Technically, why does RDM's Vercure heal more than SMN's Physick?

I've known that RDM's Vercure is a much more capable heal than SMN's Physick for years, but the other day I realized I didn't quite know why, so I figured I'd dive into RDM's abilities and traits to find out why. I was expecting to find something like a trait with the description, "Makes healing magic 1000% more potent", but after looking through all of both SMN and RDM's abilities, I found nothing like that. They seem to both have the same boosts to healing magic (30% via traits) and Vercure is even 350 potency compared to Physick's 400 potency. My SMN and RDM have comparable Mind values — which the UI explains is the stat governing healing magic — and the same goes with secondary stats; in fact, my RDM is less geared so their other stats are lower than my SMN's. And yet, their heals do 10-15x as much.

Is there an in-game, technical explanation that explains what is happening mechanically to give RDM much stronger heals? To be clear, I'm asking about game systems, not lore! Thanks!

RDM's vercure scales off of INT while SMN's scales off of MND.

The devs will tell you SCH jank is why SMN physick scales off of MND but at this point its vestigial.

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Originally Posted by SaberMaxwell

RDM's vercure scales off of INT while SMN's scales off of MND.

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That's all it is.

You won't notice it at low levels because caster gear is shared with healers until just before Lv50, so casters have the same amount of mind as healers from Lv01 to Lv45-Lv49. But when SMN starts wearing exclusively caster gear the power of Physick immediately drops to almost nothing because all their mind points over naked base mind disappear.

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Originally Posted by SaberMaxwell

RDM's vercure scales off of INT while SMN's scales off of MND.

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I had heard this might be the case. Is there anything in the game itself that would clue a player into this? Or is this just one of those things that you can only learn by going outside the game (from someone who datamined, a developer who explained that's the way it is, etc)?

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Originally Posted by LilimoLimomo

I had heard this might be the case. Is there anything in the game itself that would clue a player into this? Or is this just one of those things that you can only learn by going outside the game (from someone who datamined, a developer who explained that's the way it is, etc)?

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The latter. Like figuring out how much your secondary stats actually do, how periodic potency even works (in terms of total potency), what skills can and cannot be queued, and so much else...

Because the game Devs don't care to fix it, even after reworking Summoner they didnt bother.
It scales of Mind because it is a left over ability from Arcanist.

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Originally Posted by LilimoLimomo

I had heard this might be the case. Is there anything in the game itself that would clue a player into this? Or is this just one of those things that you can only learn by going outside the game (from someone who datamined, a developer who explained that's the way it is, etc)?

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Basically in ARR your spells and abilities actually scaled off appropriate stats. Attack magic scaled off INT, healing magic scaled off MND, melee skills scaled off STR and ranged skills scaled off DEX.

As time went on they phased all of that out. NIN was added and scaled off DEX instead of STR, PLD and DRK got attack spells that scaled off STR instead of INT, healers were updated so their attack magic scaled off MND instead of INT and when RDM was added vercure scaled off INT instead of MND.

Physick is now the last remnant of the old system where a skill scaled off something other than the jobs main stat (even though the SMN version of physick is now a completely separate skill from the SCH version so there’s no reason for it to be that way).

This topic comes up pretty much every expansion, people asking for it to be scaled off INT, people asking for it to be upgraded into a new skill via a trait, or people just asking for it to be outright removed.

I believe the last time the devs talked about it was when RDM was added, people asked in the Q&A if “now that RDM exists and has an INT based cure, can SMN be updated so physick scales off INT too?”. Dev response was essentially “we don’t want to give something to SMN just because RDM has it”.

Just for reference this is also how cleric stance used to work on healers

Your mind stat was the stat healing skills scaled off, your damage spells scaled off int, by default healer gear only have mind, so you healed for the normal amount but your damage spells were about as potent as a SMN spamming physick, then cleric stance would swap your mind and int stats while active, so now your heals did nothing but your DPS skills did the normal amount of damage they were supposed to

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Originally Posted by Rongway

You won't notice it at low levels because caster gear is shared with healers until just before Lv50, so casters have the same amount of mind as healers from Lv01 to Lv45-Lv49. But when SMN starts wearing exclusively caster gear the power of Physick immediately drops to almost nothing because all their mind points over naked base mind disappear.

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This makes me think of Bozja's upscaling of gear stats – I've heard that it's efficient for WHMs to take a wand and shield in there as it gets boosted to level 80 stats despite being underpowered in any other situation.

Does the same apply to SMN gear? Can they wear something with mind stat on it and get boosted up to have a working Physick?

Probably moot due to Lost Cure, but still.

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Originally Posted by Iscah

This makes me think of Bozja's upscaling of gear stats – I've heard that it's efficient for WHMs to take a wand and shield in there as it gets boosted to level 80 stats despite being underpowered in any other situation.

Does the same apply to SMN gear? Can they wear something with mind stat on it and get boosted up to have a working Physick?

Probably moot due to Lost Cure, but still.

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No

The difference the shield makes is absolutely tiny (like fractions of a percent)

Outside of the haste gear from CLL and DRS all classes are scaled to a particular stat set; not based on gear

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Originally Posted by SaberMaxwell

RDM's vercure scales off of INT while SMN's scales off of MND.

The devs will tell you SCH jank is why SMN physick scales off of MND but at this point its vestigial.

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The incredibly stupid thing is that this isn't even the case. As soon as you put on a Scholar job stone you get a different Scholar-exclusive version of Physick. There is literally no reason for ACN/SMN Physick to scale to Mind, it has zero impact on Scholar. Like all things SMN its just absolutely baffling anyone thought this was a good idea.

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Originally Posted by SaberMaxwell

RDM's vercure scales off of INT while SMN's scales off of MND.

The devs will tell you SCH jank is why SMN physick scales off of MND but at this point its vestigial.

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This is actually not true, both SMN and SCH physicks are different spell instances, as one can check in the Garlandtools website.

In fact, they purposedly created a SMN physick scaling with MND back in Stormblood while the previous one remained the SCH's one. I know that because I remember when I changed to SMN back then the Physick spell was greyed out (as in removed) and I had to drag it again from the spellbook to my hotbars.

The reason why Physick scales with MND seems to be an actual choice rather than a consequence of something.

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Originally Posted by LilimoLimomo

I had heard this might be the case. Is there anything in the game itself that would clue a player into this? Or is this just one of those things that you can only learn by going outside the game (from someone who datamined, a developer who explained that's the way it is, etc)?

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Or you could ask one of the many players whom you share the game with old school style. That's usually what I do.

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Originally Posted by Raikai

This is actually not true, both SMN and SCH physicks are different spell instances, as one can check in the Garlandtools website.

In fact, they purposedly created a SMN physick scaling with MND back in Stormblood while the previous one remained the SCH's one. I know that because I remember when I changed to SMN back then the Physick spell was greyed out (as in removed) and I had to drag it again from the spellbook to my hotbars.

The reason why Physick scales with MND seems to be an actual choice rather than a consequence of something.

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Yes, they are now. They weren't always. Though it is definitely a choice they're making at this point: a choice to be actively lazy about fixing problems they themselves created years ago.

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Originally Posted by Payadopa

Or you could ask one of the many players whom you share the game with old school style. That's usually what I do.

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This isn't the sort of question that just any random person in the game will know the answer to. Forums are supposed to be a resource for asking questions like this.

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Originally Posted by Iscah

This makes me think of Bozja's upscaling of gear stats – I've heard that it's efficient for WHMs to take a wand and shield in there as it gets boosted to level 80 stats despite being underpowered in any other situation.

Does the same apply to SMN gear? Can they wear something with mind stat on it and get boosted up to have a working Physick?

Probably moot due to Lost Cure, but still.

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I'm pretty sure people went with a shield for a chance to block. Both on WHM and BLM

SMN Physik could easily be upgraded to something Phoenix themed if they felt the need to stay on brand for the job even though that wouldn't be until level 71-80. It would still give it some kind of use or relevance to the job other than being this strange vestige.

Rydia is the iconic summoner and her progression mirrors this. She can cast some white magic as a kid, but stops and only does black magic and summons when she comes back as an adult. Maybe this is intentional since summoners really only have access to Physik because they share the Arcanist roots with Scholar.

This whole thread stinks of, “gib buff” nonsense.

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Originally Posted by ChonkGoblinSuprem

This whole thread stinks of, “gib buff” nonsense.

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To lay my cards on the table, I don't care whether they make Summoner's healing better or not; my primary interest in asking this question was to determine whether the game's UI/UX made it transparent why the heal was weaker. It sounds like it doesn't, which is a shame because that kind of obfuscation only serves to confuse players.

It still stinks…. “I’m just asking questions bro.” is a really easy rhetorical escape hatch…

Even if SMN's physick did scale off of INT, it'd be very rare to see SMN casting it just like its rare to see a RDM using it for anything other than dualcast prep. Rarer still since unlike RDM, SMN has self shielding.

Also when I say "rare" I mean, outside of rpers and people who don't know better, "practically never." Even though it scales off of INT, vercure has all the power of cure 1 and yes, dualcast still costs a gcd so vercure x2 is still just casting cure 1 twice basically.

What I'm saying is it wouldn't even really be a buff so there's no reason to start gaslighting OP. Which is also a scummy tactic.

You don’t know what gaslighting means.

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Originally Posted by ChonkGoblinSuprem

It still stinks…. “I’m just asking questions bro.” is a really easy rhetorical escape hatch…

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Except I'm not "just asking questions". I asked these questions with the intent to use those answers as a means to judge the quality of the UI/UX of the game, since I'm incredibly opinionated about that kind of design.

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Originally Posted by ChonkGoblinSuprem

You don’t know what gaslighting means.

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More gaslighting, nice.

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Originally Posted by ChonkGoblinSuprem

Rydia is the iconic summoner and her progression mirrors this. She can cast some white magic as a kid, but stops and only does black magic and summons when she comes back as an adult. Maybe this is intentional since summoners really only have access to Physik because they share the Arcanist roots with Scholar.

This whole thread stinks of, “gib buff” nonsense.

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So much wrong with this.

Rydia is not the “iconic summoner” there have been multiple summoners in the FF series including Yuna, Eiko and Garnet (all healer/support characters).

Summoner does indeed only have physick because it shares it with scholar. But it shares it through their base class of arcanist, there is no reason for summoner’s base class healing spell to get weaker as they grow as a dps any more than there is for scholar’s base class offensive spells to get weaker as they grow as a healer.

Finally, the OP didn’t ask for buffs (which they could have because it’s not an unreasonable request for the only skill in the game that works this way to be brought in line and is something that has been asked for since Heavensward), they didn’t even imply they wanted buffs. They simply asked if there was a reason or even an explanation in game as to why it worked that way (the answer being there is no good reason or explanation).

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Originally Posted by ChonkGoblinSuprem

Rydia is the iconic summoner and her progression mirrors this. She can cast some white magic as a kid, but stops and only does black magic and summons when she comes back as an adult. Maybe this is intentional since summoners really only have access to Physik because they share the Arcanist roots with Scholar.

This whole thread stinks of, “gib buff” nonsense.

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Even if it scaled with Intelligence, it wouldn't empower SMN, but rather give Physick just enough use cases to be worth having on one's bar instead of arbitrarily being worse at level 90 than at level 41.

Such would at least put SMN Physick on tier with other often-complained of skills like Shield Bash and Repose, buttons which likewise needn't be so rarely useful, rather than it being outright garbage over a hidden quirk of its coding.

That would be a reasonable and effortless improvement over its current situation, not because it's a buff (it any content with at least a modicum of difficulty, it wouldn't be), but because it isn't then a contradictory mess.

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Originally Posted by LilimoLimomo

I asked these questions with the intent to use those answers as a means to judge the quality of the UI/UX of the game, since I'm incredibly opinionated about that kind of design.

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I don't consider it a problem with the UI because most problems I perceive with the UI in the matter of the character sheet or Action sets are due to the existence of unnecessary stats, the elimination of which would be a design decision separate from the UI. For example, the only ACN/SMN is the only remaining case where there is a meaningful difference between "Attack Magic Potency" and "Healing Magic Potency". It should just all be "Magic Power". Then we get to where Attack Power and Magic Power only make a meaningful difference on mage jobs because their auto-attacks use the physical Attack Power stat while all their entire Action set uses Magic Power, so just collapse Attack Power and Magic Power into plain "Power" or "Expertise" or something. And oh hey, we could do the same with Skill Speed and Spell Speed.

Such UX improvements mostly don't involve the UI, though once the stats collapse the tooltips for the Attributes can be simplified to just "Affects action power for [role list / job list]". But the changes would require the devs to make some design choices that they don't have any indication of wanting to make.

Keeping exact formulas and damage values private is a valid game design choice, and while many modern games have chosen to expose formulas and damage values in the UI, I don't care that this one doesn't. They just need to make sure Potency is a consistent and comparable measure within a job or role, and for that they either need to make Physick scale on intelligence or they need to remove it.

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Originally Posted by LilimoLimomo

Except I'm not "just asking questions". I asked these questions with the intent to use those answers as a means to judge the quality of the UI/UX of the game, since I'm incredibly opinionated about that kind of design.

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I think it's mostly that FFXIV was designed and seems to have Devs that want it to be where you have some things passed by word of mouth and where people aren't mechanically min/maxing everything. A combination of wanting some mystery, some community, and people not to be slaves to parses.

...the latter one completely fails because some people want to be parse slaves no matter what. The rest is kind of interesting. Like that thread in General about damage types. All the BLU spells have various types - both elements but also the physical attacks come in slashing, blunt, and piercing varieties - and it's kind of interesting that those types are still in the game even now, though not overly relevant. Tested by using piercing attacks in Turn 2 of Coils - as you go through it, some of the node bosses you kill have resistance to some damage types depending on which route you go, so if you go to the right, for example, you get piercing defense up/piercing resistance. Using this, you can test if abilities like Fleche (piercing) actually have that hidden damage type by seeing if its damage (controlling for Crit and Direct Hits) does less damage.

Spoiler alert - it does do less damage, meaning those "hidden" damage types still exist.

A lot of this is from 1.0/ARR/HW era where they were going for more of a mechanics RPG thing, but they moved away from it due to min-maxing stuff. Specifically a WAR/DRK/AST/SCH/DRG/NIN/BRD/MCH comp being meta and so good that other Jobs were being extensively blacklisted. DRG had a piercing damage up thing and both WAR and NIN had a slashing up (WAR's cost them less than NIN's did, so WAR was the priority to apply it). With this comp, WAR buffed WAR, DRK, and NIN's slashing damage, DRG buffed DRG, BRD, and MCH's piercing damage, and NIN (Trick Attack [now Mug]), AST, and SCH buffed everyone's damage, along with SCH having the highest personal damage of healers since it could drop into Cleric, poop out a bunch of DoTs, then go back to healing (and also oGCD heal effectively even when in Cleric...at least I THINK they hadn't changed Lustrate yet and it was still a base 1/4th a Bene at 25% HP healing on the target...). Basically, they all buffed each other's damage types and such so that this was a very good comp to the point people were running 2 Melee + 2 Ranged phys and benching their Casters, and PLD, WHM, and MNK were also getting benched.

That's why they changed a lot of that stuff.

Not Physic, though. I think the Physic deal is they really aren't quite sure if they want SMN to have Raise or healing, but they don't want to outright take them away. Also Physic is useful when soloing lower level stuff. It can be decently useful in PotD (especially if you have some Mind) and it can be useful for soloing the ARR era FATEs if you're trying to get SMN's relic. So it's not USELESS, it's just...very niche. Absolutely it would be better if based on INT (contrary to the min-maxer position, it's not BAD to use Vercure or an INT based Physic, it just isn't optimal if you're doing high end content with a well conditioned team), it just doesn't because part legacy and part they don't want SMN to overlap even more with RDM in terms of the utility.

...of course, then they gave it Everlasting Flight and Rekindle, so... <_<

I think they want to keep it there in case they DID decide to use it in the future (same with damage types like Piercing still existing for those abilities that have it, even if it isn't used in a practical sense in modern encounter and Job design), but until such time as they do, they want it to be relatively irrelevant. Kind of an "installed backup" or contingency plan, maybe.

Or maybe not, but who knows? I prefer to think the best of people rather than the worst, personally.

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The short version is probably "It's complicated". :)

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Originally Posted by Rongway

I don't consider it a problem with the UI because most problems I perceive with the UI in the matter of the character sheet or Action sets are due to the existence of unnecessary stats, the elimination of which would be a design decision separate from the UI. For example, the only ACN/SMN is the only remaining case where there is a meaningful difference between "Attack Magic Potency" and "Healing Magic Potency". It should just all be "Magic Power". Then we get to where Attack Power and Magic Power only make a meaningful difference on mage jobs because their auto-attacks use the physical Attack Power stat while all their entire Action set uses Magic Power, so just collapse Attack Power and Magic Power into plain "Power" or "Expertise" or something. And oh hey, we could do the same with Skill Speed and Spell Speed.

Such UX improvements mostly don't involve the UI, though once the stats collapse the tooltips for the Attributes can be simplified to just "Affects action power for [role list / job list]". But the changes would require the devs to make some design choices that they don't have any indication of wanting to make.

Keeping exact formulas and damage values private is a valid game design choice, and while many modern games have chosen to expose formulas and damage values in the UI, I don't care that this one doesn't. They just need to make sure Potency is a consistent and comparable measure within a job or role, and for that they either need to make Physick scale on intelligence or they need to remove it.

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I agree that it's valid to keep formulas and values private as a part of a game's design. What I disagree with is misinforming players. When looking at a Red Mage's stats, the UI tooltip explicitly states that Mind is the stat that governs healing; so if there's an exception to this rule where that is not the case, I'm of the opinion that it should be made clear to the player. The description of a trait or even the text of Vercure itself would be a simple enough place to provide this clarification.

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Originally Posted by LilimoLimomo

The description of a trait or even the text of Vercure itself would be a simple enough place to provide this clarification.

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The problem is not in Vercure, though. Every physical job, including any with conceptually magical healing (PLD, DRK, GNB) uses Attack Power for their heals. Evey magical job except for SMN uses Attack Magic Potency for their heals, at least in effect: RDM does, outright, and healers mechanically use Healing Magic Potency but it is the same as their Attack Magic Potency in all but a few cases such as under Temperance which "increases healing magic potency" but could still just as easily "increases healing magic potency" if both attack and healing just used a single "Magic Potency" stat.

So the only job where mind truly "affects healing magic potency" in any meaningful way is SMN.

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Originally Posted by Rongway

The problem is not in Vercure, though. Every physical job, including any with conceptually magical healing (PLD, DRK, GNB) uses Attack Power for their heals. Evey magical job except for SMN uses Attack Magic Potency for their heals, at least in effect: RDM does, outright, and healers mechanically use Healing Magic Potency but it is the same as their Attack Magic Potency in all but a few cases such as under Temperance which "increases healing magic potency" but could still just as easily "increases healing magic potency" if both attack and healing just used a single "Magic Potency" stat.

So the only job where mind truly "affects healing magic potency" in any meaningful way is SMN.

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That's interesting, I hadn't made that connection before! So it's not Vercure that's special, but that a non-healer class has healing affected by Mind. In that case, the place to correct such information would be the Character page where it incorrectly lists Mind as the only stat that governs healing. And while potentially controversial, just to help prevent confusion it might also help to remove the heal from SMN; having a single spell that plays by its own rules and isn't even worth casting in most cases probably isn't worth it, especially if it creates confusion. But that's just my opinion.

If a job has a spell then that job should be able to use that spell, either fix it so it does what its meant to or remove it.