White Magic limitations?

First of all, spoiler warning: this topic will touch on WHM job quest.



As someone who never played other FF games I've been wondering what exactly does healing magic (mostly White Magic I guess?) do? Yeah, I know it's "magic" so you can't logically explain it, but I feel like I'm really missing what exactly am I healing other than a bar floating above someone's head.
Let me explain. We can resurrect people and it was even included in early WHM quests, so it's not only combat mechanic. Despite this there are NPCs that die in our arms and we can't do anything about it. I always accepted it as natural part of story that can't change too much just because you are running it as a healer and not other class.
But then there comes last part of WHM story. I always thought it'd be cool to be healer because you don't need to be afraid of dying to some disease or wound and could save people close to you from it. It turns out you can't actually heal anything other than "corruption" and maybe some flesh wounds.

It feels like white magic is just slightly better version first aid kit.

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Originally Posted by Terkhev

We can resurrect people

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We cannot. Spells like Raise restore enough vitality to revive an unconscious or nearly-dying person. It takes much more than that to heal an actually-dying person or raise the dead (and the doing of such is not looked so favorably upon).

^This. Raise does not actually literally raise the dead to life, it merely restores a person to consciousness (hence why if your character's HP drops to zero in the game it results in 'KO' status not death), making Raise somewhat analogous to resuscitation.

It's mentioned time and time again that restoring the actual literal dead to life is not only extremely difficult, the results usually are not pretty - because 'life' is aether and when a person dies their soul (as in, their aether) returns to the river of aether/Lifestream from where it came under the natural order of things and can usually no longer be brought 'back' (although there are some rare exceptions to that), meaning any attempt to revive the dead usually merely reanimates a corpse at the very least as a zombie, and at worst, a voidsent demon takes up residence inside the corpse, turning it into abominations like mindflayers, succubi, naga and ahriman.

So despite the flavour text about WHMs being able to restore the dead to life, they actually don't.

Oh well, good to know.

Still, resurrection was only example meant to make a point about the most important part: lvl 70 WHM quest and why can't WoL do anything about it.

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Originally Posted by Terkhev

Oh well, good to know.

Still, resurrection was only example meant to make a point about the most important part: lvl 70 WHM quest and why can't WoL do anything about it.

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Well we've seen in the MSQ and in places like the Alchemist questline that it's perfectly possible to resurrect a dead body but there's not much point if the soul's already let go and moved on.

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Originally Posted by FJerome

Well we've seen in the MSQ and in places like the Alchemist questline that it's perfectly possible to resurrect a dead body but there's not much point if the soul's already let go and moved on.

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Interesting that you brought up the ALC questline. The level 50 questline really did culminate in what should have been impossible: a deceased woman's soul really WAS reunited with her body. It may have been temporary (just long enough to give her sister and Sevarian some closure), but from what we know the soul SHOULD have long since dispersed into the Lifestream.

There may be more to life, death, and resurrection than the scholars of Eorzea think they know...

Ok, I get it. No zombies. But resurrect is still pretty powerful spell. If we have access to such tools, then why a White Mage, Master of Conjurers Guild and very talented apprentice couldn't save a woman with a heart condition?

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Originally Posted by Terkhev

Ok, I get it. No zombies. But resurrect is still pretty powerful spell. If we have access to such tools, then why a White Mage, Master of Conjurers Guild and very talented apprentice couldn't save a woman with a heart condition?

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There are many possible explanations, but none given in game. One possible reason could be that Conjuror curatives don't so much heal wounds directly as accelerate the process at which the body heals itself. In the case of a heart disease, such magic could possibly extend a person's life - but it's treating the symptoms, not the disease, and inevitably the disease will win out.

I don't think that the claim is ever made that Conjury can cure diseases (at least, not natural diseases). You need actual doctors for that, with knowledge of medicines and such - and if Sanche's condition was ever something Eorzean medical science was advanced enough to cure, she was too paranoid to seek out the doctors that could have saved her. All we could do as Conjurors was ease her passing...

Oh, Conjury can heal deadly diseases - early Gridanian quests actually touched on that (a quest in Hyrstmill mentioned about the 'wasting sickness' that once decimated the hyur population of Gridania to the point it reached epidemic levels, but that now conjury spells exist that can treat and cure the disease - the context of the quest was that CNJs knowledgeable in that particular spell may not always be around so herbal treatments were still stored as a last resort).

As well, the spell Esuna (when it was still a CNJ spell) seemed to have the context of being a treatment for disease as well (after all, there is an actual status effect called 'disease' in the game). So CNJs (and by extension, WHMs) most definitely can heal illness and disease with their magic.

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Originally Posted by Enkidoh

So CNJs (and by extension, WHMs) most definitely can heal illness and disease with their magic.

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I stand corrected.

In that case, Sanche's illness doesn't have the little blue bar over the icon that lets you know Esuna can cleanse it. Sucks for her!

Seriously, though - just because it's magic doesn't mean it can do everything. I mean, in-real-life modern medicine is pretty fantastic. So why don't we just cure all diseases already? There are some things it just can't do.

The way I see it, the heart problem Sanche has was a physical defect moreso than an actual disease. As far as I know (which isn't much since I'm no doctor), heart disease isn't really a curable disease. You can unblock clogged arteries and control the problem with blood thinners to help the flow, but I don't think you can "cure" it (outside of changes to diet and exercise, I guess?).

That being said, I think that White Magic probably could cure these issues in the past. However, keep in mind what happened after Amdapor. The elementals were not pleased. I would assume that the elementals would believe in the cycle of life and death as this is the natural order of things. We probably aren't allowed to use magic to cure natural causes of death so that the elementals don't get pissed.

When Y'shtola was sliced by Zenos, weren't the healers present doing more of an emergency first aid and she was taken to real doctors afterwards? I'd imagine lore-wise it would be longer process than just casting cure and sending the patient away. Like in combat they'd be able to keep you going long enough for you to not just fall over, but you'd need some longer treatment and rest after the fact.

...So it's just magic morphine and in reality we were heavily injured in the ARR opening cart, and now we're just seeing dreams and hallucinating while overdosing on cures.

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Originally Posted by Waliel

I'd imagine lore-wise it would be longer process than just casting cure and sending the patient away.

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In the Astrologian quests, it's quite literally casting Aspected Benefic and sending the patient away.
"Heishia
What is this sorcery? My cuts... They knit themselves! Are you a healer, adventurer? If so, I have another request of you."
"Heishib
How did you...? It is as if I was never dealt a single wound! What manner of magicks do you wield, friend?"

Etc. You do that a lot in the 50+ quests and many of them are in their death throes to boot. Truly, many of them are sent back several malms through the snow right away. While conjury might possibly be a little less powerful, it's unlikely White Magic would be.

That said, the reason why we can't just heal everything away is simple: It cheapens the narrative.
Just as healing trivializes mechanics if you can just comfortably heal through the damage, it also cheapens the narrative effect of pain, death and disease, as it erases the consequences and thus impact and effect.
So you're given limitations to preserve those consequences and those are commonly arbitrary: You cannot dispel "that" debuff, you cannot rescue "that" person etc. Or as a compromise, you can "barely" save them, but they need to jump through X, Y or Z hoops afterwards. Why? Because whoever made that encounter/story didn't want the effect to just be completely erased. You can instead have your healer power fantasy on inconsequential random NPC #471 instead. It's that simple.

People generally underestimate how dangerous healing is on a meta-level.
To cope with it, the narrative adjusts healer power to the desired level to achieve the desired effects. Sometimes you can fix a dying person up with a single cast, other times they need months to recover and still struggle and other times you just outright cannot do anything.
The content instead adjusts boss power - hence easy content has lots of mechanics that can be healed through, hard content has instant kill and instant wipe mechanics galore.

Just crack it up to function over form.