Geomancer

[PatronasCharm]

I'm looking forward to this I always enjoy reading them!

We have two lines of spells in game to go off of for Geomancer at this point in time:
1) Kyokuho the Geomancer currently running the only Geomancer school in the world (that we know of) using Qi of Water, Qi of Earth and Qi of Wind. A heal, stone direct damage and wind direct damage. As well as some instant cast damage spell that I do not know the name of.
2) The Sai Taisui in Swallow's Compass and Heaven on High using their own Malediction of Water, Malediction of Wind and Malediction of Earth. Being a point blank aoe around the caster, a targeted aoe and I hoenstly can't remember what earth does but I assume an aoe as well.

So while they could go about a mixing or entangle for the elements/weather it would probably be confined to the certain elements.

Here’s the concept I was cooking. Still need some polish, but it’s all there.

https://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/...threads/420228

Last one, unless another game inspires me to write another job. We’ll see

[SeikishiYuuki]

And they obviously should use the history they already created, I just don't think they should limit themselves to it.
I'd simply prefer for them to come up with a unique concept, both for gameplay and visually, and adjust the lore as necessary. They can do so and have done so before.
For example, while the lore we've got up until now says GEO usually uses Water/Earth/Wind, that might be simply because these elements tend to be the most accessible, but a skilled GEO in the right environment can draw on any element of their choosing. Its just not common knowledge due to the relative rarity of volcanic/frozen/thunderous environments. Fits well enough with GEOs classic theme of using the Environment and explains why we've never seen a GEO use Ice/Fire/Thunder before while leaving the door open for them to be part of the skillset.



Never said AST and GEO were the same thing, lorewise they were always presented as seperate entities. It just always seemed to me like SE originally planned to roll some concepts from GEO into AST rather then make GEO a standalone job, what with Leveva musing about fusing the schools and all.
At least that's always been my theory; though it seems they've abandoned that idea - probably due to player feedback or popular demand for standalone GEO or shift in Healer and/or overall job design or any combination of reasons.



Earthly Star says hi - kind of. Ground targeted effects as an engine for GEOs Terrain-command were a popular suggestion back then (and still are to an extend).
It's not much of a stretch to believe Earthly Star to be early experimentation for that concept.

The only real counter I have to the use of multiple elements is Yoshi P. saying they can't do a Geomancer that actively utilizes the terrain/weather and the class would have to rely on more stable component. (this is not say them using other elements is outside the realm of possibility just specifically terrain weather based ones are unlikely) As to Earthly Star I would not be surprised if this was actually true or not far off. There were dozens of 1.0/2.0 unused abilities that got rehashed and rebuild like ACN's original "Distaff" abilities and its entirely possible it came from there.

I don't think they meant to incorporate Geo into Ast, I mean they might have but it seems more likely the plans they've had to add seem to always go awry and they honestly might just be giving Geo a lore presence because they couldn't find a good playable execution for it within the game at the time.

[ArcaneCarbuncle]

The only real counter I have to the use of multiple elements is Yoshi P. saying they can't do a Geomancer that actively utilizes the terrain/weather and the class would have to rely on more stable component. (this is not say them using other elements is outside the realm of possibility just specifically terrain weather based ones are unlikely) As to Earthly Star I would not be surprised if this was actually true or not far off. There were dozens of 1.0/2.0 unused abilities that got rehashed and rebuild like ACN's original "Distaff" abilities and its entirely possible it came from there.

Well, obviously they wouldn't be able to utilize Terrain/Weather directly, but they could have very well been playing around with mechanics to "create" Weather/Terrain to utilize in the first place. Which is what I was getting at with Earthly Star, since it is already more elaborate than most ground targeted/lingering AoEs. (Besides being inspired by Geomancy from a lore standpoint, iirc)

I don't think they meant to incorporate Geo into Ast, I mean they might have but it seems more likely the plans they've had to add seem to always go awry and they honestly might just be giving Geo a lore presence because they couldn't find a good playable execution for it within the game at the time.

This is of course another possibility, but as I said before, Leveva thinking about ways to combine the concepts (and the story being kind of about combining aspects of both schools) just seems a bit suspicious to me.
Or they were just cannibalizing the concepts they had come up with for the Oracle-type job they were playing with before they decided to make RDM, I can only guess.

[BasicBlake]

character limit

I think they only use those three elements because at some point they were trying very hard to set Onymuji and Geomancer apart (I assume to parallel CNJ and THM). But at this point the line that separates the two seems to fluctuate. They could just have the two cannibalize eachother and just be one straight up eastern entity though and give it to the playerbase. My personal hope is that whatever the playstyle ends up being, I really hope through the use of certain spells/oGCDs they end up able to place fields at their feet that end up having different effects. This way we would still get the feel of terrain manipulation but don't have to place targeted aoe's. (since they seem to not want dps to use those, thank god). And from what they have shown us of the class so far, they aren’t interested in the “all elements” theme. They seem pretty honed in on the name of the class and went full on Feng Shui.

As for the Geo and Ast thing I was commenting on how you said SE was shoehorning Geo into Ast, which I didn't really see. But I do think they probably saw player feedback and really tried to separate the two!

Earthly Star is by no means the first targeted ground ability in the game. I think the tooltip is even something to the effect of you are placing a celestial body on the ground. So while I agree that terrain has played a big role in Geo as a whole, I don't think the placing of Earthly Star was a branch out experiment into the class. Not when we have Asylum, Sacred Soil, HAD Shadowflare and I think Drk gets one as well. Ast just needed a placed aoe healer circle to match the other two healers.

[ArcaneCarbuncle]

I think they only use those three elements because at some point they were trying very hard to set Onymuji and Geomancer apart (I assume to parallel CNJ and THM). But at this point the line that separates the two seems to fluctuate. They could just have the two cannibalize eachother and just be one straight up eastern entity though and give it to the playerbase. My personal hope is that whatever the playstyle ends up being, I really hope through the use of certain spells/oGCDs they end up able to place fields at their feet that end up having different effects. This way we would still get the feel of terrain manipulation but don't have to place targeted aoe's. (since they seem to not want dps to use those, thank god). And from what they have shown us of the class so far, they aren’t interested in the “all elements” theme. They seem pretty honed in on the name of the class and went full on Feng Shui.

The thing is that all they've shown so far is two years or older at this point and was created when they likely weren't planning on making GEO an actual job.
Should they have started/are starting to look into adding GEO as standalone job plenty of things are likely to have changed.
Kyokuho for instance is at best equivalent to what 3.4 Alisaie was to RDM (i.e., a stand-in that has nothing to do with how the job acually plays), and the Geomancer Mobs in Swallows Compass/HoH dont have to mean all that much either seeing as they don't use standard player models/animations. SE could base GEO on them, they could however as easily go the route of the last boss of Amdapor Hard, which teased a bunch of then suspected future WHM Abilities (including Cure 4!) - except none of those abilities ended up being added.
Ultimately I see it this way: Astrologian has been in the game since ARR and the AST we got was vastly different, Gunblades have also been in the game since ARR and Gunbreaker is very different to everything we had seen involving Gunblades before; I'm for one am not comfortable basing my expectations of GEO on stuff that was released over two years ago.
Nor do I want to tbh, and I repeat myself: I'd want them to come up with an interesting, unique concept first and then adjust lore from there, rather then limiting what they can do with the job because lore; and I say this as a lore-aficionado. Obviously I would't want them to outright break anything, I just dont want them to stifle their creativity.

As for the Geo and Ast thing I was commenting on how you said SE was shoehorning Geo into Ast, which I didn't really see. But I do think they probably saw player feedback and really tried to separate the two!

Shoehorning might have been a strong word, but it very much still seems to me like they planned to have AST and GEO linked together rather then create a standalone Geomancer job.

Earthly Star is by no means the first targeted ground ability in the game. I think the tooltip is even something to the effect of you are placing a celestial body on the ground. So while I agree that terrain has played a big role in Geo as a whole, I don't think the placing of Earthly Star was a branch out experiment into the class. Not when we have Asylum, Sacred Soil, HAD Shadowflare and I think Drk gets one as well. Ast just needed a placed aoe healer circle to match the other two healers.

I might not have explained it well, but I never meant to say it was the first ground-targeted AoE, I meant to point out that among that group of abilities it was the most elaborate/unique.
All other similar Abilities simply apply their effect over time to anyone standing within, whereas Earthly Star basically sits one the field doing nothing until you pop it. And then it affects both enemy and ally in different ways.
Of course its possible they made it different just for the sake of being different, but at the same time they could have planned to do more with it at some point in time.
You know, like creating different types of temporary environments to be used by a job that historically used their environment for different effects. Just saying.

[BasicBlake]

@Arcane
(There is no way I was gonna try and quote all that on mobile! Haha)

I agree with a lot of your points! And I do hope that was we get is very creative.

I think my only negative takeaway from that is the Ast ARR npc’s. It’s hard to compare a few npc’s in a tower without a single spell or cast animation to things they have been adding for 3 years on Geo now. Granted with Geo it’s just small stuff like mounts at the moment. If those AST npc’s had at least a spell or two, or a dungeons 100% focused on them it would be a slightly larger comparison.

We got Kyokuho with 4.0 and then we got Swallow’s Compass with 4.3, and I know this is 100% my own opinion but that very much felt like... a solid direction for the class. And then we got Seiryu is 4.5, and then in 5.0 we finally got confirmation that Kyo’s school of Wind and Water was open.

So while the lore is old at this point, they have consistently been adding to it and giving it direction.

But I digress, this is all opinion and hope. I like the Feng Shui direction they have been going opposed to trying to fit every element in. It would feel very red mage to me. And I know they are different classes and different thematically. But I’ve spent 3 years playing a caster that is using (almost) all the elements, not exactly eager for them to put it a different variation of it. Kind of my same views on getting a second healer with anything involving Aero/Stone.

Not to mention my hot bars. That’s a lot of elements to put on there, especially if that gimmick revolves around placing terrain for 6 elements. My fingers hurt just imagining this.

[ArcaneCarbuncle]

@Arcane
(There is no way I was gonna try and quote all that on mobile! Haha)

I agree with a lot of your points! And I do hope that was we get is very creative.

I think my only negative takeaway from that is the Ast ARR npc’s. It’s hard to compare a few npc’s in a tower without a single spell or cast animation to things they have been adding for 3 years on Geo now. Granted with Geo it’s just small stuff like mounts at the moment. If those AST npc’s had at least a spell or two, or a dungeons 100% focused on them it would be a slightly larger comparison.

We got Kyokuho with 4.0 and then we got Swallow’s Compass with 4.3, and I know this is 100% my own opinion but that very much felt like... a solid direction for the class. And then we got Seiryu is 4.5, and then in 5.0 we finally got confirmation that Kyo’s school of Wind and Water was open.

So while the lore is old at this point, they have consistently been adding to it and giving it direction.

No worries, I know the mobile site is hard to manage

While it's fair to point out that the situation with AST is slightly different, I think it still illuminates the point that just because something already exists in lore doesnt mean that any job with the same name has to be based on it. For all we know they could pull a Gunbreaker on us and the Geomancer we get is a vastly different iteration than the one they've shown before.

The thing with Kyokuho is also that with him and his school being involved in the AST Quests I doubt he'd play a role in any possible GEO Quests as the time bubble only goes so far and I don't see them locking progression on one job behing progression on another. So they'd effectively have to come up with something (or rather someone) else anyway.

But I digress, this is all opinion and hope. I like the Feng Shui direction they have been going opposed to trying to fit every element in. It would feel very red mage to me. And I know they are different classes and different thematically. But I’ve spent 3 years playing a caster that is using (almost) all the elements, not exactly eager for them to put it a different variation of it. Kind of my same views on getting a second healer with anything involving Aero/Stone.

You see, thats the irony: I fear basing GEO on using only three elements again would end up giving us Alternate-Element-BLM or DPS-Conjurer, neither of which seem fun to me.
The more the Devs have to work with the more unique they can go, is what I believe.
And for the record, I like the Feng Shui-Direction as well, I'm just not sure it necessarily precludes the inclusion of more elements.

All that said, this all hinges on the Devs deciding to create GEO in the first place, which I'm not entirely convinced is going to happen. We'll just have to wait and see, I guess.

[MirronTulaxia]

I think an important part about any sort of Geomancer that we see is that we know Kyokuho isn't a full one. The guy wasn't as talented as his grandfather. So any changes they want to make to Geomancer could just become Kyokuho pulling information from other areas to try to supplement the job, like he wanted to do with Astrologian.

[SeikishiYuuki]

No worries, I know the mobile site is hard to manage

While it's fair to point out that the situation with AST is slightly different, I think it still illuminates the point that just because something already exists in lore doesnt mean that any job with the same name has to be based on it. For all we know they could pull a Gunbreaker on us and the Geomancer we get is a vastly different iteration than the one they've shown before.

The thing with Kyokuho is also that with him and his school being involved in the AST Quests I doubt he'd play a role in any possible GEO Quests as the time bubble only goes so far and I don't see them locking progression on one job behing progression on another. So they'd effectively have to come up with something (or rather someone) else anyway.



You see, thats the irony: I fear basing GEO on using only three elements again would end up giving us Alternate-Element-BLM or DPS-Conjurer, neither of which seem fun to me.
The more the Devs have to work with the more unique they can go, is what I believe.
And for the record, I like the Feng Shui-Direction as well, I'm just not sure it necessarily precludes the inclusion of more elements.

All that said, this all hinges on the Devs deciding to create GEO in the first place, which I'm not entirely convinced is going to happen. We'll just have to wait and see, I guess.

It would be really cool to see them implement the cycle of imbalance in Feng Shui or a build up system sorta like Samurai building up Sen where actions award a seal and spending them has effects based on how many you have, only instead of Sam Big dps buttons get more supportive ones like DNC and let Geo fill that roll of support DPS that RDM and SMN doesn't quite hit.

[BasicBlake]

With the hints at Beastmaster and Battle Medic in the Bozjan storyline, with the storyline being around Rabanastre, and the Zodiark story coming to an end.

And with how you actually get access to Zodiark in FF12 being a Geomancer, maybe we'll see a nod along the way in that direction.