Quote Originally Posted by Ilyrian View Post
Is that they are either OP and/or completely unbalanced - and become mandatory, making all the other healers a statistical worse choice: Hello AST.
I admit that they are harder to balance, but Astrologist is unbalanced not because it's a support healer, but because developers gave him White Mage level of healing while adding support on top of that. And Balance was overpowered before Stormblood because it was basically "free" on top of everything else.

In this case, for example, using the attack-boosting dance you lose out on a different effect and damage.

Dancer as I made it have multiple blocks that can be utilized to balance it. Of course, it would require balancing. Heck, Finishing Step, which could be used in a combo with Prepare, Induce Love and Contagious Inducement for instant party heal of 1000 potency is rather...eh...yeah. Though it would require three abilities AND a spell cast, it would still need some sort of decrease in power or frequency of usability. Then again, it wouldn't need to be that much weaker considering Earthly Star exists...


I'm afraid that the developers really have three choices.
1) Make hybrid healers/DPS that can compete with DPS's on almost equal footing while healing, having a somewhat even distribution between healing and damage skills/spells. Something that they are pretty strongly against.
2) Make a "reskin" of one of the current healers (even more than Astrologist did) adding more or less irrelevant set of skills that are meant to be their flavor, but that would do little to actually make them unique.
3) Tread the risky grounds of making healers unlike the ones that are now. Including an actually support healer. Astrologian is a healer with extra support, but not much of a support healer. It's got cards, and that's all. A completely random mechanic that is basically one skill +RNG with means of skewering that RNG portion slightly. When it is both RNG based and limited to only one aspect, and that is supposed to make the entire theme of the class, it's little wonder it is so easily over or underpowered.

I think that a "fixed" job, that would have no random element to it, would be easier to balance. And if it would be slightly weaker, taking the wary road?! Sorry, but Scholars are considerably weaker now (though better than at beginning of Stormblood...in high level content anyway), and if you had any more basic healer, you would end up with a White Mage...So yes, the whole aspect of being a healer is already prone for unbalanced situations, along with tanks.

Quote Originally Posted by Teranuh
This is just my opinion, but I'd much prefer a healer that deals damage to heal in place of another support healer a la AST. Something similar to Chloromancer from Rift, mechanically speaking.
Astrologian is hardly any more of a support healer than White Mage or Scholar. It have a whooping one skill that generates a random buff and one skill that changes that buffs effect. That's literally all. Everything else is related to healing or damage mitigation that is part of every healer since their respective day 1. So yes, Astrologian is a healer with support abilities, but so are technically White Mage (Fluid Aura and Repose) and Scholar (Chain Stratagem, Fey Covenant of Eos, Silent Dusk and Fey Wind of Selene).

I would also like a DPS that "drains" health from enemies, but that just doesn't seem to fit a dancer in my opinion, and I wanted to specifically make a Dancer. I did give one ability like that to it though.