Why are the dev’s allergic to Water magic?

[Cled-cat]

Just to preface this passionate rant; I’d be a Waterbender if this was Avatar: TLA. What can I say, I like tidal waves and floods?

This been really bothering me for years now that the ONLY element that there’s a severe lack of in our repertoire is water. It feels like they’ve rubbed salt in the wound with giving Y’shtola Water IV as well! They’ve completely ditched Earth and Wind on WHM now too, so now we only have Red Mage’s lesser versions of those as well, while still obviously having NO water spells. Red Mage could have filled that aesthetic void easily. But nope. Why? Who knows. You’d think with Red Mage being all about balancing the elements they’d at least make SOME offensive use of Water, but nope. You’d think after witnessing the raw power of the great flood they’d be inclined to use that abundance of water for offence. But nope.

To make things worse they continually nerf Fluid Aura every expansion... just get rid of it at this point, it’s such a shell of what it used to be it’s a waste of space now. They explained that even the healing spells are wind-aspected. So what gives SE? Do ya’ll hate water that much? I just think it’s such a cool element and seeing it get ignored by all our jobs yet used frequently by enemies and allies is so frustrating.

GIVE US WATER MAGIC ALREADY!

[Hash_Browns]

I-I'm so sorry..

[Cled-cat]

Ah, it says a lot about Blue Mage that I completely forgot about its existence... damn. Normally I’d concede there but until we get useable water magic in most content (as in after level 50 and in duty finder lol) my point still stands! Trust them to dabble in water magic on the only limited job there is... will my dream of using water spells on any other job ever come to fruition? Who knows.

[Kurando]

Ninja has Suiton Ninjutsu as well. I think the question should be, why are the devs allergic to giving WHM offensive water magic? Fluid Aura just doesn't cut it....

[official_coconut]

If I'm not mistaken don't the Geomancers later on have water magic? I don't know what their dungeon is called but I remember seeing a huge water tunnel there. I think that might also be the reason why White Mage got more light magic in order to shift more of those spells towards Geomancer in the future.

[Hezzlocks]

Y'shtola, as a Thaumaturge, runs through pretty much every element. Fire of the Seventh Dawn, Ice of the Seventh Dawn, Stone of the Seventh Dawn, *Water of the Seventh Dawn*, etc, she casts each element once, then casts stronger versions of each element once, then casts Foul of the Seventh Dawn.

So, yeah. Y'shtola has a Water spell. Maybe one day it'll be incorporated into a class, or made into a class of its own.

[Enkidoh]

This isn't the only FF game to throw water elemental spells under the bus, FFVII also did not have many player-useable water themed spells (there was no 'natural' water spells at all - there was the Blue Magic Enemy Skill Aqualung, the Leviathan summon... and that was it really) - although enemies seemed to use water spells freely. Instead you had fire, ice and lightning as the main 'elemental' damage spells (Earth spells were later gained, but even those were less effective than Fire, Ice and Lightning as the Float buff would render an Earth elemental spell completely useless, and Wind spells seemed to be entirelly enemy used, like the commonly used enemy attack 'Aero 3'), something which I presume SE were actually emulating here back in 1.0 when the battle system was redesigned and CNJ lost some of it's elemental spells to THM.

Maybe the actual spell 'Water' will return in the future, but as it stands Fluid Aura is the limit of your water spells for CNJ (and for what it's worth I too am not happy at how SE has consistently neutuered that particular spell - it was far more potent back at ARR's start but now is practically worthless, the damage it did did not need to be removed as players could hardly spam it after all due to it's long cooldown, which was by design. But that's another barrel of moogles...).

[Ayuhra]

The Water magic line was always a classic black mage thing... Except for this game where it was a conjurer thing in 1.0 and then an enemy only thing now.

That IS a little weird.

Geomancer could be a class in the future, though, they could possibly learn water magic.

[Dualblade]

It isn't just this game, the actual Water line of spells usually isn't available for the player, and when it is half the time its only Water with no upgrades. X was the first game to actually give the player access to Watera and Waterga that I've seen, and after that only XIII had those two as well. So this isn't really all that new for FF.

Water-type magic on the other hand has had various spells to their name, via Geomancer spells, the Ninja's Flood ability, Blue Magic, and various summons usually via Leviathan. So as someone said above if we ever get Geomancer it will most likely have plenty of water magic to its name.

[DevilsDontFly]

Maybe they are saving it for another class? There's some small water based skills here and there but nothing that defines a job. WHM used to be big on air and earth, but this expansion transitioned the job into a light/holy focused one. So I'm guessing the reason WHM is losing its earth/water/air identity throughout the expansions might be because Geomancer is in the works. So by the time it becomes a thing, WHM won't have any air, earth or water based skills in the arsenal to clash with Geomancer's concept. That's just my guess though.