A lot of the main issues with SCH are not being addressed with Endwalker

[ty_taurus]

Same, healing the Bozja duty as a dancer is the most fun I've had in this game outside of Savage prog in years.

You know, it's funny--For the hell of it, I was messing around with re-theorycrafting Dancer as a healer using largely the same kit, and honestly, it works pretty smoothly. We would undoubtedly need casted healing in the form of Curing Waltz, Divine Waltz, Astral Waltz, etc. (Though rename the existing Curing Waltz as your staple OGCD heal and keep it). You could probably get away with just 3 casted spells as your Cure, Medica, and Raise equivalents, but Dancer certainly has the hotbar real estate to afford that. We'd also need to lower potencies and damage because obviously keeping DPS numbers would be a big no-no for a healer, but that doesn't necessarily mean that their rotation would need to go.

Cardia is basically plagiarizing Closed Position already, so it could've easily turned out the same in practice.

We could add healing to Standard Finish and Technical Finish. Yeah it runs into the Assize problem, but since the playstyle would really lay into the offensive healer identity, you'd be sure to benefit from that healing regularly, not to mention you'll know when your next burst heal would be coming when your party has some damage given how frequently standard comes around.

I'd say we could convert feathers into OGCD healing gained through your DPS rotation as usual. As mentioned above, we need to lower the damage anyway to make Dancer a healer, and since you store them as a resource anyway, they'd be perfect for your core healing resource. We could do something similar with Saber Dance and make it damage and healing since Esprit also gives you room to save it.

Honestly the only thing that truly breaks in functionality is MP. I mean, you could simply add MP costs to Dancer's actions and call it a day, but that's a bit odd I feel. A different idea I had was linking Dance Partner to MP similarly to how Foe's Requiem worked--as in it drains your MP (though more slowly than foe's), and we could perhaps include more MP management as secondary effects of things, perhaps make your steps restore your MP instead of act as additional healing and put more emphasis on maintaining feathers for HP. This would guarantee you had MP going into your bursts which would be important, but it would also limit your DPS buffs more which would also lower your overall damage a bit more in that process of balancing Dancer with other healers.

Beyond that one big thing that would need some design work to rectify, everything else I think would flow pretty well into a fun and exciting healer that wouldn't be for everyone certainly, but would be exactly what a lot of people want in healer that we're not getting even with Sage.

[Grimoire-M]

You know, it's funny--For the hell of it, I was messing around with re-theorycrafting Dancer as a healer using largely the same kit, and honestly, it works pretty smoothly.

I have an old Dancer healer kit thread from Stormblood (here) that basically had Cardia as the go-to mechanic well before it became a thing, though it did a lot more than that. It used a basic 1-2-3 combo and augmented it in a few ways and let that be the core of the DPS rotation. It had guard heals (think HW/ARR Inner beast, but the heal was delayed so you were encouraged to time your use of it perfectly) augmented by a DPS version of Cardia to refund the loss (which got used in a few cooldowns) and relied on burst heals and mixture of debuff and buff based support. No regens, no shields.

It was from a time where that seemed realistic, that's for sure.

[Acidblood]

Snip...

A healer version of DNC is exactly the sort of healer that FFXIV needs; i.e. mostly oGCDs heals (with cast-time heals as backup); simple, flexible, instant, and no-cost damage abilities; a few buffs, utilities and cooldowns sprinkled in; and best of all, it's all integrated so the more active you are the more prepared and better you'd be at dealing with whatever happens.

The sad part is, this is also exactly the sort of healer FFXIV will likely never get