Elemental Spell Reform

[Shurrikhan]

As I mentioned in the thread about magic revamps, the devs went all Suikoden on this game's magic system. Each element has a specific use and/or purpose. This wouldn't be bad in itself...were it not for the fact that as I've said before, BLM and WHM should both stem from CON. It stands to reason both in lore and basic design (which like it or not is still a throwback to how CON was at launch). You can't really have elements mix because the elemental wheel is split between two classes. That needs to change before anything else can really be done to fix things.

Would be nice then to see Conjurer itself be a viable raid-caster in combination with Black Mages in order to complete some of those cross-wheel combinations. If that were so, I wouldn't mind the spell wheel being cut in half for the two CONJ specialty classes (err... Conj and Thaum, grr). But either way, a system would need to be in place that makes whipping together something like Fire and Wind, Water and Ice, Water and Lightning... do something...

[Lewiz5]

Ok, I think I have an idea that should make everyone happy. The main issue everyone seems to has with the current magic system is how 1) Thunder is far more useful than Fire and especially poor Blizzard and thus THM/BLM is forced to spam the same spell chain over and over again and 2) BLM can't take advantage of all the elemental weaknesses present in the game due to not having access to all of the elemental spells.

The solution to this is to simply 1) Give CON Water and Watera. 2) Allow all classes to be able to use Stonera and Aerora as well as the new Water and Watera spells. 3) Allow BLM to be able to use CON spells. And of course 4) Balance Blizzard and Fire to be more useful.

Doing this will allow for BLM to be able to use all the elemental spells without having to fully rework the magic system present in game.

Also an easy and effective way to make it so BLM can have access to CON spells is to make it so all of the jobs can use three other classes abilities instead of just two. For example, Paladin could use CON, MRD, and let's say PUG abilities in addition to it's base GLD abilities. This would not only fix THM/BLM's problems, but would also give everyone more choices for Jobs making it a bit more interesting.

As for the 15 ability limit, you could either get rid of repose and make Sleep available for every class (since they do the same thing with a slight difference in MP cost) as well as ditching one of CON's class only abilities like Blissful Mind or Cleric Stance, or get rid of the 15 ability limit and give every class two extra abilities that they lost from 1.21.

Either way, I think this would be the best route since it would definitively be the easiest way of fixing everything and would leave Scourge and Banish available for a new Magic class.