WHM using Amdaporian White Magic techniques.

[SkyEdge1]

So I was watching an older lore video, and a small question came up for me regarding WHM and their use of white magic within our universe. Is there any (lore or otherwise) reason why the PC as a WHM would not seek to use skills from the Amdapor legacy of white magic. We know that it was of a higher class of battle magic and presumably those skill would be responsibly used in our hands, but I really would like to see the use of Earth magic to summon Gargoyles and other soulkin to our aide in battle.

[Dualblade]

So I don't know all the lore for White Mages, mine is still in the mid-50s. That said the most likely reason is that those higher tiers of magic were part of the reason why Amdapori was wiped out alongside Mhaci. While Black Magic was most likely the worse of the two during the war White Magic was/is something to be feared, and the Elements still are afraid of some of them. We went into Lost City of Amdapor Hard Mode because the Elements were anxious/fearful of the White Magicks becoming unbound within it after all.

Things like the Gargoyels are the White Magic version of Voidsent. We probably won't get it...that said its always possible that in small doses it might be okay similar to how Summoner Egis are okay for us to use, but not the summons themselves.

[Anonymoose]

That would more or less be my assumption for the time being, as well. The Padjal are allowed to use and steward white magic under the Pact of Gelmorra (the treaty with the Elementals), but that's it. It's already a massive exception that they've been granted permission to teach the Warrior of Light (singular). Thus, learning from the Padjal and being inspired by the job crystal are expected, but going out of your way to learn the magicks hidden by the Elementals against their wishes probably won't work out well for anyone.

We do use arcanima from time to time (the type of magic behind soulkin, minus a few nuances), but raising white magic-powered arcane constructs on the side would probably not go over well, either.

[Sylvain]

I won't repeat why everyone said but the case of Amdapor and Mhach is also a bit special IMO in the sens that they did abuse magic thus creating their own cataclysm.
It was an all out war with heavy use (to not say abusive) of magic.
We know Ether is everywhere. Everything is made of it. Magic is the manipulation of the said Ether. Like natural ressource, you can effectively deplete it. Once you destabilise the "ethereal equilibrium" of a said region, a massive shift of ethereal type occurs thus the cataclysm. In the case of Mhach and Amdapor you had a huge amount of Ether shifting its alignement to water which created the flood.
For instance, (if I'm right but I think I've read it in the book or somewhere in the dialogue), when a conjurer use Stone/Aero, it temporarely shift the surrounding Ether to the said alignement to create the effect. (The Ether than goes back to it's former form which is why spamming stone doesn't create rumbles) However this is a very minor and localised "shift" of Ether.
You changed half a meter cube of something to rock for a few seconds.

After Bahamut oblitarated half of Eorzea, the region of coerthas had reacted by shifting the etheral balance toward ice. This is why there's a place where you see dragons and warrior litteraly frozen in place. The entire zone, this point especially, froze in an instant. (That's a very quick rebalance if you ask me). Here we aren't talking about a half a meter cube but half a continent worth of stuff. It's like burning 1L of fuel vs 1M tons of fuel. The first one won't affect the atmosphere, the second one will deplete oxygen in a huge radius around the center of explosion.

I guess we could somewhat compare abusing ether (in any form) to climate change on a much shorter time scale
If you use too much of a specific natural ressource (ether in this case), changes are bound to happen because you unbalance the "ethereal environnement".
For instance, if you'd suddently melt all the icecap, you'd have an overflow of water around the world.
if you'd release all the greenhouse gaz trapped in the iceground in north Canada, (and Russia too maybe? I dunno), you'd see temperature rise quickly (which would then lead to other changes)

The only real difference between that and the "natural" events I took as an example are
1 : No one really knows how ether work but SE tend to enjoy theme such as "natural balance, order of things" etc. So you could easily relate to our own world when it comes to ressource manipulation and their effect on the environnement. Just remember that in this case everything is made of ether which has elemental alinement and that those alignement CAN change. If by some unique way a character is like "I've found a way to shift Earth aligned ether to Water for a short period of time on grand scale" and "grand scales" includes object of mountain size, he could litteraly turn a mountain to water (which would then turn back to stone since he said it wouldn't last long)

2 : Unlike our world where things happen slowly, ether seems to enter a chain reaction MUCH faster. Like, once you've broken a specific threashold of unbalance the whole system rebalances itself within a few minutes resulting in catastrophic events for the living (Flood, Instant freeze of Coerthas are the two main example coming to my mind).



So, I think the only reason Black Magic and White Magic are banned is because there were abuses in the past and instead of learning how to use it properly, they rather ban it altogether.
Which is dumb imo, I like to think of those as Nuclear powerplant vs Coil powerplant.
The former is much more potent than the later but fail to use it adequatly and the result might not be so good. Mhach vs Amdapor sounds is a bit like an Eorzean Tchernobyl where they pushed the system too far (ether - the powerplant) and made it explode. So now we're back to Coil because coil can't explode over a continent.

And the WoL is a special snowflake that is learning to use Nuclear fission power again.


However one important point is that the flood was created by the Elements and honestly, we don't know much about them.
Could it be that they're conscious ether? Dunno.
Looking at the previous cataclysm, all of them have a specific alignement and only the flood was caused by the element.
The only other case we have of "man made catastrophe" (that we know of) is the Fourth caused by the crystal tower power surge when it transfered energy from Dalamud to the tower.

What we know is that every case of cataclysm was caused when a lot of Ether was moved around.
Crystal Tower power surge caused an Earthquack that destroyed an entire civilisation
the Magi war enraged the elements causing a flood (something would have happened anyway)
the 7th was cause by Dalamud powerplant (Bahamut) breaking free

We don't know what happened during the First, second, third and Fifth cataclysm beside their alignement. But one thing we can safely bet is that those event were caused. They didn't occur naturally. Eorzea and the way Ether can return to equilibrium really quick suggests (to me at least) that you can't have a cataclysm popping randomly for no reason.

[SkyEdge1]

So as I understand it, from replies and from a small amount of digging i did on the side; the main reason the Elementals took issue with White and Black magic as seen in Amdapor and Mhach was, less because of the prevailing political conflict and more because of the massive toll on the Aether that the magicks had. For an example the large stone guardians used by the Amdaporian for city defense were in essence very similar to primals in that they were a gigantic mass of Aether. Given their proclivity in using these effigy the amount of Aether taken from the land would be enough to cause a sever imbalance in the surrounding land. That I get. However, and please forgive me my ignorance since i have not played any of the SMN quest line. Is this not a problem that has been solved already by the SMN? Are Egi not simply a more controllable, Aether efficient simulacrum of Primal energy? I kind of find it a little hard to believe that in this timeline we the WoL, would not be a proper steward for that lost magic, and that it would not be a far more efficient use of Aether given our story given reservoir of personal Aether. I'm honestly just kinda bummed that WHM is simply given title of healer when White magic can and was so much more fearsome.

[ObsidianFire]

The Lvl. 70 Summoner quest reveals that Egi actually have nothing to do with Eikons and everything to do with what happens to the aether of something when it dies. The Allagans just figured out how apply that knowledge and they don't do things by halves.

When something dies, it's aether gets released back into the environment and ultimately the Lifestream. This includes the aether of the other living things around it. If someone is really, really good at sensing aether, they can figure out what part of their own aether really started out as the aether of something else and what shape/geometry that aether has. Then they can essentially program some of their own aether take the shape/geometry of that other aether almost like it's an aetherial robot. That "robot" is the Egi.

What does this have to do with Eikons? Well people are really, really bad at calculating geometry and sensing aether (keep in mind this is the Allagans). It's really hard to tell you're own aether apart from the aether of other beings like you and the amount of "processing power" needed to calculate the geometry of living things is more then most people can handle. The Allagans did manage to make an Egi of someone specific, but that required a supercomputer powered by Summoner Soul Stones to get all the calculations right.

Eikons on the other hand, aren't living things. It's very obvious what their aether is like and their aether shape/geometry is much easier to calculate then other living things (probably comes with ultimately being based on an idea/concept). So doing all that math is actually possible. Personally, this is what I think the Ultima Warrior in Fractal Continuum (Hard) is an evolution of (knows the math of primal mechanics), but that's just headcanon at this point.

In addition, some of the geometry/shapes the Eikons have are so powerful that making an Egi out of them would require all the summoner's aether. So instead of spending aether to make an Egi, the summoner attunes their own aether to the same shape/geometry of the Eikons and gets to use their abilities, but that attunement doesn't last very long. The WoL ends up doing this with Bahamut's aether in Dreadwyrm Trance. As for Demi-Bahamut... we've got nothing. There's no lore explaining what it is or why it's called a Demi (means half/partial) instead of being called an Egi (means "essence of" in Allagan). I really hope we learn what's going on with it in the next lore book or the next expansion and Dreadwrym Trance got a whole lot of set-up.

So yeah, Summoners aren't so much summoners of primal aether as they are mystical computer programmers who steal code from their enemies.

[LineageRazor]

I'm honestly just kinda bummed that WHM is simply given title of healer when White magic can and was so much more fearsome.

I'm not so sure you should get too invested in the idea of the badassery of White Magic. In all likelihood, the White Mages were able to hold their own against Mhach because of the power of their defensive and curative abilities rather than due to "white magic flavored" nukes. I think there's very little doubt that Mhachi Black Magic was by far the more destructive of the two disciplines. You can probably imagine an Amdapori offensive as consisting of an army of constructs, marching inexorably on their target as White Magic shielded and healed them against the onslaught of Black Magic attacks.

Then, as now, White Mages were healers, first and foremost - but the overpowered healing and defensive magicks were just as destructive of the aetherial balance as Black Magic's overpowered raw firepower.

[Dualblade]

As for Demi-Bahamut... we've got nothing. There's no lore explaining what it is or why it's called a Demi (means half/partial) instead of being called an Egi (means "essence of" in Allagan). I really hope we learn what's going on with it in the next lore book or the next expansion and Dreadwrym Trance got a whole lot of set-up.

The main antagonist of the SMN 60-70 story specifically notices that we are a "Dreadwyrm" summoner or something to that effect during our first fight with him. The explanation for why we couldn't summon more Egi was because we have much more Bahamut Aether within us that it blocks out other primal aether, this most likely means that once we reached the point of being able to summon a Bahamut Egi it ended up being much more powerful, so Demi is probably noting that fact. This could also possibly be the reason it can only be around for a short period, it uses more aether compared to a normal Egi which might be verging into "and this is why we don't summon Primals" territory.

I'm not so sure you should get too invested in the idea of the badassery of White Magic. In all likelihood, the White Mages were able to hold their own against Mhach because of the power of their defensive and curative abilities rather than due to "white magic flavored" nukes. I think there's very little doubt that Mhachi Black Magic was by far the more destructive of the two disciplines. You can probably imagine an Amdapori offensive as consisting of an army of constructs, marching inexorably on their target as White Magic shielded and healed them against the onslaught of Black Magic attacks.

Then, as now, White Mages were healers, first and foremost - but the overpowered healing and defensive magicks were just as destructive of the aetherial balance as Black Magic's overpowered raw firepower.

Yet as we see when we do fight their creations they are in fact capable of a good offense. Many of the spells used by them are infact our own healing spells that they "Reverse" into being attack spells. They can turn their great defenses into powerful offenses, so they very much can nuke things. Plus Holy still is one of the most powerful attacks for any WoL.

That said the destruction to aetherial balance very much was the bigger problem.

[Ametrine]

Worth noting that the 60-70 SCH storyline shows us that, despite the powerful offensive power, Ampadori White Mages were absolutely obsessed with healing magic, so far as to capture Scholar POWs to try to learn as much as they could about their unique methodology of healing. Almost ironically, treating a POW like a test subject doesn't usually result in them giving open lectures on their school of magic, so they never got far.

Ampador's whole strategy was high desense is best offense, with Mhach sitting squarely in the opposite camp. Nym just seemed to play about maintaining themselves until the Tonberry sickness struck. It was a long standing war of attrition, and not really a surprise the Elementals stepped in as a fourth side (or more, if Skalla counts) in the fight and utterly decimated anyone still at war.

It's likely the Elementals limiting WHM knowledge to their hand picked Padjal was a power play and recognition in just how useful healing magic on that scale is. Saying that, now that Gatty exists, it's a possibility we may learn more directly some new, otherwise Padjal exclusive, knowledge if the devs push towards the direction of her educational catch up.

Basically, since we are already a trusted WHM, we can likely start learning those extra special WHM skills Ampador's elite used.

[MPNZ]

Basically, aether isn't infinite and can have negative effects from over exposure to it or extreme sudden shifts in the area's aspected aether in both nature (floods, Ishgard) and living organisms (Sastasha HM, voidsent, zodiac braves of FF14, Thancred & Y'Shtolla). And, all of these are concepts and ideas from several the other entrees in Final fantasy like transforming humans into fiends and mako poisoning.