Another reference for good Healer design

So I just started playing Star Ocean: The Divine Force, and I gotta say, it's doing a pretty good job thus far despite the last 2 games in the series being more lackluster.

That said, I want to talk about Nina. In SO: TDF, Nina is the party's dedicated healer who uses a bell in combat. In this game, combat has you lock onto enemies to target for attacks, but Nina is unique in that she doesn't target enemies; she targets allies. There is a dash mechanic where other characters can spend a gauge to rush enemies, blindside them to stun, and deal damage, but Nina uses this to rush to her target ally and heal them.

Nina has several interesting qualities to her gameplay:

1. All of her abilities are point-blank AoEs except for 1.
2. She cannot heal herself directly. She needs to be within a party member's range and heal them. She heals for 20% of the HP she restores to other allies.
3. She can set up a "turret" basically that stays in place and heals anyone that gets close to it in a smaller range than her normal spell.
4. She has buff songs that buff one of the 4 main stats.
5. She has a song that pulls all party members to her.
6. She has more DPS abilities than she does healing. Despite not being able to target enemies at all, she has point-blank AoE songs that deal respectable damage, and are meant to knock back enemies or hinder them, but still does good damage. She can also set up a DPS "turret" like her healing one that radiates her knock-back song over and over.

Nina is a very interesting character in an action RPG that takes a role that previously could be quite binary in Star Ocean and shows yet again how a dedicated healer who can't even target enemies in the first place can have a variety of offensive actions.

For anyone interested, you can find what her gameplay looks like here.

Too complicated, while it's great that she's a healer that can function entirely off of casting various flavors of Medica, it also brings in the added complexity of 'stand in the right place' which the newer healer players would find too difficult to work around in the heat of battle, so I suggest if it were brought over to FFXIV, we increase the range of the heals to 20y

only partially /s, because we've all seen how many times people just... dont stand in the Soil/CU/Asylum. I have zero doubt that if this character's kit was in FFXIV, people would stand in Narnia, die because they made it impossible to do the job of healing, then blame the healer because 'we died, surely its the healers fault'. On the flip side though, I say only partially /s because this, and plenty of other designs, show how there's lots of avenues of 'how to heal' that haven't been tried here, and certain people both at SE and in this forum seem to be dead set on forcing every healer into this 'WHM with sprinkles' mindset. Every healer has a Cure equivalent, every healer has a 'bubble' of sorts now, every healer's AOE healing is a circle, etc. When they first announced Sage I had a dream, that it's 'Medica equivalent' (now called Prognosis) would be a LINE AOE heal? That positioning would be a part of the Sage's gameplay. Nah, too complicated, just make it a circle like everything else.

On the plus side though, since every boss now has 100% melee uptime because their hitboxes are the size of Australia, what legitimate reason is there to not have a healer, that has melee skills to build a gauge that you spend on healing? Like, a simple 123 that gives 5/5/10 gauge, and you can spend 25 gauge on a single target heal, or an AOE heal, say, a cone AOE in front of you? cough cough

I wasn't really saying "this is what we need specifically in FFXIV," but more about pointing out another example of a character or class literally established to be a healer in-universe (Nina is a doctor on a quest to find a cure for an epidemic) who still has a well-established library of offensive abilities. Nina has 5 attacking actions, 3 healing actions, 3 buffing actions, 2 utility actions, and 1 AoE provoke.

Honestly, that's not too far off the general idea we had for dancer before it was confirmed as a physical ranged dps instead.

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Originally Posted by Allegor

Honestly, that's not too far off the general idea we had for dancer before it was confirmed as a physical ranged dps instead.

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I still want Hybrid Dancer...

Certainly a lower priority than reworks to the existing healers, but still -- let us have dances that amount to more than just AoE damage... with... damage bonus or bigger AoE damage with... damage bonus (so varied and exciting, no?) ...

I guess we have like, Improvisation, Shield Samba and Curing Waltz, that are dances with different effects than 'does damage', they just... don't require pressing dance steps to activate. In the devs defense on this one, I can't imagine it'd be fun trying to put up Shield Samba in time by doing a 2 step dance like Standard Step, not to mention it'd be on the GCD like that and therefore a DPS loss

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Originally Posted by ForsakenRoe

I guess we have like, Improvisation, Shield Samba and Curing Waltz, that are dances with different effects than 'does damage', they just... don't require pressing dance steps to activate. In the devs defense on this one, I can't imagine it'd be fun trying to put up Shield Samba in time by doing a 2 step dance like Standard Step, not to mention it'd be on the GCD like that and therefore a DPS loss

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You'd probably just build different resources via GCD steps, release them via oGCDs. The responsiveness is still there, but the utility then doesn't just feel like a barely rethemed rehash of any other toolkit's party-mit and Dancer could have actual versatility and greater resource swing.

Once upon a time, I did a little "What if DNC was a healer?" Theorycraft back in Shadowbringers that looked kinda like this...

Damage potencies dropped, naturally, but the toolkit largely stayed the same in terms of actions, though some actions had their effects changed. Standard Step currently gives you one two-step button combo to press in order to gain the maximum damage and buff. This stayed, but you'd have the option between that 2-step combo and a second using the remaining two steps, and you'd pick which one to use each Standard Step usage. The second combo would grant the party a 15 second Bloodbath-like effect that healed them when they used a spell or weaponskill. Since the Standard Step buff lasts 1 minute, you could use the recovery step instead every other Standard Step in theory. Technical Step would grant this effect on top of its current effect, making it easier for you to go into an offensive burst phase. These changes would also have made Tillana's effect more clearly valuable, whereas now, it feels very redundant. Meanwhile, Improvisation changed to a potent burst heal you could only use while using Standard Step or Technical Step before you finish the dance, that way if you were caught in need of healing while you were dancing, you had a way to heal the party. With Improvised Finish being added, it could be an additional OGCD burst heal you got after triggering Improvisation during one of your dances and could be used both in and out of dances.

Curing Waltz stayed the same but moved to the GCD in addition to Divine Waltz which was half the potency but a much larger AoE. Fan Dance III, however, would upgrade them both to Curing Waltz II and Divine Waltz II for 1 use, in which their potency stayed the same, but they became OGCD. Flourish also granted this proc. Then you'd have Astral Waltz as your raise and Healing Waltz as your Esuna. Astral Waltz was instant cast by nature, but debuffed yourself for 1 minute making future casts of Astral Waltz have a cast time of 8 seconds, effectively building Swiftcast into it.

Saber Dance was removed as an Esprit spender and just made a GCD cooldown. Meanwhile Shield Samba had its cooldown reduced to 30 seconds and used for Esprit along with Drain Samba that gave the party that Bloodbath-like effect from Standard Step and Technical Step, and Chocobo Samba which gave everyone combat sprint (I know Expedient was a meme prior to EW's release, but I always liked the idea of movement speed buffs). So your Esprit was basically a buff gauge.

Dancer should have been a healer I agree.

Healers still do damage and dancer was about debuffing the enemy or buffing your party. Doing damage isn't major in its franchise counterparts.

Then they could have had more dances they can use as mixer for healing spells. This is how people initially thought of dancer could have done.

Missed opportunity I suppose.