Battle Balance Adjustment: Cure Potency

[Daniel_Hatcher]

Do you ever get tired of being a one-trick pony?

OP is OP, deal with it.

If you genuinely think BLU should be a better healer than DNC, RDM or SCH (especially). Shame on you.

[Neisan_Quetz]

Except that isn't what he was asking at all. You really are being inane if you think Blu is OP.

[Economizer]

By the way, RDM can get significantly more curepot than BLU even without weapons. It's not SE's fault if your Magic Fruits outpace your Cure 4s in per-cure output and it hasn't been for a while now.

Sorry to burst your bubble, but a Blue Mage that gears for it is a powerful healer.

Blue Mage can get 32% cure potency in gear (28% without add-on augments, but you can cap in Abyssea while still doing procs). We'll assume 150 Healing Magic, 90 MND/VIT from a terribly stated out BLU who only focused on cure potency.

We'll compare to a RDM with 50% cure potency, 150 MND, 80 VIT, and capped Healing Magic.

The Blue Mage will get Cure 43, Cure II 122, Cure III 256, Cure IV 510, Healing Breeze 233 (AoE), Wild Carrot 242, Magic Fruit 574, Plenilune Embrace 719, and White Wind (AoE).

The Red Mage will get Cure 52, Cure II 147, Cure III 306, Cure IV 618.

For stats that were terribly slanted in the Red Mage's favor, this is incredibly disappointing for the Red Mage.

The reason that White Mage dominates healing is mostly because of the ability to spam several large cures in a short amount of time without burning through a ton of MP. (e.g. If you think Cure VI is a reason White Mage is good at healing, you are mentally deficient, and if you think WHM being able to cast a Cure IV for 108 points more would make a big difference if White Mage lost Cure V, you'd also be similarly lacking mental capacity on a scientifically proven scale.)

Basically, having two more large cures (which are more MP efficient then the Red Mage's Cure IV) then the Red Mage is what will make the difference, and make the Blue Mage a better healer currently.

Considering that more and more things these days are able to be handled with just Cure III/IV (and many more would be able to be handled if there was a Cure IV a and Cure IV b for recast purposes) this further skews things in the favor of the Blue Mage.

The basic conclusion is that Blue Mage is the second best healer in the game, provided that they are set for healing (note that this is not a statement that Blue Mage is unbalanced or not, merely statement of about Blue Mage being the second most powerful healer as of right now).

[Camate]

Howdy!

Here are some responses from the development team to questions regarding the cure potency adjustments.

Was receiving benefits from stacking MND put off?

After looking into various possibilities such a MND and healing magic skill itself, we decided to go with adjustments to healing magic skill after considering the benefits this would give to jobs that possess this skill. MND affects cure potency more than in the past and the effect will remain as it is.

Will there be any changes to the success rate of removing Death?

With the current system, the higher the healing magic skill, the higher the success rate will be. However, to balance this with the rate of success of Holy Water, there is no 100% success rate even if your skill is very high.

Will the values of blue magic-type healing spells also be increased?

Since the main focus of this adjustment is for Cure–Cure VI, there will be no changes to blue magic spell’s cure potency.

With this adjustment, when using Cure IV with +50% cure potency, you can cure for around 850 HP, so it would be really nice if you could lower the amount of enmity gained after curing.

Since a fundamental rule of battle is that enmity increases as the amount of HP you restore increases, after considering the relationship of Cure V and Cure VI, this rule is being maintained. It would be best to mitigate this increase with Tranquil Heart and equipment that decreases enmity.

[Economizer]

Was wondering when this would be translated, I almost said something about it but I didn't understand it clearly enough before and was being cautious.

After looking into various possibilities such a MND and healing magic skill itself, we decided to go with adjustments to healing magic skill after considering the benefits this would give to jobs that possess this skill. MND affects cure potency more than in the past and the effect will remain as it is.

I would like to reiterate my thanks for making Healing Magic Skill useful.

With the current system, the higher the healing magic skill, the higher the success rate will be. However, to balance this with the rate of success of Holy Water, there is no 100% success rate even if your skill is very high.

The last time we got a statement about this was some time ago and I got the impression that Healing Magic didn't affect removal rates. This has been backed up the the seeming lack of removal rate difference between myself and someone subbing White Mage... and my skill is currently two points from cap.

Since a fundamental rule of battle is that enmity increases as the amount of HP you restore increases, after considering the relationship of Cure V and Cure VI, this rule is being maintained. It would be best to mitigate this increase with Tranquil Heart and equipment that decreases enmity.

If enmity control becomes an issue with the increased cure amount (as in people are still complaining about it a few months after it gets implemented) please consider having higher Healing Magic Skill increase the effectiveness of Tranquil Heart by some amount.

[SpankWustler]

The last time we got a statement about this was some time ago and I got the impression that Healing Magic didn't affect removal rates. This has been backed up the the seeming lack of removal rate difference between myself and someone subbing White Mage... and my skill is currently two points from cap.

I'm guessing, if skill has or should have any effect, either the cap is very low or the effect is simply broken and no Development Bro has ever noticed. The latter has been noticed with more and more difficult-to-eyeball stuff, such as additional effects on weapons and Blue Magic, so it wouldn't surprise me.

[Mageoholic]

If enmity control becomes an issue with the increased cure amount (as in people are still complaining about it a few months after it gets implemented) please consider having higher Healing Magic Skill increase the effectiveness of Tranquil Heart by some amount.

Could always add a couple ranks of the tier at a lower level If this change affects all levels then low level healers could find themselves pulling hate more than they would like. Could make sense to add another tier, and maybe bring the total amount of enmity reduction from TH to 1.4 or so to offset some of the 1.4 increase to baseline healing done. (on RDM and SCH maybe, leave WHM off additional tiers as they have C5.)

[Dragoy]

Will there be any changes to the success rate of removing Death?

With the current system, the higher the healing magic skill, the higher the success rate will be. However, to balance this with the rate of success of Holy Water, there is no 100% success rate even if your skill is very high.

I guess this is about Doom, instead of Death, really, even if the end-result is pretty much the same? ^^;

Either way, I will never accept that Holy Water and Cursna only have a possibility of removing the effect.
It makes no sense so far as I can tell.

While we are at it, why not implement this to each, and every one of the detrimental effects.

Paralyna -> 15% chance of removing Paralysis.
Blindna -> 15% chance of removing Blindness.
Raise -> 15% chance of removing K.O. status.

Et cetera...

You'll catch my drift, I'm sure.
I have played every Final Fantasy game from number 1 to 12, and 14, including the 'spin-offs' and whatnots like Mystic Quest, and I can't remember such an effect for a medicine/spell from them.
If there is even one, I'm sure someone will notify me about it, but it sure as Death did not make an impact enough for me to remember it right now, so I doubt it!

I know it will not happen, but I would implore you to reconsider on changing this into something that makes sense.
That is, either have a 100% rate of removing the effect, or, change all the others to be the same (meaning Paralyna and the rest has a chance to remove the effect that is desired to be gone).

[Nightfyre]

OP is OP, deal with it.

If you genuinely think BLU should be a better healer than DNC, RDM or SCH (especially). Shame on you.

Evidently you can't read.

Sorry to burst your bubble, but a Blue Mage that gears for it is a powerful healer.

Burst what bubble? I'm aware BLU is a capable healer and I have very good BLU cure sets that allow me to realize that potential. You seem to have missed the point of that statement, which was to point out that Saevel's complaint about per-cure healing capacity is entirely a product of their own gear choices rather than what each job is actually capable of.

[Economizer]

You seem to have missed the point of that statement, which was to point out that Saevel's complaint about per-cure healing capacity is entirely a product of their own gear choices rather than what each job is actually capable of.

Then your statement's point was nonsensical, has nothing to do with actual healing, and is just about making an unimportant number larger. Might as well be talking a White Mage into spamming Cure VI because it cures more.

It doesn't matter an ounce if you can heal 44 more HP on a spell because you have 20% more cure potency gear when the guy also has two more spells on separate recast timers (not to mention that one heals for over one hundred HP more so that throws out the flawed big numbers argument). It doesn't matter if you have 20% more cure potency if half his spells are more MP efficient even after that extra potency is taken into account.

Being technically right about a useless number is pointless if the spirit of the argument is lost. In this case the spirit is that regardless of gear limitations BLU can push higher cure amounts in a shorter period of time then Red Mage can. Cure IV might be able to cure 44 more points then some Blue Mage spell you are comparing it too, but that's just a pointless number in a vacuum away from actually doing healing work.

If I wanted to go after a pointless technicality that is so meaningless by the way, I could have and I'd still be right. A Blue Mage can sub Scholar, get 370 skill by popping Light Arts and push (with the same stats I mentioned earlier) a Magic Fruit for 650 HP, a win over the superiority stat boosted Red Mage's 618 Cure IV in the example. For the example I figured that I'd consider having another cure on a timer would be more valuable then having some meaningless number on a cure that was already more MP efficient, which is why I didn't bring this up.

I hope this brings some enlightenment. Blue Mage is the #2 healer currently. I don't want people to have misconceptions about this.