Melee healer

[AgathaAllalong]

I really wish a melee healer similar to Holy Paladin from WoW would be added to this game. It would be cool if it had a 1-2-3 rotation just like tanks as well.

I could see concepts for either a pure hp or shield healer.

I know for sure that a 1-2-3 rotation would be a lot more fun than the current state of healing where you're just mashing glare/dosis/malefic/broil and reapplying a dot twice a minute...

[NemuNemu14]

A melee healer would be a lot of fun in my opinion! I'm just really unsure how the devs would go about making one considering the way they are with healers right now..

[GrimGale]

I know for sure that a 1-2-3 rotation would be a lot more fun than the current state of healing

Yes, but very, very marginally. 1-2-3 Rotation is second laziest filler, right behind 1 button spam. And if you're gonna give said healer 1-2-3 rotation and Nothing else for filler, it will end up being worse that what we already have, melee or not.

[P0W3RK1D]

A melee healer would be a lot of fun in my opinion! I'm just really unsure how the devs would go about making one considering the way they are with healers right now..

I mean, we already have something that could work as a melee healer (in theory) with a few adjustments.

Dancer; you wouldn't even need to change too much.
just make most of its attacks melee ranged, allow fourfold feathers to be spent on cure waltz, increase cure potency of cure waltz, and reduce cool down of free curing waltz to be viable, increase regen potency of improvisation, and maybe even allow the dancer to have 2 dance partners instead of one, and just like that you have a melee healer can be at the front lines close to the enemy to rack up feathers , stack cure waltzs, aoe buffs, and regen. (and i can almost guarantee it would be more fun than any of the 4 healers we have now)

[Absurdity]

While potentially being fun it's very unlikely. Almost every higher end fight is, at best, designed for 4 melees around the boss so your shiny melee healer is losing dps uptime constantly, making them flat out worse than the healers we currently have.

Sure, SE could change how they do boss mechanics to fix that. But do you really think they'd go through all that effort for a single job, especially when healers can't even get necessary changes to their terrible gameplay loop after 2 years?

[Vatom]

I mean, we already have something that could work as a melee healer (in theory) with a few adjustments.

Dancer; you wouldn't even need to change too much.
just make most of its attacks melee ranged, allow fourfold feathers to be spent on cure waltz, increase cure potency of cure waltz, and reduce cool down of free curing waltz to be viable, increase regen potency of improvisation, and maybe even allow the dancer to have 2 dance partners instead of one, and just like that you have a melee healer can be at the front lines close to the enemy to rack up feathers , stack cure waltzs, aoe buffs, and regen. (and i can almost guarantee it would be more fun than any of the 4 healers we have now)

Ah reminds me of when everyone thought DNC would be a healer haha... memories

[Renathras]

I mean, we already have something that could work as a melee healer (in theory) with a few adjustments.

Dancer; you wouldn't even need to change too much.
just make most of its attacks melee ranged, allow fourfold feathers to be spent on cure waltz, increase cure potency of cure waltz, and reduce cool down of free curing waltz to be viable, increase regen potency of improvisation, and maybe even allow the dancer to have 2 dance partners instead of one, and just like that you have a melee healer can be at the front lines close to the enemy to rack up feathers , stack cure waltzs, aoe buffs, and regen. (and i can almost guarantee it would be more fun than any of the 4 healers we have now)

There are times that I wish FFXIV was a little less rigid so that crazy stuff like this would be possible.

And yes, I, too, remember when everyone thought DNC would be a healer...

[Liam_Harper]

SE just doesn't do innovation sadly. With skilled class designers and a dedicated healer designer even a melee healer might be possible, but the current team just isn't capable of it.

This is why they just scrapped Chemist entirely, because it required being creative and we got a recycled SCH clone with flashy visuals instead. Even Reaper is just a mish-mash of various other jobs and the same formula shuffled about a bit to feel different, with flashy animations.

[Duskane]

Ah reminds me of when everyone thought DNC would be a healer haha... memories

I also remember Yoshi p respond to people thinking it was a healer "why would it be?"

[Sebazy]

A melee orientated healer is something I've advocated for a bunch of times, WoL showed that the concept has a ton of merit and yeah, I too was guilty of falling into the trap of believing that DNC was going to be just that.

I don't think the positional thing is as big as roadblock as has been suggested though. If we take P4S P2 as an example, it has 3 moments where a 5th melee would be potentially forced out of range longer than the first 4.

Act 1's tower soak, Act 3's furthest towers might lose an extra GCD over the middle towers (Big maybe on this one), and lastly, Finale.

Most fights are like this really, even as a healer currently, I'm usually in melee range caneslapping away for that extra glare's worth of damage and as you go down through the tiers of content, the risks of being in melee range evaporate pretty quickly.

If it was my task to design the job, I'd be leaning leaning towards the melee elements being primarily for resource generation to fuel the classes oGCD kit. Falling back out of range would see the job have to fall back to inefficient GCDs. Viable and functional, just not optimal.

There's a ton of room for fresh ideas with this sort of concept and I really do hope that SE do consider thinking it over eventually.