"I don't want to think while I play, so no one should be allowed to."

[Shougun]

well keep in mind, Slow, Paralyzed, Dia II, Holy II are white magics as well

also FFXI whites mages can also uses those spells only if your subjob can use those spells like red mage, Runefencer, Scholar, Geomancer

I don't believe it is fair to count Dia separate from Dia II. In that case I'd count stone, stone x, glower, glower X, etc, etc. Which bloats the numbers for both jobs. I think in terms of game design they don't offer enough to be interesting enough to separately count. Dia is Dia II with a essentially passive adjustment, like FFXIV has (with mp costs and cast time they're not exactly a direct upgrade, at least back when I played FFXI, but for the purpose of this conversation I'd argue they're definitely in similar veins and we're not counting FFXIV's passive upgrades).

Like I see your edit with Boost and I do think I'd count that under potency effects, but I wouldn't count each one separately. It's bloated compared to what more interesting rules could provide in a more modern game. (Though including Boost does make FFXI either on par or 1 above FFXIV in count of potency effecting spells).


The point I do like particularly is that FFXI has subjobs, which could technically suggest a lot. Jobs are not just 'jobs' in FFXI. Personally I wouldn't use too much of FFXI's combat as an example, because to me having interesting tooltips/combos/interactions is more fun than the find a spell in a menu type system from FFXI.

Like you can have a lot of 'options' in FFXI but I'd prefer to have a lot more 'smart' spells than just 'lots of options'. (Which isn't a full defense of FFXIV, as I've put in other posts I think we could enhance jobs with smarter spells or sometimes more options like I did suggest more buff / debuff spells with a bias based on which job you were and even removing some healing spells for two reasons.. 1) it will reduce the amount of healing output potential meaning healing might be a bit more valuable and 2) regain slots to do something a bit more fun like buff / debuff or just another offensive spell of value).

So I'd append to my first response to you that I still don't think FFXI would make a shining example, becaues I wouldn't want to replicate the spell bloat, and I do think FFXIV and FFXI are not terribly far away from each other on white mage when speaking potency specific spells (its like 4-5 vs 4), but I would still agree there is more fun that could be added (and I don't think it has to be against the theme of healer, which I believe is one reason why SE is not hot on damage spells- add more support skills over straight healing then as the repeated example).