Does having AST cancel the possibility to have Time Mage?

I know many want oracle, geomancer, or something else but I've wondered how neat Time Mage would be as a healer job. Something that has SCH's pre-emptive planning but more based around timing of healing. Things like setting someone's default hp to return to t hat spot in 30 seconds, or putting regens on players then fast forwarding them to be a big heal rather than leaving them as a regen. AST seems like it has a general time concept but.... not truly? What are the odds we could see Time Mage given the healers we have and how they function?

Ast felt more like a nod to Time Mage in 4.0, but since then they have stripped a lot of the Time Mage feel from the job and focused more on the divination of the cards... well kind of. I wish they would bring it back, because the space and time aspects of the job were fun, but if they don't then I hope we get a proper Time Mage. It would be hard to do though seeing as Ast still has some of Time Mage's core spells like Gravity and "Haste" (lightspeed). You never know though, with the way they change every job each expansion, they very well could strip those spells away to make room for other abilities and bring us an actual Time Mage with it's traditional kit. Only Time will tell.

Maybe, but lore wise time is part of AST.

Though the removal of elemental stuff for WHM kinda hints at perhaps a Geomancer coming along.

Not anymore, at least. From 3.0-4.0 time was a big feature in ASTs kit. Extending buffs, timed heals etc.

That's more or less gone in 5.0 and replaced with more generic heals, the only timed spell left is Earthly Star (which doesn't make much sense anymore now that you can't manipulate it's time but that's SE).

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Originally Posted by Rai_Takara

Maybe, but lore wise time is part of AST.

Though the removal of elemental stuff for WHM kinda hints at perhaps a Geomancer coming along.

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I still am having trouble imagining how Geomancer would go... At least, how would it be presented as a unique healer ya know?

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Originally Posted by Exiled_Tonberry

Not anymore, at least. From 3.0-4.0 time was a big feature in ASTs kit. Extending buffs, timed heals etc.

That's more or less gone in 5.0 and replaced with more generic heals, the only timed spell left is Earthly Star (which doesn't make much sense anymore now that you can't manipulate it's time but that's SE).

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That's what I think too.

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Originally Posted by Valic

I still am having trouble imagining how Geomancer would go... At least, how would it be presented as a unique healer ya know?

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Back when Summoner and Scholar came out and the idea of having jobs that were "split personalities" of eachother a lot of people thought that Geomancer would be the DPS counterpart to WHM. IT would have made perfect sense at the time, but seeing as Yoshi doesn't want any other jobs to split like that it has made it harder to picture it. Also seeing as canonically Geomancer in this game is like a hybrid of WHM and AST it is unlikely that they will bring it in as a playable job, unless they completely retcon the WHM storyline and make it totally light/holy based and transfer all AIR/EARTH/WATER abilities to Geomancer, which is absolutely possible considering the direction certain jobs are going with 5.0

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Originally Posted by Exiled_Tonberry

the only timed spell left is Earthly Star (which doesn't make much sense anymore now that you can't manipulate it's time but that's SE).

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I don't think it's out of place now - you're not manipulating time, you're just creating a 'bomb' that will take some time to gather energy then release it.

MCH has a similar mechanism despite never having any kind of time control powers. (Matrix-style bullet animations aside...)

AST still has time elements, they are just a bit more subtle then before. And one of their new skills Horoscope is very Time Mage-esque, in addition to being divining based.

Prior to 5.0 I'd say the odds of a Time Mage being added were basically non-existent. But with the changes they made it's not so hard to see the possibility. But I doubt they would make it a healer.

Outside of AST, probably, so long as it claims any part of that motif. But it would be possible to have those elements added back to AST, even if not in the same way they were given before.

AST no longer has time themed spells and WHM no longer has nature themed spells - Time Mage and Geomancer confirmed for 6.0!

Time mage does exist in lore as something separate to AST, you meet a time mage in the hildebrand quests.

Also pure speculation from here, Xande from the CT raid series is likely a time mage as well, as his fight gives time magey abilities like comets and meteors, gravity, quake and teleport, also the crystal exarch using the power of the CT has time mage like abilities as well, so theres a link

There was once a thread in the lore forums on this very topic. I wish I could find it again.

Originally I thought AST did preclude time mage, but there were suggestions both in the game lore and... I think even some old interview? that suggested time mage could very much be its own, separate thing.

Astro was FFXIV's "time mage" until 5.0, when it was robbed of its time-affecting abilities (one of which actually had TIME in the friggin' name).

One can hope it's because devs wanted to be able to control spell/skill balance numbers without the variable of a class being able to extend effects.

I think quite a few AST players would be a bit pissed if the job was stripped of its uniqueness and flavor just to rebrand those stolen abilities as a new class.

I'd say being an MMO with little to no crowd control precludes the possibility of Time Mage.

What would even be the point if they can't have the core Haste/Slow/Stop (or they would otherwise be pointless/useless)?

Personally, I never thought that AST would take the place of a Time Mage or vice versa: even when AST had its full suite of time-related abilities, AST's "specialization" was in celestial-themed magic and divining. Therefore, there is always room for someone who specializes in Time Magic. It's like saying that RDM couldn't exist in its current iteration because BLM has fire/lightning magic, and CNJ has/had earth/wind magic.

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Originally Posted by MintnHoney

Personally, I never thought that AST would take the place of a Time Mage or vice versa: even when AST had its full suite of time-related abilities, AST's "specialization" was in celestial-themed magic and divining. Therefore, there is always room for someone who specializes in Time Magic. It's like saying that RDM couldn't exist in its current iteration because BLM has fire/lightning magic, and CNJ has/had earth/wind magic.

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It mostly just depends on whether AST, in being "celestial", is supposed to be the time-space caster (even if among other things). Celestial magics may also include a more Divination (though that is, in most systems, a sub-set of space-time magic, just as gravitational magics are another subset), but you don't usually get Haste, Slow (Heavy), Gravity, Levity, and Time Dilation magics, as AST launched with, without being deeply invested into time-space magics. Gameplay wise, sure, someone else could take that from AST, but not without cannibalizing its former lore and gameplay, even if the devs has since gutted most of that area in the name of accessibility.

Unless you want to spend every GCD lightening and then immediately heavying DRGs' jumps, lightening enemy attacks while heavying your allies', time-compressing your team's DoTs while time-dilating the enemies, ad nauseum, no job is going to be just Time Magics and Time Magics alone. There's going to need to be a larger aesthetic umbrella of skills and motifs into which they'll fit to give it a functioning toolkit, to host Time Magic cohesively but usefully. And I can't imagine a better host for that than AST. Time-, Space-, Bless-, Curse-, and Divination-based magics make for a pretty great package.

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Originally Posted by Hasrat

I'd say being an MMO with little to no crowd control precludes the possibility of Time Mage.

What would even be the point if they can't have the core Haste/Slow/Stop (or they would otherwise be pointless/useless)?

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Pre-5.0 AST gives a very good idea of what a partial time mage kit could look like. You could do haste (AST literally had a renamed haste), SCH has slow, and so on. You could also work in extending buffs and so on. These are not impossibilities in FF14. Other ideas might be things like "rewinding" damage on an ally, and so on.

I think what's far more likely to preclude time mage is the fans' desire for other classes. A lot of people want chemist. And if SE chooses not to do that, there's geomancer, necromancer, and so on that get regular suggestions. Time mage is rather distant on this list. Not that it's impossible, but SE does seem to prioritize the players' desires in adding new classes, and time mage isn't up there.

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Originally Posted by Allegor

AST no longer has time themed spells and WHM no longer has nature themed spells - Time Mage and Geomancer confirmed for 6.0!

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AST heals still function accord to lore by rewinding time, and also, the whole divination thing, predicting the future, is an element of time manipulation.
Plus Gravity, which was always a time magic spell, because in Japan they don't differentiate between Time/Space, they call it Spacetime magic.

WHM still has it's elemental spells though, being replaced at higher levels doesn't remove them from lower levels.

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Originally Posted by Seraphor

AST heals still function accord to lore by rewinding time

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What lore would that be from? I've never heard it mentioned.

The lorebook (and in-game as far as I can remember) describes Benefic as "channeling healing energies by [the caster] attuning their aether to the 'benefic' bodies in the heavens".

I don't mean to be that person but people can hardly deal with the "complexities" of current AST. . I find it very doubtful that the majority of the community (well.. atleast the forums) would enjoy something like that. I think AST has a good amount of preemptive skills. Knowing when to place Earthly Star so it pops at the right moment. Knowing the right down time to pop your horoscope and such.

I like the idea of a new healer but with the three we have right now I just seems really hard to introduce a new one that has its own identity. Not to mention balance.

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Originally Posted by Iscah

What lore would that be from? I've never heard it mentioned.

The lorebook (and in-game as far as I can remember) describes Benefic as "channeling healing energies by [the caster] at tuning their aether to the 'benefic' bodies in the heavens".

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I believe hes referencing some quest dialogue where a solidier says something like "It"s like my bodys gone back to before the wound was there" (heavy paraphrasing idk which quest it was. This line is still pretty ambiguous as the dudes just happy to not be injured