About Chemists and their potential use for FFXIV

[Mhaeric]

I don't think they'd go with a Chemist job when there's already an Alchemist class in the game without some sort of really good explanation as to why an Alchemist can't just be a Chemist and vice versa. That said, they could put a magical spin on it similar to Gunblade where a Chemist's abilities stem from imbuing their concoctions with their aether in order to make them functional and this aetheric imbuing only functions on their specially formulated concoctions. Without the aetheric component, the Chemist's concoctions are worthless and they don't have the knowledge to make any other type of concoction. This would explain why an Alchemist can't just achieve the same effects by mixing something up, and why a Chemist isn't able to just mix up a bunch of glue or ink like an Alchemist. I.e. a Chemist relies on their aether to power their concoctions whereas an Alchemist relies on the concoction itself.

I know most people aren't familiar with the Alchemist from EQOA, but I envision a Chemist job behaving (at least superficially) like them: a ranged job actually flinging alchemical bottles around the battlefield that explode on contact either healing or doing damage depending on the concoction used and having a handful of resource heavy direct damage spells to weave in between potion throws for burst and stat increasing potions. In that game, Alchemists were predominantly a dps class tending toward being a hybrid solo healer depending on build and had to actually manually create their potions ahead of time. Due to the way ranged attacks worked in that game (they used a fixed percentage of your max power resource per shot instead of a scaled fixed amount like most abilities) they also had a similar mechanic to Black Mages where they would burn all their mana super quickly on incredibly high sustain single target or AoE dps potion bombs and then drinking a toxic draught that would incredibly quickly restore their mana at the cost of some HP to full effectively giving them unlimited resources as long as they came prepared with potions in their inventory. An EQOA Alchemist could create potions on the fly during combat if they ran low on potions, but it was a lot more button pressing and reduced the effectiveness of their potential burst since they had a handful of standard abilities they could use in between potion throws at the cost of power efficiency. It was not uncommon at all to see Alchemists just standing around Freeport spamming their potion creation spells.

Potion creation ahead of time wouldn't fly in FFXIV and the BLM mp resource thing wouldn't work well on a non-rotation based role like healer, but the thematic elements would work well in my opinion. I.e. a class that actually tosses aetherically infused cure-bombs with the occassional actual dps/dot/buff bomb and actual spell tossed into the mix. Traditional FF Chemist abilities like Mix or Stash would make obvious 30-120s cooldowns used to modify their concoction use.

[MomomiMomi]

I don't think they'd go with a Chemist job when there's already an Alchemist class in the game without some sort of really good explanation as to why an Alchemist can't just be a Chemist and vice versa.

No need, you just need the most basic of explanations: a chemist and an alchemist are not the same thing. At all.

A chemist is a physician, a medicus, a doctor. Their purpose is to treat the ill and wounded. An alchemist is someone who studies a sort of mix of science and philosophy, with a purpose of trying to find the secrets of the universe, including but not limited to finding the cure to everything, even death.

This is only confusing to some people because "alchemist" contains the word "chemist" in it. In japanese the names of the jobs aren't even remotely close. Alchemist is Renkinjutsushi, while Chemist is Kusurishi, which is just a way of saying "Doctor" or "Pharmacist." I'm pretty sure there would be no confusion at all to the Japanese players.

EDIT: Actually I guess it's also confusing because job names are all over the place. FFX-2 has the "Alchemist" job that functions like Chemist; in Japanese that job is literally just called "Item shooter." And we have FFT with a job called Chemist, which in Japanese was called "Item User."