Geomancer

[GucciSan]

2. Even if one wants to argue that White Mage still has it, one can very easily handle it by saying Geomancers are "Eastern" Nature Healers.

This is it. This is exactly our point. With how SE wrote CNJ lore, and with how they’ve presented GEO up to this point, you can effectively sum up GEO as “Conjurer, but Japanese”. WHM may lose their elemental attacks but based on the animations of their Cure spells, I’d say they’re water-aspected, like I imagine GEO would probably do. Even Divine Benison is water-aspected. There’s too much overlap to justify them as a healer.

So, a thought to express exactly where I am on the whole “job fantasy” stance. Summoned and Scholar. Both use the same weapon. Both share the same base class. Both summon and use... I’m not sure what to call their offensive magic, I guess just non elemental.

Even if both of them were DPS or Healers I would not consider them the same “job fantasy”. Whereas to hear you all talk about them they would be the same job just about. Does that give an idea of how very different your opinion is from mine?

I focus on the Class Fantasy because if you have SMN and SCH both in the same role you have two classes doing the same job in the exact same manner: Summoning to Heal/DPS. These two get away with it because even if the core idea is the same (Summoning) they utilize their core idea in opposite manners (Healing and DPS). Another hypothetical example is having a sniper/musket Ranged Physical. The lore will be different from MCH and they'll have different attacks but at the end of the day they both have similar themes (gun wielding Ranged DPS) and would feel redundant.

WHM and GEO would both heal with the power of nature. If a new player wants the fantasy of a healer using the elements to heal, they could pick CNJ. Adding GEO would give them 2 options, which mind you none of the other roles have, but it wouldn’t really amount much more than “CNJ, but Japanese”.

4. Trying to speculate on how many people would be excited or disappointed about an unknown job based off of subjective similarity to another job is pointless. You could just as easily say Casters would be disappointed to get Geomancer and thus they won't even do the job at all because it was similar to White Mage. At the end of the day you're dealing with such a small, small, small part of what a job looks like (what elements it uses) and then attempting to write whole cloth what that must mean.

Disappointment about not getting the Job you want is one thing. Disappointment about getting a Job that’s similar to one we have in the same role would be a whole other level. It's a very realistic thing to keep in mind especially for a company with paying customers so you can't exactly rule it out.