The nine-billionth idea for Dancer (stop me if you've heard this before)

My friends and I were discussing how we could attract or ease players (DPS) into the healer role. The conversation turned to Dancer, something that would probably be a TP-based healer (instead of a MP). Essentially, you would operate like a DPS role, as you would have an overall rotation with combos and positional requirements. Much like say, tanks, you would have a DPS/resource recovery combo and a healer/resource intensive combo that's doing damage to an enemy while simultaneously healing those nearby (5 - 10 yalms), so positioning is important to make sure you keep the tank healed and any DPS that took a hit. You would obviously need some off-global-cooldown abilities as a stop-gap for situations that require ranged healing and a few other utilities (most likely movement utility and resource recovery).

This way, DPS classes don't have to learn a completely new style of gameplay while easing themselves into the healer role. Thoughts? Or am I just too inebriated?

Addendum: 1000 character limit for a forum post infuriates me.

Edit for circumventing the 1000 charcter limit

Now for my thoughts on this topic.

I think the problem is not the overall difference of playstyle between healer and DPS itself.
DPS have many forms of rotation or priority system to maintain their damage, so this cant be the breaking point.

The bigger problem i see is the point of "responsibility".
As healer you have the responsibility to keep your comrades alive while they do (sometimes stupid) things. This proces in itself is relative easy in dungeons, but kan get pretty hard in Ex or Savage content. In addition their is the pressure from outside to squeeze additional damage between healing phases or downtime as long as ressources are no problem.

Now your DNC idea would fusion this two points by making DNC a DPS with a basic healing while DPSing. This would need additional abilities, spells or skills to compensate for the short range and perhaps low level of its basic healing.
Also would this need to be balanced from DPS output and healing power to the other healers.
And don't forget he needs an additional melee spot on the boss/target, making it hard to use 2 melee DPS, also it would draw healer mechanics into the party.

All in all in my own opinion a DNC would be better as support DPS with a barebone DPS combo rotation and offGCD casts as dances with different effects like healing, damage, buffing, debuffing and ressource regeneration, like a melee version of BRD.

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Originally Posted by Legion88

Edit for circumventing the 1000 charcter limit

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Didn't realize that, thanks for letting me know!

How would dancer be able to heal that BLM that refuses to move in so close to the boss with this design? A melee-based healer idea is okay, but ranged is, you know, ranged, and they have to have some way of reaching them for heals.

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Originally Posted by Elamys

How would dancer be able to heal that BLM that refuses to move in so close to the boss with this design? A melee-based healer idea is okay, but ranged is, you know, ranged, and they have to have some way of reaching them for heals.

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That would be for their off-global-cooldown heals would be for--probably a high potency Heal-over-time, I would imagine. Barring that, I can see having a second combo set that could be used to heal the whole party rather than just in an area around them, but if it went that far, there wouldn't really be a reason to not just have a WHM use medica, huh?

Whatever gauge they built up through the use of their rotations/actions could probably be utilized for ranged healing as well, but then we run into the issue of ranged healing not being immediately available, so some form of OGC ability seems like the best stop-gap for that situation. Planning a melee-range healer around long-range DPS is rather tricky, I'll admit.

WoW's implementation of a melee-based healer was honestly very interesting and I wish they had been more bold with it. While they had some classic heals, I feel like their intent for reaching ranged was via the statue (which duplicated your healing to people near it) and the orbs (which people could walk through, they just appeared around the battle area at random when you healed). The main problem with the orbs, of course, was that people wouldn't walk through them.

That's certainly an option as well, though I'm not sure what Dancers could use as a mimic to totems. We wouldn't need the orbs, since Dancers would be healing in an area around themselves almost constantly anyway, just stand close to the DPS and tank (ie, probably the flank), in order to make sure everyone is covered. As for a totem stand in, I'm tempted to make a dancer pole joke, but it'd look weird for thus random pole to just appear out of nowhere.

I'd be open to new healer ideas if SE didn't take two years to balance them.

The best melee healer I've seen is the disciple from Warhammer. You can do some melee damage while splash healing, and if there's times you need to step back, you could change stance for more traditional heals. This could work well with dancer, with combos healing the party through tp or enabling an instant heal... And using mp for when you can't.
I also like in Rift, you select one main target to heal the most through your damage done.

The dancer from 11 was essentially this. Melee focused TP based buffer and healer. Could replace a healer if need be, but wasn't preferred. (Just how it was setup in 11) - The Disciple of Kaine, and whatever the Order healer that looked like a Paladin was in Warhammer as well (as mentioned above)

I would love this. To elaborate just a little further, now that the ground work is in for player based tethers (Like dragoon buff) - It's pretty easy to have a dancer tether a tank and have X portion of dmg dealt heal... then have some oGCD's to work on.

We need more healers to begin with. Well we need more tanks but that's not a class problem imo, its a community impatience thing. If tanks weren't expected to know every crack of every dungeon before they even run it, (oh and expected to pull like its their 1000th run) there would probably be more due to less pressure.

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Originally Posted by Cyrocco

I'd be open to new healer ideas if SE didn't take two years to balance them.

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Or mess up the existing ones in the process. Either they're severely undertuned like vanilla AST and current SCH, or they're severely overtuned like the current AST. They never seem to know how to balance them properly without hurting one of the others.

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Originally Posted by Sahjin

The best melee healer I've seen is the disciple from Warhammer. You can do some melee damage while splash healing, and if there's times you need to step back, you could change stance for more traditional heals. This could work well with dancer, with combos healing the party through tp or enabling an instant heal... And using mp for when you can't.
I also like in Rift, you select one main target to heal the most through your damage done.

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Disciple of Khaine and Battle Priest were quite fun....

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Originally Posted by Enla

Or mess up the existing ones in the process. Either they're severely undertuned like vanilla AST and current SCH, or they're severely overtuned like the current AST. They never seem to know how to balance them properly without hurting one of the others.

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I honestly suspect that a large part of the problem is precisely because they have 3 healers. 2 healer spots in a group - one of them is always going to get left out. By having 4, it would probably be much easier to balance and people would have a harder time sticking so closely to some stupid meta they follow because they just copy the world first clears.

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Originally Posted by Elamys

I honestly suspect that a large part of the problem is precisely because they have 3 healers. 2 healer spots in a group - one of them is always going to get left out. By having 4, it would probably be much easier to balance and people would have a harder time sticking so closely to some stupid meta they follow because they just copy the world first clears.

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Meta's always gonna meta. Adding more classes won't change that.

As someone that used to play Chloromancer Mage in Rift, previously Mistweaver Monk and currently Discipline Priest in WoW, I can say unequivocally that a damage-focused healer can work as a mechanic but it needs a lot of work and adjustments that I'm not sure Square will really want to go all in on. Futhermore, there's no way in the seven hells that it will play anywhere close to what DPS classes do; the entire thought process is different, and I'd rather not design a healer around wanting to attract DPS to the role.