New Healer Request Next Expansion

[Connor]

Not gonna get into the balancing discussion but I feel like there’s a really good amount of demand for the next healer job to be a ‘Chemist’ type job. I also love the idea, so I hope they’ll seriously consider it for the future since many others seem to also like the idea. I think having be ‘tactical’ would really fill a nice niche in the healer role too.

I mean, a ‘tactical’ playstyle for a new healer wouldn’t necessarily have to mean reducing that feeling for Scholar. Tactics come into play as a Scholar because of the importance of planning out ability usage to maximise damage output. It’s like, ‘which Aetherflow ability do I use so I can Broil more / which Fairy ability will give me more Energy Drain’.

A Chemist type job could have a variety of Mix potentials, and the ‘tactical’ elements would be based around what you plan to Mix and when, like if you want to Mix a buff potion or a DoT potion, heal potion or Regen, etc etc. Maybe it could have like a really big ‘attack potion’ with high potency, but it shares a cooldown with a ‘big heal potion’. Beyond this will be the standard ‘small 1.5s cast heal’ ‘medium 2 second cast heal’, ‘big aoe’, ‘weaker AoE with additional effect of Regen/shield’, etc etc. Which is a little lame, but also extremely necessary

Scholar has the identity of ‘Tactical DPS healer’ already (putting aside the lack of DPS abilities for that identity to make sense for now lol). So maybe a Chemist job could be a ‘Tactical X healer’? That’d mean two healers that are more about direct healing and regens with White Mage / Astrologian

(Addendum: I get that these ‘tactics’ are a crucial part of every healer but I just mean that they’re considered part of the Scholar ‘identity’ whereas they’re mostly associated with good play as a White Mage / Astrologian as opposed being part of what makes job ‘feel like the job)

Anyway, I think the most interesting part of discussing a Chemist type job is what weapon it should use. They aren’t really associated with a weapon in the same vein that other jobs are, and unfortunately the one they do use is already part of another job (Machinist). That said, there are plenty of ways they could differentiate a Chemist pistol from the Machinists gun. I love the idea of jobs going into battle with impractical or unconventional weapons, part of why I really wanted to play Arcanist when it was announced was just the novelty of running into a battlefield with a magical book lol. I think a magic bag would be pretty fun since the Chemist job could just pull whatever other items they need out it. Though, seeing another player pull a giant cannon or bomb out of a small bag might be a bit too comical for FFXIV lol

[CrimsonGunner]

i believe the iconic time mage will be the next healer and if not him then geomancer might since they were introduced in SB and weren't yet explored.chemist probably wont be for awhile cause of alchemist as a craft job but i can see the sage class with a skill related to potions might become real.

[Commander_Justitia]

TLDR of the above statement, the healers had to be redesigned so that more healers could be feasibly added.

Yeah I remember that interview too. It was impossible to add a new healer with a unique identity for shadowbringers.
How good a "support/tactical" healer sounds, or how dancer should have become one, it would have made balancing difficult. Even if a new healer would have had those support traits, it would have been weak and still would feel the same like other healers ultimately.

Every new healer has to be able to be good enough in dungeon and raid/trial environment, even if there are two times the same healer. As soon as you invent an interesting healer, you still need to give him abilities that let's you easily clear that content as good as the other three or it will be hard to implement it and turn out as niche healer, barely playable even if fun(sounds like blue mage destiny) .

I would like to see a melee healer/mitigator(but no shields) for example, like wow did it a bit with monk, could be a way... But then the whole party has to focus more on positioning to get the heals. The luxury of getting heals 30y away would be gone or more rare.

Anyway, I feel like many people would like to see a new healer but turn out to be the players later who will complain that it plays the same as others xD I think it's okay if current healer lose or lost some skills in order to be able to create a new unique healer again.

[MVX21]

Chemist would certainly make a cool healer and would make sense, they could even give it a heavy assault weapon like in ffX-2 however I feel like they've been trying to be a bit... different with the jobs and might see it as too obvious a choice. I'd be happy with it myself but I wouldn't be surprised if they went a different direction, they already set up geomancer as existing in the world and being a healer but again I feel like it might be too blatant. Going back to FFT roots I could see them trying to mix it up and tossing in Calculator or Oracle as a healer. Oracle in particular I feel would make an interesting class regardless of what roll it was. No matter where they go it's a long way off and we may as well strap in for the ride.

[Almostward]

This 100 times over. SE can't handle the 3 healers they have now, why would we want a 4th one?

Agreed. They did chop jobs on two of the jobs making them shadows of their former selves with way to many problems, and Whm still has issues.

If the devs cant fix healers after 4 years of promises then I dont want a fourth healer. I want fun and fixed healers.

[Jehrek]

Am I the only one who foresees that if we get a chemist, the Mix ability will be a reskin of the AST Seals/Divination?

You have 6 ingredients in your bag, action draws one out. You want it, action puts it in the pot; you don't like it, action redraws a new ingredient. Once you get three ingredients in the pot, Mix and apply.

[Hatstand]

Am I the only one who foresees that if we get a chemist, the Mix ability will be a reskin of the AST Seals/Divination?

You have 6 ingredients in your bag, action draws one out. You want it, action puts it in the pot; you don't like it, action redraws a new ingredient. Once you get three ingredients in the pot, Mix and apply.

They should have added a chemist with a chemistry themed divination as a new healer this expansion. Then they could have left AST alone. (Or, you know, given it some little fixes without altering its core gameplay).

[Connor]

They should have added a chemist with a chemistry themed divination as a new healer this expansion. Then they could have left AST alone. (Or, you know, given it some little fixes without altering its core gameplay).

Maybe I’m wrong, but I feel like if Astrologian also had some kind of ‘competition’ as the ‘support oriented healer’ they’d have been able to play around more with how the card effects worked in the old system. I mean, their thinking currently seems to be that Astrologian can’t have the same card effects as before because then it becomes a ‘must have’?

But am I right in thinking this would be less of an issue if there was an Astrologian ‘competitor’ you could take instead? Meaning that Astrologian wouldn’t become a guaranteed job for raids? And I mean, you’d also have more variety in the kind of healers you could take. You could use WHM/SCH for more powerful healing and direct DPS, WHM/AST for healing and some DPS buffs, SCH/CHM for shields and whatever buffs Chemist would bring. I mean, maybe a ‘Chemist’ would act as a competitor to Scholar more than Astrologian, providing shields and high DPS uptime or something like that.

That said, I think what I’m more getting at that maybe it would’ve been easier for them to balance out the way the healer role does things if we got any kind of fourth healer lol. I mean, it seems to me that it’s easier to create a balance with 4 because you can ‘split’ the kinds of healer there are by 2:2 instead of having to split them 2:1. And splitting them means that it’s easier to avoid any one becoming ‘compulsary’ because they can make sure that each healer has its own kind of ‘competition’. It would also mean they could do something more interesting with Sects, since it would have to be directly competing with both White Mage and Scholar

[EpicOverlord85]

This 100 times over. SE can't handle the 3 healers they have now, why would we want a 4th one?

Which really makes me sad. Skill wise looking at my Scholar honestly makes me feel a bit depressed. It was bad enough that they got rid of our Dots and replaced them with Art of War, but what they did to Selene is just not ok.

[EpicOverlord85]

The devs are well aware of the demand, we were told as such. And they also expressed why there was no healer this expansion, given that the ranged DPS slot had less options than healer. Given this, it is reasonable to assume that next expansion we will most likely get a healer and a caster (though how cool would it be if we got a healer, physical ranged, and BLU upgraded to raid level). If I were to choose these jobs, the healer would definitely be CHM, and I would have to say GEO for the caster.

As for your statement about fixing the healers. You are well aware that the healers needed to be broken in order to be fixed right? It might feel bad right now, but the devs needed to fundamentally shift the direction of healers in order to balance them together. Adding a fourth healer won't harm this, and in 6.0 the healers will be altered based on their new direction and enhanced based on identity. The tanks saw this with the addition of GNB and are the most balanced they have ever been.

I’m sure they are well aware of it, but they’ve done nothing so far to alleviate it. If anything they made it worse by gutting the tool lots of the already existing healers (WHM dodged that a bit). In the past I would have assumed the same thing, but with their tracked record so far I’m not going to get my hopes up until they fix the mess they already have at their feet.

Shift the direction of the healers? What is this new direction you’re referring too? Homogenizing the classes? As it stands Scholar and Astro have lost a lot of their identities and any further homogenization is just going to make it worse. It’s also worth noting that sure the tanks are balanced currently, but they’ve all lost much of what made them unique in the past (especially DRK and WAR, they are almost carbon copies of each other now).