Quote Originally Posted by Iedarus View Post
This. If SE is unable to think of more original mechanics to balance, why not have White Mage mirror Black Mage? Unprecedented, I know; it's not like the lore states they were locked in a war or anything unless you really want to believe the White Mages fended off the Black Mages' meteors, blizzards and lightning storms with their dinky little Glares. Instead they decided to compare apples to oranges and try to have White Mage compete with Astrologian when they are in two completely different planes. Have Astro be the handy utility regen focused healer and have White Mage be the stationary healer that heals like a god and hits like a freight train with Quake, Tornado and Holy (if it was made to be a finisher instead of a spammy blinding AoE) if they stand inside their ley lines.
To be fair, being in a war is usually the result of having opposing interests, not alignment of techniques. In the lore, the White Mages of Amdapor's major power was Golemancy, and they fought against Mhach's Voidsent with their stone golems. In a bit of irony, the flying head mount you can get from PotD is probably the most White Mage-y mount in the game - the Unicorn you befriended as a Conjurer, but the flying head's description is that E-Una-Kotor created it from some of the stone of PotD in an effort to better understand the guardian golems from the Lost City of Amdapor. Indeed, Mhach's most powerful techniques were not Blizzards and Thunder spells, but things like Xenoglosy and Voidsent summoning.

Despite a lot of the community mentioning the spells, we have no lore that really supports White Mages using a ton of Quake, Tornado, etc magics. Quake is used by Xande, who isn't a WHM and existed well before Amdapor. A lot of elder and eldrich spellcasters use spells like that, but not really a lot of White Mages in the lore.

Stationary Healer with more and longer cast times that's more of a caster would be kind of neat if it weren't for the combat/fight design demanding lots of movement...