#FFXIVHEALERSTRIKE

[TheDustyOne]

hey man, they're there. and it needs to be mentioned. If this thread is looked at by devs, would you really want them to read it and think cleric stance should be missed?

I certainly don't doubt they exist, especially after 250 pages, but I've been here for for at least 70 of those pages and no one in those times brought it up that I could see outside you and Nirokon. It mostly tends to be just older damage buttons that are missed.

If Square looked through all 250 pages of this thread and came to the conclusion that what we wanted was Cleric Stance, they're even more tone-deaf than I expected.

[Milkbeard]

I certainly don't doubt they exist, especially after 250 pages, but I've been here for for at least 70 of those pages and no one in those times brought it up that I could see outside you and Nirokon. It mostly tends to be just older damage buttons that are missed.

If Square looked through all 250 pages of this thread and came to the conclusion that what we wanted was Cleric Stance, they're even more tone-deaf than I expected.

There are ways of searching threads for certain words. If you search a word, for opinions on something and find more positive than negative, then yeah that could give a dev a good idea. Its okay to talk about changes you don't want, as well as the ones that you do.

[Milkbeard]

I certainly don't doubt they exist, especially after 250 pages, but I've been here for for at least 70 of those pages and no one in those times brought it up that I could see outside you and Nirokon. It mostly tends to be just older damage buttons that are missed.

If Square looked through all 250 pages of this thread and came to the conclusion that what we wanted was Cleric Stance, they're even more tone-deaf than I expected.

Can't disagree with that. I won't clog the thread with anymore than that 2 cents

[Niroken]

So for those who want cleric stance back, you really don't. That one button was not complexity, it was an inconvenience that created a subsection of healers believing that dps was a choice and not a functional necessity. Leading to lots of dead weight. You don't want cleric stance back. Please enjoy that you can switch between dps spells and healing spells freely. And knowing the stats you're stacking on your gear go towards both healing and dps

DH is what you want. You want DH on your gear. You want DH to be functional for healing too. Please focus your energy there instead of misunderstanding the fundamental concept of healer dps and thinking that you should have a GCD of nothing that makes healing spells no longer work.

I believe it was mostly the idea to bring the skill ceiling up. Cleric Stance did increase the skill ceiling more then what it is now. I believe the essence of the change requests is to bring the ceiling up because right now it's basically touching the floor. The discussion that as been going on for years is how to achieve that.

[Eorzean_username]

So for those who want cleric stance back, you really don't.

Man, come on, don't J Allen Brack me.

Yep, I'll play the "villain" on this topic — I want Cleric Stance back. No caveats, no buts. If the developers suddenly put Cleric Stance right back in the game, exactly as it was in ARR/HW, it would not bother me at all.

I liked Cleric Stance. I thought it made healing in FFXIV more fun.

I personally feel like Cleric Stance is being cartoonishly-vilified by most of FFXIV's community, now that it's all far-away and in hindsight.

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I was playing in the Cleric Stance era, and in my own experiences, Cleric just wasn't that big of a problem. Dungeons, Normal Raids, and Alliance Raids didn't constantly wipe because Healers were in Cleric. If someone wasn't feeling confident about DPSing, or the encounter seemed too risky / unfamiliar / spicy, then Healers would just... stay out of Cleric.

There's a tendency to exaggerate and portray "less dedicated" / "more casual" players as complete idiots who can't do anything correct, but in my actual experiences, most people playing Healers had no problem utilising Cleric correctly. And if someone wasn't using Cleric correctly, it was almost-invariably due to being too cautious, and not entering Cleric as much as they could have. Which didn't even feel that bad back then, because Healing from Healers actually mattered a lot more, so if your Healer was being cautious, it was like... "OK, no problem, that's fine, just keep the HP bars up".

And I also think that it's overexaggerated that Healers were being bullied about Cleric uptime or something. I cannot personally remember a single moment in any content outside Savage and maybe some EXs when I ever saw anyone even care whether one or more Healers were in Cleric or not, as long as the Party wasn't wiping to healable damage.

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Actually, thinking about it now, Cleric Stance was one of the first things about FFXIV that stuck-out to me as a new player. It was interesting and a new sort of mechanic to me, and it made Healing actually work differently from how it felt in other MMOs.

In fact, FFXIV used to be full of strange and interesting differences in its design and play-feel like that, and it was a large part of what made me become interested in the game past the free trial, and stay-on as a dedicated player.

The successive changes that Mr. Yoshida has pushed-for since Stormblood to "broaden appeal" have, for me, served to water-down, genericise, and dilute FFXIV's gameplay design more and more, and at this point, if you put me in a test environment where the player-units had FFXIV's Job mechanics, except everything was reskinned with generic models purchased off an Unreal Engine asset-store, I might be hard-pressed to correctly identify which game I'm even playing.

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As far as the statements about how supposedly-unpleasant it was to have to deal with Cleric, I personally didn't view Cleric as an "inconvenience" — I viewed it as a mechanic.

A mechanic that was just like any other mechanic that is part of how Jobs and Roles functioned, like Enochian or Blood of the Dragon.

So I just learned how and when to use it. And it felt good to get better at encounters, and become more confident and bold about when to safely enter Cleric to deal some more damage. There was a sense of definite "skill progression" as I repeated encounters more and more, and it also made even Dungeons feel a lot more engaging to learn and practise the mechanics and patterns.

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As for Cleric clock-blocking you from DPSing... I don't know what to say, really.

I mean, I did "switch between DPS and Healing Spells freely", because the cooldown on Cleric was 5 seconds, and even in ARR/HW, FFXIV's healing pace was lethargic compared to other games.

So tales of switching to Cleric, and then everyone DYING HORRIBLY AHHHHH because you can't heal because you're strapped in Cleric Jail, seem perplexing and greatly-exaggerated to me.

At worst, you might sweat slightly for ~1 GCD before you just toggled Cleric back off and Cure 2 or Lustrate or something. Maybe burn a Swiftcast if something really weird happened.

Honestly, dancing into Cleric to reapply DOTs, then swapping back out to reapply Regen or something, was an enjoyable rhythm to me. And again, it felt actually-distinct, rather than just "What if we made WoW, but the server responsiveness was really bad?"

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And as for gear and stats... I personally found the INT/MND split interesting.

I liked that different stats actually did different things, and it felt cool to "shift" between Help Mode and Death Mode, even at the numeric level.

There was a tangible power-reward for using that shift intelligently, and it felt cool to gradually watch content clear faster and faster as I became more confident about when to Cleric.

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Actually, I don't even see how Cleric would be a problem with FFXIV's modern design — everything has only become more hyper-scripted and meticulously-plotted. Dedicated EX, Savage, and Ultimate Healers could probably map-out down to the exact GCD exactly when they would toggle Cleric Stance on and off.

Especially because, there is already barely-any need for "spontaneous emergency healing" in current FFXIV, so there would be little risk of being caught inside Cleric at the wrong time, unless you're completely YOLO'ing a Savage floor with no plan whatsoever... which would probably cause you not to succeed anyway, with or without Cleric Stance in the game?

And even if you did "mess up" your Cleric timing, it's just not very common in FFXIV to encounter cases where a maximum possible delay of 5s would actually cause a wipe, because you would both need the timing of incoming damage-waves to be that precise, and also to have activated Cleric literally right before the designated mechanic occurred. Otherwise, you'd have a delay before Healing of less than 5s, because Cleric was already cooling-down by some amount.

To be honest, Cleric's 5s CD is actually incredibly-forgiving in a game that has scripted and paced-out damage as precisely as FFXIV does.

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...So yeah, you're totally welcome to personally dislike Cleric Stance as a mechanic, we all have different play-sensibilities.

But lecturing me about what I "actually want" is... pretty inaccurate, regarding this topic.

[Kayokane]

-snip-

I'm glad you've never had the experience of accidentally double clicking Cleric's Stance off and back on again when you needed to heal, that combined with Hallowed Ground delay caused many a wipe back in the day. 5 seconds is a long time when you need to heal now.

Cleric's Stances CD only applied when turning Cleric's Stance on, not when turning it off. I guess you must have done a hotbar swap macro so you didn't need to deal with the possible recast?

[Pandurah]

Cleric's Stances CD only applied when turning Cleric's Stance on, not when turning it off. I guess you must have done a hotbar swap macro so you didn't need to deal with the possible recast?

It happened to me a few times when learning, but that's the point of learning. Although, as a SCH main I could pump out % heals with Lustrate (at least in ARR).

[Kayokane]

It happened to me a few times when learning, but that's the point of learning. Although, as a SCH main I could pump out % heals with Lustrate (at least in ARR).

I was always a WHM main but I do miss watching a SCH full dump stacks into the tank because I messed up Cleric's Stance again. Lustrate Lustrate Lustrate Aetherflow Lustrate Lustrate Lustrate, 20% overheal on paper, but damage was still going out :3 SCH players back then were pretty epic considerring how... touchy Eos and Selene could be to control.

[IDontPetLalas]

I'm glad you've never had the experience of accidentally double clicking Cleric's Stance off and back on again when you needed to heal, that combined with Hallowed Ground delay caused many a wipe back in the day. 5 seconds is a long time when you need to heal now.

Cleric's Stances CD only applied when turning Cleric's Stance on, not when turning it off. I guess you must have done a hotbar swap macro so you didn't need to deal with the possible recast?

You know, I also never experienced a wipe due to that (admittedly, a close call- but that was on me). Am I disputing that it happened? Not at all, however people also die to:

- mistimed/misplaced rescues
- mistimed heals and tank invuls
i could keep going, to be fair, I would not have tossed out Cleric Stance entirely but adjusted it somewhat- however I was able to work with it even as a sprout healer at the time.

[Rolder50]

You know, I also never experienced a wipe due to that (admittedly, a close call- but that was on me). Am I disputing that it happened? Not at all, however people also die to:

- mistimed/misplaced rescues
- mistimed heals and tank invuls
i could keep going, to be fair, I would not have tossed out Cleric Stance entirely but adjusted it somewhat- however I was able to work with it even as a sprout healer at the time.

I personally would have made Cleric Stance give a % increase to damage and a % decrease to healing, rather then the whole stat swap thing. To make it a bit more intuitive and less punishing if you mess it up.