Armored Healer

[RinaB]

I've seen people come up with all kinds of ideas for healers and chemist seems to be liked but how about an armored healer? I know the default thought is "paladin is already in the game" but for a game with no specializations like WoW, perhaps they could do something like how sch and smn level and your gladiator could choose between being a tank or healer. There's potential here in terms of gameplay to break up some of the sameness in healer roles and the gear would obviously be different. I loved maining a holy pally in my wow days and was sad to see no similar class was in ff14.

[Iscah]

What are you envisaging this healer would do beyond "wear armour" though? It's not much of a gimmick to base a class around on its own.

SCH/SMN seems to be regarded as a failed experiment that they don't want to repeat - and a healer/tank combo would also be a bad plan in terms of keeping a balanced number of roles participating in roulettes. Make two separate classes and people will need to level both of them; combine them and they only need to spend half as much time playing those in-demand roles.

(Also, due to the way classes and weapons seem to work here, a "healer gladiator" might still need to use a sword, or at least the animations for it. You may or may not regard that as a problem.)

[Pepsi_Plunge]

I thought the next Healer will be some kind of hammer wielding cleric anyway?

[Reinhardt_Azureheim]

I thought the next Healer will be some kind of hammer wielding cleric anyway?

That or Chemist is also a popular choice. Potion / Item Stash healers are quite classy in FF. Since PvP has shown that potions as abilities or actions can exist, chances are good for our itemslinger here.

[Risvertasashi]

I've seen people come up with all kinds of ideas for healers and chemist seems to be liked but how about an armored healer? I know the default thought is "paladin is already in the game" but for a game with no specializations like WoW, perhaps they could do something like how sch and smn level and your gladiator could choose between being a tank or healer. There's potential here in terms of gameplay to break up some of the sameness in healer roles and the gear would obviously be different. I loved maining a holy pally in my wow days and was sad to see no similar class was in ff14.

People love the class branch idea and come up with these suggestions fairly frequently (though less so recently), but they seem to miss a key point - skills from a base class can't be separated out depending on the branch you choose. This is why SMN has physick, even though it's so weak it's useless. If you try to branch a healer from GLD, you have to keep in mind this healer will have things like enmity generating melee combos with no way to separate that out. You really might as well just make a new class/job entirely, it would be easier than trying to cancel all the tanking abilities.

Now with that out of the way, there's a problem with "armored healer" in general. All tanks share gear within their role, and all healers. SE isn't likely to make custom gear for every content for an armored healer. Even if you take the approach that maybe they should share gear with tanks or melee, that introduces its own problems, eg, they'd be more survivable than other healers while potentially having useless stats - or if you make them useful, you have to balance that as a dimension entirely separate from other healers.

Now what you could pragmatically do is have heavy armor be part of the new healer's AF. However, that's not much of an identity in itself. Maybe you could make Chemist armored, or have a necromaner-healer that's armored, but just "armored" doesn't tell us much. But if you're envisioning a holy type healer with the holy pally thing... well, it's doable, but it would be tricky to avoid a lot of overlap with WHM.

As is, you can get fairly close to this by glamoring plate armor onto WHM (just you've got a staff instead of a sword). So to separate your idea from this, I would suggest fleshing it out a bit more. For example, are you envisioning a melee healer? If so, that helps give it a bit more identity. But we still need to know more about what this healer would do.

tl;dr: "armored" healer is a visual style (not class/job design) that you can have right now. To create a class with that theme, a lot more work would need to be done.

[Jonnycbad]

Armor is an aesthetic. Unless you mean it would actually have higher max HP and defenses, but that then begs the question as to why this healer would require heavy armor and HP compared to other healers--like what purpose does it serve? In FFXI, DNC could wear leather armor class and was technically a healer but it was only because they were required to build TP through autoattacks to heal (and there was no dodging aoes in FFXI), so they sustained more damage than normal compared to WHM which was a ranged healer.

[Jaelommiss]

People love the class branch idea and come up with these suggestions fairly frequently (though less so recently), but they seem to miss a key point - skills from a base class can't be separated out depending on the branch you choose. This is why SMN has physick, even though it's so weak it's useless. If you try to branch a healer from GLD, you have to keep in mind this healer will have things like enmity generating melee combos with no way to separate that out. You really might as well just make a new class/job entirely, it would be easier than trying to cancel all the tanking abilities.

This is blatantly false.

SMN maintains all ACN spells. SCH maintains one ACN spell, plus a few that share the same name but have different spell IDs. You can verify this yourself on the official job guides or Garland Tools. It might also be visible in game, but I'm away from my computer right now and can't check it.

While I agree that a single class branching into multiple jobs is probably a poor idea, it's not because the split jobs would necessarily have all of the base class's abilities.

[Reinhardt_Azureheim]

This is blatantly false.

SMN maintains all ACN spells. SCH maintains one ACN spell, plus a few that share the same name but have different spell IDs. You can verify this yourself on the official job guides or Garland Tools. It might also be visible in game, but I'm away from my computer right now and can't check it.

While I agree that a single class branching into multiple jobs is probably a poor idea, it's not because the split jobs would necessarily have all of the base class's abilities.

(damn you beat me to it) Going further from this post, this would technically mean they could easily rework SMN Physick to work with INT instead since SCH's Physick has a different skill ID, or they could use the skill ID to implement a new skill.

To sum up all spells that exist on both jobs visually, but are rarely if ever the same:
1.) Ruin I - SMN: 180pot, SCH: 160pot
2.) Ruin II - SMN: 160pot, SCH: 160-200pot, upgraded with Broil masteries.
3.) Energy Drain - SMN: 100pot + grants 2x AF, SCH: 150pot + steals HP and MP + gives 10 fairy gauge (costs 1x AF)
4.) Physick - ironically same at this point, but the skill ID is seperated from ACN / SMN and SCH

[Pepsi_Plunge]

That or Chemist is also a popular choice. Potion / Item Stash healers are quite classy in FF. Since PvP has shown that potions as abilities or actions can exist, chances are good for our itemslinger here.

Yes, but Yoshi hinted more then once about Gaia and her hammer that her class could be the 4th healer. Itemslinger is probably more of an option for the 4th physical range.

[Iscah]

Yes, but Yoshi hinted more then once about Gaia and her hammer that her class could be the 4th healer. Itemslinger is probably more of an option for the 4th physical range.

I don't think he ever hinted that. All I ever remember being officially said about Gaia's hammer is that the designer drew her like that, then realised there isn't a hammer-wielding class and Yoshida said it was fine.

People were just so desperate for news of a new healer class that they started brewing theories this could be it.