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

[Shurrikhan]

I didn't play 1.0, but that'd actually be something of a problem I'd see with 1.0 Conjurer in a game with elemental weaknesses: they just had more game to play, because there was basically a system reserved for them.

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.

Between those, you could soak an enemy to shock it, granting it polarity in such a way as to, say, MRI the damn thing, find the cracks in its shell, hit there, saturate and heat further, shock again, purposely harden that angle with earth magic (Petra, not Stone -- Stone is physical damage, usually with low Pierce), then hit it with physical attacks timed together (especially, Blunt) to break the shell open there, then broil the thing in its shell.

:: (During all this, equal complexity would likely go into just keeping the mob in check and locked down so you could pull off this more macro-level stuff.)

[MikkoAkure]

We are meant to infer from this that the black and white mages significantly drained the land of all the elements except water. Therefore, the Amdapori white mages didn't use anywhere near as much water magic as they did earth or wind.

Like I said in another thread you were in awhile back where you brought up the exact same thing, I don't think we're meant to infer anything. If "not using as much water magic" was an actual reason for the calamity, then you would think if would be important enough for there to be an explicit description of that in the game or the encyclopedia.

You're trying to come up with an explanation for a lore event with gameplay mechanics. That's like saying lightning magic is vastly inferior to all other types because BLM only used it for DoT. In that case, why wasn't there a lot of leftover lightning aether if all BLM had is 1 spell that uses it?

WHM/CNJ had the spell Fluid Aura removed, does that mean it never ever existed? But then EW gave WHMs Aquaveil, wouldn't that mean that 5th Era WHMs had access to it too and would be spamming it since the EE says White Magic is all about healing, purification, and protection and spent the war under siege? Considering Verstone and Veraero build up your white mana gauge while Verholy drains it, wouldn't that also mean that the light-aspected magic that the vast majority of the magic that 5th Era WHMs used also drained water aether?


As ShB told us, extra aether on one of the Shards will creep into the Source until it floods the Source with that aether. It makes more sense that Ascian shenanigans causing an imbalance of aether on a Shard leaks water aether into the Source where all of the aether has been sapped dry from years of mage war then boom, Great Flood. Instead of the other explanation of "WHM didn't use much water magic so the world suddenly flooded".

You would think if that were the case, then the worlds' mages, being much more advanced in magic than modern mages, would have known that would happen. Especially if they knew the aspect of all prior calamities before theirs. At the same time, I don't think they couldn't have predicted aether coming in from a Shard because as far as we know they had no idea Shards existed or the reason calamities happened.

[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.

[Kesey]

It's pretty clear to me that White Mages can't swim when they carry that heavy staff and excessively baggy robes.

/sarcasm

[Shurrikhan]

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.

Do we even have any statistics saying they were the most popular. When playing, CNJs were easily the class I met the least. THMs seemed to hugely outnumber them both during leveling and at level-cap. They were better healers, better nukers... just, largely... better all around. Dark Seal, Blood Rite, and Paradigm Shift were arguably better offensively than the likes of CNJ's Fastcast, and THM's alternate spells like Shadowfall and Shadowsear were beastly by comparison, as were its pseudo-defensives like Punishing Barbs, Stygian Spikes, Emulate (steal target's Element Resistances), and Contagion (afflict enemy with all the afflictions that are afflicting you -- and iirc, yes, you could cast your DoTs on yourself) -- and then their CC like Gravity, Slow, and Flashfreeze was able to get around more resistances. ...Then add to that their ability to steal anyone's stats.

Also... why did we give up that more interesting caster for just 'alternating frost and fire mage'? Or... why couldn't we just have both?

(If the answer is that an increasingly nigh unkillable, do-everything caster may be a bit problematic, I can understand that, but... c'mon. It was a fun base design.)

[Cleretic]

Do we even have any statistics saying they were the most popular. When playing, CNJs were easily the class I met the least. THMs seemed to hugely outnumber them both during leveling and at level-cap. They were better healers, better nukers... just, largely... better all around. Dark Seal, Blood Rite, and Paradigm Shift were arguably better offensively than the likes of CNJ's Fastcast, and THM's alternate spells like Shadowfall and Shadowsear were beastly by comparison, as were its pseudo-defensives like Punishing Barbs, Stygian Spikes, Emulate (steal target's Element Resistances), and Contagion (afflict enemy with all the afflictions that are afflicting you -- and iirc, yes, you could cast your DoTs on yourself) -- and then their CC like Gravity, Slow, and Flashfreeze was able to get around more resistances. ...Then add to that their ability to steal anyone's stats.

Also... why did we give up that more interesting caster for just 'alternating frost and fire mage'. Or... why couldn't we just have both.

(If the answer is that an increasingly nigh unkillable, do-everything caster may be a bit problematic, I can understand that, but... c'mon. It was a fun base design.)

I heard this from a friend, and with a bit of digging, found out their source: A long-defunct FF14 news site. To my knowledge, nobody actually performed any quantitative surveys after this; hell, ff14news itself just completely gave up and fell silent in December that year.

Their metric was basically 'how many people were logged in on this job' for a specific day very shortly after release. And in that case it completely tracks why Conjurer was the most popular (and it was not close): the meta hadn't firmed up yet, and CNJ was getting both the 'healer crowd', anyone into their aesthetic, and whoever actually tried to do some metagaming and realized that it was stuffed full of good-looking cross-class skills.

Also, despite what the writer of that post was saying... wow those launch numbers are bleak.

[Shurrikhan]

I heard this from a friend, and with a bit of digging, found out their source: A long-defunct FF14 news site. To my knowledge, nobody actually performed any quantitative surveys after this; hell, ff14news itself just completely gave up and fell silent in December that year.

Their metric was basically 'how many people were logged in on this job' for a specific day very shortly after release. And in that case it completely tracks why Conjurer was the most popular (and it was not close): the meta hadn't firmed up yet, and CNJ was getting both the 'healer crowd', anyone into their aesthetic, and whoever actually tried to do some metagaming and realized that it was stuffed full of good-looking cross-class skills.

Also, despite what the writer of that post was saying... wow those launch numbers are bleak.

Yeah, there'd be only a handful of grind parties per zone back then. And uh... keep in mind that there was only a single zone each for all of Thanalan, all of Gridania, all of Coerthas (still larger than Central + Western combined), all of Limsa Lominsa, Mor Dhona (was the size of 3 ARR Mor Dhonas), etc. So... concurrent players... It felt like maybe 1000, on a good day?

But yeah, anyways, by the time I was playing, MRD, LNC, ARC typically felt like the most populace classes, with THM and maybe PGL not far behind. People had already noticed by then, though, that GLD was finnicky to get value out of, and that CNJ really only played with 3-4 attack spells at a time.

Granted, that's just my anecdotal evidence.

:: Quick note: Back then, I'm pretty sure we could actually start as whatever class we wanted from any city. The guilds would offer you a free level 1 weapon, but... you could just buy one, too, and skip going to the guild hall. They weren't required for progression.

[Zero-ELEC]

Of note to the whole "adding elemental damage and properties to all enemies and player attacks would be a nightmare" bit, that wouldn't actually be the case because they already do that. All attacks are typed internally, the typing simply serves no practical purpose.

Regardless, it would still be a nightmare to balance and would cause more problems to actually make elements relevant than not.

[Cleretic]

Of note to the whole "adding elemental damage and properties to all enemies and player attacks would be a nightmare" bit, that wouldn't actually be the case because they already do that. All attacks are typed internally, the typing simply serves no practical purpose.

Regardless, it would still be a nightmare to balance and would cause more problems to actually make elements relevant than not.

Yeah, it's not that it's technically impossible to make it so that, say, Broil does earth damage, doing so would actually be super easy*, but if they just did that alone then it wouldn't matter; you'd have to add elemental resistances and weaknesses to everything, and then find a way to balance that in a way that doesn't lead to something like 'now White Mage is objectively worse than other healers at the Anabeisos raids and there's nothing the White Mages can do about it'. And Zero's right, that would be way more trouble than it's worth even if it's not literally impossible.

...thinking about it, the healers are definitely the big pain point on that one on a design perspective, because at least you could theoretically cram all six elements onto a DPS or tank kit to make sure they've all got options, even if for some jobs it's gonna get weird. But by my count none of the healers even have six damage-dealing spells.

*Also we can't count out the possibility that weirdo spaghetti code means that it actually would be way harder than we expect to do this, and somehow adding elemental damage to Broil breaks Leap of Faith.

[Raikai]

Aquaveil literally has 'aqua' in its name and a splash-y animation.

Granted, I wish White Mages still kept more elemental magic on their kits, because it's barely there. If it would depend on me, I'd make Glare and Dia more of a special occasion proc spells or something enabled after a blood lily.

But who knows, maybe they are just paving the way for an elementalist job in the future.