Quote Originally Posted by Naria View Post
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)