Hello, and welcome!

This thread has been made to address some of the posts about "how the mage changes are doing away with Final Fantasy Tradition", and it's not meant to address other issues such as the obvious lack of offensive water or debuff spells. So, here we go!

Oh, just one thing. For whatever reason, my spell checker is all fuzzy and I'm sorta busy to check everything. Expect typos, sorry for that.


1 - Black Mages without access to all elements? HERESY!

Nope, that's tradition. Black Mages rarely had access to all basic elements in the series. In fact, I believe only in Final Fantasy XI and XII the Black Mage's repertoire includes all elements. Can be wrong on that, tho.

Anyways, do you know what are the traditional elements Black Mages have access to?

Fire
Lightning
Ice

Please take a look at the proposed THM / BLM skillset. What elements do you see there?

Fire. Lightning. Ice.

Also, did you know that these three elements were the ONLY that had (a) (aga) tiered levels originally?

On the other hand, Wind, Earth and Water are more commonly available as 1-2 spells that are either Blue Magic (Water Breath, Twister, etc), basic (Aero in III, Water in IX, for example), top tier (Quake in most of it's appearances) or enemy only spells (Waterga in IX). Some games do deviate from this, but that's not the norm.

-MythBusted.

2 - What's wind doing on my white mage?

Final Fantasy III was the first game in the series to give players access to a wind elemental offensive spell. Aero is a level 2 white magic while tornado is level 8.

This one is a bit more debatable, but still has it's roots on the series.

-MythBusted.

3 - No Offensive Water spells.

Like I've mentioned previously, Water has almost always been a hard to use element. Often, Water spells are Blue Magic, Summon Magic or a single, very specific Black magic. We don't have a Blue Mage or a Summoner yet, so while it does sucks to not be able to exploit water weakness currently, this is not new to the series.

-MythBusted.

Things that did change. But do remember: Reinventing itself is also a Final Fantasy tradition!

1 - Lack of debuff spells

This is a point where everyone complaining is right. Black Mages hardly, if ever, are debuff heavy, however they always do have access to few, specific debuffs such as poison or frog. White mages too, often use Mini or Confuse.

This has been kept somewhat via the Sleep spell, but still deviates from the norm. Likely, we will have a new debuff specific class, and indeed most FF games with a debuff class remove almost all debuffs from Black Mage (example: Final Fantasy Tactics), but never to the point FFXIV did.

2 - Offensive Earth spell for White Mages.

This is new. As in, completely new, no precedent. Closest we get to it is......well, nothing.


So, this is it. Feel free to correct me!

We can now proceed to argue with each other like always. j/k