A thought on a DPS-Healer Job "Battle Nurse"

[Niltaru]

Being able to effectively heal while simultaneously being able to put out non-trivial amounts of damage is either overpowered or worthless, depending upon implementation. If they're supposed to be able to compete with standard healers, they're overpowered because they're throwing out damage while doing all of the healing that another healer would be able to do which means that the other healers are basically redundant (why bring the other healers when they're not going to be doing damage). If their healing is reduced to make up for their damage capabilities, then they're worthless (in groups that aren't specifically made to accommodate them) because we're dealing with a trinity game: the damage that a tank or a healer deals isn't a major factor in determining their usefulness because that's not what they're brought into groups for.

The closest that you could get to this type of design without being broken would be providing a very limited subset of attacks (i.e. not your entire attack string; likely just a single attack) that converts some proportion of its damage into a single target heal (converting damage into an AoE heal is ridonculously strong unless there is some substantial degree of value dilution based upon number of targets) that provides roughly as much as a SCH in Cleric Stance throwing out DoTs while Eos is healing, which is the closest ARR approximation of what you're suggesting (it's still better since you've got stronger control over it, but that's a comparatively small advantage).

The first implementation of such a set up that I ever saw was Disc Priest from WoW in Cataclysm, where Smite bounced a heal for the damage dealt to the most damaged ally within 10y of the target. It worked because Smitespam healing was only a low grade maintenance heal. Any time that you actually had to behave like a healer, you wouldn't be Smitespamming for the exact reason I outlined above: if you're a healer that can throw out damage in addition to the normal level of healing, you're providing more to the group than any other healer.

The problem with doing something like this in ARR is that there is a comparatively limited number of abilities that you can provide through a job. Unless this capability were built around a job specifically intended to gain this capability later (e.g. built off of something like WHM instead of ACN where all of the healing abilities you need are local to your class instead of having to be gained through your job), you'd be losing out on something that you need in order to get a comparatively low value utility.

Just look at what ACN gets in the conversion into SCH: you don't just get the 5 abilities from the job because your pets are completely converted as well, which frontloads your healing functionality within the job because you're getting Embrace and Whispering Dawn along with Adloq. The relatively severe limitation on job abilities is the main problem with adding a healing job to a current DPS or tank job: there aren't enough slots to provide the full healer toolkit and, even if you do attempt to do so, you end up screwing over the class at the entry levels because they don't have even the most barebones healer toolkit.

The closest implementation for something like this that I could imagine would be something like a base class using a mace that gets a job reminiscent of some kind of warpriest, wherein the *class* is built and balanced with that capability in mind (and, honestly, I could see it being something interesting like the combo bonus of a t2/t3 combo for a DoW healer job such that it's bouncing a straight up heal instead of a heal based upon damage dealt so that you're not screwed over by enemies using damage reduction effects).

I think there was also the shadow priest in WoW that made a heal for the team while he made damage.
I don't remember if it was some good healing or not though.

I know that there are a lot of difficult things to watch out at this kind of job.
He would probably not as good in healing as Sch/Whm but on the other hand dish out a little bit of damage.
Maybe you couldn't go to Bahamut 5 with him, but help people on 1-4 with it.
It would definitly be a murder fun to play this kind of character.

I also thought that the Party heal would only be a little bit of the potency of the Single Heals.
Maybe a quarter or half of it.
I think especially for Content like Amudapor and these kind of Dungeons it would be cool to have a little DD that
doesn't need to heal for most of the content.

[Kitru]

I think there was also the shadow priest in WoW that made a heal for the team while he made damage.
I don't remember if it was some good healing or not though.

It was only up for a limited time and was a small heal. Eventually it got tweaked into just being an mp restoration thing, iirc. Even then, when it *was* a heal, Shadow Priest was never a healing spec; it was always a DPS spec that could provide a small about of extra healing, like Enh/Elem Shamans with Healing Stream totem. The healing was never the primary function, which is what you're suggesting here.

He would probably not as good in healing as Sch/Whm but on the other hand dish out a little bit of damage.

Which is why it's never going to get implemented. Healers need to the have the same fundamental level of healing functionality, just like all DPS need to deal roughly the same damage, and all tanks need to be similarly survivable. What you're suggesting is similar to the idea that WAR was supposed to be squishier than PLD because it dealt more damage (which was prevalent in 2.0) which actually meant that it was a job that no one ever wanted to bring. ARR uses the trinity, which means that classes have to be specialized; if you're not as good at your specialization as the other classes in your role, even if you're designed to make it up in other ways, it's not going to see play outside of farm content wherein class selection means pretty much nothing anyways. All classes should be viable for *all* content, not just stuff that they readily outgear; it's the exact reason why WAR got all of the tweaks it did in 2.1 because it was a tank that was only good in overgeared 4 man farm content.