As with its previous expansions, Final Fantasy XIV: Endwalker will feature two new jobs for players to sink their teeth into: the Healer job Sage, and the melee DPS job Reaper. While game director Naoki Yoshida had been teasing something along the lines of Reaper for some time now, the announcement of the Sage job was a bit more of a surprise, though certainly a welcome on. Now, it’s been revealed that the Healer job releasing in Endwalker was originally going to be Alchemist, not Sage.

In a recent interview with IGN, Naoki Yoshida spoke about the process of creating a new class for Final Fantasy XIV, revealing that the discussion typically starts around the weapon said class would use. Prior to locking down the plans to implement Sage, the team considered the idea of bringing in the Alchemist job, which led to the team theorizing how the class would work on the battleground. “Of course there were ideas about, like, ‘Oh, bring over Alchemist,’ and things like that,” Yoshida explained, “and when we thought about, ‘Okay, so what if we used Alchemist? What kind of weapon would they wield?’ Some of the initial ideas involved a sort of medical kit, though it was determined that a magic-wielder using a science-based weapon “would be weird.” The team also agreed that having the player essentially chuck potions at allies during battle would be “very difficult” to implement into the game.

Since the Final Fantasy XIV team wasn’t getting anywhere with Alchemist, it was then decided to work with a clean slate and come up with something more or less from scratch. One of the team members suggested using floating orbs that could be shaped into projectiles or “healing missiles,” which ended up becoming Sage’s flying weapons. One neat nuance that the team appreciated is that the weapons are sheathed on the player’s back, which “looks very sci-fi, but still, it looks very magical.”

For those curious, the Reaper job apparently came together very quickly, with development on the job only taking about 3 months since it revolved around a widespread desire for a scythe-wielding class. Sage, meanwhile, took about half a year to figure out due to the aforementioned difficulties. Players will be able to get their hands on both new jobs when Final Fantasy XIV: Endwalker releases on November 23rd of this year.

Final Fantasy XIV is currently available for PC and PS4, with the full PS5 version releasing on May 25.

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