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

[Cleretic]

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.

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.

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.