Shocked at the reduction in mage damage, quadruple mp cost, and lowered resources

[Neptune]

Man some of you are really getting carried away. My OP was in no way about party play vs. solo play, easy vs. hard, or one class versus another. The issue at hand is the dev team significantly changing the type of role we play with our characters without giving us any other options. To fix it, they need to open the job system to Conjurers to choose between Black Mage and White Mage at the very least.

Also Dubont, you are in the exact same boat as me; I don't know why you're trying to fight me on my points. You leveled Conjurer for elemental magic and not curing, and your Thaumaturge is low level just like mine. If you didn't nit pick my points you'd see that we both want the same thing - Black Mage, and to not be a heal mule.

Well then equip Siphon MP, Siphon MP II, Stygian Spikes II, use Tranquility/Exaltation. There's still something you can do about MP recovery. Before this patch I rarely had to use MP recovery skills/spells/abilities. You just have to use your MP smarter.

Roll this isn't gonna work, because I of course used this strategy on NMs before this patch, when cure wasn't quadrupled in cost. There's no way this is gonna happen now. There were a lot of hard solos where you would heal yourself for around one hit's worth of damage, but not if it takes up more than a a tenth of your MP per hit.

I love being main healer. I was looking forward to CON being transformed into WHM (with the Job System, not before it), but this is just unacceptable. You know, when I do 8-man versus Great Buffalo I often run out of MP, but it's because I'm actually doing a lot of shit. I'm curing. I'm DOT spamming. I'm interactive in setting up BRs. We typically have a main healer and then some "support" mages doing what I just described. Now honestly I'm going to be Curing and waiting for MP. I don't think I can go back to that. I don't want it to be like XI. I liked my "all-around" mage and I liked being active and aggressive in difficult fights.

This is a great post. You loved being a White Mage type character but with the ability to contribute beyond that strict role. Too bad the dev team saw the need to lock you in to a strict role. I agree with you, that kind of gameplay was exhilarating. It's really a shame that they are going to dumb down the gameplay in a feeble grasp of solidarity.

YouTube video on the Art of the Spit Take.
I keep hearing that the 2nd is going to be harder than the first one. So I guess I'll just spawn in a die seconds later, instead of it taking me whole minutes to die in the last one.

I'm still not getting the whole spit take thing. It's spitting on someone or being spit on? Or just the element of surprise? lol

the point of NMs is to require good party play by persons around that level.

Negative dude. There is no rule. You pulled that out of your ass, and it should probably go right back in your ass. The reason I can think of that this is not desirable is that just like in FFXI, no one wants to do these NMs after the first 5 minutes. None of these noobs are going to find a group of people willing to go camp these things for 5+ hours. I think it's far cooler if these NMs are more like an extremely challenging solo fight. That's how I did it many times. Soloing by myself for hours. I soloed Sirocco for 25 minutes a pop on my 30s or 40s ish Conjurer, and it was very challenging. But fun too. The dev team has eliminated that thrilling gameplay now.. that was hard, a party kill would be easy.

You've been talking a lot about easy mode but soloing an NM is not easy.. there's no reraise and nothing to cover your ass if anything goes wrong.

ignorant people want mindless gameplay other games mages were always more of a challenge to play you have to keep people alive & keep crowd control. now you have to think a little and now its ignorant??

ignore darkstar...he's just butthurt because his favorite class is no longer OP and mages now take a little bit of skill to play.

Dude you and indira have got this backwards.. you aren't thinking it through. You are thinking LESS with cure spells that cost 130 MP out of 800MP @ R50. It takes LESS skill to cast cure 7 times than to do 30 or 40 different actions during a fight. That should be obvious to you. What is there to think about when your options are limited to cast cure X number of times??

People were complaining about Thau and Conj being overpowered, now they've been toned down and balanced out a bit, and there are still complaints? What exactly did the select mages complaining want?

If anyone complained it was people that weren't mages.. are you really trying to compare the complaints of mages and non-mages?