Why do Melees/Physical rangeds have more HP than Casters/Healers?

I can understand why Tanks need to have the most HP. But I am just curious why all the other jobs have the same amount of MP but not same amount of HP.

Are there fights that being a caster/healer with lower HP is actually at a slight disadvantage? I personally think they all (besides Tanks) should have the same amount of HP. What do you think? :confused:

Jobs used to have different MP pools and also a TP stat. The MP pools were made static and TP removed as part of game homogenization as it went on. Though to be fair the differing MP pools were kind of pointless anyway since MP costs for spells and abilities scaled with it anyway to keep the costs roughly the same % of the pool regardless.

In group content melee are more at risk of pbaoe and cleave attacks so they get more HP to balance the more hits they might take. Casters are usually out of range for those so don't need the extra hp.

Lore and logic reasons. Would it really make sense for a cloth class to have more health and a mail or plate class?

Besides that rock-solid and well-established reasoning, all else is efforts to make the numbers and mechanics match.

Casters have higher Magic defense, DRGs have higher physical defense, and other melee and phys ranged havce equal mdef and pdef.

Most aoes that do raid damage are magic, so no extra hp needed for casters.

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Originally Posted by Drkdays

Lore and logic reasons. Would it really make sense for a cloth class to have more health and a mail or plate class?

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Yes, especially in a game where a single character can access every available job. There's also nothing to suggest that a mage would not seek to strengthen their body in addition to their mind to account for situations where they may need to fight in close quarters, do some heavy lifting or strive to overcome an anti-magic barrier.

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Originally Posted by Theodric

Yes, especially in a game where a single character can access every available job. There's also nothing to suggest that a mage would not seek to strengthen their body in addition to their mind to account for situations where they may need to fight in close quarters, do some heavy lifting or strive to overcome an anti-magic barrier.

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Sure...the occasional oddball exists,

But GENERALLY SPEAKING...

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Originally Posted by Ayden

I can understand why Tanks need to have the most HP. But I am just curious why all the other jobs have the same amount of MP but not same amount of HP.

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Because MP isn't determined by your stats, but your HP pool is (it's based on vitality). I have been in groups where, as a white mage in extremely good gear, I have more HP than the DPS do.

But beyond that, as noted, casters (including healers) have a fairly high magical defense stat. And the vast majority of unavoidable damage in this game is magical in nature, which means we take less damage from those attacks (presumably because, lore-wise, as magic users ourselves, we can defend ourselves against magical strikes more readily). DPS don't have as strong a magical defense as we have, therefore the amount of damage an unavoidable raidwide does to a DPS will, all other stats being roughly equal, be larger than it does to a caster. Thus, they need a slightly larger health pool to soak that damage -- it all generally balances out.

(The exception being raidwides that just take a straight percentage off of your HP bar, or which reduce you to 1 HP. In those cases, your defense matters not, because it's doing an absolute value, like 50% of your maximum HP, or 'all your HP except the last one', or whatever else.)

Melee jobs have to handle the damage that happens in melee range, which to give Odin as an example can hurt a lot and they are also supposed to tank extra enemies or soak things sometimes. Most of them even have ways to mitigate like tanks do. Whether tanks just pick them up and do soaks is a party decision.

Casters being at range means they are only likely to take raid-wide damage, which is usually magic, so they have extra magic defense at the expense of physical defense. I think this is a big reason why most damage is magic now even if it doesn't look particularly magic, because casual casters would die too often if it wasn't.

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Originally Posted by Drkdays

Sure...the occasional oddball exists,

But GENERALLY SPEAKING...

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Well it's not that much to do with lore. Even the melee dps don't all have the same level of armoured protection and there's separate stats to HP dealing with defence, since HP is more all encompassing and not limited to what protection armours offer... besides which some caster sets are part mail or plate anyhow. It's for separate balance reasons.

If it were not for that difference in the magic defence stat, I'd see no reason for physical ranged to have any more HP; in fact, the opposite, since they face the least risk of any damage due to relying entirely on instants at range - again, a higher mdef stat is the only reason why it makes sense IMO to give them a bit more. In PVP for example they've had parity or near parity at varying times (bearing in mind Manaward is a selectable role action for casters in it rather than specific to BLM.)