Quote Originally Posted by kikix12 View Post
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.