The reveal that Dancer was a ranged DPS caught a lot of players by surprise as well. Why did the team decide to add another DPS to the game as opposed to a new healer?
A.) Out of curiosity why was the community generally expecting it to be a healer?
Me.) Mostly because we really expected it to be both a tank and a healer for the expansion.
A.) Simply we only had two ranged physical DPS so we wanted to add another. We have 4 tanks and 4 melee dps, 3 casters and 3 healers, and yet there were only 2 ranged dps. We wanted to balance the number of jobs across the board.
We also really wanted to add another tank to balance the tanks more. With 4 tanks, we can better balance the tank role, with two main tanks and two off-tanks.
When players decide which role or job to play. Even a small difference in abilities and attribute make a big difference. People like to take Paladin as an off-tank thanks to abilities like Cover, so the Warrior and Dark Knight are fighting for the main-tank spot most commonly.
So hypothetically speaking, if we rebalance things and put Warrior as MT, then the Paladin and Dark Knight would be fighting for off-tank. No matter what we really needed to balance this with two and two. Its much more fair this way, so its two jobs between main tank and two between off-tank. This is very tentative so please convey this is no indication at all of our final plans.
When looking at this history of healing jobs. Making strong balance between three jobs it has been tough. With three its been tough, so with a 4th the balance might get even worse. Instead of doing this, we want to prioritize balancing them better this expansion so we didn’t want to add a new healer at 4.0 or 5.0. We really think we need to restructure the way healers are handled. We can’t keep this strict division between pure healer and barrier healer. Something needs to change here so we can maintain good balance. Thats the main reason we didn’t have a healer. First priority was to add a 3rd ranged, then a 4th tank while we balance the healers better.
We need to maybe change the way to present new jobs at Fan Festivals. Perhaps reveal the roles first and then reveal the job later to subvert expectations.