Quote Originally Posted by Risvertasashi View Post
Er... no?

SE said "item user" AKA chemist was one of the candidates they considered back in HW. AST didn't start as chemist any more than Samurai was rooted in Machinist.
Yes.

SE stated that Chemist was the intended healer at the time, utilizing guns as their main weapon. But since they couldn't get the mix command to function how they wanted, it eventually developed into the card system for AST. But prior to the reveal of both jobs, SE only hinted at a gun wielding job. MCH was the byproduct of that, since they "hinted" at a gun wielding job at the time, but had originally planned on it being a healer.

If you go back and scour through all of the live letters and whatnot you'll find the "official" source, but here is something I found on TV Tropes that can at least point you in the right direction, if you wanna search. Because, honestly, at this point in time, that bit of info is just common knowledge for most veteran players.

To a lesser extent, when information for*Heavensward*was buzzing about, Michael "Fernehalwes" Koji-Fox said that the expansion wouldn't have a new DPS class, but a healer one. Later in that same fan fest, he heavily alluded to a gun using class. Come the December fan fest, he showed that there was indeed a new DPS class: Machinists, and the healers he was talking about are Astrologians, an entirely new, completely unforeshadowed class. In a later Live Letter Koji admitted that when he made that statement, there really*were*plans for a gun-toting healer class based on the Chemist from*Final Fantasy Tactics. However, there were enough problems regarding mechanics during the preliminary phase of development that they scrapped the idea and made the Machinist and Astrologian instead.