Healing Magic - A balanced approach?

As someone who plays conjurer and thaumaturge quite a bit, I had to agree with turning off the AoE on cure and sacrifice. An increase in the MP cost though, has made it nearly impossible to keep a party alive. I think what would work best is to leave the area of effect changes in place, and remove the increase in MP cost for cure and sacrifice.

You could also reduce the magic power for disciples of war, and the attack power for disciples of magic. It would eliminate a lot of imbalance I think you were trying to get rid of in the patch. (Maybe a bonus for abilities in your class?)

It's perfectly possible keep parties alive, until
1)you're using always cure 3 and curaga 2: then you doing it wrong
2)party members are sponges and should re-learn to play

that's all.

I agree with Grey the mp requirement for low rank spells is way too high they need to lower it or get most of MND -> mp ie xx MND => xx mp

but along with your #2 Yukikaze and even thoe its off topic, same goes for the previous battle system what was wrong with that...couldnt people re-learn to play to use the previous battle system?

I agree that the costs are a bit too high for the amount of healing I do. I've been playing CON/THM and put the majority of my points into Int/Mnd/Pie. From the first time I learned Cure, however, it's been doing pretty much the same amount of healing. It's gotten to the point where I'll just use Sacrifice instead (it heals FAR more, just over time) and Curaga is for emergencies (it takes a fifth of my MP!).

It's sad that I can toss elemental damage spells at the enemy all day long, but a few heals and I'm done. And if my friend is hurt so badly she needs healing, it's going to take two or three to get the job done (Cures, that is).

I'd much rather see Cure as a 'basic healing spell' because as it stands my friend keeps Second Wind, Aegis Boon, etc. on because it's just not efficient for the -caster- to do the healing.

Seems like it's better to prevent the damage (Protect, Shell, Stoneskin even) than try to heal it right now.

I agree with what yukikaze said. If you're having trouble keeping the group alive it's probably because the party is taking too much damage. I think a lot of people got too used to being able to charge into groups of mobs without worrying about it as DD classes or not even attempting to avoid tp attacks by mobs because healers had unlimited MP prepatch. I'm still seeing tanks facing mobs like puks towards the party and getting the whole party hit with the tp attack and DD classes running around recklessly like we still have unlimited MP. If that's what your party's doing... it's not your or the patch's fault you're running out of MP.... it's the party's fault.

So I also agree with the idea of lowering the mp costs for cure and sacrifice. The changes to AoE were drastically needed, but I don't feel that MP costs should have risen this high in addition. Mp costs for cure and sacrifice should have been doubled at the most. However considering the MP regen rate and all of the other spells I think it would be better to simply return mp cst to what they were, and then half the MP gained from ranks and MND.

I.E.

-Return Cure and Sacrifice MP costs to previous values
-Have the Curagas MP cost equal to 3x the respective cure cost (like ffxi valves were correlated)
-Halve the amount of MP gained from Ranks and MND.