Confessor: A Self-Indulgent Job Concept

Not sure if this is the right place, but I've had an idea kicking around in my head for ages now and I figured I should put it to page.

The job in question is called Confessor, and it's a light-themed physical ranged DPS themed around the sin eaters of Shadowbringers, and a counterpart to Reaper. Its weapons are a set of aetherially-conductive needles and darts held between the fingers of each hand and thrown at enemies, that act as a medium for the Confessor to drain the target's aether and cast followup light magic to destroy their foes.

If Paladin represents the light's capacity to defend and hold fast against adversity, and White Mage represents its capacity to heal and bring succour, Confessor represents the capacity of light to scour and sterilise. Much like the sin eaters themselves, and as a counterpart to Reaper, it casts light as something powerful, insatiable and relentless.

(1/4)

LORE

In terms of lore, the idea I had was that it originated in the Sixth Astral Era, during the latter part of the War of the Magi in the city of Amdapor. The first Confessor was an Archon with great technical knowledge of magic, but with a congenital birth defect that left them with a chronically low capacity for aether. This condition prevented them from becoming a White Mage, but they still wished to join the war effort in some capacity, so rather than attempt to force the issue, they instead looked to study the techniques of their enemies to develop a countermeasure that they could employ.

What they found was that Black Mages were heavily reliant on the natural ebb and flow of aether currents in the environment and within themselves, shifting at regular intervals between Astral and Umbral states in their casting. They didn't necessarily have the knowledge that light is the aspect of stasis, but they found through experimentation that the precise, surgical application of light-aspected aether to specific points in the target's body could disrupt those currents and inhibit the Black Mage's casting long enough that they could be taken down for good.

In order to make this happen, they devised a combat style that used thrown needles to effectively perform magical acupuncture at a distance, relying on the relatively longer casting times of black magic to strike the target first and interrupt them before they had the chance to fully wind up their most powerful spells. While they didn't naturally have the aether within themselves to reliably subdue an enemy mage, they realised that the aether they needed could actually be derived from the target themselves, using the arrangement of needles as an arcane catalyst to drain the aether from their target and redirect it to hinder them instead.

The Archon presented their findings to their fellows in Amdapor, and while their results were promising, the White Mages were also quick to realise that these arts could just as easily be turned on them if they fell into the wrong hands. In the end, it was decided that the arts of the Confessor, as they began to call it, would be kept under wraps and hidden from the public eye, but that privately, the Archon would be allowed to take apprentices, and that the Confessors would be used as assassins to target and remove highly-dangerous Mhachi black mages from the battlefield.

The war was long and vicious and the Confessors served for many years, taking down a variety of black mages, voidsent and other threats, until the Sixth Umbral Calamity. Most of the Confessors drowned along with Amdapor, leaving only a handful that managed to flee to higher ground. When the waters receded, the Confessors that remained were left to navigate the destroyed world, bereft of purpose or direction, and hated and feared by all who knew what they were thanks to their association with the mages that had destroyed the world.

Within the city of Amdapor though, even with its residents dead, the city wasn't fully abandoned. Voidsent, monsters, and constructs of light still roamed, that were now free to gorge themselves on the crystals and reservoirs of aether within the city. Hungry and vicious, many of them grew bold and escaped to prey on the denizens of the Black Shroud, and over the years the Confessors found new purpose using their skills to hunt down these monsters, draining their aether and absorbing it into themselves to prevent the Light from bringing them back (similar to Kuribu and the Lightwardens.)

It was a thankless job, and for many years the Confessors were viewed with fear and suspicion, and forced to live on the fringes with only beasts and monsters for company. Many of them chose to leave the arts behind and fade into society as normal citizens, but those who continued their work eventually found a place in society similar to the Vipers of Tural, and over the years the Shroud's residents slowly began to calm down and grow more tolerant towards them, as in spite of their misgivings the Confessors had saved many of their lives.

Unfortunately, over the years, the Confessors slowly began to grow complacent, and they had no way of knowing that in many cases, the power they were absorbing was poisoning them from within. This culminated in an incident, many years down the line, where a master Confessor absorbed a massive volume of Light aether from a powerful Amdapori construct, and the overflow triggered a transformation into what the people of the First would call a sin eater.

Those who had fought with the Confessor were completely blindsided as the monster they had become swiftly turned on and slaughtered its former allies and civilians alike in its hunger for aether. Eventually it was put down by its former apprentice, but the Light flowed into them as well - thankfully, by sheer chance, the apprentice's capacity for aether was higher than their late master, but publically the damage was done. The goodwill the Confessors had built up was destroyed overnight, as the populace realised that their work had the capacity to make them into monsters as well.

The apprentice was forced out back to the fringes, and spent the rest of their days researching a way to purge the Light that now dwelled within them, to keep it from affecting others. The answer they came to, unfortunately, was that the only way to reliably stop the transformation, was for the afflicted Confessor to die before they turned. So, after taking on an apprentice of their own, they taught them everything they had to give, lessons and warnings alike, before taking their own life to dispel the Light before it could harm others.

Over the centuries, the Confessors continued in this pattern - staying out of the public eye, killing monsters that won't stay down, taking on apprentices of their own, and dying by their own hands or those of their students such that they won't threaten the world, before the cycle repeats again with the next generation. This chain has continued mostly unbroken for years all the way into the present day, and the job trainer NPC is the current apprentice in the dynamic.

Their master, unfortunately, left it too late and has transformed into a sin eater, and they've come to one of the major cities of Eorzea to seek out someone who has the aetheric capacity to safely contain their aether without transforming themselves. Enter the Warrior of Light - officially, your massive natural capacity for aether, and the fact that you've contained and purged the Light of an entire world within yourself makes you the best possible candidate to take up the Confessor's arts for a new age.

Unofficially? This cycle of death, hopelessness and fatalism has continued for far too many years, and the job trainer has the hope that with your strength, you might finally find a better path, and close these old wounds of war for good.

The major themes of the job questline are parallels to the Reaper and Dark Knight questline; whereas those in many cases are explorations of indulgence, freedom and the toxicity of hedonism, the Confessor questline is an exploration of self-sacrifice, toxic virtue, the bloodshed that drives righteous conflict, and the nobility that can arise even in the hurt and broken. It parallels the Warrior of Light's own journey in many ways, and explores the relationship between heroism and martyrdom, a topic with which the Warrior is intimately familiar.

In terms of job design, my thoughts on that front are quite malleable, but I had the idea that the Confessor has very little in the way of personal buffs - most of its utility comes in the form of debuffs applied to enemies, and it's one of the few jobs aside from Ninja and Scholar to have a damage-taken increasing debuff that it applies to enemies for the whole group to use. Within the aiming-type jobs we've got two more supportive DPSes in Dancer and Bard, so it may be a good idea to skew Confessor more towards the selfish DPS end of the spectrum, closer to something like Machinist.

Similar to how Reaper is something of a jack-of-all-trades "help you while i'm helping myself" kind of job, Confessor would fit into a similar niche, reducing enemy damage output, and could have something like a direct hit taken rate debuff that it applies to enemies as part of its two minute burst window, to complement Ninja's Dokumori (raw damage taken up) or Scholar's Chain Stratagem (critical hit rate up). I'm thinking higher personal DPS than Bard or Dancer but less group damage potential, and lower personal DPS than Machinist but higher group damage potential.

In terms of thematics, much like the sin eaters, a lot of Confessor's attacks use the names of religious rituals or old torture devices for their naming schema - things like Breaking Wheel, Confession, Exorcism. As much of the job questline is based around moving on from the sins of the past, forgiveness, learning to hope again, the tentative name for the level 3 limit break is Total Absolution.

Mostly this job exists because I love the aesthetic of the sin eaters and I think the light they represent is an interesting avenue to explore, but do let me know what you think - I'm curious to see if anyone else thinks this idea has legs.