Must All Healers be Casters?

[AnotherPerson]

Chemist as a healer could work if it was like Ninja.

Either hitting different mixes before throwing/casts or having it interact with the buffs it gives. Like it gives out “Regen Salve” and hitting the target with another skill could expend it for burst heal, shield, AoE heal.

The problem comes from people having to remember the right order and mixes. And NIN mudras get enough complaints so having to cheat sheet a healer? That wouldn’t get cleared.

Best solution would be to have each chemist mudra just flat out do something in lore.
Simply tying one button to healing, one button to mitigation, one to utility, and one to damage/explosions. Then the combination & number of times you press determines the strength and effect of the salve. There's no RNG, just science and math. To reduce DPS vs utility argument, you can even go one step further and give all of the buttons a unique charge resource rather than a shared resource.

[Liam_Harper]

Chemist was their big chance really. It would probably still have to be tagged as a Disciple of Magic, but they could have really made it unique. Perhaps a physical weapon with instant attack, lots of weaving and a Mix system similar to Mudra for various heals. All sorts of ways they could go nuts.

However Chemist was basically scrapped because Yoshida said it was just too difficult to design. So the best they could do was make a SCH clone without a fairy, tweak it a bit and make it flashy.

If anything says "we really need a heal designer, badly", it's the fact they scrapped Chemist.

[Azurarok]

Chemist's main weapon should be bombs (both the living and hand tossed) and the job mentor should be a goblin and/or kobold.

Also them landing on AST means they tried it in the ARR~Heavensward days when MP worked significantly differently, right? I wonder if they'd think any differently with the current system?

[Recon1o6]

Chemist's main weapon should be bombs (both the living and hand tossed) and the job mentor should be a goblin and/or kobold.

Also them landing on AST means they tried it in the ARR~Heavensward days when MP worked significantly differently, right? I wonder if they'd think any differently with the current system?

Mp hasn't changed at all. They only standardised the max mp and rounded the casts to end in 0
Additionally they removed a lot of mp management as part of their dumbing down program in shb

[Anhra]

WAR (and somewhat PLD) is quite a valid non-caster Healer choice.

[Azurarok]

Mp hasn't changed at all. They only standardised the max mp and rounded the casts to end in 0
Additionally they removed a lot of mp management as part of their dumbing down program in shb

From what I've heard/read (I started late shb, if it wasn't obvious at this point) I had the impression MP regen was much sparser in battles, physical DPS used TP for most skills, and part of AST's card mechanics included recovering those resources. It made sense that the variety of support pre-shb AST had was their original take on CHM.

[Semirhage]

From what I've heard/read (I started late shb, if it wasn't obvious at this point) I had the impression MP regen was much sparser in battles, physical DPS used TP for most skills, and part of AST's card mechanics included recovering those resources. It made sense that the variety of support pre-shb AST had was their original take on CHM.

Yes and no. BRD had an MP restore song that was mostly for recovering the healers from disaster, because it competed as an MP spender for them with Foe's Requiem, which debuffed enemies and made them take more magic damage. The Ewer recovered MP which was nice if you needed it, but you couldn't plan around its use. Otherwise, the MP situation was oddly similar to how it is now, for different reasons. Aetherflow restored 20% of maximum MP, plus the recovery from Energy drains meant Scholar had functionally infinite MP. AST had Luminiferous Aether which functioned like Lucid Dreaming (plus some terrible threat management attached) that they could extend with Celestial Opposition. Combined with their lower MP costs across the board, AST also functionally infinite MP unless things started going really far south. White Mage had Shroud of Saints (Lucid but with fewer ticks and a good threat dump attached) and Assize was still a fantastic ability, but MUCH weaker than it is today. It was 300/300 heal and damage potency, you had to effectively choose between the damage and heal with Cleric Stance (so it was basically only a damage tool without the bonus heal effect), it restored 10% MP but was on a ridiculous 90 second cooldown. White Mage, you're gonna love this, was the only healer that bled MP just from maintaining their basic rotation with nothing they could do about it other than hope for Ewers from an AST cohealer or a pity Mage's Ballad from the BRD.

Huh, weird, WHM was the only healer that was MP negative from its basic rotation? We really do come full circle with this job design I swear. WHM's MP economy was overcorrected in Stormblood with Thin Air, several cooldown reductions to Assize (but nerfed MP recovery in exchange. The recovery is effectively the same, but more frequent so it's less punishing if you die). Shroud of Saints benefited WHM from becoming the role action Lucid Dreaming because it had an additional tick. And now here we are in Endwalker, they smacked down one of the major changes they made to rescue WHM's garbage Heavensward MP economy and...we're basically back to garbage Heavensward MP economy, because they fixed nothing else about it since then.

[Jonnycbad]

lol ffxi had a TP based melee healer as Dancer

[ty_taurus]

We absolutely could have had melee or physical healers, magical tanks, and other atypical roles. Is it harder to balance? Sure, but it's entirely doable.

That said, our community is hyper critical of even minor balance concerns. Endwalker launched having implemented a number crunching and a damage formula rework, and people were raising pitchforks despite the fact that there was still no "unplayable" job. Yes, there were changes that needed to be made, and still do need to be made, but we're not even at our X.1 patch yet where we typically start seeing more mechanical changes rather than potency adjustments. I mean, healers tend to be forgotten usually, but as far as the other roles, we're likely going to see a handful of mechanical adjustments to meet a stronger equilibrium.

In other words, there would be a lot of pressure on the devs to get new subrole styles down right, and I can understand why they would choose not to go down that route. Why take the risk of your community burning you at the stake when you could just go with what's safer?

[Azurarok]

White Mage, you're gonna love this

oh no (appreciate the history lesson, thank you)


So WHM was always built around having tight MP management, which is weird coming from ShB because it didn't really quite feel like that, unlike BLM, PLD (at the time), and DRK spending mp fast but also having utilities/phases built-into their rotation for recovering it fast. Healing's more dependent on your party's performance + the boss' rotation so I get they can't make it quite as extreme as them, but the result seems to be a diet version stuck in a rift between power/mp recovery that's ended up not having either of those.

MP in general just seems to be a really odd resource at this point since it's a minor nuisance at best outside those four jobs and an RDM having to mass-raise a raid.