Light based damage spells.

[Crimson_Slasher]

Old, nearly dead thread, yeah kinda a necrobump but i tossed on some MAB gear on my whm/rdm (90/45) And loaded some mnd in open slots and hoofed it out to west ronfraure to see some unresisted nukes, it was dissapointing but not totally aweful, but MAB is not the only factor in the situation.

Gear is Apollo's staff, staff strap, incantor stone, artemis' medal, moldavite earing, hecate's earing, Twilight cloak, Eradico mitts, Diamond ring (+2 mnd aug), Star ring, Searing Cape, Penitent's rope, Jet Seraweels, Blessed Pumps.

Overall, 86+23Mnd (109 mnd), Skill of 287 (dont get a lot of demand to cast banish/flash/holy/repose in abyssea...)
and at the time of this test, it is darksday, with moonphase of Waxing Gibbous (64%), with all that in mind, i am nearly at 50 MAB in gear. I will conduct 10 casts of each spell on single target rabbits near the gate. I do NOT have signet either.

Banish; 109, 122, 109, 122, 122, 122, 109, 122, 122, 122. So its likely to cap at 122 damage with my current MAB, darksday lowering it to 109 on proc.
Banish II; 325, 362, 362, 362, 362, 325, 362, 362, 325, 362. Again, cap at 362 damage, lowered to 325 on darksday proc.
Banish III; 678, 609, 664, 678, 678, 609, 678, 678, 678, 678. 678 cap, 609 due to darksday, and i assume the 664 is eithe a darksday proc + magic crit, or a partial resist/miss...

Now with holy, ill do atleast 2 with cures prior and solace up, the rest, just with regular nukes.
Holy; (871 cure)621, 394, 440, 394, 440, 440, 394, 440, 440, (968 cure)686. So 440 cap, 394 with darksday, and gives about 188-20% damage from the cure to overhead damage i estemate.

Anyway, this is outside abyssea, hope this shows out the potency (or lack there of) that banish and holy spells have.

[Mirage]

I think the banish spell and holy should have the damage potential of the equally tiered blm magics, but only be that strong when it's against undeads. The small selection of offensive spells, and the recast timers of them would already be enough to limit WHMs total damage potential compared to blm. Where BLM has several high powered nukes to switch between that they can cast with good efficiency on almost all mobs, whm would be limited to good damage only on undeads, and only when the holy and banish 3 (or 4 if we got that) cooldown was up.

Of course, to get big numbers, whm should have to get a decent nuking build, not just use the normal cure potency gear they have.

[Bubeeky]

Our spell's effectiveness against undead in general needs an overhaul....cures don't even do like half damage against undead, which is retarded in my opinion since we should be foremost in undead fighters, right after Paladins

[Teraniku]

I never understood why Holy required so much MP to cast. I does maybe the same if not less damage than Banish III most of the time, and has one hell of a recast.

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I always thought they balanced the mp cost of Holy with the speed of the casting.

[Bubeeky]

I always thought they balanced the mp cost of Holy with the speed of the casting.

unfortunatly no, it still costs a rediculous amount of mp, considering the crap damage it does....unless it's been powered up by a significant number of cures or w/e, it barely does a number of damage greater than the number of the mp cost :/

[Economizer]

What would be really nice is if Cure spells didn't do half damage to undead, considering that the things can already resist on top of that. Being able to only do significant damage to one type of mob wouldn't be too bad for other magic damage jobs, and it isn't like Black Mage is the only heavy magic damage job anymore anyways. Additionally, more Banish nukes wouldn't hurt, as they would probably be fairly weak anyways. Currently I mainly use Banish/Holy for skillups and managing mobs while PLing people, and the occasional killshot snipe (the first time I ever fought Promanthia, we would have wiped at 1% if it wasn't for a well timed Holy).

Of course, White Mage getting more damage potential is mostly important if other jobs continue to get more healing potential, since adding more healing to White Mage to compensate may be difficult.

More importantly then even getting better nukes, I'd like to see Reposega. Repose is almost never resisted for me thanks to its high accuracy and my near-cap Divine Magic, even without magic accuracy gear. Seeing an AOE version of this would be nice, especially since Bard, the traditional light based sleep job, is getting a better AOE sleep, meaning we wouldn't be stepping on anyone's toes. Personally, I'd mainly use it for bypassing shadows, and sleeping groups of undead, since there are usually more capable sleepers in my party. Additionally, I think Paladin deserves Repose, since Dark Knight gets Sleep, Sleep 2 and Break.

[SpankWustler]

More importantly then even getting better nukes, I'd like to see Reposega. Repose is almost never resisted for me thanks to its high accuracy and my near-cap Divine Magic, even without magic accuracy gear. Seeing an AOE version of this would be nice, especially since Bard, the traditional light based sleep job, is getting a better AOE sleep, meaning we wouldn't be stepping on anyone's toes.

This. So much this. I have high hopes for an AoE sleep for White Mage, now that Bard is getting a second tier of Horde Lullaby. They could remove the magic accuracy bonus if they want, I don't care. I'd love it anyway.

[Retsujo]

If I remember correctly - in terms of cure damage against undead - Divine Seal's bonus to cure-based spells actually took that extra bit away from damage dealt. I don't know if that's still the case as it's just a fleeting memory now, but I always thought it was weird that it worked to make cures less damaging against undead.

[saevel]

Banish spells use the exact same formula as the elemental nukes, except they use dMND instead of dINT. Actually you should be thankfuly, the original Banish spells used dINT, MND did nothing for them. SE basically took Aero and put a long recast with "light" based damage. That whole "undead" thing was added later when SE decided to make them use dMND instead of dINT.

Anyhow, the reason most WHM's banish's seem to small is WHM's normally don't carry around MAB gear nor equip +Light Damage / MAB atma's. Otherwise Banish III does comparable damage to Stone III
http://wiki.ffxiclopedia.org/wiki/Ca...g_Magic_Damage

Stone III
92mp
Base V of 210
M multiplier of 1.5

Banish III
96mp
M multiplier of 1.5
Base V of 198

Now saying this, I fully believe WHM's should have Banish IV, V, Banishga III, Banishja and Holy II. You guys are supposed to be the kings of divine based light damage, its not used often but it's something that does exist, the holy nukes shouldn't end at tier III.

Basically as a WHM/RDM with HQ Light staff, Beyond / Allure / Holy Mountain, and tons of MND / MAB gear, you should be hitting big Banish IIIs. The utility of this is questionable but it ~is~ possible, there is nothing with WHM or Banish that prevents it from doing high damage. SE just needs to add bigger spells for christs sake.

[Malacite]

Long long time ago back when FFXI was only in Japan, Holy had comparable damage to the other AM, plus it instacasts. Blms hated it. It was nerfed. The Solace/Misery update was an attempt to throw whm a bone with out angering blms (one which I am very happy with). Personally, before a change to the dmg/debuff formulas I would like to see whm get Banish IV and Banishga III (I mean come on SE smn has banish IV but whm does not?)

O rly? Well, there are lots of things that changed before the game made it over here - for instance spells originally did not get resisted, that was a rather huge nerf to mages in general but especially BLM.


As to the OP's remarks of Banish doing crap damage, I have to disagree. It's far from spectacular, but Banish IS capable of dealing decent damage provided your divine skill is capped or near-capped.
Particularly in Abyssea, I have seem some dazzling Holy - I managed to fire one off on PLD (with Atma & Divine Emblem mind you) for nearly 2400 to a Faunus Wyvern. On WHM with Atma I tend to hit up around 800~900 average, 1600+ easily with Solace bonus.

Holy is pretty inefficient for it's MP no argument there, but the increases in MP cost for Holy II and Banish IV over their previous tiers is much, much smaller compared to elemental spells and that's nice.


I don't think that Holy should ever go back to dealing the kind of damage it used to do, just because that's not really WHM's purpose except vs Undead. It would be nice if WHM & PLD could really stick it to undead enemies with their Divine Magic, perhaps a new trait that's exclusive to them? (50+ so it can't be subbed). It's fine in the offline games, but in an MMO setting Divine Magic should only really be devasting to undead/demon mobs (basically anything undeniably evil and/or unnatural)