. EW WHM, by contrast, has around 6 planned non-Glare GCDs per minute (2x Dia, 4x Afflatus). In the oGCD department, Fluid Aura was 3x as frequent as Assize (though, again, that doesn't affect Stone/Glarespam at all).

This is a relatively small overall change compared to literally any of the other Healers (SGE aside) over their tenure in the game.

Just FYI SCH had Miasma 2 in ARR as well, it wasn't a HW addition, also for ARR, SCH had Bio (18), Miasma (hardcast, 24), Bio 2 (hardcast, 30). At least, so says WaybackMachine (note the top saying the version of the page is from 2013)

Wow I didn't realise how dog the potencies were on things back then. 20 for Miasma 2 spam? 80 for Ruin? Really? Guess they were all-in on the 'put your DOTs up and spread them' playstyle

Oh nice. Was Miasma 2 really in from 2.0? I thought it was later than that, but I'm probably thinking something else...

And yeah, Potency inflation is real. Also balance passes, I guess? And they also reworked how magic Potencies worked at some point, I think..?

Potencies were pretty much all dog until Stormblood, where the potency creep slowly began. And didn't they only recently fix the different scaling between spell and melee potencies? So spells were extra dog in ARR because they scaled differently.

Fell Cleave was 500 potency in HW, Fire IV was 280.

Yeah, this. I'm not sure when they did it, though. Was it in 6.0, or was it RECENTLY recently, like 6.2 or 6.3?

Fire 4 was also buffed by 80% invisibly due to the Astral Fire 3 effect, so it was more like 500 (calculator says 504), but yeh there were some odd inconsistencies caused by the phys/magic split calculations

Crazy to think that 'capstone 2min big damage skill' Dragonfire Dive was like 300 potency, and now we have 'capstone 2min big damage skills' like Ogi or Plentiful Harvest. Hell, Communio isn't even '2min' it's 'every time you enshroud', same with RDM combos you get like 5 of those per 2mins, they really should have dropped all the potency values to more reasonable amounts when they did the statsquish

Agreed on that.

It never ceases to amaze me how MMOs get insane stat scaling, do a squish...then don't learn the lesson and keep the ilevel/stat inflation so they have the same problem in AT MOST two expansions (often less than that) and have to do it all over again when they COULD just tone things T-F down a bit since they're already doing a squish.

[Absurdity]

Yeah, this. I'm not sure when they did it, though. Was it in 6.0, or was it RECENTLY recently, like 6.2 or 6.3?

It was with Endwalker's release, which is still recently compared to the 7 or 8 years where the scaling for both was different.

[Icecylee]

Again, as I said:

"HIGHLY dependent on player, content, and era."

I didn't run into a single WHM in Cleric in 4 mans when I was leveling PLD in 2.5. Cleric Stance has been said - and I agree - to be the single most rose tinted goggles ability in all of MMO history. At the time, FAR less people used it than people insist now did so. As I said above, it really came into prominent use in HW, not ARR, and I'm comparing EW to ARR, not EW to HW. I also noted that for high end players in 2nd Coil Savage - which was some of the most difficult content for an era produced in the game's history, to the point it wasn't even exactly a pushover at level 70, and could still be difficult at level 80 - it was used, but at the time, that was literally only like 1-3% of the entire playerbase.

I'm not saying no one did it, but I'm saying the average player did not, and even many above average players did not, and that's why I minimize it. Yes, people COULD, but MOST PEOPLE did not. Again, look at most of the period videos of players running content recorded at that time and WHMs are most of the time not in Cleric at all, and if they use it, it's often only a brief dip in and out.

Honestly I think this is probably chalked more up to server culture than anything else, because on mine at least it was about 60% using it 40% by the time people started speed running dungeons, which also started happening consistently pretty shortly after the first coil launched. Not 100% uptime, obviously, but it was pretty easy to tell if the WHM was making an effort or not. Maybe your server was just slower to adapt, or people were just playing a lot more conservatively after coming from WoW or something, but on excal people were pretty quick to realize how much milage you could get out stoneskin+regen at the start of gathering -> get a fresh regen ticking on a PLD right as the mass pull stops -> clerics/swiftcast holy, then chain holy until the stuns ran out and go from there on a case by case basis. (if you were REALLY going nuts you could even alternate Bene and Hallowed for Extra Value pulls!), and after doing something like that about 50% clerics uptime on the mini bosses themselves was pretty trivial. We were, in fact, doing this shit even in amadapor keep and the tonberry dungeon! Not every was doing this obviously since sometimes you'd have a bad tank, or the healer wasn't well geared or confident in the party (or you got a blizzard mage......) or even *themself*, but it was, in my experience on my server, always common to see WHM's popping clerics if they were making an effort.

[fulminating]

I thought you got more potency per potency on magic prior to endwalker? I think it was more the melee damage skills that were changed, fell cleave springing to mind (590 > 460).

[Renathras]

Honestly I think this is probably...

Maybe, but that would just be "dependent on player, content, and era"; as you note, it was speedrunning dungeon people doing this.

Again, I think most pro-Cleric people overestimate HOW MANY people were doing this. If it was truly as many as people argue, they likely would not have removed it in SB.

I started playing in 2.3. I leveled WHM first. In 2.5, I leveled SCH (and SMN for free, but leveled as SCH) and PLD to 50. In HW, I did the same thing to 60. When I was tanking as PLD, I don't recall any of my Healers using Cleric in any leveling dungeons. In 24 mans (the level cap stuff I did at the time), I don't recall WHM Healers using it (granted, the HW 24 mans were notoriously spicy at the time). I do think it WAS prevalent in the raiding community in HW, but you have to remember far fewer people raided back then than do now.

I DO remember a few cases of SCHOLARS using it, though they were still uncommon, and they tended to be people in high ilevel/content gear, meaning they were raiders.

I remember a lot of 4 mans with a wipe early on followed by a "Woops! Forgot to turn off Cleric since I was doing MSQ up to this dungeon." I distinctly remember that happening to me (though without a wipe; I went through ALL my CDs) in the very first HW dungeon, the ice one. First trash pack I was like "Good god! Why do they hit so hard!" then realized I had forgotten to turn off Cleric, which I had been using while soloing. When they removed Cleric and just boosted my damage to be the same without it was a very happy day since we had one less point of "forgot to turn on Tank stance" failure at the start of dungeons (Cleric was the opposite in that you had to remember to turn it OFF).

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Again, worst rose tinted goggles ability in all of MMO history - people weren't using it nearly as much as people who want it back insist.

Scholars were, absolutely. White Mages were not.

[ForsakenRoe]

Again, worst rose tinted goggles ability in all of MMO history - people weren't using it nearly as much as people who want it back insist.

Scholars were, absolutely. White Mages were not.

Maybe you're just seeing it from the side of WHM? After all, as we have seen in other threads, the relative potencies of the SCH kit meant that Cleric'ing, applying your DOTs, and then dropping out of Cleric was a much bigger source of your damage in ARR, compared to WHMs who had Stone 2 being (apparently) 90 potency stronger (stone2 170, ruin 80, says waybackmachine). Also cos of Lustrade being 25% rather than a specific potency, SCHs got punished less for using Cleric than WHM. I guess when you think about it, the solution should have been 'make Cleric less punishing for WHMs to use', and in a sense they did that with the SB change, where damage skills scaled from MND instead of INT.

Which leads onto the important clarification which needs to be made: it wasn't removed in SB, it was 'reworked'. It went from 'skill you used when you had safe time to DPS' to 'skill you used when you had safe time to DPS', the difference was that instead of being a punishing stance dance it became a simple throughput CD (one that was still possible to 'use at the wrong time' and 'waste' though). It's change in SB, to make it more casual-friendly, if anything, should be seen as the devs agreeing that 'yeh I guess healers should do damage too, so we're going to make it easier for them to do so'. It was a change specifically to help less-skilled healers get their damage out with less risk to themselves and their party. It didn't affect the skilled healers, because they could already DO the dance, they didn't need the help.

As for it's actual removal for SHB, IDK why they did. I guess they looked at it and went 'look, button that only adds like 0.7% dps over an encounter, might as well prune it!'. But then again we have Astrodyne so... Who knows at this point?

Personally, I don't really want Cleric back. Not the ARR-HW version. It's too clunky and janky and casual-unfriendly design. I'd rather see it as, you guessed it, a 60s burst CD for WHM. And for the 'complexity' side it added in ARR/HW, I'd rather see something else added that fits more with modern design, rather than a clunky stance dance. At least with tanks they could still mitigate while in their 'dps stance'

[Icecylee]

Maybe, but that would just be "dependent on player, content, and era"; as you note, it was speedrunning dungeon people doing this.

Again, I think most pro-Cleric people overestimate HOW MANY people were doing this. If it was truly as many as people argue, they likely would not have removed it in SB.

Right, I don't disagree with this. It was absolutely dependent on a lot of factors. But as you were posting your own personal anecdotal experience, I was posting mine. I've been around since the 1.0 beta, and I leveled every single one of my jobs to 50 during the 2.x cycle. I was a White Mage Primary, Paladin secondary, so I had a pretty good feel for what other players were doing in dungeons as it always had a direct impact on what I was doing on those two roles. Most of the DPS (other than monk) were low maintenance enough that you could devote some processing power to keeping an eye on what the healer was doing (and you could absolutely FEEL the difference between a WHM doing no DPS, one making an effort but not great at it, and one dpsing as hard as possible, especially if you were running with a PLD instead of a WAR, which you probably were because most people thought WAR sucked for most of 2.x). And in my experience, even a lot of the randos WERE in that second category of trying to use it, but maybe not being great at it. Which again, server differences, but yeah. But it certainly wasn't "hardly anyone". (also as a side note, speed running in expert roulette was basically the assumed norm even in duty finder as early as 2.1 on my server, when you could be reasonably confident every in there would have up to date tomb gear, vs the insane i50-i90 range you had during 2.0. So that wasn't like, exceptional circumstances or anything)

I also don't think anyone is like, seriously suggesting that Original Cleric Stance ever comes back? It'd be kind of a big ask of the game's community at this point and "oh yeah all your nukes fucking suck now until you hit this button that tanks your healer", *especially* with healing being as ogcd focused as it currently is, would be an incredibly hard sell. I liked it at the time, but I also like a lot of weird unfriendly healer clunk (I loved Sharla and her stupid overheat mechanic in Xenoblade 1 as well, forex). But it coming back probably wouldn't really... improve the game in a significant way, and it would DEFINITELY piss a lot of people off, so it wouldn't be a terribly reason request even if someone did want it.

[Renathras]

Maybe you're just seeing it from the side of WHM?

Yes.

I'm only talking about it from the WHM side.

As I said a few posts ago:

Blizzard 2 was very much used by SCHs at the level cap in ARR and HW up until it’s removal, I don’t think I have any old recordings left now but the best DPS for SCH was dotting and baneing on pull as many times as you could, then shadowflare into blizz 2 spam once the tank planted. In HW SCH could handily out DPS WHM in dungeons this way.

Right, but the comparison was WHM abilities in ARR vs EW, not SCH.

SPECIFICALLY, WHM, because it has only 1 less damage spell now than it had then. SCH is a case everyone already agrees on because it had SO MANY more it's not even a point of contention. It's why we aren't mentioning Aero 1, because we're talking about WHM not SCH...because SCH is so obviously deficient now vs ARR that we all openly agree on that point.

It's why even my position on this point is "Give SCH back its SB toolkit".

It's also why I mention this all the time:

I DO remember a few cases of SCHOLARS using it, though they were still uncommon, and they tended to be people in high ilevel/content gear, meaning they were raiders.
...
Scholars were, absolutely. White Mages were not.

I'm not saying no one did it, but I'm saying the average player did not, and even many above average players did not, and that's why I minimize it. Yes, people COULD, but MOST PEOPLE did not. Again, look at most of the period videos of players running content recorded at that time and WHMs are most of the time not in Cleric at all, and if they use it, it's often only a brief dip in and out.

Again, SCH was a different case, because Lustrate was broken under Cleric and in 8 man content, you often had a WHM doing the heavy lifting on healing so as the SCH in the party, you were more focused on damage and spot healing what the WHM couldn't cover

And so on.

I've tried, and think I have been, very very consistent on this fact:

WHMs were main healers in ARR and most of the playerbase did not use Cleric with WHM;
SCHs were support healers in ARR working as a team with WHMs, and a large portion of them did use Cleric in all sorts of content;
Indeed, many people who have fond memories of stance dancing did so with SCH or in HW.

I even remember, at the time, thinking it was weird Cleric was a CNJ ability instead of ACN, considering SCH (and even SMN) could get more use out of the ability than WHM.

This is what gave me the "Four Healers Model" idea in the first place; that WHM and SCH in ARR played distinctly, one more as a pure/main healer and the other as a damage/support healer, and everyone loved it. People could pick up whichever one matched their preference for healing style, and everyone was having fun in this same swimming pool together. It was how the game worked and how the VAST majority of players played it at the time. A lot of the people who say they love the hybrid playstyle keep saying how much fun SCH was in ARR. That's no coincidence. And likewise, people who didn't like that largely seemed to enjoy WHM at the time. Also no coincidence.

That's what I'd like to reclaim today.

Correct, I'm not talking about SCH, because I thought we all agreed already SCH used Cleric and had more DPS buttons, a greater focus on DPS, and was a more damage/support healer in ARR and HW? Do we...disagree on that? I thought we all agreed on that...? There's simply nothing there left to discuss since we even largely agree on what should be done with it.

As for why they removed it: Nothing so arcane. They even said so at the time - that it was dividing the community, that some players felt they needed to be in Cleric to DPS, that players were attacked for not doing it, and that players were attacked for doing it "too much". Overall, it was a divisive ability not worth keeping in their mind. Yoshi P was even explicit on that point in terms of removing it and boosting the base DPS of Healers so that they could DPS without Cleric and pull the same numbers, encouraging people to DPS more and reducing the disparity between Healers that did and did not use it. We don't need any crystal ball or to speculate on some 0.7% damage (it was a lot more than that, btw); we know this already.

I also don't think anyone is like, seriously suggesting that Original Cleric Stance ever comes back?

Some people have made arguments for it and do hold the position of wanting it, but I think everyone's recognized the reality that it's never happening and semi-moved on.

The closest modern incarnation of that would PROBABLY be if SGE got an actual gigabrain DPS rotation. It wouldn't be a "dance" but would be the "weak heals, more dps focus". The problem is that encounters are balanced around Healers bringing a set amount of DPS (arguably one of the game's problems is things are TOO balanced now), so it would be "You get to press 7 attack buttons to do the same damage and healing WHM does with 3 attack buttons and some healing buttons. But that's what you want, so have fun with it.", as opposed to you carrying the team's damage on your back or anything like that.

[Sebazy]

SCH were absolutely not support healers in ARR though =(

You saw more SCH's using cleric stance because it was just so much easier for them to sit in it for longer. 20-21 seconds of Rouse>Whispering Dawn and 3x oGCD Lustrates every minute was a HUGE comfort blanket when juggling Cleric. Meanwhile WHM only had bene on a 5 minute cooldown if I'm remembering correctly.

Also note that in that time, SCH was doing much of it's healing without any cast times visible in the part list, thus it was all too easy to overlook how much HPS that SCH was actually putting out. With WHMs it was much more obvious, both Medica II and Cure II are instantly audible and recognisable.

Lastly, another reason you saw WHM using cleric less was frankly because they had less uptime full stop. SCH's MP economy was always lightyears ahead of WHM and as such, pre SB, SCH's uptime handily outstripped WHM's assuming equal gear and player skill.

Of course, this doesn't mean that WHM couldn't do damage. When WP was the tome farm of choice and locking mobs out of boss rooms hadn't been figured out, I used to run double WHM/Tank/BLM for what was at the time the fastest way to clear WP.

As mentioned above, perhaps it was a server specific thing. But on Ragnarok at least, if a healer used cleric stance or not depended on the calibre and mentality of the player, not the job they were on. WHM vs SCH simply changed how much uptime was on offer for them in any given content.

[ForsakenRoe]

We don't need any crystal ball or to speculate on some 0.7% damage (it was a lot more than that, btw); we know this already.

5% more damage, 15sec duration, 120sec CD. How's 0.7% meant to be far off as a spitball estimate? Ok I'll correct it, 2.5% due to stacking with raidbuffs. That is, assuming you even got to play in a group that stacked raidbuffs, since AST was so much better at the time compared to WHM. (Ult WFs still brought WHM though so I guess it wasn't that bad after all) Are you thinking that the estimate was referring to HW Cleric, when I had said 'As for it's removal going into SHB', implying that the comparison was to 'the version directly before it's complete removal'?

Ok I'll be super lenient and call it 4%, final offer. But it was not some make-or-break tool that casuals would get bullied for not using. It was optional to take for the first half of SB as a role action after all, competing with stuff like Largesse (aka Divine Seal), Lucid (aka Shroud of Saints), Esuna (aka Esuna), Protect (aka Protect), Swiftcast, Surecast, damn we only had 5 slots to pick with and 4 of them were potentially filled with 'stuff that WHM already had before in HW' genius design choices