[dev1206] Where in the world did my THM go?!

[Catapult]

I could have handled it if they went the whole way and did it properly, but no. Thaumaturges are now masters of six elements despite being outside the domain of the elements and actually can only cast with 3 of them.

*sigh*

Of course it would have been cool if you kept the astral/umbral sense in THM and allowed BM traits to align those spells to an elemental affinity. Another wasted opportunity...

[JTSpender]

Yeah, I'm honestly pretty disappointed too. I don't necessarily think the new classes are going to be bad, but... from a game design perspective, I think the original Thaumaturge was a fairly cool concept. The core drain & debuff mechanics were really cool, and I love that they made a functioning class out of a number of otherwise fairly underutilized and underappreciated spells from FFXI. I'm a little less psyched about playing yet-another-elementalist-mageytype. (One of the things I liked about conjurer is how they managed to make the elementalist feel a bit less like the standard mage trope.)

That said, as long as they keep THM from devolving into the FFXI Black Mage whose core mechanic is to cast mostly-identical damage spells for each element, I'll probably still play it. If you take away my disappointment about losing the old THM concept, I actually have a reasonably favorable impression of the action list they posted. Especially if they *don't* give THM native access to all elemental nukes. That would make me happy. I was just playing some of the older Final Fantasys recently (FFIII in particular) and was noticing how many cool spells Black Mages have that aren't elemental. It would be neat to see a class that focused more on that concept than on the FFXI one.

And hey, if they took out all the awesome THM debuff stuff because the next mage class they're going to release turns into Red Mage, then they have my complete and total forgiveness. (Though honestly, I'd rather see the debuffs moved a class that turns into Scholar, or maybe Geomancer, and RDM turned into an actual magical fencer with mechanics similar to FFXI's dancer.)