Will we ever get an edgy healer?

[Transient_Shadow]

I love healing but sometimes I get tired of all of our abilities being nothing but blinding light. Especially with 5.0 coming around the corner it highlights how silly a healer wod would be.

So I offer a question to ponder. will we ever get an edgy healer job. one that has a little bit more of a dark tone to its magic. I feel it would be a nice change of pace

[Doozer]

Well with Dancer being rumored to be the next healer, I doubt you'll get something 'edgy'.

[Elamys]

This thread title looks familiar...

[Seraphor]

This thread title looks familiar...

From well over a year ago...

[Transient_Shadow]

This thread title looks familiar...

Not sure why you took the effort to look through my post history. I'm also not sure how this invalidates the topic. A little variety and spice is always worth chatting about.

[Sakuraluna]

This thread title looks familiar...

Even I don't tend to remember what I've posted on this forum a year and a half ago, tbh.

I love healing but sometimes I get tired of all of our abilities being nothing but blinding light. Especially with 5.0 coming around the corner it highlights how silly a healer wod would be.

So I offer a question to ponder. will we ever get an edgy healer job. one that has a little bit more of a dark tone to its magic. I feel it would be a nice change of pace

I tend to wonder if it's for the same reason healers so consistently get white robes when new gear models are added. I agree that more variety would be amazing, and honestly a healer job that operates more on the darker side of the character's personality and with interesting lore, much like DRK, would be interesting to explore. I remember there being some statement made in a live letter or Q&A or something a few years back that seemed to indicate the devs being hesitant to stray too far from the pure-in-spirit cleric healer stereotype as far as most content gear is concerned... (although this could just have been the statement about it being potentially confusing for new players to see mages run around in heavy armor or one job wearing another's job-specific gear, in which case I just look at the player's job icon anyway tbh.) I would love to see us get something other than white robes, or white recolors of caster gear for once. And definitely, a healer with different spell-casting visuals and lore wouldn't be an unwelcome sight.

I really liked cleric stance on whm back in ARR when it was an actual stance. It would be nice to see that sort of mechanic return on maybe a future job for those of us who enjoyed playing it.

[Enkidoh]

We did once have an 'edgy' healer in 1.0 - it was called THM. Then Jobs were added and THM lost it's drain healing and umbral/astral spells so as to be a better fit for BLM, becoming a straight spellcaster with a weird alignment shift mechanic (CNJ becoming the dedicated healer). So I don't see SE repeating that I'm afraid.

[tinythinker]

I don't see the idea that occurs to me as something that would be implemented in FFXIV, but how is this for edgy...

How about you cast your oGCD heals (and buffs and debuffs and other utility) using your health bar, but leech health back to yourself from enemies with mana-based attacks? Minor to average GCD heals using mana would still be out there, but wouldn't be enough to get through tough fights. This is the bare bones of the concept -- it would have elaboration on the mini-game -- but basically a very high-stakes risk and reward affair. A kind of blood magic -- take a life to save a life.

To flesh it out a bit, imagine if Benediction, Tetragrammaton, Assize, Asylum, Presence of Mind, Thin Air, and Divine Benison were fouling chunks of your health bar each time they were used, and that as long as you remained in combat the specific amount of health they cost you needed to be renewed/purified by Stone, Aero, and Holy. You would need to manage the situation to keep things from getting out of hand but would be able to really push the limits of your healing to whatever you feel comfortable with. (Maybe being able to at times even getting an extra instant cast opportunity for the oGCDs that if taken push you further into danger.)

Kind of like how in the Fallout games some of your health bar gets taken over by radiation and regular healing items can't do anything about that part of the bar -- you have to use RadAway to free up or renew that portion of the health bar. If 50% of your health bar is polluted/weakened/on-borrowed-time, you are effectively operating only at 50% of your regular max health. Normally you have 35,000 health, but you've spent 10,000 on your blood magic. It's the same as only having 25,000 health until you pay it back to yourself damaging foes.

It could (additionally or differently) work something distantly akin to a Brewmaster Monk in WoW.

[Gemina]

Edgy healer?

You mean you don't let the tank get to <10% before using Bene?

[Transient_Shadow]

Edgy healer?

You mean you don't let the tank get to <10% before using Bene?

lol. Honestly I should probably explain where I'm coming from with this. I've always been a huge fan of dark souls. Especially the way they treated the concepts of light and darkness. instead of the typical trope of good vs evil, light was shown as not inherently good. It was turbulent and harsh in a way and the characters tied to light were far from benign. Darkness on the other hand was peaceful and tranquil by itself. It never became a roiling abyss until agitated and corrupted by light.

This has always been my personal mantra ever since ds2 when they introduced hexes which included dark healing spells. Which is why I'm ecstatic for Shadowbringers. The idea of a healer using the tranquility of darkness to heal has always struck me as a really compelling story idea.

Both the Ast and Drk quest-lines have already illustrated that SE is willing to defy the convention of light vs dark and the healers are inherently good tropes. I mainly said 'edgy' because that's what people normally associate with the idea of a dark healer. Even though my idea falls more in line with the twilight healing in Highschool DxD