Is this the BEST they could come up with?

[Rhomagus]

yes, they would be in a combo as in thunder>thundara>thundaga. what i was getting at though is that it's still the same spell for all intents and purposes. it's just a lightning based spell. you brought up like the bind from thundaga, but also remember that effect only activates when casting it by itself. when you are a blm it's stupid to cast it by itself because it doubles the recast time on it and that combo is the only way to do good damage.

i agree with you about the aoe toggle. i liked being able to determine whether to cast an aoe or single target spell depending on your situation. one of the things i consider more redundant is the fact, yes, you do have multiple versions of a spell on your bar. out of the 30 actions you had on your action bar you didn't have all 3 versions of each of the elements on your bar. you only equipped one maybe 2 versions of whatever spell was beneficial for the mob you were fighting against.

now if you fight against a mob that is an umbral based mob a blm is worthless. that was the main thing about thm originally it was the mage over umbral/astral magics. if a mob was strong against one you equipped the other and then saved room to add other abilities that would help you in the fight. the abilities being set on the classes now gets rid of the versatility to get your job setup to where it is the most beneficial to the party. i enjoyed taking the time and finding out what is the best ability to equip on my class and figuring out what i could do to maximize my damage output. now the way it's done i either use fire spells or lighting spells and you cannot replace those 4 spells of the other element that's worthless in that fight.

think about originally you had 30 abilities and you could put all kinds of choices into what you used on any given fight. now you have 25 and 8 of them are either a lightning based or fire based spell. that only leaves 17 total abilities that is not of those 2 elements.

eidt: sorry missed your edit



i'm completely in agreement with you on this one.

to me like i was giving an example earlier with thm, yes, it needed nerfs and tweaks. i just think they took it a step too far when they did it. thm was able to heal/buff/dot/nuke/enfeeble. they needed to reduce that to 2 of those things in my opinion. for example they could have taken thm to where it did nukes and dot's. you then had thm advance to the job of blm and later when they added the dot class that would have been its either job.

it could have only had the low versions of nukes and low version dot's on thm, the advanced nukes on blm, and the advanced dot's on that unreleased job. that would have allowed people to take that class in either direction if they wanted. you could either take a blm and be a fantastic nuking job, take the dot job once it's out for upgraded dot's, or taken a thm in a situation where you needed someone that was proficient in both aspects to fill avoid.

I thought you might have been meaning that when you were talking about the lightning casts, but just added it to be sure.

Also: Agreed.

While I enjoyed creating my character set ups more in vanilla XIV, I enjoy actually playing my character more in post Yoshida XIV. To be fair, I haven't maged as much as I have melee'd so that could be why as well.