Is There a Reason Why Conjruers and White Mages Don't Use Water Spells?

I already know the Doylist reason is that the devs slimmed down the healer offensive tools in the name of balance.

But I was having a conversation with a bunch of other people who INSIST that the Sixth Umbral Calamity somehow discouraged the use of water magic by conjurers at Stillglade Fane. I know this is inherently false because water is a regular element used by conjurers (even if it's not reflected in the playable toolkit nearly as much).

But why don't conjurers regularly use water for offense? We have Water, Water III, and Water IV spells used by enemies, so why doesn't say, Kan-E or Raya-O use them?

Mostly that they were taken from Geomancer

They literally did used to have water-themed spells, I think the longest-standing one was Fluid Aura, it's just that they were gradually pruned off of the toolkit because they didn't really make gameplay sense. Back in 1.0 Conjurers had access to every single element because that was their 'thing', including Water (Thaumaturges instead got light and darkness magic), but come ARR they realized a heavy focus on elemental damage didn't really work for the game they were making. 'Conjurers don't use water magic because something something Sixth Calamity' is just pure headcanon, and it's not even headcanon that has a long memory for exactly that reason.

As for why no NPC conjurers use water spells in-game, outside of the mechanical reason? Well... they've mastered magically hucking rocks, controlling the wind and healing wounds; practically speaking, what is water magic going to do for them that they can't already cover?

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Originally Posted by Dikatis

But I was having a conversation with a bunch of other people who INSIST that the Sixth Umbral Calamity somehow discouraged the use of water magic by conjurers at Stillglade Fane.

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This is another one of those lore "facts" that were made up by the community and seem to spread despite having nothing related to it in the source material.

White Mage got a new water spell as of EW: Aquaveil. It may not be an offensive spell but it's still water. And as Cleretic said, there used to be Fluid Aura which used to deal damage and knockback, then was just knockback, then it was removed because it served absolutely no purpose. There was even a whole CNJ quest that revolved around using it on a water elemental to heal a spot of miasma and commune with the power of water.

It used to be that the healing spells had (and still do somewhat) a water effect that was a headcanon-y way to claim those were our "water" spells, but it seems like SE just hates water magic in particular since it's also absent from RDM's toolkit (alongside blizzard for some reason).

Now, SE has somewhat paradoxically diminished and reinforced WHM's identity as the "Nature Mage" by replacing their usual CNJ spells with more light-aligned ones with seemingly no Lore-explanation, yet at the same time introducing the lily system and the flower-y looking bell (and aquaveil), which makes me wonder if they regret turning CNJ into White Mage and trying to fit WHM's "Holy Mage" identity with CNJ's more "Geomancer" one.

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Originally Posted by Cleretic

As for why no NPC conjurers use water spells in-game, outside of the mechanical reason? Well... they've mastered magically hucking rocks, controlling the wind and healing wounds; practically speaking, what is water magic going to do for them that they can't already cover?

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Water is the great eroder. If compressed and focused, it can cut through things with tremendous speed and power. Not to mention the displacement and area denial effects of triggering a flash flood on command with Water III. As shown by Leviathan, water can possess crushing force and be used as a powerful defensive tool, as his Veil of the Whorl can reflect cannonballs if his magic isn't disrupted by specialized tools. Even then, his head reflects arrows and guns while his tail reflects magic.

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Originally Posted by Dikatis

Water is the great eroder. If compressed and focused, it can cut through things with tremendous speed and power. Not to mention the displacement and area denial effects of triggering a flash flood on command with Water III. As shown by Leviathan, water can possess crushing force and be used as a powerful defensive tool, as his Veil of the Whorl can reflect cannonballs if his magic isn't disrupted by specialized tools. Even then, his head reflects arrows and guns while his tail reflects magic.

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Well, a lot of that's either easily covered by what they can do (pretty sure a boulder can crush pretty hard), or of really specific need that's not really gonna come up in situations like short-warning combat (I don't think the cutting force of water is gonna do you a massive amount when a treant's bearing down on you). Water's defensive options are... honestly not something I completely buy on a physical level, but that's also literally what Aquaveil does (I don't play White Mage so I did forget that one, thanks Mikko). Aquaveil's really high-level, so maybe that's just really damn hard when you're not shortcutting the learning process with Blue Magic, and when they're literal healers it's probably just easier to patch things up afterwards if you can't get that right.

Despite not playing the job regularly, I have done its whole story fairly recently, and I can't think of a single situation where they were in a fight and water would've done more for them than just 'boulders and healing'. ...in fact, with a number of fights against animate trees and the like I can imagine water might've been a worse offensive option, if we assume that elemental weakensses and resistances still exist in-universe.

Be like water, my friend~

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Originally Posted by klykodesh

Mostly that they were taken from Geomancer

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Conjurer and Geomancers are the same archetype, just manifested in different cultures...

Both are shamanistic/druidic mediators of variably sentient elemental forces.

Originally, the game split casters into essentially two halves, the Priestly/Oracular/Divine with a focus on the rituals of man (Majutsu) and the Druidic/Shamanistic/Naturalistic with a focus on the innate channels of nature (Mahou). During that time, Conjurers had access to all of the natural elements (Wind, Earth, Water, Fire, Lightning and Ice), while Thaumaturges (at the time a support-capable caster, opposite Conjurer -- likewise a hybrid role, with no pure healers in the game) had access to Blood, Poison, Umbral and Astral.

As for why Conjurers had no Water spells for a time (until Aquaveil returned to replace Fluid Aura)... it's the same reason they don't have more than a single DoT: pruning/simplification.

Oh, that being said, all the basic CNJ heals are canonically water-affinitive.

WHM has plenty of Water spells?

Esuna, Benediction, Tetra, Divine Benison, Plenary Indulgence, Aquaveil, Lily Bell

They really need to re-introduce element-based damage / defense as a part of the game mechanics to make sure this plot / setting element makes sense.
It would obviously be a nightmare -- having to add element-based data to every existing enemy / equipment / skills.
However, that level of complexity will destroy the currently monotonous skill / job optimizations.

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Originally Posted by Ghost_of_Ebina

They really need to re-introduce element-based damage / defense as a part of the game mechanics to make sure this plot / setting element makes sense.
It would obviously be a nightmare -- having to add element-based data to every existing enemy / equipment / skills.
However, that level of complexity will destroy the currently monotonous skill / job optimizations.

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While you can certainly involve elements, an actual traditional elemental strength/weakness system basically exists only to rotate a reduction of choices, making it so only certain jobs are viable (and others barred) and only certain parts of even just those viable jobs' toolkits actually see use. While perhaps more technically 'complex' in itself, it usually results in a significant net loss in complexity for the game overall.

Moreover, do you really want up to some 8 sets of gear just so you can play optimally via Wind Resist/Penetration gear for Barb, Fire Resist/Pen gear for Rubi, Umbral Resist/Pen gear for armored cyclops man, etc.?

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Originally Posted by Ghost_of_Ebina

They really need to re-introduce element-based damage / defense as a part of the game mechanics to make sure this plot / setting element makes sense.
It would obviously be a nightmare -- having to add element-based data to every existing enemy / equipment / skills.
However, that level of complexity will destroy the currently monotonous skill / job optimizations.

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On top of that, it would also destroy any point of the BLM job if there’s an enemy resistant or immune to fire or ice and would make them even more monotonous or downright useless since according to the setting, they only have access to 3 elements. RDM would be more awkward to play as well since it revolves around having to use all of its elements in balance. Melee that deal fire damage like DRG, NIN, and MNK would be objectively bad jobs to play in certain content by losing DPS against fire resistant enemies

Not having FFXI’s elemental weakness system means the game is less complex but it also means cutting down on the list of abilities and not having to play mages through menus. At this point it’s way too late to redo the combat system like that and it would be almost an ARR-level overhaul to adapt to it since the casters would need to all change.

For everything else, there’s still Eureka as a FFXI-in-FFXIV simulator.

Basically: there are games that benefit from an elemental strengths/weaknesses system, and one of the many things the FFXIV developers realized over the course of making ARR was that they didn't make one. That's fine, not every game benefits from every possible mechanic (elemental strengths/weaknesses would also be bad in, for example, a fighting game), and once you realize that you're making a game that doesn't benefit from one, it's best to de-emphasize it.

In this case, as Mikko said, it'd basically just cause very specific jobs to fluctuate wildly in usefulness--and therefore demand--depending on what content you're doing, and does so in a way that's so blatant as to be a false choice. P8S, for example? Well that guy's obviously resistant to fire damage, let's bin BLM, DRG and MNK (NIN can maybe sweet-talk their way in with Suiton). And on the other side, there's so many jobs where it wouldn't even matter because they just don't have elements; what would adding elemental strengths and weaknesses do for, say, a Paladin who doesn't wield any elements?

I didn't play FFXI, so I can't say how well that actually does implement elemental affinities. But I'd say that a game needs to be built like more typical Final Fantasy games to make that system work: the player needs to have at least theoretical access to all elements, so that way they control what elements they can use, and theoretically have access to all of them. Or you could approach it like SMT or Pokemon, and basically take the angle of 'you can't cover every base at once, so build your strategy'. But honestly, I'd say none of that works for an MMO with co-operative play, because if a Pokemon player decides Charizard's not useful for this gym, nobody gets screwed over by swapping them out; if the playerbase of FFXIV realizes Machinist just can't contribute to this raid, then Machinist players don't get to play.

Just so you know, back in 1.0 we had the ability to make a full party of Black Mages to take down Garuda when we did have the elemental weaknesses in the game.

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Originally Posted by Naraku_Diabolos

Just so you know, back in 1.0 we had the ability to make a full party of Black Mages to take down Garuda when we did have the elemental weaknesses in the game.

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In 1.0 you could also take down Ifrit without job stones so that’s not saying much. I don’t remember it having much of an effect when you could assign your own resistances either.

If elemental weaknesses/resistances exist but are negligible, then what’s the point of them even being there if you could brute force through it? That seems to have been the philosophy from 1.0 into ARR.

And if they’re enough of a thing where you need to strategize around it, then why bring jobs that deal the elemental damage the thing you’re fighting is resistant to as an integral part of their rotation if it’s going to have a heavy dent in their DPS?

Yoshi-P’s 1.0 changed THM from being just light/dark spells and CNJ having all 6 main elements on the wheel, as well as introducing elemental damage from physical jobs. It was from that point on that the design philosophy changed to an environment where weaknesses/resistances just won’t work.

I never got the elemental conjurer back then, they quickly tossed that idea out the window with whitemage, as traditional of a healer as it gets. The elemental side would fit more into a druid/shaman playstyle, which this game is lacking as it's a combination of dps and healer. If anything it looks like some new caster job will be the elemental mage job eventually.

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Originally Posted by SilversLyu

I never got the elemental conjurer back then, they quickly tossed that idea out the window with whitemage, as traditional of a healer as it gets. The elemental side would fit more into a druid/shaman playstyle, which this game is lacking as it's a combination of dps and healer. If anything it looks like some new caster job will be the elemental mage job eventually.

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1.0 Conjurer was just fundamentally a completely different class for a completely different game. And... well, I was going to say it probably wasn't a good one for that game either, but apparently Conjurer was the most popular class in 1.0, so they were doing something right.

...or possibly doing something wrong and just overgeared Conjurer to hell to the point where it was just way more fun/interesting to play. I didn't play 1.0, but that'd actually be something of a problem I'd see with 1.0 Conjurer in a game with elemental weaknesses: they just had more game to play, because there was basically a system reserved for them.

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Originally Posted by Cleretic

'Conjurers don't use water magic because something something Sixth Calamity' is just pure headcanon

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Not conjurers, but specifically the Amdapori white mages; and it's not that "they don't use water magic because the Sixth Calamity" but rather "the Sixth Calamity was a flood (of water) because they didn't use much water magic". You've got the cause-effect backwards.

We know from the Red Mage quests that what separates red magic from its white and black magic origins is that red magic uses just the caster's personal aether, which makes it more environmentally friendly than the white and black magicks of Amdapor and Mhach which used ambient aether. From the EEvol1 we also know that the white and black mages fought for so long that in the end there was so little of anything but water aether left in Eorzea that it brought on a Calamity of Water.

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Originally Posted by Encyclopaedia Eorzea vol. 1, p. 034

Three centuries of ceaseless assault on the land had taken its toll, the drain of energies used to propagate war sending the realm's elemental balance askew ... A Calamity was upon them, and soon the waters would rise to purge the land of those who had ravaged her so.

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We are meant to infer from this that the black and white mages significantly drained the land of all the elements except water. Therefore, the Amdapori white mages didn't use anywhere near as much water magic as they did earth or wind.

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Originally Posted by SilversLyu

I never got the elemental conjurer back then, they quickly tossed that idea out the window with whitemage, as traditional of a healer as it gets. The elemental side would fit more into a druid/shaman playstyle, which this game is lacking as it's a combination of dps and healer. If anything it looks like some new caster job will be the elemental mage job eventually.

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Just and FYI, the classes back then were meant to situate building your own job. As such, the Japanese class names were literally just "Axeman" "Swordsman" "Bowman" "Spearman" etc. The two Disciples of Magic, which did not fit particularly well into the Armory System, simply used perhaps the most basic thematic distinction of all: is it an art born of (humanoid) culture, or prior to / outside of (humanoid) culture?

Mahoushi followed the "Way" of Magic, preexistent to humanity and based anchored in the element(als). Majutsushi followed the (manmade / formal / ritualized) "Art" of Magic, such as of ritual and impacts of a collective unconscious. English went with "Conjurer" for the first simply because it manifested things, and "Thaumaturge" for the second because "miracles" (a THM being a "miracle-maker" / "wonder-worker") are observed with a cultural lens.

All things considered, they're pretty good localization choices, but they hide the initial distinction that formed the two sides of 1.x's Disciples of Magic that's still obvious in the JPN names.

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Originally Posted by Cleretic

I didn't play 1.0, but that'd actually be something of a problem I'd see with 1.0 Conjurer in a game with elemental weaknesses: they just had more game to play, because there was basically a system reserved for them.

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Sadly, the game available to CNJs to play was akin to modern healers (ST direct, ST DoT, and AoE), but for each element. In practice, you might use 2-3 DoTs, but you'd fill with just the one ST or AoE skill, spamming it ceaselessly. It was not good.

If you wanted a real elemental system that doesn't just waste up to five-sixths of each toolkit, you'd need mobs to be able to hold granular affectable floating values besides just their HP. This would be things like Heat, Saturation, Hardness, and maybe even Polarity. Add time magic to that, and you'd also want Weight or even (Time) Dilation.

Between those, you could soak an enemy to shock it, granting it polarity in such a way as to, say, MRI the damn thing, find the cracks in its shell, hit there, saturate and heat further, shock again, purposely harden that angle with earth magic (Petra, not Stone -- Stone is physical damage, usually with low Pierce), then hit it with physical attacks timed together (especially, Blunt) to break the shell open there, then broil the thing in its shell.

:: (During all this, equal complexity would likely go into just keeping the mob in check and locked down so you could pull off this more macro-level stuff.)

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Originally Posted by Rongway

We are meant to infer from this that the black and white mages significantly drained the land of all the elements except water. Therefore, the Amdapori white mages didn't use anywhere near as much water magic as they did earth or wind.

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Like I said in another thread you were in awhile back where you brought up the exact same thing, I don't think we're meant to infer anything. If "not using as much water magic" was an actual reason for the calamity, then you would think if would be important enough for there to be an explicit description of that in the game or the encyclopedia.

You're trying to come up with an explanation for a lore event with gameplay mechanics. That's like saying lightning magic is vastly inferior to all other types because BLM only used it for DoT. In that case, why wasn't there a lot of leftover lightning aether if all BLM had is 1 spell that uses it?

WHM/CNJ had the spell Fluid Aura removed, does that mean it never ever existed? But then EW gave WHMs Aquaveil, wouldn't that mean that 5th Era WHMs had access to it too and would be spamming it since the EE says White Magic is all about healing, purification, and protection and spent the war under siege? Considering Verstone and Veraero build up your white mana gauge while Verholy drains it, wouldn't that also mean that the light-aspected magic that the vast majority of the magic that 5th Era WHMs used also drained water aether?


As ShB told us, extra aether on one of the Shards will creep into the Source until it floods the Source with that aether. It makes more sense that Ascian shenanigans causing an imbalance of aether on a Shard leaks water aether into the Source where all of the aether has been sapped dry from years of mage war then boom, Great Flood. Instead of the other explanation of "WHM didn't use much water magic so the world suddenly flooded".

You would think if that were the case, then the worlds' mages, being much more advanced in magic than modern mages, would have known that would happen. Especially if they knew the aspect of all prior calamities before theirs. At the same time, I don't think they couldn't have predicted aether coming in from a Shard because as far as we know they had no idea Shards existed or the reason calamities happened.

Also the post-Amdapor White Mages mostly responded to 'we mage'd too much and then a flood happened' by restricting white magic as a whole. Remember that canonically speaking there's only about five of them, and the conjurers that work under them are working in a very restrained system with heavy oversight. They didn't crack down on specific elements, they cracked down on the whole thing.

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Originally Posted by Shurrikhan

Sadly, the game available to CNJs to play was akin to modern healers (ST direct, ST DoT, and AoE), but for each element. In practice, you might use 2-3 DoTs, but you'd fill with just the one ST or AoE skill, spamming it ceaselessly. It was not good.

If you wanted a real elemental system that doesn't just waste up to five-sixths of each toolkit, you'd need mobs to be able to hold granular affectable floating values besides just their HP. This would be things like Heat, Saturation, Hardness, and maybe even Polarity. Add time magic to that, and you'd also want Weight or even (Time) Dilation.

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Yeah, I think something useful to remember with 1.0 is that the game wasn't very good, and all their original post-launch ideas got thrown out the window basically immediately, so not all of the things that you'd have thought would have mattered in theory mattered in practice.

Looking over at the actual spells they had and who could use them once learned (you can find them over here), I suspect the reason they were the most popular wasn't because people actually wanted to play them, and more because it was full of really desirable cross-class skills. If you wanted to heal, to cast spells faster, to take less damage, to use elemental spells (never mind if they were actually useful)? You had to level Conjurer. It's like how back when we had cross-class skills in the live game, every single caster had Black Mage leveled to at least the 30s because of Swiftcast.

It's pretty clear to me that White Mages can't swim when they carry that heavy staff and excessively baggy robes.

/sarcasm

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Originally Posted by Cleretic

I suspect the reason they were the most popular wasn't because people actually wanted to play them, and more because it was full of really desirable cross-class skills. If you wanted to heal, to cast spells faster, to take less damage, to use elemental spells (never mind if they were actually useful)? You had to level Conjurer. It's like how back when we had cross-class skills in the live game, every single caster had Black Mage leveled to at least the 30s because of Swiftcast.

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Do we even have any statistics saying they were the most popular. When playing, CNJs were easily the class I met the least. THMs seemed to hugely outnumber them both during leveling and at level-cap. They were better healers, better nukers... just, largely... better all around. Dark Seal, Blood Rite, and Paradigm Shift were arguably better offensively than the likes of CNJ's Fastcast, and THM's alternate spells like Shadowfall and Shadowsear were beastly by comparison, as were its pseudo-defensives like Punishing Barbs, Stygian Spikes, Emulate (steal target's Element Resistances), and Contagion (afflict enemy with all the afflictions that are afflicting you -- and iirc, yes, you could cast your DoTs on yourself) -- and then their CC like Gravity, Slow, and Flashfreeze was able to get around more resistances. ...Then add to that their ability to steal anyone's stats.

Also... why did we give up that more interesting caster for just 'alternating frost and fire mage'? Or... why couldn't we just have both?

(If the answer is that an increasingly nigh unkillable, do-everything caster may be a bit problematic, I can understand that, but... c'mon. It was a fun base design.)

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Originally Posted by Shurrikhan

Do we even have any statistics saying they were the most popular. When playing, CNJs were easily the class I met the least. THMs seemed to hugely outnumber them both during leveling and at level-cap. They were better healers, better nukers... just, largely... better all around. Dark Seal, Blood Rite, and Paradigm Shift were arguably better offensively than the likes of CNJ's Fastcast, and THM's alternate spells like Shadowfall and Shadowsear were beastly by comparison, as were its pseudo-defensives like Punishing Barbs, Stygian Spikes, Emulate (steal target's Element Resistances), and Contagion (afflict enemy with all the afflictions that are afflicting you -- and iirc, yes, you could cast your DoTs on yourself) -- and then their CC like Gravity, Slow, and Flashfreeze was able to get around more resistances. ...Then add to that their ability to steal anyone's stats.

Also... why did we give up that more interesting caster for just 'alternating frost and fire mage'. Or... why couldn't we just have both.

(If the answer is that an increasingly nigh unkillable, do-everything caster may be a bit problematic, I can understand that, but... c'mon. It was a fun base design.)

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I heard this from a friend, and with a bit of digging, found out their source: A long-defunct FF14 news site. To my knowledge, nobody actually performed any quantitative surveys after this; hell, ff14news itself just completely gave up and fell silent in December that year.

Their metric was basically 'how many people were logged in on this job' for a specific day very shortly after release. And in that case it completely tracks why Conjurer was the most popular (and it was not close): the meta hadn't firmed up yet, and CNJ was getting both the 'healer crowd', anyone into their aesthetic, and whoever actually tried to do some metagaming and realized that it was stuffed full of good-looking cross-class skills.

Also, despite what the writer of that post was saying... wow those launch numbers are bleak.

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Originally Posted by Cleretic

I heard this from a friend, and with a bit of digging, found out their source: A long-defunct FF14 news site. To my knowledge, nobody actually performed any quantitative surveys after this; hell, ff14news itself just completely gave up and fell silent in December that year.

Their metric was basically 'how many people were logged in on this job' for a specific day very shortly after release. And in that case it completely tracks why Conjurer was the most popular (and it was not close): the meta hadn't firmed up yet, and CNJ was getting both the 'healer crowd', anyone into their aesthetic, and whoever actually tried to do some metagaming and realized that it was stuffed full of good-looking cross-class skills.

Also, despite what the writer of that post was saying... wow those launch numbers are bleak.

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Yeah, there'd be only a handful of grind parties per zone back then. And uh... keep in mind that there was only a single zone each for all of Thanalan, all of Gridania, all of Coerthas (still larger than Central + Western combined), all of Limsa Lominsa, Mor Dhona (was the size of 3 ARR Mor Dhonas), etc. So... concurrent players... It felt like maybe 1000, on a good day?

But yeah, anyways, by the time I was playing, MRD, LNC, ARC typically felt like the most populace classes, with THM and maybe PGL not far behind. People had already noticed by then, though, that GLD was finnicky to get value out of, and that CNJ really only played with 3-4 attack spells at a time.

Granted, that's just my anecdotal evidence.

:: Quick note: Back then, I'm pretty sure we could actually start as whatever class we wanted from any city. The guilds would offer you a free level 1 weapon, but... you could just buy one, too, and skip going to the guild hall. They weren't required for progression.

Of note to the whole "adding elemental damage and properties to all enemies and player attacks would be a nightmare" bit, that wouldn't actually be the case because they already do that. All attacks are typed internally, the typing simply serves no practical purpose.

Regardless, it would still be a nightmare to balance and would cause more problems to actually make elements relevant than not.

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Originally Posted by Zero-ELEC

Of note to the whole "adding elemental damage and properties to all enemies and player attacks would be a nightmare" bit, that wouldn't actually be the case because they already do that. All attacks are typed internally, the typing simply serves no practical purpose.

Regardless, it would still be a nightmare to balance and would cause more problems to actually make elements relevant than not.

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Yeah, it's not that it's technically impossible to make it so that, say, Broil does earth damage, doing so would actually be super easy*, but if they just did that alone then it wouldn't matter; you'd have to add elemental resistances and weaknesses to everything, and then find a way to balance that in a way that doesn't lead to something like 'now White Mage is objectively worse than other healers at the Anabeisos raids and there's nothing the White Mages can do about it'. And Zero's right, that would be way more trouble than it's worth even if it's not literally impossible.

...thinking about it, the healers are definitely the big pain point on that one on a design perspective, because at least you could theoretically cram all six elements onto a DPS or tank kit to make sure they've all got options, even if for some jobs it's gonna get weird. But by my count none of the healers even have six damage-dealing spells.

*Also we can't count out the possibility that weirdo spaghetti code means that it actually would be way harder than we expect to do this, and somehow adding elemental damage to Broil breaks Leap of Faith.

Aquaveil literally has 'aqua' in its name and a splash-y animation.

Granted, I wish White Mages still kept more elemental magic on their kits, because it's barely there. If it would depend on me, I'd make Glare and Dia more of a special occasion proc spells or something enabled after a blood lily.

But who knows, maybe they are just paving the way for an elementalist job in the future.

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Originally Posted by Raikai

Aquaveil literally has 'aqua' in its name and a splash-y animation.

Granted, I wish White Mages still kept more elemental magic on their kits, because it's barely there. If it would depend on me, I'd make Glare and Dia more of a special occasion proc spells or something enabled after a blood lily.

But who knows, maybe they are just paving the way for an elementalist job in the future.

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I know Aquaveil exists, I'm just wondering whey there aren't more water spells given its destructive and defensive potential and the fact that an entire section of the CNJ questline is spent discussing the power of water.

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Originally Posted by Dikatis

I know Aquaveil exists, I'm just wondering whey there aren't more water spells given its destructive and defensive potential and the fact that an entire section of the CNJ questline is spent discussing the power of water.

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There is no lore reason. Most elemental spells were just phased out over time in favour of more generic holy-esque ones. It's not some lore changes or anything, just a little bit of disconnect between game mechanics and lore.

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Originally Posted by Heroman3003

There is no lore reason. Most elemental spells were just phased out over time in favour of more generic holy-esque ones. It's not some lore changes or anything, just a little bit of disconnect between game mechanics and lore.

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Honestly, to me, WHM nowadays seems completely disjointed from its CNJ roots, unlike other jobs such as BLM, BRD, PLD, etc... who all keep the essence of their specific base class' fantasy still relevant one way or another. The big thing that hearkened 'Conjurer' - the elemental magic - is almost completely gone from the White Mage arsenal.

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Originally Posted by Raikai

Honestly, to me, WHM nowadays seems completely disjointed from its CNJ roots, unlike other jobs such as BLM, BRD, PLD, etc... who all keep the essence of their specific base class' fantasy still relevant one way or another. The big thing that hearkened 'Conjurer' - the elemental magic - is almost completely gone from the White Mage arsenal.

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Conjurer's in a very weird spot there, where it's the only class that doesn't actually resemble the classic job it became all that much (probably a relic of jobs not actually being planned by the 1.0 devs). It's got healing in common, sure, but beyond that, no; White Mages are known for spells like Holy and Dia, they don't touch Stone and Aero.

But even then, something that I think we just need to keep reiterating constantly in this thread: Remember Aquaveil. It would be one thing if the elemental magic completely fell away and got memory-holed, but they're still actively adding parts of it in, even if it's gradually moved away from the center of WHM's stage.

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Originally Posted by Dikatis

I know Aquaveil exists, I'm just wondering whey there aren't more water spells given its destructive and defensive potential and the fact that an entire section of the CNJ questline is spent discussing the power of water.

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But there are 7 water aspected spells. Or are you just upset there are no offensive ones.

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Originally Posted by Raikai

Honestly, to me, WHM nowadays seems completely disjointed from its CNJ roots, unlike other jobs such as BLM, BRD, PLD, etc... who all keep the essence of their specific base class' fantasy still relevant one way or another. The big thing that hearkened 'Conjurer' - the elemental magic - is almost completely gone from the White Mage arsenal.

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Most 'jobs' feel disjointed from classes to me personally. Ninja doesn't have same rogue-ish aesthetic, Bard leans all in on music aspect, Monk is a lot less about punch and more about all the balance and stuff, Paladin brings in the holy stuff that wasnt there for Gladiator, etc. The only jobs that feel like they keep class's essence, from original 9 are, imo, Warrior and Black Mage. Rest all take steps in different directions.

We should all be lucky and thankful that Aquaveil in FFXIV puts up a barrier to absorb a portion of damage taken. In FFXI, Aquaveil enables the WHM to not have casting interrupted for a few minutes.

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Originally Posted by Naraku_Diabolos

We should all be lucky and thankful that Aquaveil in FFXIV puts up a barrier to absorb a portion of damage taken. In FFXI, Aquaveil enables the WHM to not have casting interrupted for a few minutes.

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Which in XI was incredibly useful since one auto-attack could and often would interrupt your cast. As a caster, that used to be the kiss of death if you were soloing.