If it’s between Dancer and Chemist for 5.0 which should be our next healer?

[Brightshadow]

Topic, which healer should be included next from these two?

1.) Chemist: A traditional healer that has roots as old as FF tactics as medics.
2.) Dancer: Tends to act as a support job and has over the years gotten some cures that make it a great contender as a healer.

http://www.strawpoll.me/15592227

[Enla]

Chemist. While both would be interesting from a mechanics perspective, I have to say that I'm heartily sick of the soft and robe/dress laden aesthetic that all our healers currently have in game. I truly want to see a healer that also doesn't rely on aetheric healing as well, but that's mostly from a roleplaying perspective. If we had the chance to get both however, I'd more than happily take it.

[Brightshadow]

Chemist. While both would be interesting from a mechanics perspective, I have to say that I'm heartily sick of the soft and robe/dress laden aesthetic that all our healers currently have in game. I truly want to see a healer that also doesn't rely on aetheric healing as well, but that's mostly from a roleplaying perspective. If we had the chance to get both however, I'd more than happily take it.

If CHM is added I’m sure they’ll be added to the dresses as well. The only unique look would probably be the AF armor, and they might make some medic/doctor looking healing gear for that expansion set.

I'd prefer neither of those to be true healers. I want to see things that cut between the roles, the sooner the better. I know full well what changes would be necessary, systemically and on the communities part, for matchmaking, but I think it's honestly worth it.

Barring that, whichever is the more original and can remain viable while being less of a "standard healer", discounting also singular gimmick sets such as Cards or WHM/SCH style-swap abilities.

Both would most likely be unique AST is our copycat healer.

[Shurrikhan]

I'd prefer neither of those to be true healers. I want to see things that cut between the roles, the sooner the better. I know full well what changes would be necessary, systemically and on the communities part, for matchmaking, but I think it's honestly worth it.

Barring that, whichever is the more original and can remain viable while being less of a "standard healer", discounting also singular gimmick sets such as Cards or WHM/SCH style-swap abilities.

[Risvertasashi]

I'd prefer neither of those to be true healers. I want to see things that cut between the roles, the sooner the better. I know full well what changes would be necessary, systemically and on the communities part, for matchmaking, but I think it's honestly worth it.

This comes up fairly often, but it has some major problems. Not just the matchmaking. You see, we saw this in heavensward 3.0 with Astrologian. It crashed and burned hard.

Anything that can fill a green role needs to be able to make all the healing checks in the game, and somewhat comfortably at that. If it doesn't, it will be shunned. If it does, but has amazing hybrid DPS (All existing healers are DPS/healing hybrids by more traditional games' design) or utilities on top of that, it will obsolete another healer (Another thing we saw, this time with late heavensward AST).

And we already have tanks that can entirely heal themselves through a lot of regular content, so that angle is pretty much already covered.

Chemist. While both would be interesting from a mechanics perspective, I have to say that I'm heartily sick of the soft and robe/dress laden aesthetic that all our healers currently have in game. I truly want to see a healer that also doesn't rely on aetheric healing as well, but that's mostly from a roleplaying perspective. If we had the chance to get both however, I'd more than happily take it.

For the rest of the thread... couldn't have said it better myself.

[Shurrikhan]

This comes up fairly often, but it has some major problems. Not just the matchmaking. You see, we saw this in heavensward 3.0 with Astrologian. It crashed and burned hard.

Astrologian has never moved towards or away from a standard healer template since its release. It merely gained power, both to raw healing and to (though reverted in SB) card potency. Its problem was that it was undertuned--nothing more. It likely could have been far less "minor variant to template slot A, minor variant to template slot B" and still reached a competitive state in 8-mans so long as it was properly tuned.

Why was Astrologian so desirable around the end of Heavensward? Because it was the go-to example of overtuning, the devs having classically overbuffed the toolkit in place of fixing its mechanical issues (e.g. Extend generally being useless with any Spread ready due to the added duration being wasted, weaker card effects overriding stronger, etc., etc.).

I'm wholly aware of short- vs. long-term benchmarking and the disadvantages a indirect contributor or primary output (i.e. rDPS)-focused job specialized categorically towards short-term goals (healing) can face during early progression and that its competitors would face during post-progression, provided there is imbalance between their growth curves or the distinct job attempts to make itself distinct by niche, rather than gameplay. And yes, there is imbalance over time in every example by which you might compare indirect and direct contributors in this game. Whether it's Ninja versus Samurai, Dragoon versus Black Mage, White Mage versus Astrologian, one side sees far higher rDPS consistency, while the other strikes that equilibrium in one comp, pales to it in another, and renders the competitor obsolete in yet another. That is the way the game works already, due to unintended issues of scaling. If that's not acceptable for new job concepts, then it shouldn't be acceptable now either. The scaling procedures need, then, to be fixed, to see far tighter total-throughput consistency across jobs.

The bottom line is that I don't want to be a minor variations on a Tank template (category A+2, B-1, C+1, D-2, E+1, F-1). I want to be a Paladin, a Warrior, a White Mage, a Scholar, a Ninja, a Samurai, etc. Even where specifically-defined or categorized parity is desirable, it can come from original conceptualizations, rather than patterned noise laid over a template. I feel it's important to allow the widest possible range of content to each job -- and to find distinction by gameplay, not niche--but I have no issue with finding x job more desirable for x set of mechanics. I'd much rather the game actually take their "all jobs on one character" concept and run with it, rather than attempt to make the experience made for and by each job interchangeable. We've never played less than 3 jobs at a time in any FF single-player game, and with quick access to the whole remaining roster, with whatever advantages and disadvantages they may have. Why should we go unpunished at all if we choose to, let alone encouraged by weekly caps and level-proportionate rested bonuses to, tunnel-vision on just one job per role, sacrificing our own and others' plethora of experiences otherwise available in seeking overspecific benchmarks of parity (and being wholly forced into design by template to meet those benchmarks)?

Hell, insofar as regular content (or really anything but fixed, "cutting-edge" content) goes, you can look at some of the compositional scaling systems WoW and a couple other MMOs have been working on: if a given healer provides only 7/10 the "standard" raw healing, the challenge retunes the raw damage output to something just barely manageable given the utilities across said healer, the DPS, and the tank, and excess of role-specific traits on the tank himself. Different experience, with as close of parity in intensity as two runs of the same standard composition by different players.

[Risvertasashi]

No. It was undertuned at launch, yes, but that's not all that's wrong. SE has created a problem they'll never be free of.

The bottom line is that I don't want to be a minor variations on a Tank template (category A+2, B-1, C+1, D-2, E+1, F-1). I want to be a Paladin, a Warrior, a White Mage, a Scholar, a Ninja, a Samurai, etc.

Sure. And Scholar is probably the best example of that. And if SE can make another healer that isn't copy-paste WHM spells, we may have that again.

The problem is in asking for a hybrid role. All healers in this game are hybrid DPS. So if by asking for a hybrid DPS/healer what you mean is higher DPS output, all the problems in my earlier post still apply:

Either the healing will be too weak to be considered viable, or it will be able to meet the heal checks comfortably and someone's getting benched because this new job would just be the same, but better.

but I have no issue with finding x job more desirable for x set of mechanics.

You might not care about that because anyone can switch to any job... but a lot of people do care. A lot of people want to be able to play their choice job because they enjoy it, and not be included or excluded based on the presence of some gimmick in a fight, or lack thereof. Specializing jobs like this isn't a new concept in gaming. It makes them mandatory for whatever content has their specialist gimmick, and trash for everything else (unless they're OP and good at everything, anyways). It's not good design.

In any case, the concept was tried in principal: What if a given healer only provided 7/10 of raw healing but brought other stuff to the table? That was literally AST at launch. If it didn't work for AST, it's not going to work for another hybrid healer concept. And if you made the content scale down the healing required, that's effectively the same as giving the job the same healing output as the others (just a lot more convoluted).

[Shurrikhan]

Either the healing will be too weak to be considered viable, or it will be able to meet the heal checks comfortably and someone's getting benched because this new job would just be the same, but better.

You're applying the concept to only a single role, when it would need to be applied systemically. Any ability to diversify a given role would be dependent on diversification in other roles as well, or at absolute minimum in one's partner in that role, or in the case of a healer, again, on the

utilities across said healer, the DPS, and the tank, and excess of role-specific traits on the tank himself.

So let's ignore that you've been ignoring everything I've said in regards to niching, or distinction by gameplay rather than by theoretical output, and just put it this way:

Let's say I have a healer with less raw healing. But, I have a tank with more "raw" or burst defense available to it.

Depending on the sync, there's no rDPS, e-rHPS, or eTTK change. The change, if actually limited to power-niching rather than gameplay, would simply be that a party can now choose to be especially defensive or offensive. The prior is technically new, unless you count such contributions as taking Monk almost solely for Mantra or double ranged or double caster solely for the extra Palisade/Apoc, rather than the rDPS advantages of rDPS-inflating comp, but the latter is something we already have right now, and are apparently mostly okay with (even if I might prefer that AST had more raw healing, in its own damn way, rather than through yet more potency buffs on copy-pasted skills, or that WHM saw small DPS bonuses born of time spent on its HPS in a way that makes use of its base Conjury themes or the idea of soul-draw from early WHM quests to push it towards tighter parity in post-prog).

The problem is in asking for a hybrid role. All healers in this game are hybrid DPS.

And not since Everquest II has it seemed exceptable to any reasonable design team for them not to be. If one can only contribute to a capped resource (damage taken), they face necessary waste of uptime. That increasingly takes away from engagement at minimum, and can only maintain viability if damage inputs are already plagued with imbalances that leaves people effectively afk part of the time, and pissing themselves the remainder, or vice-versa; short of such issues, they are swapped out for a hybrid because at least it can still do something with the otherwise 90% wasted time.

There is only one long-term goal in FFXIV's fights: damage dealt. That isn't an MMO design rule; that's FFXIV's own self-inflicted restriction. Every XIV fight ends with the enemy or enemies' death. Thus, every fight is won through damage. Surviving merely maintains damage throughput. The purpose of any healer or tank is damage. Whether that's more effective in a given situation or strategy through direct or indirect means will vary. (As XIV healers stand almost laughably high in their relative power curve compared to damage-dealers, contributing towards survival -- though as efficiently as possible -- will virtually always exceed direct contribution.) To treat them as solely healers or tanks, therefore, is disingenuous. They are simply party members with additional healing specialization; that is not the end-all-be-all of what they do.

You might not care about that because anyone can switch to any job... but a lot of people do care. A lot of people want to be able to play their choice job because they enjoy it, and not be included or excluded based on the presence of some gimmick in a fight, or lack thereof. Specializing jobs like this isn't a new concept in gaming. It makes them mandatory for whatever content has their specialist gimmick, and trash for everything else (unless they're OP and good at everything, anyways). It's not good design.

1. That goes hand in hand with the sentence that follows it. At present, I don't think such a design philosophy would be as sensible as it should be; if, however, XIV actually made something of its "all in one" mentality or allowed greater depth and breadth in job toolkits, then yes, I'd be fine with it.

"I really like having Clemency available for the healer jail, but if we take a Dark Knight for <TBN> and have the Warrior <Warcry> before the White Mage goes it, it can pummel it so fast that we shouldn't need the pre-shielding of a Minne+Mantra+Conv Deployment." Those are vitally different ways to handle a mechanic/situation based on composition. That's what I want more of. That's quite distinct from "Warrior Veil first, then real Veil, then knockoff DRK Veil" that we're moving towards.

I am NOT asking for a job to be better for a given fight, or I would have said "fight", and certainly NOT asking for it to be made necessary by a gimmick or to tick off a compositional check box. You should be able to glean my opinion of such gimmicks by now, I would think.

And if you made the content scale down the healing required, that's effectively the same as giving the job the same healing output as the others (just a lot more convoluted).

The per-serious-level content that exists only to engage the players enjoyably, rather than to set a fixed, math-able challenge? Let's be clear about the parameters set. I've recommended no such adjustments for content that actually requires experience-based design already. But I see no reason why you should leave content less engaging just because it needs to allow for a larger relative amount of variance with just 4 players, or less synergistic alliances, if given the option instead to scale its outputs and mechanics to the toolkits brought thereto.

[Bold] Is that not what using Shield Oath unnecessarily is? You trade off healer DPS for tank DPS, making things more convoluted. Heck, isn't literally every toolkit that has anything more than direct damage, healing, or absorption do... exactly that? What a player considers complexity (or better yet, depth) enough to be engaging will vary from player to player... So why should we say that everything above the current line (or even trading complexity for depth, for instance) be somehow innately superfluous or redundant? So I have to make use of a given tool more than the next guy, and sync my outputs around its compensation, gaining a rarer unique advantage in exchange? What's innately wrong or overly convoluted about that?

In any case, the concept was tried in principal: What if a given healer only provided 7/10 of raw healing but brought other stuff to the table? That was literally AST at launch.

AST wasn't just given a penalty in raw healing, though. It was penalized across the board, and left with only RNG to mitigate that. That isn't a trial of distinct (albeit it more complicated) means of competitive output. That's a trial of niche, or replacing healing floor with chance damage bonus. And, for the fourth time, I have no interest in niche. Niche is not what I've been referring to. I want distinct ways of approaching the content, not distinct contents to which a job is applicable. Distinction by gameplay, not niche. NOT niche.

Consider, for instance, if Astrologian actually had control of its cards. I am in no way recommending such a gross change, but just consider. If in lacking in potency on spammable heals AST was nonetheless able to balance out damage input to match that reduced output (such as through Bole or whatever revised card or cards or system of cards), that raw healing disadvantage would just be something AST works around, and plays differently as a consequence of, rather than setting a benchmark that leaves it benched until x time and to bench its competitors shortly after said time.

You can have a raw healing disadvantage and still reach parity in survival provided. It just comes from anything but raw healing.

If one cannot allow for distinctions in how one approaches the difficulties of a fight between toolkits A, B, and C, beyond merely swapping out CD timings to the same effect, then what do you have left by which to love a given job? It may as well be a skin, where you use a .dat file to rename Opener, Combo1-Mid, Combo 2-Mid, Combo1-Finisher, Combo2-Finisher1, (Combo2-Finisher2), ShortCD, MidCD, Immunity/Full. If there's no significant difference in the experience providable then... what did it really add to the game? I get that even by that logic, DPS can still be distinct, if only because they're actually tailored towards the real, primary output by which fights are won, and DPS checks tend to be at least a little less rigid than healing checks or tankbusters, but if design would go so far as to require raw healing (i.e. spammable heal potency) parity just because they can't tool a kit sufficiently to allow for another way to achieve survival in their fights with a given disadvantage there (and advantage elsewhere, as it still concerns survival), then tank and healer available design breadth is screwed. The best we can hope for at that point is to track every standard output curve and then slot it as differently as possible and merely hope it actually plays different in more than just button-flow.

[Usho]

Why is Dancer even in this question? Dancer had never been a healer. It's a dps with some healing ability like RDM. We had this debate about RDM being a healer, and everyone was complaining and guess what? RDM, as predicted, released as a DPS. FFXI's Dancer was imo the best solo job in the game. Great dps, TP based healing and buffs. Also, Dancer's use Daggers or Knives as weapons.

Dancers with staves, books or globes or wands? Really? Come on people. Chemist uses items to heal allies. THEY can be considered for a healing position but Dancer? Yeah, not gonna happen and if it does, I would have lost all faith in SE.