What jobs are we hoping to see in the next expansion?

[kikix12]

This tone. Calling people out on prejudices. Because they note traditional identities.

This tone was used for an obvious reason. Because she is selective in her noting of traditional identities.

There is nothing wrong with her wanting the dancer to be a DPS. It IS common for people to prefer DPS, which is an absolute fact (hence why all the games I have ever known had more "DPS" classes than "tank" and "healer" classes, and in MMO's those numerous classes had significantly more people playing them than any of the healers/tanks). However the problem begins when someone tries to pass that under a veil of "keeping the traditional identities" as an argument.

Do you have any argument as to why, in a single post (heck, a single PHRASE), she both noted that bards are the "defensive" counterparts of the dancer AND used that as argument why they should stay "offensive" support despite the bards being that in this game?

(...)just because s/he happens to believe that the DPS role could make a more compelling use of Dancer's toolkit.

That's wrong. I say that she is strongly biased because she uses arguments that are, by their nature, very selective. She "conveniently" omits that were these arguments taken at a wider scope, they would have applied to more than a dancer effectively changing this game. Bard, Dark Knight, Warrior, Red Mage and Summoner, all should have been changed in part or in whole (Warrior and Dark Knight should be DPS, Summoner and Red Mage should have significantly more healing power...Phoenix is still the single most powerful heal in this gaming franchise). Going and selectively putting focus on how DPS was always an offensive support (in and off itself false...which the person in question knew very well "maining" the class in FFXI, with Mog in FFVI also using dancing with a fair deal of healing to it...and by fair deal I mean that 6 out of 8 skills could heal, 3 out of 8 could heal status ailments and only 1 of them could only damage) can only be seen as misuse of the argument. And the "kindest" reason for that is bias.

DPS How is your preference towards Dancer being a healer any less biased? I don't mean this rhetorically; tell me how.

You're putting the cart before the horse.

I have given arguments to support my claim that the poster is biased. Ones based not on an empty claim, but on logical flaws. If you can find arguments to support me being biased by using similar logic flaws...go ahead.

I need not do anything more in that respect until the time you do since you're the one accusing me of bias. Try and prove that before asking me to defend by stance.

And why, exactly, would the healer role create a more enjoyable Dancer than one situated in the damage role?

This is similarly approaching the matter from the wrong angle.

It is not why the healer role would create a more enjoyable Dancer, but why a Dancer would create a more enjoyable healer.
The problem: Healers and tanks being treated as "necessary evil" and not being given many "goodies". They are generic, similar to each other, lack variety in their lore. All tanks have one feeling as their energy source. Honor for paladins, anger for warriors and hate for dark knights. All healers utilize casting through abstract means. Elemental forces for white mages, mathematical calculations for scholars and celestial paths of some sort for astrologians. Only scholars out of the three don't even have pseudo-deities, instead replacing them with fairies as the catalysts.

Any class can be made to fit any of the three roles, once you consider the artistic freedom of the designer. Since the lore of the world is changed for every Final Fantasy piece, no lore of the previous titles have a tight bond beyond the very, very fundamental parts of it. Dragoons are related to dragons, white mages use holy and heal while black mages use elemental magic to destroy etc. If you'll pay attention, the "realistic" classes, like paladins, warriors, bards etc. utilize real-life aspects of these professions instead. These jobs really existed and always had some things in common to be called that.

That means that dancer have only one thing that is absolute. The fact that they dance. Then there is something that was upheld for all of their appearances. They supported the party in some manner alongside their individual offense. Those are the only two things that need to be upheld for the Dancer to be...well...a Dancer.

So if the problem is lack of highly-attractive, unique jobs for the healers and tanks, Dancer being the solution is simply reasonable. Personally I would be as satisfied with it being a tank, really, but that is highly doubtful. This game does not permit evasion tanks by design, so quite a lot of hoops would need to be jumped through to make a tank with a Dancers esthetics that could work in this game. Not impossible, but unlikely. So the option left is a healer.

I really loved the debilitating side of dnc and it just makes me sad to think it won't have that full arsenal of status ailments it's known to have.....

That's impossible. The developers in this game make their best effort to remove ANY status ailments they can, without moving away from the fact that Final Fantasy series is riddled with them. That's why most effects that work on bosses are ONLY DoT or some vulnerability+ (which they culled as well). There is no crowd control, no fixed damage (gravity effect), no nothing. The negative status effects are used purely against players, and most of them are uncurable because it would be too easy to just Esuna them.

[Shurrikhan]

This is similarly approaching the matter from the wrong angle.

It is not why the healer role would create a more enjoyable Dancer, but why a Dancer would create a more enjoyable healer.

A more enjoyable healer than... what? Have we even tested the waters on other potential support jobs?

Until that point, I disagree. If a job is to be implemented, it should be implemented to its best benefit. Only once design is caught between an exhausted pool of candidates for a role should design consider compromising the job's own attractiveness in favor of filling out a given role.

The problem: Healers and tanks being treated as "necessary evil" and not being given many "goodies". They are generic, similar to each other, lack variety in their lore. All tanks have one feeling as their energy source. Honor for paladins, anger for warriors and hate for dark knights. All healers utilize casting through abstract means. Elemental forces for white mages, mathematical calculations for scholars and celestial paths of some sort for astrologians. Only scholars out of the three don't even have pseudo-deities, instead replacing them with fairies as the catalysts.

This isn't a problem with their roster, though; White Mage, Scholar, and Astrologian are entirely capable of differentiating themselves, as are Dark Knight, Paladin, and Warrior. Its specifically a problem with design philosophy, and compounded almost every step of the way by vast sections of the player community: the driving need for them to fill as nearly as homogeneous a set of capacities as possible. In XIV tanking is not an action or activity so much as it simply existing while having access to an enmity combo, an enmity AoE, an enmity ranged attack, 6 to 7 cooldowns, Provoke, and an immunity skill. Job identity has been sacrificed at nearly every step to ensure that every job which can tank (verb), is a (near-identical) tank (noun). It's precisely because job identity has been sacrificed in favor of homogeneity that healers and tanks have become "necessary evils". They do not meet a given role: they simply are that role -- the same protojob -- with a small allowance of randomization. Conceptually, certain DPS are no less hindered, but at least their toolkits, being centered around their own rotations, offer more variance where it most counts, i.e. in their gameplay.

Any class can be made to fit any of the three roles, once you consider the artistic freedom of the designer. Since the lore of the world is changed for every Final Fantasy piece, no lore of the previous titles have a tight bond beyond the very, very fundamental parts of it. Dragoons are related to dragons, white mages use holy and heal while black mages use elemental magic to destroy etc. If you'll pay attention, the "realistic" classes, like paladins, warriors, bards etc. utilize real-life aspects of these professions instead. These jobs really existed and always had some things in common to be called that.

That means that dancer have only one thing that is absolute. The fact that they dance. Then there is something that was upheld for all of their appearances. They supported the party in some manner alongside their individual offense. Those are the only two things that need to be upheld for the Dancer to be...well...a Dancer.

Agreed. Completely.

So if the problem is lack of highly-attractive, unique jobs for the healers and tanks, Dancer being the solution is simply reasonable. Personally I would be as satisfied with it being a tank, really, but that is highly doubtful. This game does not permit evasion tanks by design, so quite a lot of hoops would need to be jumped through to make a tank with a Dancers esthetics that could work in this game. Not impossible, but unlikely. So the option left is a healer.

I'd be fine with Dancer as a healer, tank, or DPS; it really does not matter to me what role it's colored as. I care only that it has a cohesive toolkit that actually makes the most out of the fact it dances, rather than it being little more than flavor text when having access to <Enmity Combo/Ranged/AoE/Topper; Cooldowns; Immunity>, <Combo 1, Combo 2, Self-Buff>, or <Useless heal, More expensive heal, AoE heal, Augmented/alternate heal, cooldowns, special>.

But... you're treating the symptoms here. For Dancer to have a positive effect on the healer roster, allowance and philosophy are going to have to change first. Offer the current design philosophy a Dancer healer and you will simply have a bit more thoroughly butchered Dancer than you'd likely see from what the DPS role allows from its jobs. No role template alone is a good fit for Dancer. But, as you've already noted, the tank and healer templates are far more restrictive. So, until things change, I do think DPS would allow for a slightly better Dancer than would Healer or Tank, and I do think that's more important, given how closely another healer or tank generate "more of the same" in the current design philosophy, than Dancer making a good Healer, or Tank, or DPS. I sorely hope that philosophy changes such that Dancer is a Dancer, and not a template with flavor elements, and could thereby be colored however without losing its unique additions to the game, but so long as a lack of allowance for job identity is what's causing the problem, I have to favor job identity over role-bolstering.

[Deathrose88]

A more enjoyable healer than... what? Have we even tested the waters on other potential support jobs?



I'd be fine with Dancer as a healer, tank, or DPS; it really does not matter to me what role it's colored as. I care only that it has a cohesive toolkit that actually makes the most out of the fact it dances, rather than it being little more than flavor text when having access to <Enmity Combo/Ranged/AoE/Topper; Cooldowns; Immunity>, <Combo 1, Combo 2, Self-Buff>, or <Useless heal, More expensive heal, AoE heal, Augmented/alternate heal, cooldowns, special>.

But... you're treating the symptoms here. For Dancer to have a positive effect on the healer roster, allowance and philosophy are going to have to change first. Offer the current design philosophy a Dancer healer and you will simply have a bit more thoroughly butchered Dancer than you'd likely see from what the DPS role allows from its jobs. No role template alone is a good fit for Dancer. But, as you've already noted, the tank and healer templates are far more restrictive. So, until things change, I do think DPS would allow for a slightly better Dancer than would Healer or Tank, and I do think that's more important, given how closely another healer or tank generate "more of the same" in the current design philosophy, than Dancer making a good Healer, or Tank, or DPS. I sorely hope that philosophy changes such that Dancer is a Dancer, and not a template with flavor elements, and could thereby be colored however without losing its unique additions to the game, but so long as a lack of allowance for job identity is what's causing the problem, I have to favor job identity over role-bolstering.

Absolutely agree with all of this and is basically what I wanted to convey before things got out of hand lol my apologies. I hope the designers of this job take these points in consideration when deciding on heal vs tank vs dps for the dancer job, because as shurri said ,if I may paraphrase, it would be a shame to water a job down to just fill a place in a roster than to create it for it is best suited.

[Lauront]

But... you're treating the symptoms here. For Dancer to have a positive effect on the healer roster, allowance and philosophy are going to have to change first. Offer the current design philosophy a Dancer healer and you will simply have a bit more thoroughly butchered Dancer than you'd likely see from what the DPS role allows from its jobs. No role template alone is a good fit for Dancer. But, as you've already noted, the tank and healer templates are far more restrictive. So, until things change, I do think DPS would allow for a slightly better Dancer than would Healer or Tank, and I do think that's more important, given how closely another healer or tank generate "more of the same" in the current design philosophy, than Dancer making a good Healer, or Tank, or DPS. I sorely hope that philosophy changes such that Dancer is a Dancer, and not a template with flavor elements, and could thereby be colored however without losing its unique additions to the game, but so long as a lack of allowance for job identity is what's causing the problem, I have to favor job identity over role-bolstering.

Agree with that point. I'm very much against homogeneisation and I think focusing on job identity over role is one of the few ways to achieve that.