Shocked at the reduction in mage damage, quadruple mp cost, and lowered resources

[LuxLex]

Speaking of which, Suz, if you can find them (unlikely) iron hide unguents and the shell equivalent, might save you some mp from casting shell and protect....

they are easy to make - come from helmet crabs (protect) and turtles (shell)

too bad the duration on shell and protect sucks so much.

[Sorel]

If making mages suck was the only way they could think of to make content challenging, then they should have asked the playerbase for more ideas before going ahead.

Let's be honest here - if they had made cures cost this much when cross-classed - I wouldn't have a problem with that.

If they had, instead of making cures drain a whole mana pool (making it un-strategic for mages to do anything but heal most of the time) put a cool down on each cure spell that forced more strategic cures, without making it so they can't afford to use almost any other spell - that would be cool, AND achieve the same goal of reducing cure spam.

Cure: 20 second cool down
Cure II: 30 second cool down
Cure III: 40 second cool down
Curaga: 50 second cool down
Curaga II: 60 second cool down

There! In five minutes I came up with a system that makes healing more strategic without forcing mages to stand around waiting for mp all the time. Wow.

I am not saying it is the be all and end all, but really, the only thing the developers could think of to make dungeons hard was to make mages suck? That's pretty weak.

Ideas in general are awesome. I really and truly appreciate any post that offers constructive ideas.

That being said, the problem this this particular idea is that an R50 Conjurer can rotate those cooldowns so that they are still spamming cures every 5 seconds simply by alternating the spells.

But I do understand where you are coming from, sir. I just ask that you give it a week and see how things work out before you make too harsh a judgement.

[LuxLex]

yes, but then the devs could make the enemies in the dungeon be doing more damage, so that the pace of being a mage remains nice and fast and mp management would still exist (some increased mp costs would be okay but they went overboard) but instead of it being final "stand and watch your mp bar"tsy it would be gameplay that is fun.

Also five seconds is a long time when mobs be bashing you.

I dunno. I've been playing whm in XI, and personally I love the way it is now - where my reflexes and my targeting skills are being tested, not my ability to stand always having to sit around and getting uber slow exp...

[Albio]

First off, what mage damage are you talking about? Nukes are horrid right now, you're better off darting a mob, or switching to a DoH and throwing a stone at it then trying to damage it while on CON. Second, MP cost was ridiculously low. There was no skill in playing mage, just a spamming fest while melee zerg mobs. It is harder to main heal now, but all CON was ever good for was main healing. Until nukes get fixed there will be no versatility with CON. THM got a nerf, it needed one. You shouldn't be able to use Emulate to tank every mob in the game. Sacrifice III was epic, it needed to be nerfed. SE is forcing players to use skill while fighting, not just hitting a button over and over.

[Neptune]

Sweet, so I can get that 30 mp back. That's like 1/5th of a cure spell!

Yes, I did all this in the R45 dungeon, bro.
You know what happened when I spiritbound? All-Seeing-Eye shat on me 20% of the time.
Siphon MP & II are on the same timer, so I guess that narrows your options.
(BTW Raise & Raise 2 are on the same timer. LOL How epic is that?)

Fortunately Rebirth is every 30 minutes, so I can use it 2x per dungeon unless I dedicate Chainspell to it (which I do) and then it's every 5.

Mage sucks. I'm so depressed over it. I recently leveled Gladiator and loved managing hate at Raptor parties, so maybe I'll play Gladiator but when the mage-lovers of the world are quitting mage because it's not fun, who the fuck is going to heal me on Gladiator?

I don't mean to nay-say really either because I practically dancing in the streets at how much I like dungeons. I think they're better than I could have ever hoped in terms of accessibility and fun, challenging content. The only downside is they ruined the 1 job I really wanted to play in there - and that's a pretty big bummer.

Fortunately I'm moving from Hawaii to Maryland so I'll have about 6wks off and maybe 1.19 will come out or some tweaks will change things, but for the next week or so I don't know what I'll be doing in game. I guess suffering through it or begging my LS to let me play Gladiator when we have too many of those already.

This really sums up how I feel.

The problem is that you are trying to solo. CON is not a good solo class just like whm, for the longest time, could not solo in FFXI. This works fine in a normal party setup, but if you are soloing, you will be getting TP from AA anyway...so I don't see the problem with radiance spam

Well, Conjurer was a fantastic solo class up until now? Are you really trying to base your statement on its solubility on the past 24 hours? The Conjurer I know is great at soloing.

Yeah, I played WHM in XI for 8 years too. Let's get medals.

Thing is though, I signed up for XIV expecting freedom. I wanted to heal (and I have!) but I was pleasantly surprised how easily I could solo! I duo'd (with my wife also on CON) many many levels on the way to 50. I was amazed at the versatility and frankly surprised. If Conjurer had been this way from the start, I may have just settled into it like an old suit, but unfortunately I was allowed to actually participate in the battle! Profundity & Spirit Dart did REALLY GOOD DAMAGE! I could solo and duo NMs and farm my own materials and gear! I could never do that shit in XI on WHM.

It wasn't "easy" mode either. It wasn't as if solo Sirocco wasn't one of the hardest things I'd done in XI. It was.

Anyway, if I slap on the "White Mage" job in XIV and suddenly I'm locked into healing only and can't even equip nukes, then well that's fine. That's what a "White Mage" is and I would be okay with that, but for almost a fng year a Conjurer has been a versatile tool that I've adapted to various situations and now I'm being told that's not what I'm going to be doing anymore on the class itself.

There was really no reason to make Thuamaturge completely useless and Conjurer completely a "healer" and nothing more. The Job system was (supposedly) designed to fill the world with FF flavor as well as give each "Job" a unique edge as a party role.

I don't get why people are so defensive of something that is clearly worse.

Maybe this sums up how I feel better.

YES, precisely! This I think it was annoys me the most! I have a few Thaumaturge friends, and we always switched on and off the role of healing. I mean, in parties, we didn't even have a designated healer. If we saw one another doing something different, whoever wasn't in the process of casting another spell, they'd heal.

The whole point of this game was to not necessarily force people in classes to fill one roll only. But that's what they're doing now and it's...It's horrible! I agree, I loved being able to farm my own things! Even in XI as a red mage, it was incredibly hard to solo. As a white mage or black mage? No way! Scholar? Not likely.
Conjurers weren't the perfect soloers. My GOD, I remember when we first got NM's we watched a 50 con solo for almost an hour that ridiculous sheep. It's not like pre-patch we could fire off spell after spell after spell, and have enough MP to cure ourselves and another party. It wasn't like that at all!

Even with 100 VIT and great gear, as a Conjurer I still took on an enormous amount of damage, using sleeps, and spiritbind to cut my AM spells in half I still had to carefully ration my MP to have enough to cure myself if I ever got in the red. Cons should be able to solo, and they were able to, but they weren't perfect. Saying a mage job shouldn't be able to solo, says who? XIV was breaking out of the box that gave roles to specific classes. I liked that I was able to play a mage and still be able to hold my own.

Now with the removal of a basic attack unless I'm in melee range, and the nerfing of Thaumaturge's potential as another healer, how is this in anyway progressive? If anything I'd go as far as to say it's regressive.

If the job of WHM removed my capabilities of casting nukes, or destroyed my nukes to the point where it's like casting Thunder as scholar with my white book equiped, I could live with that if it boosted my healing capabilities and gave me more effective and wider ranged cures in the form of Curaga.

You guys are defensive of a system that has its heart in the right place, but you're blind to the fact that it could have been implemented better, and at a later time. There were so many other things the team could have done to make this more attractive. You must be a masochist to like the system the way it is now.

I agree.

MND is one of the few stats that actually does have a significant effect. Of course everything will be overhauled in 1.19, but until then that is something you can do.

More importantly, there are a ton of MP recovery skills that got almost no use before the patch. Sorry but you're going to have to learn to use them.

Why would you assume Conjurer's wouldn't no about their own skills? Sounds like you are the one that just found out about them.

Exactly why people should have fought harder to keep the AoE/single toggle for all and any spells. I still believe the AoE/single toggle for spells was one of the best feature about spells.

I am for the toggle. They needed to get rid of the prompt, but aoe on every ability was great. Much better than what we have now.

Oscillate_Wildly: do you think the mp should be back to pre 1.18? I'd think a main job CON would be happy to finally have a place in a party since pre 1.18 it was: THM>all>CON

And you even said MP has never been an issue yet, and now it is... isn't this proving the point that this change was needed? You should be focused on MP usage as a mage this seems like common sense? and Yes DD's are already bound by TP generation rates. Imaging a DD that can spam WS's w/o stopping this seems like a nice ZERO strat game that I would never touch.

Mages do need a challenge, but your post doesn't well apply here. Conjurer is a black mage and white mage, but the black magic requires ONE QUARTER of the management as the white magic… does that seem ok to you?

In FFXVII, this patch will show up in the Loyalty Mode thread.

After the Squeenix-Tecmoei-namco-Bandai-Capnami merge.

Hahahaha.. brilliant. I think your vision of the future is true! How sad.

i like mage now, i have to take care with my MP, people need Mages to party coz now they cant autoheal, etc

if you dont like it is coz u are these guys that at begin of playing GTA before doing first mission, u already pasted codes for invencible, infinite ammo, infinite all, instant kills, etc

Easy mode: off

i think we're already shown this line of thinking to be irrelevant here..

yeah, I'm sorry for you loss. Perhaps there is another class that is closer to your preference in play-style. I really do feel for you but you should know that if these kinds of adjustments don't happen Final Fantasy XIV will probably fail. Extreme differences in the dynamics of playstyle is what Final Fantasy is all about. With regard to this, the popularity of the Final Fantasy Online games is solely dependent on expectations. OF course the developers are always trying to bring new players into their camp, but clones of every other mmorpg on the market are not exactly in high demand which further enforces the necessity of tactile alterations.

Magic isn't easy, really impossible.

AT least your house didn't burn down...

There is another class.. Black Mage. Where is it?? It's not on Thaumaturge.

Other than that, mages deserved the nerfs and so did Archers.

Just because they could do incredible things doesn't mean they needed to be nerved. You should be content playing the class you enjoyed enough to pick.

XI are 6 member parties and SMN could main heal. MP management was a big part of XI. I cured a 4 man party yesterday through the 25 Dungeon as THM and it was a challange but not impossible.

If people learn to go into passive mode after a fight.
If people stop brainlessly rushing through the dungeons.

We made it to the end boss (full west one not the close one) with 12 minutes to spare.

Now, let me repeat that: I cured the party on 32 THM, after coming back from a 6 month break, on our first attempt we made it to final boss (we wiped there).

I don't see a problem with the Mage Classes, i see a problem with people not able to adapt to the changes. Learn to Play!

So your point is that you wasted an hour by wiping at the end and thus Thaumaturge is not broken? Hahahahah.

Solo "tanking" a mage is not tanking, it's a combo of heals and attacks. Yes, I solo conjurer. A real tank can take dmg much better.

However, the defense was off, I'll give you that. I should have been getting hit harder.

Edit: You might also note, I did not say you should be able to do that with an NM. That was the OP. I consider NMs to be party content, so I wouldn't think you should be able to solo them easily in any class.

Here is an instance of the word NM going in one ear and out the other. I was referring to the NMs that were my level or below, not the bosses or world NMs.

Oh noes, i can no longer spam cures and nukes like crazy!!
I'll actually have to think before using a spell. Damn! This game sucks.

I think we've already shown your line of thinking to be poorly informed.

Gee, use your brains, it's not that hard. Gravity, Bind, Sleep, Bio, Slow, Paralyze. Cripple the mobs and they become a joke.

Sure, the old "i just spam nukes and laugh when they hit me" method won't work anymore, but that does not mean Mages can't solo.

We're not talking about Red Mage here.. we're talking about Conjurer, and the affinity goes down when using debuffs. Debuffs should be used anyway, but that doesn't take away from the issues at hand.

i mean dont you think they are trying to make the game harder neptune? should you really be able to solo NM's? no.. im sorry you shouldnt.

Yes that's right, what's wrong with making the game an actual challenge with problems you have to be resourceful enough to solve in mid battle? It was possible to solo the mid-tier NMs with great skill before and I don't think it makes sense to solo higher level NMs.

I didn't read through the thread at all, but I think I can offer some tips for you. Bare in mind I haven't done any instances so this may not apply to those.

- I find the lack of basic attack with no cooldown for casters HURTS. Really bad. I think they should adjust the CD to something like 3 or 5 seconds (whatever Archer's is). No advice here, I play THM and DoTs do sufficient damage.

- Cure costs have been raised dramatically but I found a pretty good remedy for soloing. Get Stygian Spikes and you'll never go oom between your 10min MP ability and Siphoning corpses. This obviously wouldn't work in instances, but I would assume in instances it will be possible to swap in and out of active stance to regen more.

- I don't see the issue of cures being split. It's a whole 2 AP, you shouldn't run around with everything equipped all the time, that's silly. If you're soloing, you don't need Curaga. If you're in an instance and you're a healer, you might need Curaga - replace your nuked with it. If you're in an instance and you're not a healer, just equip your basic single target heals.

- Siphon MP is no longer AOE'd but I think I answered this one above. The true strength of Stygian Spikes is really showing now. Prior to the patch all the THMs leveled CON for Shock Spikes because it was so good, now it's time for CONs to level THM for Stygian Spikes.



How do I feel? I feel it's too early to judge. They clearly changed things up dramatically. I went out to solo some leves and had an incredibly difficult time trying to do so. I could hardly solo 1 star leves I use to tear through on 3 stars. So that part sucked, but as I started swapping around my action bar and trying different abilities and different strategies for approaching battle, things eased up a bit. It's still REALLY hard, but I think over time it's adaptable. Just don't give up.

I appreciate your thoughts. Stygian Spikes doesn't work if the enemy doesn't have MP, or has a small MP pool. So there's still an issue there. Even with all the abilities at hand, still something has been lost. Spirit Dart needs to be on a 3 second cooldown like you said, along with Nature's Fury and Elemental Shroud. Soloing for sp should be fine still but soloing tough fights is going to be needlessly complicated by the shift to party gameplay.

Another thing I would like to bring up is, before this patch mages could straight tank mobs and just spam cures on themselves, now this is not the case. So when mage soloing we may need to get more creative. For example, gravity and repose mobs and nuke from a distance. Kite nuke style time! Not sure how well this works because alot of mobs have a ranged attack, but, the attack much less frequently with their ranged move i think. Also could do some sleep nuking! It'll be slower, but much safer and more efficient. This is for soloing obviously not pt play :P

This is actually a very good suggestion. I will try it out.

Having tons of fun on conj/thm Finally... All I gotta say is the changes make them alot more balanced and it's not one big cure fest :P Actually have to use enmity abilities... synchronize movements with team, and conserve mp^^ Fantastic... especially compared to before Keep up good work dev team!

All of what you're talking about needs to be described as White Mage, not Conjurer.

Casting spells in passive mode means regening WHILE casting.

But yes ATM there needs a balance fix. Stop being pushy and acting like this games destroyed. Your argument sucks.

This isn't necessarily the case. Casting a spell in passive mode could just move you into active mode the second the spell hits. We need the dev team to respond to this issue before they screw it up even further.

If making mages suck was the only way they could think of to make content challenging, then they should have asked the playerbase for more ideas before going ahead.

Let's be honest here - if they had made cures cost this much when cross-classed - I wouldn't have a problem with that.

If they had, instead of making cures drain a whole mana pool (making it un-strategic for mages to do anything but heal most of the time) put a cool down on each cure spell that forced more strategic cures, without making it so they can't afford to use almost any other spell - that would be cool, AND achieve the same goal of reducing cure spam.

Cure: 20 second cool down
Cure II: 30 second cool down
Cure III: 40 second cool down
Curaga: 50 second cool down
Curaga II: 60 second cool down

There! In five minutes I came up with a system that makes healing more strategic without forcing mages to stand around waiting for mp all the time. Wow.

I am not saying it is the be all and end all, but really, the only thing the developers could think of to make dungeons hard was to make mages suck? That's pretty weak.

I would favor this system over what we have. If the dev team can't get with the times, they should take a cue from Final Fantasy XIII and make MP management a thing of the past.

[CrazyCarl]

was mage damage reduced?

[Neptune]

was mage damage reduced?

Yes, because you can't use damage dealing abilities in party play since your Cures now take up 100% of your MP.

[CrazyCarl]

are you talking only solo?

[Punainen]

Mages were totally nerfed, its true. There is no longer any purpose to us having offensive spells because we can't spare the MP for it. And with the 10 second timer on spirit dart, it will take mages an age to get any TP.

[Geoffrey]

Can't solo NM? I haven't even seen one yet. I came back to the game just 3 days ago after having heard the news of 1.18 but now after having played it for a few hours... I can't even do a rank 10 leve (solo difficulty) without dying once or twice. I just barely get though a grouping of 3 mobs before I run out of mana. So much for being a healer. I always play healers and was having fun until tonight. Now with the reduced gil for leves an dying constantly I am not sure it is even worth doing them solo. In fact it doesn't seem like the game is soloable any more, from my perspective anyway.