My vision of a Healer Dancer

[kikix12]

Thing about AST is that their support elements are substantially more consistent when compared to lengthier cooldowns such as those from SCH and more valuable than the crowd controlling abilities from WHM that haven't seen much use in major content. Sure, it's just a couple of buttons, but in the right hands, those buttons can prove to be close to gamebreaking.

I'm not arguing that support is more important in Astrologists than it is in Scholar and White Mage. But they are healers with more support, not support classes, per see. In other games, healers themselves are considered support characters by the lone fact of healing. So it depends on the point of view. In mine, the amount of variety and control of different support abilities matters primarily, the up-time secondarily. Astrologians, wanting specific combinations of cards or setting up Royal Road, do not have as much up-time as I would expect from a true support class, and they certainly have no selection of variety. It's just RNG, where trying to "select" something is just going to make it further and further away in the up-time.
So yes, support is important for the class. It is the little "theme" around them. But it makes them better at support, not support classes. At least in my eyes.

Two things to point out. The first is the ongoing reference to "stamina", and unless that is referring to TP, that might need its own gauge as well and means of restoring it (unless there's something there I missed).

Yes, my bad. I tend to refer to TP as Stamina due to more games I did play in my life having secondary resource use that term. I'm not used to tactical points. I'll edit it properly to avoid confusion.

The second thing is kinda big not just for FFXIV healers, but for healers in any MMORPG that uses a role trinity. Although it might look like a reskin, every healer typically has a rudimentary toolkit to adequately function in all content. The basic heal, the big heal, the instant heal, the AoE heal, the big AoE heal and some sort of panic button when things are really going south....

This is already tweaked a lot, main offender being Scholar. Their "big heal" heals less than the normal heal unless Emergency Tactics is used. The AoE big heal is tied to a resource that you very well may not have available for it. And most of all, neither their AoE big heal nor their instant heal are even available until later parts of the game (now, less "late", but they still are not available for a good chunk of content).

Also, these things are actually present in the dancer I made. Though due to the design, they are actually "kinda different".

Standard Heal: Induce Love + Cheering Dance for 350 potency heal. Slightly less than other healers, but it is far easier to sustain with low MP cost of Induce abilities (for their effect, due to distributing it over ten stacks) and low TP cost of Cheering Dance.
Big Heal: Available since lvl30, just like Cure II. Cheering Dance + Induce Love automatically turns into it on targets with less than 50% health. Its potency is 650, so same as Benefic II. Its unavailability outside of lower HP is made up for with its low cost, "automatic" trigger and mobility of healing dancer (so no interruption to avoid AoE).
Instant Heal: Finishing Step with Induce Love is 500 potency instant heal. Two Induce Love or Prepare/Swiftcast and Induce Love give 1000 potency heal (and prepare guarantees you will have TP for it). The single-target "panic" button. A bit more complicated, but hey. The benefit is bigger too. Available when Lustrate, at lvl50. At higher level, an emergency "panic button" in the form of Panicked Dance...The name couldn't be any more obvious. It's got a drawback, but it's going to be up, no questions asked (it's pointless to use it to get more up-time for DPS after all).
The AoE: Induce Love can be cast on multiple targets and a dance can be used. Any dance other than Cheering (which is single target). Echoes turns Cheering Dance into a Cure III for 15 seconds at lvl30 that heals with either 350 potency, or 650 potency for targets with less than 50% HP. Contagious Inducement (lvl48) spreads Induce Love in a radius of 15 yalms. Then you can use most dances (Meditative Dance for 200 potency heal three times, or for double the amount of MP it will heal to you if you spread Induce Courage instead) for 100 potency AoE heal over time. Or you can blow em up with Finishing Step for 500 or 1000 potency heal (again, 10 or 20 stacks). There's your serious panic button.
Big AoE: See above. At lvl70, another big heal, Angelic Dance, for instant big heal, and high AoE heal that with Induce Love will be 400 potency every 3 seconds.

If anything, there may be too much variety. Seeing as the skills are working in combinations, it's not a matter of "31 skills". There are far more. The result depends on what you use it with. As a cave-eat, most requires some foresight since there's some preparation time for most of it. But that shouldn't be a problem with people saying left and right how scripted the battles are...right?!...

The reason why it looks like reskinning for healers in FFXIV is because it makes them easier to balance....at least in theory anyway. It's not really a "set in stone" thing, but it's still something worth bearing in mind whenever making a healer concept.

I'm sorry, but that's exactly why so few people play healers. If you're going to be using mostly the same skills, with different names, then you have only one healer in game, with slight variations depending on few additional skills. Yes, that's how it looks to people not interested in healers in greater detail. As barely more than one class...

If our goal is to make more players play healers or tanks, it's important to make them look as more than reskins. Completely new playstyle. Achieving the same result in multiple different ways is not easy, but why healers should get the short end of the stick?! DPS have variety galore. And DPS are the role that needs it the LEAST, since people since the beginning of MMO's were swarming to the high-offense classes.

Healers are often bleak and unoriginal. That's why they are not liked nearly as much. And following the "easy" path, is not going to change anything. So yes, I did stray from that on purpose.

[Averax]

The concept of dancer has always been hilarious to me. Like i always imagine 7 people fighting their hearts out while one dude is doing the chimichanga in the background.

[Jhett_Magnum]

I laughed way harder than I should.

[Jhett_Magnum]

I think you went a lil too complex with the stacks. You're on the right track though.
Main problems I have is it overlaps AST utility and missing a lot of potential because of BRDs utility. Moving and dancing would look weird, It should be stationary.

There should be some kinda Rythem type mechanic for dances other than holding the button. (I.e. Blitz, FFX overdrive, etc)

[basketofseals]

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.

I'm not trying to make any commentary on healer balance, but are you really comparing cards to repose and fluid aura?

[Brightshadow]

If our goal is to make more players play healers or tanks, it's important to make them look as more than reskins. Completely new playstyle. Achieving the same result in multiple different ways is not easy, but why healers should get the short end of the stick?! DPS have variety galore. And DPS are the role that needs it the LEAST, since people since the beginning of MMO's were swarming to the high-offense classes.

Healers are often bleak and unoriginal. That's why they are not liked nearly as much. And following the "easy" path, is not going to change anything. So yes, I did stray from that on purpose.

I agree with this statement 100%, while I don't like how similar your job idea is to ast with the support dances, I think they should have a unique/interactive job gauge that will pull players. Something that recently came to mind is an April fools joke blizzard released about a bard class for world of Warcraft a decade ago. I think a job gauge like this picture attached would be a great way to pull players to a healer dancer, perhaps they can use a dance like "cheering dance" thus popping an active time maneuver where when the buttons prompted are pushed correctly the stronger your heals/support are, And it can simply be cancelled by moving.

So for ps4 you would use cheering dance then the job gauge will start popping right side buttons prompts to press (circle/square/etc).

For PC maybe the 1,2,3,4 keys ?

[TankHunter678]

-snip-

I would rather not have to do a rhythm game minigame at the same time as needing to dodge a constant stream of aoes, while needing to heal people through those aoes who get clipped by them.

Its fine to go dream big and make the class complex in concept, but you then need to tone it down so that its not too hard to play in the technical content we are getting and will be expected to play through. A dancer healer should probably be the most mobile of healers, rather then constantly bound more so then the other healers by minigames.

[kikix12]

Main problems I have is it overlaps AST utility and missing a lot of potential because of BRDs utility.

I'm sorry but...what?! Bards main utilities are critical increase, damage dealt to enemies increase and movement speed buff, none of which were suggested on my dancer.
They have MP and TP regeneration, yes, but in their own way, every class does. Melee DPS have Goad to recover TP, magical DPS can share their MP with others.
And besides, MP and TP regeneration are one of those utilities that stack very well, especially since Bards/Machinists have 3min cooldown on theirs.

Moving and dancing would look weird, It should be stationary.

I disagree. By its nature, dancing is a method of movement. Especially some dances involve going all around the place.
Yes, it would require a decent choreographer. Yes, that's entirely managable.

There should be some kinda Rythem type mechanic for dances other than holding the button. (I.e. Blitz, FFX overdrive, etc)

I know that kind of elements from other games...mostly single player. They just don't work in anything that's regular. In Final Fantasy X they were overdrives of SOME characters (others had plain and simple ones). And overdrives were used somewhat rarely. Interrupting the gameplay for a mini-game like that every two or three seconds is just annoying.
The most "rhythm" complicacy you can expect is to have skills that can be used together for different effects and to know how they combine. But that's more for a songstress/bard...which clearly is not the case.

I'm not trying to make any commentary on healer balance, but are you really comparing cards to repose and fluid aura?

Yes and no. Crowd control is part of support classes. It was meant to show that White Mages do have support elements besides healing as well, and ones that they can use frequently (and besides, Repose would be actually a lot better than it really is if you could expect the tank and DPS to not wake up the sleeping monster a second later). It was in no way a comparison of power. There is no doubt that over time, Astrologians support brings by far the biggest effect on party performance out of the three healers.

(...)while I don't like how similar your job idea is to ast with the support dances, I think they should have a unique/interactive job gauge that will pull players.

I'm sorry, but I cannot see the similarity. If we went with a "similarity" by having thematical focus on buffs, we have only three classes. A tank, a healer and a DPS. Cause all tanks are thematically most focused on taking and mitigating damage to themselves, all healers are first and foremost healing and all DPS are just doing variety of variously named stuff to damage the enemies. But if you look at HOW they do it, that's when the differences start popping out.
The Dancer as described here is completely different from Astrologian. There is zero randomness. It is all entirely under control. Heck, it have more planning ahead than most other classes.
Also, most of the support comes from healing HP, MP, TP or debuffing enemies (slow, vulnerability, silence, bind, blind. In comparison, there is a total of two buff effects on party, haste and attack up. Others are just triggered heal or damage over time.

It really could not be any further from Astrologist, except by not being a healer.

Furthermore, due to the ranges and radius aspects of the abilities, dancers are most likely going to be within 5 to 15 yalms away from the bosses and mobs at all times (outside of running for their life from AoE's). The results of that alone makes them play differently. At 10 yalms, some enemies may be very, very painful, not giving you the opportunity to move out of their cone attacks in either direction, so you have to plan it out properly. If you move closer in to be able to run past them, you'll have to dodge like a melee class, without as much survivability. You move further away?! You lock yourself out of a fair chunk of your arsenal, including nearly all means of attacking.

[Kazrah]

This is already tweaked a lot, main offender being Scholar. Their "big heal" heals less than the normal heal unless Emergency Tactics is used. The AoE big heal is tied to a resource that you very well may not have available for it. And most of all, neither their AoE big heal nor their instant heal are even available until later parts of the game (now, less "late", but they still are not available for a good chunk of content).

So major misconception as damage absorption effects are in fact heals. Just because they're preventative heals doesn't mean they're not treated as effective healing, which is what devs actually look at when making healing skills. This would also explain the other misconception that their basic AoE heal isn't Indomitability, but rather Succor, which has the effective potency equivalent to Medica or Helios. Also, the only reason why Scholar gets those bigger heals so late is because the class system starts it off almost 30 levels behind the other healers in terms of toolkit (hence the fairy, which is another element added to effective healing).

If our goal is to make more players play healers or tanks, it's important to make them look as more than reskins. Completely new playstyle. Achieving the same result in multiple different ways is not easy, but why healers should get the short end of the stick?! DPS have variety galore. And DPS are the role that needs it the LEAST, since people since the beginning of MMO's were swarming to the high-offense classes.

You'd be surprised at how different you can make a healer look while still keeping to the basic toolkit. Even tweaking the parts of that toolkit while retaining its effective healing can make a generic healer seem far from it.

[kikix12]

So major misconception as damage absorption effects are in fact heals. Just because they're preventative heals doesn't mean they're not treated as effective healing, which is what devs actually look at when making healing skills.

I assure you, I know that. But there are certain reasons why in practice, it just doesn't work the same, hence why in this discussion in particular, their "big heal" heals less is valid.
Adloquium heals less and puts on a shield. It also costs you an arm and a leg in MP. If the one you heal is not the tank, chances are that the shield will never be used up and it will just fall off. Hence to heal non-tanks, you have to use Emergency Tactics or hope the DPS will get hit...something that you never should want. This is the "quirk" of a Scholar, a change of the basic toolkit. That's what we are talking about here, right?!

As I said above, Dancer have "big heal" as well, just with a quirk. No different than Scholar.

This would also explain the other misconception that their basic AoE heal isn't Indomitability, but rather Succor, which has the effective potency equivalent to Medica or Helios.

I know that Succor is the basic AoE heal...Indomitability is the "big AoE heal"...I did main Scholar to lvl70, you know. However in practice, Succor suffers far more from the shields falling off than Adloquium. In practice, at least half of the shield is wasted in majority of the encounters. It is NOT as good a heal as Medica, unless you use Emergency Tactics. It IS however useful in that you can prepare the party for AoE you know is coming in advance to lessen the HP drop in the first place though.

This "shields dropping off" and the fact that as heals neither of these two can compete with Cure II or Medica respectively, is exactly why Emergency Tactics had the cooldown reduced from 30 to 20 in the last patch. Developers realized that the true healing output of Scholars is just barely doing it for the content. I cannot say now, since I stopped playing Scholar after reaching lvl70 to wait for it being fixed (and I don't think this patch did it fully, though it certainly helped and solved the issue of no AoE).

Also, the only reason why Scholar gets those bigger heals so late is because the class system starts it off almost 30 levels behind the other healers in terms of toolkit (hence the fairy, which is another element added to effective healing).

Irrelevant. We're not talking about why its like that or is it good or bad. We're talking about whether the game is true to the scheme you spoke of...and it's not true at all. It never was, seeing as Scholar is the second healing class that came out, not the third. The reason why Astrologian is almost identical to White Mage in that respect stems from the fact that its a hybrid between Scholar and White Mage. Otherwise, it would have its own tweaks as well.

You'd be surprised at how different you can make a healer look while still keeping to the basic toolkit. Even tweaking the parts of that toolkit while retaining its effective healing can make a generic healer seem far from it.

That's what I did. Make it look different while still leaving it with the basic toolkit. It's all there. A basic heal, a big heal, an instant heal, an AoE heal, a big AoE heal, a panic button. It's just not dumbed down to a copy-paste heal.

And I wouldn't be surprised. But many would. The very same people that everyone wants to try healers, but that won't. They would be surprised, but they won't even try. And that's the problem. Unless there will be a healer that is already different at first glance, they will never start playing a healer, even if they would enjoy it.

Being conservative keeps the status quo. You claim that you want unique classes to bring more players to tanking and healing, but at the same time, you seem to be in favor of keeping the status quo. I prefer to be realistic rather than optimistic. If I want something to change, I don't do the same things the same way, hoping that the randomness of life will this time be in favor.