Remove or decrease race penalties

[Economizer]

Try laying down a few curaga3-4's, remove debuffs, and maintain a haste cycle on a Galka MP pool outside of [A]/VW without taking a breather.

Inb4 /RDM
It's bad, and you should feel bad for thinking about it.

Okay, let me tell you why that's bad and you should feel bad.

First off, you should be /SCH unless you have a very good reason. It has better MP management, and is the only way to get the best barspells possible, and the easiest way to get Enhancing in general. Not to mention faster recast times, which are more important then the slight casting time reduction advantage. Toss in the occasional Penury or Celerity and you have the single best subjob for White Mage, hands down. In comparison, /RDM is bad, and you should feel bad thinking about it.

You know how much a Curaga 3/4 costs for a White Mage when properly used? 0 MP. If you don't know why this is, stop playing White Mage now or start wearing the right pants. At best you'd be undercuring for your MP refunds because your party is full of idiots who don't under the concept of party positioning (y'know the folks, the ones who don't understand that "Gather together. Shellra." is code for "STAY RIGHT HERE"), you're using the wrong tier, or just the inevitable slight mismatch that still leaves the Curaga spell costing less then a single target cure.

Refresh sources gives you 20 MP/minute per 1MP/tic given. Sublimation charges 3MP/tic, but has a 30 second time when it isn't charging between usage and setting it to charge again, but charges to 25% of your max HP. Mathing that out, that's a 252 MP charge for a Tarutaru's base 1011 vs a 364 MP charge for Galka, favoring Galka for Sublimation. This would be about 53MP/minute for a Tarutaru's base HP vs. 55MP/minute for a Galka's base HP.

Refresh is 3MP/tic for cases in which you have support (although in this case, you can probably delegate Haste cycles so you can do the more important work), which will give slightly better numbers then Sublimation with 60MP/minute (44MP/minute if self cast).

Refresh from gear should at least be 2MP/tic from your body piece, although if the situation is low on refresh/temps (such as the hypothetical you suggest), you'd also be wearing some more gear to bring it up 1~2MP/tic, and macroing in other gear to bring it up to 7MP/tic when casting things other then cures or barspells. This would range you from 60MP/minute to a full 140MP/minute, so I'd imagine you'd be getting enough to give a low number of 75MP/minute (with some real work getting squeezing you even more then that).

Haste costs 36 MP if you are doing it right, and if you are in situation where you need to cover the full party with it that somehow doesn't have someone else doing it so you can spam your almost-free cures, that's 72 MP/minute. Cure costs are a bit more ticky to calculate with the refund and not being sure how much you're dumping in a minute, but based on information back from the Cure Formula Changes thread, we'll just assume something like 20HP/MP (which is fairly low unless you think Cure VI is your goto spell) without calculating cureskin, then assuming that your tank is losing something like 1000 HP/minute not counting AoE moves the mob does to your group (which are either or almost free to cure), that would cost something like 50MP/minute to cover. Compare the rough gear refresh and sublimation totals of about 130MP/minute against the rough guess of a need for 122MP/minute and you'll see that if you're not gearing like a dualbox trashmage (but by no means geared like a king) you'll do okay.

If you really have troubles with that, such as for short fights where you have to dump absurd amounts of MP, you can open a fight with a full charge of Sublimation boosted with gear and top it off with some max MP gear to open with, but I can't really think of many fights outside of Voidwatch or Abyssea that require much of that, and the ones that do would be well served by having a Bard or even just a Corsair to make things easier. Any on the ones that do, I don't think 467 MP more at the start of a fight is going to change things - since I busted out the math, any retorts I see should at least have an example of a fight that requires six people, can't have a Bard, or even a Corsair, or even a Red Mage who for whatever reason can only cast Haste and Refresh II (seriously, 2~3 minutes into the fight, a Red Mage covering Haste cycles and Refresh IIing you would negate any advantage a Tarutaru has in terms of an MP pool)

You can't gear to have 450 more HP for the whole fight if you're the tank, but you can gear to have 470 more MP at the start of a fight. A Galka might have to work slightly harder, but in no case should that MP break them at 99.

-

In the interest of fairness, since someone brought up possible solutions in regard to making a Tarutaru's max MP actually matter, I'd like to counter with talk about things that make a Galka's max HP not matter as much - Migawari: Ichi, Earthen Armor, and SSentinel's Scherzo come to mind. Of course, these abilities are straight up better with more max HP, but I suppose they at least exist.

[Kincard]

Having chosen Tarutaru years ago for both aesthetics and melee/mage considerations years ago, I would really love for this to be done, even moreso than a race/gender change system. I'm attached to my Taru avatar now and don't really want to change my race. Aside from melee/mage being a pretty useless combination in most situations, the idea went out the window as soon as Dancer was introduced, so any advantage I had for playing a melee/mage combo is completely nonexistant now. There's no way I could've known all this at the time I made my character, so I would really love it if either:

1. Stat differences eased between races
or
2. Allow the choice of race and a stat spread (Decided at character creation and only changeable through payment like the race change idea). That is, I can play a Taru with Galkan stats, or a Elvaan with Tarutaru stats.

As far as base stats go, I'd say the only one that makes a massive difference is DEX, because of how the stat spikes towards the end of the curve, and of course only in certain circumstances.

[saevel]

The stat differences between the races has actually gone down since 75. The number is bigger but the percentage is smaller. The sole exception seems to be HP/MP which continued their growth at previous rates.

11 STR difference from the strongest to the weakest is small potatoes.

Now HP / MP on the other hand is an entirely different story. MP restoration is more important then max MP in a similar way that HP restoration is better then maximum HP. Max MP is now long a mage can go without support, its the buffer time they have. A taru WHM will have a longer period they can go without support then an Elvann / Galka WHM, though both will need support eventually. In the same way an Elvann WAR has a longer grace period from damage -> cure then a Taru WAR. It's for this reason that I went 15/15 HP merits and started packing a PDT/DT set, to extend my life expectancy in a battle.

[Kincard]

HP restoration is not better than max HP if we're talking about regen on equipment, which is the whole problem. Aside from the fact that mages actually have opportunity to idle in their refresh while melees don't get chances to idle in regen during combat (not that it'd matter- mages idles in 4+ refresh even with average gear, melees have to stack a ridiculous amount of gear to get maybe 20/tick at most? Each point of MP is worth like 10x HP), restoration doesn't matter when SE decides to make all endgame monsters do ridiculous amounts of damage now. A Galka NIN is at 1600 HP at 99 (Before merits) and a Taru is at 1200, with the rest sitting around 1400. That 200-400 HP is more than enough to make the difference between getting one shotted and surviving, so some way of changing this would be welcome. I'd be more than happy to trade away some max MP and/or INT so I can get some more HP.

EDIT:

Perfect timing too, Matsui just made a post about this specific topic, because JP Tarus are thinking the same thing...he thinks the effects are very far reaching and quite a major change if it's considered, so he has to think about it for a while.

Good to know it's being considered!

[Kristal]

What about racial merits? You can spent 5 upgrades of 30 points each.
If you are a taru, you can spent points on hume, mithra, galka and elvaan. Put 1 point into galka, and your character will have 80% taru stats, 20% galka stats. Put em all in galka, and your stats will be fully galka while still looking like a taru.
If you decide that it's not to your liking, drop the merits and you got your original stats back for the race.

[Mayoyama]

God.. google translate really didnt translate that post well.... xD But I got the general idea from my limited JP skills

[Kincard]

That idea would work, yeah- would allow variance between how much people want stats to look like, too. I like it.

At least we don't have a SE representative coming in to tell us to wear RSE gear to make up the difference whilst totally missing the point, lol.

God.. google translate really didnt translate that post well.... xD But I got the general idea from my limited JP skills

He's basically just saying that it's something that's a pretty big change so he has to think about it for a while (There's some conflicting opinions on the JP boards just as there are here), and how closing the gap between races would also require a consideration of how the stats curve from 1-99 VS respective level content and not just at the cap. I'm sure we'll get an official translation in a few hours.

[Mirage]

Mmmaybe. Being fully a galka while actually a taru might be a bit much. Maybe 5 merits could make you a half-galka instead. Still lots of hp to be gained.

[Kincard]

I'm sure if they were going to do the idea it'd be a simple "one race's stats or the other" sort of thing, since Matsui brought up the whole "balance from 1-99" aspect of it. It'd be weird to level up from 98 to 99 (or 74 to 75 I guess) and then instantly have my MP pool drop to half of what it was, so having to rebalance stats for 1-99 for a 2/5 Galka, 1/5 Mithra, 2/5 Taru character probably isn't something they'll want to invest time in.

[Byrth]

I'm of a similar opinion and posted about it here: http://forum.square-enix.com/ffxi/th...maging-attacks

The gap between race max HPs needs to shrink, and ideally player stats would converge by 99 instead of just paralleling each other since 75. This is very similar to the merit-uncapping debate, in that it will remove artificial uniqueness from your character but overall make the game easier to balance because it removes variability. I can see why monsters one-shot tarus. They wanted to have monsters that hit a galka for 80% of its HP in appropriate damage down gear so the next hit would kill them if they didn't get a cure. The problem is that tarus only have 75% of a galka's HP to start with so they can't do events where galkas are supposed to be fearing for their lives.