How would they even make another healer job though?

[Theodric]

I'd like to heal my comrades by throwing potions at them.

[Risvertasashi]

I'd like to heal my comrades by throwing potions at them.

Chemist would be awesome.

[Jaelommiss]

SE's guide to making a healer job
Estimated time required: 2 expansions worth of development cycles
1) Compile n healers' abilities into a giant list
2) Throw out half of the list
3) Divide what's left n+1 ways

Please look forward to it.

[Rilifane]

There are so many flavors for healers left, it's not just about who shields and who regens but about HOW they do it.
Job mechanics and job gauges are the true flavor of jobs, not the shields or the regens.

Things like:
- totem healer, who places totems on the ground which have short durations and various effects, can be triggered manually like Earthly Star and/ or work automatically like SCH fairy while also having a base toolkit of ST/ AoE heals. Also a lot of room for raid support or debuffs
- melee healer, who relies on charging up its stronger heals with melee attacks and combos, probably with some dmg to heal conversion aswell while also having a baseline set of casted heals. Utilizing your combos properly is simply more effective compared to baseline [insert fancy name for Cure II/ Bene II equivalent] spam. Think of e.g. a melee attack that stacks a buff that can be consumed for a strong oGCD heal
- combo healer in general who is good at preparing heals and triggering them when needed, a bit like current Horoscope from AST. Baseline heals are probably a bit weaker than those of the other healers, because it relies on proper preparation. Another way would be to stack buffs by using attack skills. Say attack A stacks buff A, attack B stacks buff B etc. and one stack of A + B can be consumed to use heal X, A + C for heal Y etc, not unlike how Mudras can be combined. Obviously also complemented with casted heals so you always have a solid base.
- damage conversion healer who can be designed to either heal the party by applying buffs to them/ debuffs to the enemies so they heal themselves with attacks or who convert their own damage into healing or a bit of both. Obviously also needs also a toolkit of basic heals and since consistent healing is rarely needed, it could work in a way that overhealing gradually stacks a shield with a certain limit based on max HP.
- potion healer who relies on non-magical ways to heal (potions, salves etc.) and can both apply them to allies aswell as throw mixtures on the ground for certain effects. You can throw a potion at an ally for strong ST heal or throw it at the ground for AoE heal in an area. Both instant heal and regen effects are possible. Think of healing vapours.
You can even make them trigger on contact which would allow strategically placing them in certain spots beforehand and have players trigger them by walking close. Works in random content aswell because if you throw them at the tanks feets (or better yet, straight in his face), he obviously touches it right away

There a lot of possible concepts than can be adjusted to fit the game's design. Wether they rely on regens, shields or direct healing isn't the primary question. Two direct healers can play completely different.

[Deceptus]

SE has designed themselves into a literal corner when it comes to healers and they probably have no idea what to do at this point.

I've lost all faith in them regarding healers.

And I've healed 2.0 to 5.0 and essentially gave it up.

But on topic:

1) SE bites the bullet and makes AST a shield or regen based healer and then makes the 4th healer the opposite. 2 shield based, 2 regen based. I mean double down on this. No more SCH with regens or WHM with shielding. A 4th healer would actually make it easier for them to do this as there would be a second option to chose from if you didn't like whm or sch.

2) Channel based healer, good to combo with regens ( the netcode is crap and this won't work).

3) Totem based with buffs, ala WoW Shaman

4) Mix based (think ninja but with heals). Again NIN mudra has sucked since implemented due to the netcode so this is out.

5) DPS based healing (Chloromancer from RIFT). You have some solid heals but a good chunk of your healing comes from damaging mobs. More support oriented.

Yep. My point is that it's a crappy excuse to exclude a role from any new jobs for 6 years. (Longer if no healers come in 6.0).

Healers are niche and hard to market. The "We're going to focus on balancing the healers" line over the last two expacs has just been to soften the blow and make healers feel like they're not being neglected.

Yep, that's the reason their ffxiv "mascot" Y'shtola job changed from CNJ to BLM. You can't market healers.

Adding another healer would frankly be a dumb move. Everyone would be better off if they took all the ideas they may have from a new healer job and distribute those ideas to the current healers to help differentiate them.

So a whole role gets no fun new toys like everyone else? Where's the parity in that? One of the fun t hings about Final Fantasy XI and XIV is they add jobs. To ignore healers just because SE is inept at designing them. . . well I don't know if that's a game I want to play anymore because I love to heal. And if I'm not going to get new healers I have little to no incentive to play.

[Melichoir]

Healing is more than "Whos got A Regen/Shield/Buff" etc. Its also a matter of how those heals are delivered. Otherwise were essentially saying every single DPS job is just a straight up carbon copy of one another because they all predominately just do damage by using skills.

If youre gonna see another healer, itll probably be a hybrid healer, and will probably incorporate a system we havent seen yet. My personal thoughts would be a chemist equivilant, with a system of stocking heals as an expendable resource. That is you pre-create a bunch of heals and hold onto them and throw them out when needed. It may end up being a strong burst healer. Dunno how this would work out in the bigger picture but it might be interesting.

[Nemmar]

Withholding new features for a dream of perfect balance is something that will never come out as a net positive.

I honestly don't see this big problem with healers, i wish someone would tell me exactly what's wrong despite the damage output/rotation.



With that said, if they added chemist, for example, it could be a healer based on instant casts (maybe lower potency to make up for it) and therefore more mobile. I mean, it's not only about how the healing works, but how the spells are delivered. Different animations give a different feel to the jobs. Saying things like Scholar is both heals + shields is a reductive way to refer to the job. Scholar has an emphasis on the Fairy pet. That is it's fantasy and uniqueness. If you're gonna tell me that the Fey AoE heal is just the same as Medica from WHM, well in the end result it is, but the way it is achieved, isn't.

[Razard]

Withholding new features for a dream of perfect balance is something that will never come out as a net positive.

I honestly don't see this big problem with healers, i wish someone would tell me exactly what's wrong despite the damage output/rotation.

The true but facetious answer?

WHM: Nothing
SCH: Muh Green DPS!
AST: Muh useless fluff cards! (Oh I suppose I was undertuned at the start of 5.0, but who cares! I lost my worthless Bole card /cryface)

I think I got the gist of it.

[Kazrah]

A healer in this game, when you think about it, can be broken up into two main elements: a healing specialty, and a secondary feature.

Healing specialties simply refer to whatever "special effect" is tacked onto a portion of non-basic healing skills in a standard healing toolkit. This is pretty simple to spot via what kind of heals a particular healer job is known for, so HoTs for White Mage, shields for Scholar, and alternation (picking either HoTs or shields) for Astrologian. Typically, a healing specialty is the element which a healer job relies on to both perform its role and to stand out among others in this role. Other examples would include Delayed Heal Triggers like Excogitation, Escalation (heals leaving buffs increasing the amount those heals heal for), and even Periodic Absorption or "Shields over time".

Secondary features, on the other hand, are elements that are usually associated with damage dealt on some level or offering a degree of ease on healing to provide more damage as a healer, but are mainly designed with the purpose of keeping a healing job unique and at least somewhat interesting. For White Mage, this would be extra damage via spells and abilities such as Assize and Afflatus Misery (which I still prefer to call "the fart bomb"). With Scholar, its secondary feature is indirect healing in the form of its fairy, which despite seeming more like a healing feature, is intended to offer ease in healing for the job to do more damage with its basic damage toolkit. Then there is Astrologian, who has its card system that allows for (at least in theory) a means of increasing damage of allies to offset for what damage it can't do. Healing via Damage is a really good example of a secondary feature, as it can offer an ease in healing required and promote damage while not being as broken as it would be if it were a healing specialty (since that means it'd have to be more relied on, resulting in massive balance issues). Other forms of indirect healing such as totems are another good example.

From those two things, you'd follow the basic healer kit shared across other healers:

Basic heal
Large heal
AoE heal
Instant heal
Specialty heal
AoE specialty heal
Raising spell
"Increased healing" cooldown

Basic damage spell
Periodic damage spell
AoE damage spell

I could probably fill it out more, but kinda nodding off. Anyway, after all that, add in some any spells or abilities that would "round out" its overall kit and voila, FFXIV healer.

[Eloah]

GNB does through its normal combo, though it's nothing major.

WAR and DRK do that as well, but with their combo ender, not the middle section.

From those two things, you'd follow the basic healer kit shared across other healers:

Basic heal
Large heal
AoE heal
Instant heal
Specialty heal
AoE specialty heal
Raising spell
"Increased healing" cooldown.

While this seems to be a good generalization, it's a bit inaccurate. SCH doesn't have a Large heal, nor does it have an AoE heal, but it does have the faerie to compensate for the lack of those skills. One could argue overlap in certain areas, but seeing as both AST and WHM have individual skills that fall into the specific categories you listed, the skills SCHs lack cannot be ignored. This is what makes SCH the outlier, which isnt bad, but it's why SCH is a bit more difficult to balance compared to the other two.