RED_NOVA'S PROFILE

Thanks for the review! I'm glad Nia's personality and gimmicks were well-received. Pianotm did such a great job with her shennanigans that I had a big smile plastered across my face the entire time I was playing it.

In case anyone's interested, I'm about to start streaming these games on Twitch. Drop by if you've got the time: https://www.twitch.tv/annoyednova

I think I found the answer! I was going to respond to a lot of the good points that were brought up, but they've all given me so much to think about that responding to them all would take a novel. That's on me for not replying to this topic sooner. Oops.

I've been playing Etrian Odyssey Nexus, and I can point to the Arcanist class and say "Do this. This is cool!" Arcanist class is not a dedicated healer, but they can be built to both contribute to damage and supporting the party at the same time. See, the main function of the Arcanist is to drop one of a variety of magic Circles down on the field. At the end of each turn, the Circle will attempt to inflict a status ailment like paralysis or poison on all enemies and provide decent healing to the party until it wears out or is replaced by another Circle. For added flexibility, the Arcanist has skills that consume the Circle prematurely to either damage enemies or heal allies.

The Circle solution solves just about every problem I had with white mages listed in the original post. Not only will the Circle take care of healing automatically, but they can still contribute to the fight directly by applying status ailments and damaging enemies by consuming the circle if it isn't needed anymore. This extra step not only requires just enough thought from the player to keep them from falling into a monotonous slog without requiring battles to be overly challenging, but gives the class breathing room to have more utility in battle without sacrificing their role as the healer. In my mind, this makes the healer architype an interesting and fun class to use.

In addition to the Arcanist, there are a surprising number of classes in Nexus that can perform healing as a sub function without sacrificing their primary roles. I picked out Arcanist specifically because it's the next closest thing to a white mage other than the actual white mage class, but I highly recommend looking at Etrian Odyssey Nexus in general because there is a lot of cool ideas condensed into one game.

Thanks so much for the kind words, iddalai! Yeah, 7 years is a loooong time to be working on a single project. I'm just glad it's finally over.

And yeah, I try to make demos for my games when I can. I think it's important to be upfront with people about what kind of game it is.

What's the thief supposed to do? Steal their wounds?

...actually....