After the Live Letter that announced Phantom Jobs and confirmed that Geomancer would be one of them, I started wondering what Geomancer might look like as a non-phantom job in a future expansion, and while the ideas I had didn't really fit Geomancer I still thought they were fun ideas if a different name got put on them, so here they are.
Job name: Animist
Weapons: Bells (as a holdover from Geomancer, subject to change)
Role: Magical Ranged DPS
Basic idea: Use damage-over-time effects based on three different elements (the current draft has a fire one called Heatstroke, an ice one called Hypothermia and a wind one called Windshear), then use spells of the other elements (water, earth and lightning in this case) which gain bonuses based on which damage-over-time effects are applying, something like spreading the damage-over-time to different targets or dealing extra damage. It might also be worth limiting the number of these damage-over-time effects that can apply to a target at the same time.
Job Gauge: Elemental Gauge
This gauge is built by landing a spell of the opposite element to a damage-over-time effect applied to the target (for example, the water spell hitting an enemy with the fire effect). Various other abilities spend elemental gauge at a variety of different costs, and some of these could also be on a cooldown in addition to costing gauge. The current draft has the most powerful gauge-spender ability be named Shadowflare (as a Geomancer holdover), on a 2-minute cooldown and costing 1/4 of the gauge.
In terms of personal damage, I imagine this job doing more outside of raid buff windows than Red Mage or Summoner, but struggling to gain much of a benefit from those windows besides unloading as much gauge as possible while buffed. For its raid utility, I don't have it learning a Raise variant, but I could see it using a group damage buff as one of the gauge spenders, and potentially a defensive ability as well, which would be the only one of those the job has access to besides role actions.
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Job name: Animist
Weapons: Bells (as a holdover from Geomancer, subject to change)
Role: Magical Ranged DPS
Basic idea: Use damage-over-time effects based on three different elements (the current draft has a fire one called Heatstroke, an ice one called Hypothermia and a wind one called Windshear), then use spells of the other elements (water, earth and lightning in this case) which gain bonuses based on which damage-over-time effects are applying, something like spreading the damage-over-time to different targets or dealing extra damage. It might also be worth limiting the number of these damage-over-time effects that can apply to a target at the same time.
Job Gauge: Elemental Gauge
This gauge is built by landing a spell of the opposite element to a damage-over-time effect applied to the target (for example, the water spell hitting an enemy with the fire effect). Various other abilities spend elemental gauge at a variety of different costs, and some of these could also be on a cooldown in addition to costing gauge. The current draft has the most powerful gauge-spender ability be named Shadowflare (as a Geomancer holdover), on a 2-minute cooldown and costing 1/4 of the gauge.
In terms of personal damage, I imagine this job doing more outside of raid buff windows than Red Mage or Summoner, but struggling to gain much of a benefit from those windows besides unloading as much gauge as possible while buffed. For its raid utility, I don't have it learning a Raise variant, but I could see it using a group damage buff as one of the gauge spenders, and potentially a defensive ability as well, which would be the only one of those the job has access to besides role actions.
Continue reading...