There was never a "melee" healer in wow unless you count monk somehow and they are awesome.
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I like to beg to differ on the changing of the base class suit the role of a job. The lancer wouldn't need changes the soul crystals would add a system of top of the existing moves similar to warrior with wrath and a stance. The class already has a parry buff so building off parry and maybe a counter attack system could change the whole playstyle but never need to change lancer as a whole. Now the skill would be piercing and your auto attack would be slashing i suppose which won't really matter. So I guess the only issue would be what to do with the crystal to weapon equip. Sam would need to be able to equip at least one spear or change the system to force a crystal equip on weapon change. All small problems. I think the big issue would be to make the system interesting and balanced with pld and war would be the issue more so then making a dps interesting.
Archer/Bard is great but we need true ranged dps that uses both gun/crossbow/bow just like in FFXI.
I don't mind having SAM as tank. Holding hate with WS would be awesome. SE seriously need to introduce WS combo burst just like in FFXI.
Thief would be awesome. It was my main in FFXI.
You know they could actually do something a little different if they did decide to go with SAM as a tank, say make it similar to WAR in it's ability to actually do decent dmg but maybe give it abilities that increase its damage the lower the mobs life is and other such abilities with off tank prioritization in mind. Or another tank type job that would actually be geared towards off tanking, so good tank great off tank.
Post 36 might be on to something they are covertly testing with auto weapon swap a with soul gems. Relics as job keyed weapons automatically equips the required gem.
Make Samurai a healer.