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

[kikix12]

1. Mog in 6 had 32 skills (31 if you don't include sunbath) of these skills 6 of them were beneficial....

No. Mog had eight dances. Eight skills from which you could choose.

Those eight skills, when used, would have caused one of four effects. You could not use, say, Tapir from a menu. You had to use Love Serenade which then would use Tapir 1 out of 16 times (statistically).

Saying that it had 31/32 skills is like saying that Rikku had 64 overdrives instead of one or Rinoa had 9 limit breaks when she have only two.

Don't mistake an "effect" for an "ability".

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

A more enjoyable healer than another copy-paste caster healer with a simple quirk to differentiate it. A healer that actually plays different, even if ultimately does the same thing. After all, there are only three major things that are being done in this game. Dealing damage, healing damage and taking damage. Well, you can count interacting with stuff and debuffs too...but meh. So it's how you do then that matters.

Until that point, I disagree. If a job is to be implemented, it should be implemented to its best benefit.

I believe that the game is for players, not the players are for the game.

This game is not one of those whose aim is artistic vision. There is no item mall in artistic vision. You don't expect to buy a statue of a human only to get the bare torso, head and limbs paid separately, do you?! Art is done and gone deal. If it's sold incomplete, it's not art but yer average product.

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.

Except it doesn't. Why do you think that a healer dancer is compromising on the jobs attractiveness? Personally I always thought the opposite. Dancing is done to relax, people watch dancers to relax. Dancing may have been used by assassins as method of getting close to the target I guess, but that's because it causes people to relax and lower their guard. In comparison...one can cause serious damage with proper wavelength or loudness of sounds, so bards always DID seem to me as the sort with more potential for destructive/negative effects (though, of course, good music is as relaxing as good dancing).

And...let's look at it from another point of view. You are claiming that it should be a DPS (because you are claiming it shouldn't be a healer and I don't think anyone here implies that it'd do best as a tank). How it would work as a DPS then?!

Simple. Most likely option is a hybrid between monk and bard. Yeah. A melee class using monks "combo" pattern with party buffs. This is literally what mostly anyone thinks about first when said "fighting dancer". That's because both martial arts and dance focus around the "flow" of the body, while both dances and music are an ongoing effect which, in world of Final Fantasy, are a positive/negative status givers. And dancers always were a counterpart to bards in this series, so they had things in common within the game.


So...what is a "better use of dancer". Making it into an Astrologian of the DPS (combining two difficult classes into one, making it impossible for average player to enjoy it) or making it into a healer that would (hopefully) force a different design philosophy due to it's differences from what a healer is?

Its specifically a problem with design philosophy(...)

And that's why a dancer is good choice for a healer because it cannot really work with the same design philosophy. Lore-wise the three healers we have here now are all very similar no matter how you look at it. They are similar by their very nature. Just like in real life a heavy knight was similar to a cavalry knight (once the cavalry knight dismounted their horse). Making them feel and seem unique takes effort.

On the other hand, making Dancer feel and seem similar to them is the part that takes effort. It is by nature as different as a knight and an archer.

(...)the driving need for them to fill as nearly as homogeneous a set of capacities as possible.

That's false. I know only one person that claims that every tank and every healer should have the same core skill set. A single person. And his main (only) argument as to that is the fact that all the tanks and healers up till now shared that. You mistook the cause for the effect. It is Square Enix that locked themselves to that one design, not players. What players want is for the classes to be viable. Not for them to be similar.

But, as you've already noted, the tank and healer templates are far more restrictive.

The problem is that templates are used at all. And dancers being so different from what other healers stand for have far higher chance of making the developers see that using a template is detriment to design. Templates by very definition can are for removal of differences. You do not make a different class only for it to be the same as all before. That's why a template never should have been made in the first place.

So, until things change, I do think DPS would allow for a slightly better Dancer than would Healer or Tank(...)

Once again...What is better in a hybrid between monk and bard than a different take on a healer?


You're also making a very major mistake. You assume that the philosophy needs to change FIRST before doing something like that. Do you know what is wrong in that? That it is impossible. Using that argument, no matter what they would try to make, they'd need to follow the same template until this games death.

After all, for the philosophy to change there needs to be some influence to change it. And that influence is a class that does not fit the "template" they made. If you want all the classes that do not fit the template to be put into whatever category they "fit in" until the template will be changed, you basically are expecting an impossible thing.