You made the assumption that I'm only talking about abyssea, yet I never mentioned inside abyssea specifically. Additionally, the point about being pampered with mp in abyssea is moot; I've stated multiple times that the difference in mp costs between comparable regens and cures is negligible assuming the caster has access to both af3+2 pants and af2 body. The comment about sitting there waiting to spam cure really doesn't make any sense either, since you should be doing that regardless. Fact is that if you use cure you will have additional time to do these tasks because of all the -cure casting time equipment/merits available.
The question about regen is what is the benefit for using it over a equivalent mp cure that casts quicker?
Regardless of sub white mage will never be able to use phalanx on someone else, that was more of a comment of "take a redmage for your healing if you're fighting trivial stuff." As far as /rdm vs /sch, they're both good subs depending on personal play style. Using /rdm as a sub gives a white mage more raw mp and gives full time access to dispel (mab, fast cast, blah blah), while /sch gives more utility with light arts + stratagems and more timely bursts of mp with sublimation. Both are excellent subs for white mage, and while I do tend to use /sch most of the time I find that /rdm (and occasionally /blm) is equally useful.
But your comment about using regen for occasional hits from light to moderate AoE damage makes me wonder what content your talking about. The problem I have with this, outside of you saying again that I'm a whm noob, is that you don't know when a person is going to be taking a lot of hits, AoE or otherwise.
"Over curing" is using healing in excess of what the target needs to get back to full hp's, which can happen just as easilly with regen as with cures. Once again the mp difference between curing and using regen is negligible if the caster has af3+2 pants. If the person that I just cured gets hit again before the Solace stoneskin effect wears off then I just blew your regen mp efficiency numbers out of the water. I don't understand why this is such a hard concept to understand.
I'm an old G white mage, so don't try to pull that card on me. I'm talking being able to tell the difference between blaster and chaotic eye based on sound because you leveled up on toramas old school. While I don't play white mage at every event I do I have played every event as white mage, and I play white mage more then any two of my other jobs combined. With that in mind, we can put the entire "noob abyssea white mage" argument to rest now.
But since we're on the topic of HNM's, let me ask you what end game content you would actually use regen on? I'm not going to hope that regen heals enough hp's before the person gets hit again for sky NM's, sea NM's, most limbus runs, ground kings, ToAU kings, T2+ VMN's, most ZNM's, salvage NM's, Dynamsis, Einherjar, or Voidwatch NM's.
So out of anything that could be considered "end game," the only situations where regen would be useful is...sky/sea regular hall trash, weak limbus monsters and early salvage? What am I missing that catapults regen into a position where it can be compared to cure without it getting laughed off the table?
I'd also like to take this time to say that if a white mage is healing light/medium AoE damage that misery + cura + esuna can often blow any other mp efficiency out of the water, and that curaga can often be near a free spell with af3+2 pants.
The reason that the merits are important to the conversation is that without them regen doesn't get anywhere close to cure V's potency, and without that efficiency number to hang your hat on the regen argument becomes laughable. So besides just arguing the efficiency numbers it also becomes a question of opportunity cost of getting regen merits vs barspell merits.
And just for sake of completeness, once you start comparing mp cost of regen with a hp healed value of only 850 it gets blown out of the water by cure spells.
If your shell asks you to come white mage then it's probably because they know you'll come white mage without crying about it, just like my linkshell often asks me to come white mage. That in itself isn't validating your stance on regen.
I'm comparing the two because you get to pick one (assuming you pick -cure casting time first). Without the regen merits the topic of regen mp efficiency becomes laughable, and I still consider it to be laughable even with them. But this is the question of opportunity cost: you only get to pick one, so which one with you get more or better use out of? That's why you can compare the two, because they form a character customization choice where you can only maximize one.
Ok, to sum up:
AF3+2 pants makes the mp efficiency negligible between the two. If the solace stoneskin is on when the person is next hit then it pushes the mp efficiency argument in favor of curing.
The mp efficiency argument can only be made if the person takes regen merits over barspell merits. Otherwise cure blows regen out.
Cure heals all the hp's instantly, and it casts much faster then regen.
While this may be harder to quantify, another issue with regen is more support classes outside of abyssea. If someone is missing a ~cure 3 worth of hp's, many redmages and bards that I do things with will top them off, which makes throwing the regen in the first place a waste of mp.
So with that concise set of reasons that cure is better than regen, I'm asking you what you are specifically fighting that makes regen such a useful tool. Educate me.


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