[dev1024] Healing Magic skill importence.

[Economizer]

As it stands healing magic skill has almost NO use outside of the standerd chance of being interrupted and very MINOR increase to cure potency, but let's be honest, unless it is a significant amount added you won't notice it, and obviously no one would ever THINK of meriting healing magic skill, my suggestion is maybe give this skill some updates to make it worth using, or rather, notice that it is actually there, because someone with say 105 healing magic skill isn't going to see a huge difference from someone with caped healing skill (which is actually hard to cap)

I actually have capped Healing Magic skill, and while I did nuke undead while trying to get it capped, most of it came from a long period of cure spamming people in Abyssea for NMs. I wouldn't say it is hard to cap, but it is a skill that takes time to cap if you don't want to put the effort into it.

Luckily for anyone who has ever burned a dual box mule to 90 overnight, having a decent amount of mind and capped cure potency - not hard things to do by any measure - will only lose you around 80 points of HP cured from a Cure V, even if you have zero skill.

The effects of Healing Magic skill are more apparent if you have low mind actually, or if you happen to be using spells that actually are affected by the spell, like Blue Magic healing spells. If you really want to see the pain of having low healing magic skill, try dropping 40 points of Mind with capped Healing Magic, and without. Losses in Mind are magnified about three fold if you don't have any Healing Magic skill.

Of course, anyone with capped Healing Magic skill isn't going to be ditching Mind for anything, because they are either a White Mage, a Red Mage, or have access to instant skillups.

Also, while it does help to floor interrupts, it does not do it enough, considering how useless the skill is outside of looking pretty when it is capped.

At 1st i thought this affected the chance of doom being removed, but i have seen no substantial evidence that it helped it in anyway.

Unless I didn't make sense of the translation work SE released, SE said in the White Mage manifesto that not only does Healing Magic skill not affect the chance, they won't make it improve the chance, as they think it is fine. Considering few people on the forums actually play White Mages, and Scholars were too busy complaining about not being able to replace White Mages, we didn't get the level of rage that you saw on the Thief forums when SE said something that wasn't true (the chance to remove is not fine).

If you can fix summoning magic skill for SMN that used to be useless i'm sure something can be done about healing magic skill.

Since any job can get C+ skill +1 in Healing Magic by subbing Scholar, or B+ if they have native skill in Healing Magic, I doubt SE will actually make Healing Magic skill that much more useful.

Still, having over 300 skill (basically any job with Healing Magic natively, or anyone subbing Scholar) should drastically improve Healing Magic for every point above 300. This would make native healers more powerful, but more importantly, make gear and merits actually useful.

Yep, WHM is definitely not a strong enough healer yet.

Ignoring the obvious QQ, this change would help non-White Mage healers out too. The only reason it is even posted here is because White Mage is supposed to be the strongest healer, by far.

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Now here is the question - at what point does Healing Magic skill become useful?

If every point of Healing Magic skill above 300 made cures cure +X much more, on top of the current cure formula, where X = (Healing Magic Skill -300)/4 * (Tier of Cure), would this be a big enough leap? Or would it have to divide the skill by 3? 2? 1?

Or do we have to give a straight boost to potency, such as (Healing Magic Skill)/25 = X, where X is +X% Cure Potency that ignores the cap? Would this be a big enough leap? Or would we have to divide the skill by 20? 15? 10?

Or what if cures and status removals had cast/recast time affected by Healing Magic skill, such as (Healing Magic Skill)/10 = X, where X =% Fast Cast added, ignoring cap?

What's our goal in getting Healing Magic improved, what would be a good number?