Healer NPC Diversity

[YianKutku]

Soulstones are not required to become a job (except SCH and WHM.)

Soulstones are a history of the job and the abilities learned by the previous holders, making it easier for the current holder to learn said abilities. It's possible to become a paladin/bard/dragoon/etc through time and effort and training alone. The soulstone is just a shortcut that lets you skip the years of extra training. (The exceptions being SCH where the fairy is tied to the stone, and WHM where the elementals won't accept a non-padjal without it.)

Principia also says a soul crystal is required to become a Summoner. He doesn't explain why, but he lists it as one of the criteria.

I don't even want to think about the sheer confusing mess that is the Paladin soul crystal, since apparently both the writers and the NPCs want to forget that the Heavensward "Paladin soul crystals must fight for dominance" questline even existed.

[ObsidianFire]

Not quite. If you ask Sugiru about what is up with Myste after the Lvl. 70 DRK quests, he just says that soul crystals are weird and no one knows everything about them. And then he backs that up by saying that rumor has Paladins have a thing where their Soul Crystals need some kind of pecking order established or their Soul Crystals don't work properly.

[Iscah]

As Iscah said, Urianger is already getting the AST treatment in ShB (whether that be Sharlayan style AST, or First style AST is unknown).

Sharlayan astromancy seems likely, since (as I said earlier) he is Sharlayan and it seems probable that he would have studied it already. From the trailer, he also seems to have been conducting a fortune-reading with the Deck of Sixty cards - he's holding them when talking to Y'shtola/Matoya about their 'undeniable fate'. (At least I assume they're standard cards - haven't actually double checked against the game designs though.)

Even if they're trapped on the First, the stars should remain the same as on the Source - it may be that the dimension-split is localised and they're still looking out on the same stars, but even if the entire universe is split, 12,000 years isn't that long at an astronomical timescale and any difference should be minimal.

Jacke casts Physick, for some reason, showing off the now defunct cross-class skill system!

He's from the city where the Arcanists' Guild is located - it makes sense that he'd learn basic healing skills from there.

I can also see the 'visual magic' of arcanistry suiting rogues better than reciting spells.

If you've only got one or two spells that you need to cast, maybe you can get away with not having a grimoire? Just have that symbol embroidered on your clothing, or maybe as a tattoo. (There was something in the second lorebook about that, wasn't there?)

I don't even want to think about the sheer confusing mess that is the Paladin soul crystal, since apparently both the writers and the NPCs want to forget that the Heavensward "Paladin soul crystals must fight for dominance" questline even existed.

Ugh. I hope they've got a good future plot point in mind involving that, because it made no sense at all at the time, and just derailed the whole plot for no good purpose.

Jenlyns summed it up pretty well.

JENLYNS
Of course. It's so simple!
...Wait, no, it's not. It's needlessly complicated.

[Bright-Flower]

Principia also says a soul crystal is required to become a Summoner. He doesn't explain why, but he lists it as one of the criteria.

I don't even want to think about the sheer confusing mess that is the Paladin soul crystal, since apparently both the writers and the NPCs want to forget that the Heavensward "Paladin soul crystals must fight for dominance" questline even existed.

But the Immortal Flames are training new summoners, does that mean they found new crystals for them as well?

[Iscah]

But the Immortal Flames are training new summoners, does that mean they found new crystals for them as well?

It's possible they found more crystals in the Allagan ruins.

[Brightamethyst]

But the Immortal Flames are training new summoners, does that mean they found new crystals for them as well?

Could be. I wouldn't surprised if someone had a bunch of SMN crystals sitting around somewhere, uncovered in Allagan ruins over the years. And as they're effectively unusable, they're probably not worth much outside of being a collectable novelty.

[zuzu-bq]

I really hope the devs see this, and add more lore to the healers.

Going by your post, seems like you haven't even read what the lore the lore team prepared about them.

Also don't know if people mentioned but, don't forget Ishgardian Chirurgeons.

[SannaR]

Tristan had a bunch of smn soul crystals course I think those were messed with as we know he got them from a questionable source.

[ObsidianFire]

There's been two places in the SMN quests where we find SMN Soul Stones. The first would be from Tristan, and those are the Soul Stones that the Immortal Flames are using to train Summoners. The second is the Node in the Lvl 70 SMN quest. In order to create the Egi of Sari, it needed to be hooked up to several Soul Stones. Those were somehow "eaten" by Principa for safekeeping in the event more Soul Stones were needed.

For the oldest Soul Stones we've yet come across, there's honestly a lot of SMN Soul Stones. It's just that the job has a lot of other prerequisites that keep it rare (being around for the defeat of a primal without being tempered mainly). What I would not be surprised to learn is if the Allagans with all their aetherchemistry figured out how to mass produce soul stones and made lots of them very quickly. Summoners weren't around for that long after all. It would explain why enough Soul Stones survived to the preset day for there to be multiple copies still around. We've probably got more Summoner Soul Stones then White Mage, Black Mage or Scholor Soul Stones at the moment.

[LineageRazor]

I was putting some more thought into the role of the SCH soulstone as home to the Fairy. SCH are an extension of ACN, and one major difference between entities summoned by ACN and SMN, and those summoned by SCH, is that the SCH summons apparently persist even when not summoned. They do not completely vanish between summonings, and maintain a continuity of memory between summons. Carbuncles (and likely also Egis), on the other hand, are created wholly anew each time they are summoned, and do not have any memories from their times previously summoned.

It makes me wonder if early Scholars might not have originally summoned Fairies just as Arcanists do Carbuncles, with the Fairy completely disappearing and "resetting" between each summoning. Eventually, Scholars realized that it could be strategically useful for their Fairies to exist persistently, even when not actively summoned. There may have been many experiments to find ways to preserve Fairies between summonings before finally settling on storing the Fairy within the Scholar Soulstone.

Otherwise, we start running into chicken-or-the-egg issues... If you can't be a SCH without a Soulstone, where did the first Fairies come from?