About Chemists and their potential use for FFXIV

[LolitaBansheeMeru]

I think part of it is 'we want a new healer, what's a classic FF job that could work as a healer?' But maybe I'm wrong and more people are excited for the idea of chemist outside of that context.

There's a few options be it, classic or not like Mascot although honestly dancer should have been a healer due to it being a support/medic with no range abilitys at all in the past games if it was a mele fighter id get why it wasn't but meha but honestly I could name a long list of possible healers if I brought up the page to rememeber them all.

I mean damn you could make make time mage a healer(bleach style) or ff5's necromancer,Oracle maybe

[Videra]

dancer should have been a healer due to it being a support/medic with no range abilitys at all in the past games

This is varying degrees of untrue, as there have been several iterations of Dancer across the franchise. That's just semantics on my part, however.

I do feel like the people who expect Chemist are going to be horrifically disappointed, however. It's like as not that we won't get a healer again, because SE has no idea what to do with healers - and the game overall stretches the 'gimmick' of the three we have to their absolute limits.

[LolitaBansheeMeru]

This is varying degrees of untrue, as there have been several iterations of Dancer across the franchise. That's just semantics on my part, however.

I do feel like the people who expect Chemist are going to be horrifically disappointed, however. It's like as not that we won't get a healer again, because SE has no idea what to do with healers - and the game overall stretches the 'gimmick' of the three we have to their absolute limits.

the games dancers were in had 3 main uses outside of that they were pointless in the party 1'st helping the healer with dances to regen////heal/rez 2nd was to debuff enemys with negative dance and 3rd was to buff your party members with buff dances like sword dance this has been the same in every game they were in until the online ones.

[Enla]

I think part of it is 'we want a new healer, what's a classic FF job that could work as a healer?' But maybe I'm wrong and more people are excited for the idea of chemist outside of that context.

It's also the fact that Chemist in past FF games was just pure fun to play and absolutely broken in FFX-2 due to the mix ability (see below). To the point that many strategies for cheesing that game revolved around the class. Likewise people want it as a healer because it's traditionally been a support class, sometimes erring on the side of doing more damage but usually having a healing or buffing focus to keep it to the original iteration from FFV. It can put out a lot of damage, see FFX-2, but generally that's not what it was known for which is why people have been automatically assuming it could be a potential fourth healer class.

And if people want to be pedantic about the name it also goes by Salve Maker in the Bravely Default series, so it's not like the fact that having an Alchemist crafting job would preclude them from adding it at all.

[Hazama999]

Whatever healer we get, I hope it's something outlandish and not necessarily mage-like. Currently the most out-there healer we have in this regard is scholar.
It's one of the reasons I was excited for dancer potentially being a healer... the concept just seemed so out there to me.

[Kaliesto]

I think part of it is 'we want a new healer, what's a classic FF job that could work as a healer?' But maybe I'm wrong and more people are excited for the idea of chemist outside of that context.

We do need one more Healer to balance out the jobs, right now only Healer and Physical Ranged DPS needs one more to balance out as 4 types of Job within that role since all the other Role Types have 4 jobs currently (unless people don't really count Blue Mage).

[GrimGale]

If the next new Job is not a healer, there will be blood.

[Deceptus]

I think a Chemist could work. Think Ninja Mudras as a Mix mechanic.

Could be really fun.

[Mhaeric]

I don't think they'd go with a Chemist job when there's already an Alchemist class in the game without some sort of really good explanation as to why an Alchemist can't just be a Chemist and vice versa. That said, they could put a magical spin on it similar to Gunblade where a Chemist's abilities stem from imbuing their concoctions with their aether in order to make them functional and this aetheric imbuing only functions on their specially formulated concoctions. Without the aetheric component, the Chemist's concoctions are worthless and they don't have the knowledge to make any other type of concoction. This would explain why an Alchemist can't just achieve the same effects by mixing something up, and why a Chemist isn't able to just mix up a bunch of glue or ink like an Alchemist. I.e. a Chemist relies on their aether to power their concoctions whereas an Alchemist relies on the concoction itself.

I know most people aren't familiar with the Alchemist from EQOA, but I envision a Chemist job behaving (at least superficially) like them: a ranged job actually flinging alchemical bottles around the battlefield that explode on contact either healing or doing damage depending on the concoction used and having a handful of resource heavy direct damage spells to weave in between potion throws for burst and stat increasing potions. In that game, Alchemists were predominantly a dps class tending toward being a hybrid solo healer depending on build and had to actually manually create their potions ahead of time. Due to the way ranged attacks worked in that game (they used a fixed percentage of your max power resource per shot instead of a scaled fixed amount like most abilities) they also had a similar mechanic to Black Mages where they would burn all their mana super quickly on incredibly high sustain single target or AoE dps potion bombs and then drinking a toxic draught that would incredibly quickly restore their mana at the cost of some HP to full effectively giving them unlimited resources as long as they came prepared with potions in their inventory. An EQOA Alchemist could create potions on the fly during combat if they ran low on potions, but it was a lot more button pressing and reduced the effectiveness of their potential burst since they had a handful of standard abilities they could use in between potion throws at the cost of power efficiency. It was not uncommon at all to see Alchemists just standing around Freeport spamming their potion creation spells.

Potion creation ahead of time wouldn't fly in FFXIV and the BLM mp resource thing wouldn't work well on a non-rotation based role like healer, but the thematic elements would work well in my opinion. I.e. a class that actually tosses aetherically infused cure-bombs with the occassional actual dps/dot/buff bomb and actual spell tossed into the mix. Traditional FF Chemist abilities like Mix or Stash would make obvious 30-120s cooldowns used to modify their concoction use.

[Seraphor]

^ It most likely would be as you describe, a special method of aetherically imbuing certain potions. After all, any healer would still have to be a magical caster role, so it'll use MP and cast times. The lore could be that it's a new Garlean method (ext expact could have us in garlemald) and like MCH and GNB, it uses technology derived from Ceruleum, but as the WoL we can use our own aether (hence the MP) to power it.