Can Healer Balance Survive a 4th Healer?

[Side-Eye]

Nobody is claiming to be able to understand your loss or your grief, little one. But a time mage, you were not.

Being able to extend both buffs and regens, as well as stunning enemies to prevent damage, were significant time-affecting abilities. It was the closest any class/job has ever come to being considered a "time mage" -- but feel free to wrongly disagree.

[ItMe]

It was the closest any class/job has ever come to being considered a "time mage"

Closest =/= being one.
The most like one maybe, but still not one.
It was close, but no cigar.
As she said:

But a time mage, you were not.

[Mortex]

To be fair astro in lore whas some one who reads the fate (aka drawing a card) and the try too change it a bit or use it for his benefit. You even learn what what cards represent in ingame lore and what fates they normally hold. So maybe not a time mage in a traditional sense ,but it whas a fate rewinding Job lore wise and the only thing that comes close too these kind of things is a time mage. Like I don’t remember any other job in final fantasy in general that could rewind time. Like even Ultimecia could only stop time and if I remember correctly not rewind it and i would call her the closest thing we have too a time mage. Like time rewind is a ability so absolutely powerful only some specific things in final fantasy can do that and only then some of the strongest entities. And don’t forget time rewinding in final fantasy 14 uses up a massive amount of aether so I don’t think it would mage sense to implement it as a job mechanic.

[ItMe]

To be fair astro in lore whas some one who reads the fate (aka drawing a card) and the try too change it a bit or use it for his benefit. You even learn what what cards represent in ingame lore and what fates they normally hold. So maybe not a time mage in a traditional sense ,but it whas a fate rewinding Job lore wise and the only thing that comes close too these kind of things is a time mage. Like I don’t remember any other job in final fantasy in general that could rewind time. Like even Ultimecia could only stop time and if I remember correctly not rewind it and i would call her the closest thing we have too a time mage.

You're not rewinding fate.
If anything you're rewriting fate.
Using words like "rewind" makes it sound like you're trying to shoehorn the concept in there.

[ItMe]

To be fair astro in lore whas some one who reads the fate (aka drawing a card) and the try too change it a bit or use it for his benefit. You even learn what what cards represent in ingame lore and what fates they normally hold. So maybe not a time mage in a traditional sense ,but it whas a fate rewinding Job lore wise and the only thing that comes close too these kind of things is a time mage. Like I don’t remember any other job in final fantasy in general that could rewind time. Like even Ultimecia could only stop time and if I remember correctly not rewind it and i would call her the closest thing we have too a time mage.

You're not rewinding fate.
For that to be the case the fate the cards are foreseeing would have already had to have come to pass.
If anything you're rewriting fate.

[MintnHoney]

Oh look, a visual variation of echolalia (j/k).

Manipulating space and time, in order to affect the outcome of an immediate fate/situation, was (is?) the premise for the Job, and so time is (was?) a defining aspect of the job, at least at first, since few other jobs, if any, have any time-related abilities to speak of in FFXIV. I'd say that, in order to see an incoming fate, one must technically see further in time, therefore one could argue that Astrologians are always using a form of Time magic as long as they're divining in some capacity.
So, I dunno. I can personally accept people thinking of Astrologians as partial Time Mages. At least until Squeen realizes this and they remove the abilities and destroy the rest of Astrologian's lore in order to erase any fun older Astrologians used to have to make room for their new healer order.

Incidentally, although not entirely related, in Dragon Quest of the Stars, they offer the Astronomer class; funnily enough, if you were to translate the name from Japanese to English using google translate, it comes out as Space-Time Surgeon.

[Lyth]

And that was an example of vorbeireden.

There isn't a whole lot of point in debating whether or not you were a once-upon-a-time-mage. Nor is there much point in debating whether page 87 of the lore book supports the fact that your sparkles are powered by space-time pokemon instead of elemental ones. In a future where healers are to be designed as either WHM flavoured or SCH flavoured, you should ask yourself how everyone else will differentiate you from your twin. Is it going to be by distributing out card buffs (as has historically been), or is it going to be something else? Without a significant redesign, it's almost certainly going to be the former.

I have no problem with time magic. I would like to see FFXIV to try and create its own spin on Haste (with an associated multistrike effect) and possibly Slow (as a physical damage reduction effect). Warp could be designed as a utility spell for moving your entire team across an arena. Reflect might be implementable so long as it allowed some damage through and only countered at a fixed potency, but that's a tough one to implement fairly without shortchanging the original. Float could be a buff that lets a player cast while moving. I would love to see a Tracer-style time-reversal ability on either a tank or a healer for removing damage and debuffs, although that would also be tough to implement.

I would be surprised to see a Time Mage in its original, iconic form (complete with cone hat), but I could certainly see these sorts of utility effects spread out across different healers. And I think that non-damage driven utility is better way of establishing identity, rather than living out your days as a vending machine for dispensing out damage up buffs to your dps masters.

[MintnHoney]

And that was an example of vorbeireden.

There are certain implications which can be reached about the fantasy of the experience based upon visuals, tone, descriptions, and just a little bit of critical thinking. It might be a barren wasteland when it comes to flavoring a playstyle, but it's not without merit since the alternative is not an option.
Even if you define flavor strictly by actions, prior to this expansion, AST had several actions and effects which would imply mastery over time. Sadly we've lost most of them and only have 1 remaining action, but it's still not incorrect to think that a Mage who primarily focused on Divining and Space-Time manipulation is at least a little bit of a time mage. Furthermore, it can easily be argued that AST is something more than just a time mage; you know, like, an advanced job, which combines classes of magic, perhaps.

Otherwise, from what I can tell, as of this expansion, creativity for healers has been delegated to creating the ability to plan out or frontload healing, both without significantly changing the overall length of an encounter except in extreme cases. While it would definitely be nice to proven otherwise, I'm under the impression that we're never going to be given something that would actively go against what the development team has been trending and advocating towards, so asking and hoping for more direct representations of time magic, in a Final Fantasy that's moving ever-further away from allowing us any ability to seriously affect battle parameters, is a fool's errand.
At most, you'll see Lightspeed moved to a Role Action, but I doubt we'll even see that happen just because it would enhance the role's DPS contributions too much for their taste, and Yoshi-P knows that's what it would primarily be used for.

Consider that everything you've brought to the table already exists in the game in a watered-down form already (except the tracer-style thing, though semantics can be argued, I'm sure); that's as much as the team is willing to give us, and they seem to regret doing so, as they are limiting it more, if not outright removing it, with each expansion.
For the sake of role balance, healers are not going to be seeing regular use of these things outside of special content, with or without a 4th healer.

[Lyth]

More accurately, you're a little bit of a white mage, except with damage buffs.

I like interesting support abilities, which is where the real potential of time magic lies. Actions that indirectly boost your team's performance by giving them positional/movement advantages are always interesting. Maybe that will become a Newtype aka Sage thing, who knows. Being a walking damage-up buff is a bit less interesting, but you do you.

You have limited hotbar design space. Decide on what you want to do with your life and commit to it (i.e. hopefully more than one to two action slots). This degree of dilettantism would even make a Red Mage blush.

[MintnHoney]

More accurately, you're a little bit of a white mage, except with damage buffs.

WHMs likely feel this more acutely than anyone, but otherwise, yes, we know that's how it is now and I can feel us creeping even further into that territory with the info we've been provided thus far, about the next expansion.

but you do you

You seem to be under this impression that, because I don't 100% agree with you about how to define the job fantasy of AST, or because I'm commenting to what Yoshi-P's team has been doing to the healer role, that I'm somehow against having anything other than DPS buffs for AST. This is an incorrect assumption, but, as you say, you do you.