Elemental Spell Reform

[DeadRiser]

I hate how lightnening is your only pure damage spell. It just kills the point of having fire, ice, and thunder if all you use is lightening spells. Black Mage and Thaumaturge is basically a watered down class compared to all the rest. Rotate the same 3 attacks for everything and throw in a flare or freeze when it's off cool down. What about non-elemental attacks? We can't have those either?

And about Black Mages being OP in content. That SE fault for not making content bad enough for too many ranged members and te communities fault for following the easiest path.

[Enfarious]

Sadly people will always take the shortest easiest way. Just like everything in nature, this is built in to us and very few choose a more diffucult road when given the choice.

After a fair bit of reading, I don't think there's anyone that can say a "good" job was done when forming the classes:
Cnj gets a mix of nukes(that should be thm's) and heals but little by way of support spells and nothing white magic DD(except holy)
Thm gets busted elemental spells and only 1/2 the wheel, setting cnj spells leaves you w/ a couple gimped ones but still no water
Pld the job that makes the most sense to be tanks, as throughout history both real and fantastic and FF has been the uber defense tank that defined the word tank, yet pales in comparison to war, and come on WHM and BLM tnaking shit?
War overpowered but people ignore it's overpoweredness because it gets 3 jobs done at once
Arc becomes brd, arc was headed toward DD and ends up the prime support job???
lnc/drg ongoing adjustments break one thing while fixing another, at least now I land 70% of my attacks vs. launch where 10% was doing GREAT
Mnk probably the closest to balanced and solid, it's dmg outshines other melees but not so much that it's absurd, it takes hits well enough but not better than a tank, it mostly makes sense.

End of the day, full on class/job reforms with a little clear direction instead of patchwork jobs that just further break already broken patchwork classes.

Yeah thm needs the full wheel, cnj needs proper white magics and not elemental nukes. Lotsa jobs need lotsa stuff.

[Klive]

We have gone over this hundreds of time on these forums. The lore is messed up. The conjurer use to be a elemental nuker and THM a divine nuker. They changed that. SE made the classes to fit the standard roles of FF, due to the terrible condition the old classes were in. They made THM a Black Mage with their standard elements: fire,ice,thunder. They made the conjurer a healer with the same elements from FFIII.

The conjure is a druid and whm is NOT a divine healer. The WHM, in this FF, gets powers from the elements of the twelveswood. Heck, the WHM AF chest piece is an elemental that turned in to it for you. The whole divine powers thing is not this WHM, so banish and dia doesn't fit. Holy, the spell in this FF, doesn't even do astral damage, it is just damage with no element.

[SionDurant]

I don't agree with BLM getting access to Dia, banish etc just because that's not typically available unless you're a hero in the FF series to BLM schools of magic:

That said, they should get Bio and Scourge back as well as a spell form of Shadowsear in my opinion.

I don't like the direction they took CNJ with stone and aero but I know it was probably necessary without gutting the entire class storyline.

Abolish all classes, replace them with the jobs we just received, keep the weapon armory system in place with the same set sub jobs and a lot of this having to tip toe around who gets what and what jobs in the future hey can make goes away!

[Enfarious]

Jinrya-Geki you said it.
I think AoE toggles for every spell though, not just thm/blm

All teir elemental spells should have the same dmg base by tier, making water as useful as fire as useful as thunder. Of course using them against weak/resistant mobs would affect this, as would your [element] attributes and [element] attack magic bonuses.

That resistance building thing is a little extreme, I'm not a magey type but what I've seen if your first cast gets partially resisted your simply fk'd, I get why they have it ramping up, it's just a little too much too soon.

Cnj/Whm imo needs to go back to what the majority of the series has had as WHM banish/holy/cure and other Light based stuff.

A final thought, on the number of abilities, magic users have always and should always have more spells than melees have abilities, this makes sense considering that in most instances a mage will only have 2~3 spells that are actually useful in a fight while a melee will be able to use all abilities every fight. But if to keep it simple enough for 6 year olds to play they want to keep the minimum ability count they've got going now, then just drop all the tiers and have spell dmg scale w/ level, you get 1 direct dmg attack spell of each element, 1 DoT spell of each element, and have 3 slots left over for other abilities.
Edit: of course this level of reform would prolly not be feasible at this point in things.

[Jinrya-Geki]

Most likely not, most black mages seem to be fine with what they got. I think it's unacceptable.

[Enfarious]

Something says they're fine with it for the same reason that people are fine with WAR as it is. They don't want it getting nerfed down to what other jobs are capable of. If SE starts looking too deeply at THM/BLM it might occur to them that 400 DPS from cycling thunder and casting ABSOLUTELY nothing else during a fight is a little broken. Of course they might scale back that damage output and noone really wants that.

[Klive]

Spells maybe simple and only have have a hand full of them, but people still have no idea on how to use them.

First, if you are only spam thunder > thundra, with thundaga when your mana and crit buffs are up; you are not playing your BLM/THM to its fullest. That what I do when I'm low of mana and trying to get some back.

Most people don't even try to use the debuff effects of their spells. Aerora dispels enemy buffs, too many CNJs don't know it can. Blizzara binds enemies and is a fantastic crowd control to use; alternate it with sleep to keep enemies under control longer. Yet, I see BLM/THM die to stuff because they don't think to bind things and walk away... all the time. I see people flare monster then wonder why they can't sleep it. I could go on.

Spell lists maybe limited, but people still have little idea on how to use them. Honestly, I fail to see how having a huge spell list of spells, that I won't use,will improve my spell casting experience. It will be like other MMOs that had giant spell lists, I had the best on my bar, the rest collected dust.

To each their own though.

[KoujiGeki]

ok everyone try to imagine this. Lets say they add Dark Knight to the game and to make it DD on par with drg and war they take War steel cyclone away and rampage and gave Drk Spinning slash and a blood weapon that isnt a 15. and Drg they take away Life surge and dreadspike. and gave them to drk also. All the Wars and Drg would god damn have aneurisms and rage quit. That EXACTLY what they did to Blm/Thm they took their spells away. in every other single game IMAGINABLE Black mage, sorceror, wizard,mage,sage,warlock has had every elemental spell in some shape or form. BLM/Thm should be useful in every magic based situation. What will Blms do when they add a fight that Thunder or fire is useless? use lolblizzard? well then they can cast Bio.... oh wait.....Elemental Dots...oh wait....... Sleepga........oh wait they are resisting now.... Blm/thm should have all the Offensive Elemental Spells.

[Enfarious]

Spells maybe simple and only have have a hand full of them, but people still have no idea on how to use them.

First, if you are only spam thunder > thundra, with thundaga when your mana and crit buffs are up; you are not playing your BLM/THM to its fullest. That what I do when I'm low of mana and trying to get some back.

Most people don't even try to use the debuff effects of their spells. Aerora dispels enemy buffs, too many CNJs don't know it can. Blizzara binds enemies and is a fantastic crowd control to use; alternate it with sleep to keep enemies under control longer. Yet, I see BLM/THM die to stuff because they don't think to bind things and walk away... all the time. I see people flare monster then wonder why they can't sleep it. I could go on.

Spell lists maybe limited, but people still have little idea on how to use them. Honestly, I fail to see how having a huge spell list of spells, that I won't use,will improve my spell casting experience. It will be like other MMOs that had giant spell lists, I had the best on my bar, the rest collected dust.

To each their own though.

First your not wrong at all, and in that vein I'd say/did say 2 tiers of each of the 6 elements in the common FF wheel, they can still have or not have enfeebling effects, so you go from 8/9 spells to 12 but have every element. The dmg for each tier being equal so w/o any mods (weakness, resistance, elemental buffs, etc.) fire = water = blizzard = 15 dmg(base as a lvl 1), and they'd scale w/ level to make them never "useless" the second tier could introduce a second enfeebling effect, boosted damage, combo access, etc. to make them also useful.

I think(again I'm not really a mage in this so much yet, but I know a number of them) most thm/blm spam thunder>thundara>thundaga because in the end all we care about in EG seems to be DPS, and that chain is where DPS is @, nothing else really matters, at least that's what I've seen up to this point in my playing.

I think the other "failing?" point of the current spell system lies in making combos necessary, and in some cases they're detrimental. I cast thunder > need to thundara now for it's added effect against a group cause something went sideways(tank died/dc'd) but I have to wait til the combo timer is up to cast it, shit I'm dead already ...
Yes there's other ways to go outside of that, and it's just a loose example to illustrate a point, not an end all be all fact.

Magic Bursting off melee combos like someone else mentioned or later off of battle regimens like skillchain > MB worked, make the buttons light up just like for a combo, that way people don't whine about having to pay too much attention to what others are doing. I loved skillchaining, and on drk being the opener and MBing off chains I started