How do you define (meaningful) choice?

[Mortex]

The choice to use Cleric Stance was the exact same choice you’d make when using any of your DPS actions, and inversely, the choice to end Cleric Stance was the same choice you’d make when stopping DPS.

Unless there was any circumstance in which you would use one without the other, old Cleric Stance was arbitrary when it came to gameplay decision-making, and at worst punished the entire party any time the healer had so much as a minor technical error or lag spike at the wrong picosecond.

Even the reworked Cleric Stande was silly. A 5% DPS increase on healers who already have extremely low DPS output amounts to almost nothing. You ask the server for more bread for your tomato soup, and they sprinkle a pinch of crouton crumbs on top of your soup. That’s what Stormblood Cleric Stance was.

Yes the choice is the same but it had consequences and draw backs. Some one might say it was a “skill ceiling” that cleric stance had. The skill ceiling we have as healer now is mapping ogcd for the entire fight and hoping if you pug you have a decent co healer that doesn’t use either medica 2 all the time and deals dmg or the polar opposite just doing dmg and not using all his ogcd/healing tools at all.

I miss having consequences in final. Back then a tank fail was a entire party wipe because the boss would often kill the entire party if the tank fukked up. Remember god kefka having double drill and killing the party when a tank was either dead or missing and no one sacced. Or o12 where the tanks had too be fast with pulling m and f apart or they would be one shot. Now tankbuster are just stay decently safe, use cds and voke/shirk and done. Self responsibility in this game just goes down the drain and it’s pretty sad

[ty_taurus]

Yes the choice is the same but it had consequences and draw backs. Some one might say it was a “skill ceiling” that cleric stance had. The skill ceiling we have as healer now is mapping ogcd for the entire fight and hoping if you pug you have a decent co healer that doesn’t use either medica 2 all the time and deals dmg or the polar opposite just doing dmg and not using all his ogcd/healing tools at all.

I miss having consequences in final. Back then a tank fail was a entire party wipe because the boss would often kill the entire party if the tank fukked up. Remember god kefka having double drill and killing the party when a tank was either dead or missing and no one sacced. Or o12 where the tanks had too be fast with pulling m and f apart or they would be one shot. Now tankbuster are just stay decently safe, use cds and voke/shirk and done. Self responsibility in this game just goes down the drain and it’s pretty sad

You don't need CS to have consequences. We saw this in some ways with Stormblood Scholar. Miasma II and Energy Drain together were stronger than Broil II, but they were ultimately MP negative and would eat up your Aetherflow, meaning if you needed the healing from Indomitability or Excog/Lustrate later, you could be forced to drop Broil II for an Emergency Tactics Adlo/Succor, which was ultimately worse. But that choice to decide how greedy you want to be was an interesting choice to make that had consequences. Why does it have to be such a polarizing and clunky all-or-nothing ability?

In fact, old Cleric Stance wasn't even a choice. You MUST use it or you cannot do any meaningful amount of damage at all. There was no choice or decision-making at play. You will do it whether you like it or not.

[LilimoLimomo]

In fact, old Cleric Stance wasn't even a choice. You MUST use it or you cannot do any meaningful amount of damage at all. There was no choice or decision-making at play. You will do it whether you like it or not.

If we are assuming that we must get as close to optimal play as possible, then there are no choices, only right and wrong answers. When operating in this framework, you are correct that Cleric Stance was mandatory because without it you could not achieve optimal results.

However, from the standpoint of a player who is satisfied with "good enough", it was most definitely a choice. Back then I was maining WHM, and I never used Cleric Stance because once you turned Cleric Stance on you weren't able to turn it off for a few seconds, which meant that activating Cleric Stance was a risk, a gamble that nothing would go wrong that needed urgent healing attention during that window. If your team is a well-oiled machine, I can imagine you might be able to confidently take that risk. But I was always playing with random strangers, so I erred on the side of caution so I could better fulfill my role as a healer regardless of what missteps my party made.

All of that said, I'm glad it's gone; it was clunky and really just acted as a psychological barrier in the way of a healer's DPS spells, as well as becoming a needless ideological minefield for players with different gameplay preferences. Did it technically add a choice? Yes. But was that choice enjoyable or worthwhile to make? No.

[ty_taurus]

If we are assuming that we must get as close to optimal play as possible, then there are no choices, only right and wrong answers. When operating in this framework, you are correct that Cleric Stance was mandatory because without it you could not achieve optimal results.

However, from the standpoint of a player who is satisfied with "good enough", it was most definitely a choice. Back then I was maining WHM, and I never used Cleric Stance because once you turned Cleric Stance on you weren't able to turn it off for a few seconds, which meant that activating Cleric Stance was a risk, a gamble that nothing would go wrong that needed urgent healing attention during that window. If your team is a well-oiled machine, I can imagine you might be able to confidently take that risk. But I was always playing with random strangers, so I erred on the side of caution so I could better fulfill my role as a healer regardless of what missteps my party made.

Except Cleric Stance was mandatory to achieve any results in regards to DPS at least. When attacking as a healer, there is a total theoretically achievable amount of damage you can do. Obviously, you can also do no damage at all. We can represent this with a scale from 0 to 100, with 100 being that theoretically highest possible damage output.

Any player who wanted to do any amount of DPS contributions at all regardless of whether or not they cared about pushing to try and reach that 100 were required to use Cleric Stance because your damage output was nil without it. In other words, the "choice" to ignore Cleric Stance if you didn't like meant you were never allowed to go above, let's say a 1 on that scale because your damage was really that low. Meanwhile, the choice to play defensively in Stormblood where old Cleric Stance was removed was vastly more realistic. In the example I gave, choosing to reserve your Aetherflow for healing instead of Miasma II + Energy Drain meant you'd still probably hit a far more reasonable number. You don't have to be an optimization obsessed player to not want an all-or-nothing ultimatum.

Because that's what Cleric Stance was, an ultimatum.

As a Stormblood White Mage, you had the freedom to toss out an Aero II or III, or get in a few Stone IVs without that fear of being locked out of healing.

EDIT: Let met put it this way. If you don't want to use old Cleric Stance, you're stuck at 0 and not allowed to go any higher. Perhaps sitting at 0 is 'good enough' for most content since most content has no enrages, but even someone who isn't popping a blood vessel trying to max their parse at any given moment would appreciate the freedom to go above 0. There are people who don't care about reaching 99, but also would like to not sit at 0 and be forced to stay there.

[LilimoLimomo]

Except Cleric Stance was mandatory to achieve any results in regards to DPS at least.

I certainly won't argue with that; I would just say that doing any damage as a healer back then was well above the "good enough" threshold in the majority of the game's content. In other words, in any situation where healer damage wasn't mandatory to succeed, Cleric Stance was an optional choice.

And to retiterate what I added in my previous edit (which may have been after you started your reply), I think it was a needlessly restrictive choice, one that the game is better without.

[LilimoLimomo]

EDIT: Let met put it this way. If you don't want to use old Cleric Stance, you're stuck at 0 and not allowed to go any higher. Perhaps sitting at 0 is 'good enough' for most content since most content has no enrages, but even someone who isn't popping a blood vessel trying to max their parse at any given moment would appreciate the freedom to go above 0. There are people who don't care about reaching 99, but also would like to not sit at 0 and be forced to stay there.

I hope you'll interpret my words not as opposition, but rather an attempt to add nuance. I think what this summary lacks is the perspective of more casual players who have no idea what 99 would even look like, and no understanding that they're not hovering around 50. They're not parsing, they're not on Balance, they're just playing the game and doing the best they can with the tools the game has given them. If you looked at my play during ARR and Heavensward, you might indeed have said, "That player's damage is 6% of what it could be." But the important thing to remember is that I didn't know that, so that information wasn't part of my decision-making process.

My perspective back then was that when doing damage as a healer you have two options: you can have Cleric Stance on and do crap damage, or you can have Cleric Stance off and do very crap damage. One of those options deals more damage than the other, but that damage boost from "very crap" to "crap" comes with a risk to my primary purpose: keeping the party alive. As a healer, I saw dealing damage as a secondary goal, one that shouldn't be done if it puts my primary goal at risk — especially because at best my damage was crap. And because of that perspective and those priorities, when I cast Aero II without Cleric Stance, I was perfectly happy and felt like I was doing a good job. I was dealing very crap damage, but that was more than zero, and I was doing my damage in a way that felt like it kept my party safe.

I think it's fair to say that that perspective is less-informed, but it's absolutely a perspective that many casual players would have had, so it's important to include it in the analysis of the possibility space.

[Shurrikhan]

Yes the choice is the same but it had consequences and draw backs. Some one might say it was a “skill ceiling” that cleric stance had.

You can arguably claim that there was some skill gap there, even if it was overwhelmed by "ping/packet_loss gap", but... there was no more "choice" of whether to use Cleric Stance than was already had in the choice between using Glare and using Cure II.

It just let you choose which part of your kit you were allowed access to. It's the still the same kit; it is not enlarged by locking it out, nor are its nuances deepened through a mere single extra GCD of locking out a given tool's opposite part of the kit.

Apply that to any other role. You want to switch from a combo opener to a sequential/RNG-procced action? Gotta hit your Infantry Stance. True Thrust, Infantry Stance, Disembowel, Chaos Thrust, Release Infantry Stance, Wheeling Thrust, Infantry Stance, Fang and Claw, Raiden Thrust, Vorpal Thrust, Full Thrust, Release Infantry Stance, Fang and Claw, Infantry Stance, Wheeling Thrust.

Stormbite, Caustic, Infantry Stance, Refulgent Arrow, Barrage-Refulgent Arrow, Release Infantry Stance, Burst Shot, Infantry Stance, Refulgent Arrow.

Fail to make those swaps, and you lose the vast majority of your output.

Skill gap there? Sure. But choice? None. And you could have that exact same degree of skill gap, or more, by... being expected to type in a specified 4-digit code between each GCD, to note whether it's an odd GCD or even GCD, etc., etc.. It's bloat.

The skill ceiling we have as healer now is mapping ogcd for the entire fight and hoping if you pug you have a decent co healer that doesn’t use either medica 2 all the time and deals dmg or the polar opposite just doing dmg and not using all his ogcd/healing tools at all.

Yes, it's so bad that we... must add several 0s to our choice and significant clunk to our gameplay? Surely that'll fix it??

No "it's bad, so let's throw fecal matter at it," does not work.

I miss having consequences in final. Back then a tank fail was a entire party wipe because the boss would often kill the entire party if the tank fukked up. Remember god kefka having double drill and killing the party when a tank was either dead or missing and no one sacced. Or o12 where the tanks had too be fast with pulling m and f apart or they would be one shot. Now tankbuster are just stay decently safe, use cds and voke/shirk and done. Self responsibility in this game just goes down the drain and it’s pretty sad

None of which has to do with Cleric Stance, nor would be helped or complimented by Cleric Stance. By all means, let's bring back some of that degree of danger... but there's no reason to ask for clunk back.

:: That said, tanks are just 1 in 4 players. Given the increased prevalence of body-checks, it's not as if the rest are increasingly getting a free ride or seeing no consequence for their failure.

[ty_taurus]

I just meant that the difference between having no INT investment and full INT investment after Cleric Stance was of the magnitude of a 1000% boost. Taking a quick look at some HW gameplay, I'm seeing Broil deal around 1200 damage, and I think without Cleric Stance it would've been around 100 or so damage, so not off the mark (if you saw this before my edit, my math is bad). That also would've been exacerbated over time as stats continued to climb, similarly to how Auto-Attacks are actually a significant part of healer DPS at level 50 but virtually meaningless at level 90. You do about 30 damage per auto, but in an environment where your basic attacks deal a few hundred damage, that 30 does add up very quickly across old fights, but since that doesn't scale at all while we level up and our MND gets higher, it becomes mostly inconsequential over time. So while HW Cleric Stance may have been around 1000%, it might now be closer to around 25000%-35000% if Cleric Stance were to still exist.

[Mortex]

You can arguably claim that there was some skill gap there, even if it was overwhelmed by "ping/packet_loss gap", but... there was no more "choice" of whether to use Cleric Stance than was already had in the choice between using Glare and using Cure II.

It just let you choose which part of your kit you were allowed access to. It's the still the same kit; it is not enlarged by locking it out, nor are its nuances deepened through a mere single extra GCD of locking out a given tool's opposite part of the kit.

Apply that to any other role. You want to switch from a combo opener to a sequential/RNG-procced action? Gotta hit your Infantry Stance. True Thrust, Infantry Stance, Disembowel, Chaos Thrust, Release Infantry Stance, Wheeling Thrust, Infantry Stance, Fang and Claw, Raiden Thrust, Vorpal Thrust, Full Thrust, Release Infantry Stance, Fang and Claw, Infantry Stance, Wheeling Thrust.

Stormbite, Caustic, Infantry Stance, Refulgent Arrow, Barrage-Refulgent Arrow, Release Infantry Stance, Burst Shot, Infantry Stance, Refulgent Arrow.

Fail to make those swaps, and you lose the vast majority of your output.

Skill gap there? Sure. But choice? None. And you could have that exact same degree of skill gap, or more, by... being expected to type in a specified 4-digit code between each GCD, to note whether it's an odd GCD or even GCD, etc., etc.. It's bloat.


Yes, it's so bad that we... must add several 0s to our choice and significant clunk to our gameplay? Surely that'll fix it??

No "it's bad, so let's throw fecal matter at it," does not work.


None of which has to do with Cleric Stance, nor would be helped or complimented by Cleric Stance. By all means, let's bring back some of that degree of danger... but there's no reason to ask for clunk back.

:: That said, tanks are just 1 in 4 players. Given the increased prevalence of body-checks, it's not as if the rest are increasingly getting a free ride or seeing no consequence for their failure.

I mean you were still allowed to use healing spells in cleric as same as you can use combos without the step beforehand and I argue that you don’t have any choices either in any job in that regard except how much resources you take into a burst windows. Like a drg never using fang and claw or wheeling trust will never get raiden trust so I assume you could call these two attacks the raiden stance. Also body checks were always there they just became more (grand cross doing more dmg the less people you had or forsake having a set amount off mechs you need people for, biblio mech on o7 with light parties and etc).

Like you can do almost any content with just 1-1-1-1 combos so I assume every combo is just bloat. Because why press more when you can do it easy. When the most meaningful choice in this kind of content is how fast I’m through then i think the entire game in that regard is flawed.

[Shurrikhan]

I mean you were still allowed to use healing spells in cleric as same as you can use combos without the step beforehand

So, the same as... another non-choice?

Let's not mistake finger-traps with actual choices. If there is no use case, ever, for the given action, it literally cannot be a choice, only a mistake. The ability to make more mistakes does not inherently mean more choice.

Like you can do almost any content with just 1-1-1-1 combos so I assume every combo is just bloat.

You do see how purposely doing 10% output with otherwise optimal gameplay (same actions, but 10% the stats) is not the same as hitting only one button repeatedly (not that you'd have changed much for healer GCDs), yes?

The latter would have higher output, yes, than someone making the "choice", as you called it, to attack without Cleric Stance or heal with it on, but it's literally only that -- neutered stats. You have equal access to that "choice" now by just stripping naked upon entering the instance.