My “Next job” predictions: “Scouting” and “Fending”

[Rongway]

It would be neat of they visited Vanadiel like they mentioned

I missed this. Do you have a citation please?

[Zairava]

I don't want them to add another tank until they give DRK its own identity again

[MikkoAkure]

I would also like to see water magic but there's a lore reason RDM doesn't have any. During the War of the Magi the Amdapori white mages only fought with earth and wind magic against the Mhachi black mages' fire, lightning, and ice magics. The extensive use of those five elements heavily tilted the land's aether away from everything but water, which allowed the Ascians to rejoin a shard via flood. Red mage arts are descended from the Amdapori and Mhachi survivors of the flood, and those white mages didn't use water.

I'm not bringing that up to say that it's writ in stone that RDM can't have water magic--I'm a quick study combat genius who could invent a Verwater spell if I wanted, obviously--but just to say there's a flavour reason for the current lack of water spells in the Eorzean jobs.

Is there an actual thing in the game that says that the Amdapori mages didn't use water magic and that's why the calamity was a flood or is that just fan conjecture? I thought that at the time Amdapor dungeons came out WHM had water magic.

Sources in the game itself say that the scales tipped toward water because the Elementals wanted to flood the world due to the rampant use of magic.


Either way, it's been something like 1600 years since the Flood so I think they can get over any collective PTSD and do some water and ice magic. Elezen fencing techniques were randomly stapled on after the genesis of the job so it's not like it needs to stay static to how it was a millennium and a half ago.

[kaynide]

I missed this. Do you have a citation please?

It was in one of the recent live letters…more of an off the cuff remark.

They were talking about what FF games they might draw from in future expansions, and they responded something along the lines of “Well, FF9 is still pretty untapped…..oh and there is Vana’diel.”

[Rongway]

It was in one of the recent live letters…more of an off the cuff remark.

They were talking about what FF games they might draw from in future expansions, and they responded something along the lines of “Well, FF9 is still pretty untapped…..oh and there is Vana’diel.”

Ah, so not literally visit, just reuse ideas or designs from.

Is there an actual thing in the game that says that the Amdapori mages didn't use water magic and that's why the calamity was a flood or is that just fan conjecture? I thought that at the time Amdapor dungeons came out WHM had water magic.

Sources in the game itself say that the scales tipped toward water because the Elementals wanted to flood the world due to the rampant use of magic.

I'll take a look and see if I can find an explicit statement in game. The circumstances surrounding the Calamity of Water are stated in game and in the EEvol1 at least: white and black mages from two opposing nations at war whose magicks used the land's aether as fuel, leaving the land with basically nothing but water aether leftover. The main reason white magic and black magic are forbidden arts is that they consume ambient aether. From this we are meant to infer that neither the Amdapori nor the Mhachi used much water magic if at all, since there was so much of water aether and so little else left.

[MikkoAkure]

I'll take a look and see if I can find an explicit statement in game. The circumstances surrounding the Calamity of Water are stated in game and in the EEvol1 at least: white and black mages from two opposing nations at war whose magicks used the land's aether as fuel, leaving the land with basically nothing but water aether leftover. The main reason white magic and black magic are forbidden arts is that they consume ambient aether. From this we are meant to infer that neither the Amdapori nor the Mhachi used much water magic if at all, since there was so much of water aether and so little else left.

Nothing in the EE or anywhere in the game says that the world's aether was unbalanced to water because White Mages couldn't use water spells. White Mage could use a water spell until Endwalker came out so I'm not sure the writers were trying to make us infer anything from the gameplay anyway. The only sources I can find of anyone saying that Amdapori mages only used wind and earth and caused the Calamity that way are random people on Reddit guessing without a source and a few of them were just joking.

1.0's White Mage questline tells a different story:

In his pride and avarice, man brought down the wrath of the elementals upon himself. A great deluge was sent to cleanse the land of his wicked presence, in the wake of which the forest rose to swallow up all that was not washed away. Thus did the Six Umbral Era begin… or so it is told.

Oha-Sok is the collective fury of the elementals given form. Their suffering summoned her forth, and in her turn she stokes the fire of their rage with her keening. As I related to you earlier, it was the rage of the elementals that brought an end to the civilization of the Fifth Astral Era. And now the selfsame harbinger of that destruction is come once more. The histories vividly describe the fearsome nature of the elemental of nihility─or ‘the Wrath,’ as she is sometimes called. It is writ that each time she keens, she sets off a hundred of her kind to doing the same. Ever more elementals shall join the keening, and so shall it continue until their chorus rends the land asunder. And then the heavens shall spill forth a deluge of tears, and the trees weep till they are hoarse of voice. Oha-Sok’s awakening spells cataclysm for Eorzea…

We also learn in ShB that that element imbalance starts on the affected Shard and the excess energy flows to the Source. Even if this Yoshi-P-era 1.0 story is now non-canon and Oha-Sok didn't summon a deluge to wipe away the Magi and it got out of control, the aether being sucked dry from the war would also mean that water aether going crazy on a Shard and being siphoned off to the Source would tip the balance towards water anyway.


Aaaanyway, sort of back on topic, anyone have any ideas for what type of weapon a scouting class could use that doesn't get too close to anyone else's territory? There's already a handful of jobs that just use different lengths/types of swords so that's a possibility, but a boring one.

[Rongway]

Nothing in the EE or anywhere in the game says that the world's aether was unbalanced to water because White Mages couldn't use water spells.

I said, "You're meant to infer it".

Here is what the EEvol1 says:

The Mhachi march on Amdapor was not the sole cause of Eorzea's downfall. 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.

[...]

Monitoring of the realm's aether indicated an unhealthy imbalance toward water, suggesting the manifestation of a Calamity-scale flood of epic proportions.

[...]

As most of their lands' energies had been exhausted in their efforts to seal Diabolos, there was little remaining for Amdapor's white mages to draw upon to stay the waters....

The white mage and black mage quest lines both stress that their respective schools are forbidden because they use ambient aether as fuel ("the drain of energies used to propagate war"). If the Amdapori white mages were also waging war with water magic, that too would have been used up. That there was enough water aether left to cause a calamity suggests that if they used water magic, they did not use it in anywhere near the same quantity as they used earth and wind magic. That they couldn't do something with the overabundance of water aether suggests they didn't know any good water spells to spend it on.

The 1.0 telling could be canonically what the very few contemporary white mages believe, while also not being what canonically happened. This much is not problematic; after all, how many people today still believe the universe was created in a literal seven day period and that the Earth is only a few thousand years old?

Aaaanyway, sort of back on topic, anyone have any ideas for what type of weapon a scouting class could use that doesn't get too close to anyone else's territory? There's already a handful of jobs that just use different lengths/types of swords so that's a possibility, but a boring one.

We have so many interesting weapons that we haven't explored yet. Not just for another scouting job but in general. Things with chains/ropes especially.

• Rope darts.
• Yo-yos.
• Chain whips.
• Meteor hammers.
• One-handed hammers.
• Long staves (the kind you hit people with, not the kind that shoot glitter).
• Just-a-shield (bonus points if the just-a-shield job is not a tank).
  Mixed-hand weapons:
• handaxe+pistol (my personal pick for a Pirate/Corsair)
• knife+kama (maybe with a chain, even).

[kaynide]

Aaaanyway, sort of back on topic, anyone have any ideas for what type of weapon a scouting class could use that doesn't get too close to anyone else's territory? There's already a handful of jobs that just use different lengths/types of swords so that's a possibility, but a boring one.

They try to reuse assets if possible, or reincorporate (gladiators used to have daggers, which became swords and the daggers moved to ninja)

So, I expect at some point 1 handed wands/clubs from blm/whm will be a thing on a new job…but for scouting…
We have axes from the beastmaster NPCs, so I imagine that will come into play (and it’s easy to recycle existing axe designs into smaller ones)

I kind of foresee dual wielding a variety of weapons, like crossbow and axe. Kinda like a reverse RDM where they melee with ranged specials…not positional, but distance related procs.

[MikkoAkure]

I said, "You're meant to infer it".
[…]
The 1.0 telling could be canonically what the very few contemporary white mages believe, while also not being what canonically happened.

Yeah I’m not buying that we were meant to infer anything and that explanation you gave doesn’t make any sense to me. Again, the EE just says there was an imbalance of aether, not that they weren’t using water magic. You would think an important detail like that which supposedly led to a taboo like you said in a previous post would be important enough to be mentioned outright, not “meant to be inferred”.

The idea that the 6th Calamity was caused by mages who didn’t know how to use water magic just because the modern job had 1 water spell that was later taken away is way too flimsy and we already know that A.) The world’s aether at the time was already unstable from intense magic war and B.) We know from ShB that a Shard being aspected towards one element has that element sent to the Source.

All it would’ve taken is a water disaster on whatever Shard to make the unstable Source go water crazy, not inept White Mages based on inferring from gameplay.

Also in that 1.0 questline, we talk to the elemental responsible for the 6th Calamity herself because she’s ticked off and wants to start another calamity.

I kind of foresee dual wielding a variety of weapons, like crossbow and axe. Kinda like a reverse RDM where they melee with ranged specials…not positional, but distance related procs.

I don’t know if they would go as far as doing a reverse RDM since it may upset the power balance between the melee, but then again they’ve been making the hit boxes so large as to be inconsequential lately.

Having dual axes would be neat and may fit the idea of “scouting”. I’d love to revive my old WAR/NIN FFXI days.

[CaptainLagbeard]

Aaaanyway, sort of back on topic, anyone have any ideas for what type of weapon a scouting class could use that doesn't get too close to anyone else's territory? There's already a handful of jobs that just use different lengths/types of swords so that's a possibility, but a boring one.

It would be mildly boring, but I could see them doing Ranger as a melee class using various larger knives (as opposed to the daggers than NIN uses)... Stuff like Machetes, Kukris, Bowie Knives and what not.