"With their aggressive steps, these thewy terpsichoreans would weave forbidden magicks upon themselves and their enemies, producing results rivaling those of even the most powerful sorcerous cants. The popularity of this profession reached its peak during the Great War, when dancers were common additions to allied army units fighting on the front lines."
Dancers are capable healers in Final Fantasy XI. While it may not be wise for them to be the main healer of a group until level 74, two functioning together can, in most cases, eliminate the need for an MP based healer. Also, Dancer is one of the only jobs offering the Dual Wield trait, which it gains at level 20. The other jobs are Ninja at 10 and Blue Mage, with the proper spells set, at 80.
Dancers have strong curative abilities that are unique to their class.
Instead of using MP to use dances, Dancers use a moderately small amount of TP, which is gained each time they hit or are hit by a monster with a normal attack.
Dancers offer unique debuffs that help all party members.
Dancer is a new job from Wings of the Goddess. Dancers are known to be quite efficient healers and support characters. Below are listed some viable subjobs and reasoning at this point.
Ninja offers the Utsusemi spell, making it a popular subjob choice for many jobs. Utsusemi helps dancers dodge attacks, a great boon because their healing capabilities, combined with their damage dealing necessity, can draw large amounts of enmity at times. As with all situations, however, a Ninja subjob can be demanding to keep up due to a constantly required supply of tools to cast Utsusemi.
In the June 2010 update, Dancers were given the Dual Wield job ability. Since then, some Dancers have switched from Dancer/Ninja to Dancer/Samurai, to help them gain TP with Samurai abilities like Meditate. However, many Dancers still prefer Ninja as their subjob because of Utsusemi.
Dancers have a decent hand to hand capacity. At least until level 20, a Monk subjob grants the Dancer access to Martial Arts which will greatly lower the weapon delay of hand to hand weapons, and using fist weapons grants them the Combo ability, useful as early on Dancers use minimal TP and dagger abilities aren't very strong early on. On the downside, a Dancer's skill in hand to hand weapons is absolutely dismal, and after a short time daggers become much more useful.
Edit
Concept art.
Concept art.
Artwork.
Artwork.
.png){kind=small}
A Mithra Dancer in Artifact Armor.
Artwork of a Dancer's equipment.
