Is There a Reason Why Conjruers and White Mages Don't Use Water Spells?

[Cleretic]

Do we even have any statistics saying they were the most popular. When playing, CNJs were easily the class I met the least. THMs seemed to hugely outnumber them both during leveling and at level-cap. They were better healers, better nukers... just, largely... better all around. Dark Seal, Blood Rite, and Paradigm Shift were arguably better offensively than the likes of CNJ's Fastcast, and THM's alternate spells like Shadowfall and Shadowsear were beastly by comparison, as were its pseudo-defensives like Punishing Barbs, Stygian Spikes, Emulate (steal target's Element Resistances), and Contagion (afflict enemy with all the afflictions that are afflicting you -- and iirc, yes, you could cast your DoTs on yourself) -- and then their CC like Gravity, Slow, and Flashfreeze was able to get around more resistances. ...Then add to that their ability to steal anyone's stats.

Also... why did we give up that more interesting caster for just 'alternating frost and fire mage'. Or... why couldn't we just have both.

(If the answer is that an increasingly nigh unkillable, do-everything caster may be a bit problematic, I can understand that, but... c'mon. It was a fun base design.)

I heard this from a friend, and with a bit of digging, found out their source: A long-defunct FF14 news site. To my knowledge, nobody actually performed any quantitative surveys after this; hell, ff14news itself just completely gave up and fell silent in December that year.

Their metric was basically 'how many people were logged in on this job' for a specific day very shortly after release. And in that case it completely tracks why Conjurer was the most popular (and it was not close): the meta hadn't firmed up yet, and CNJ was getting both the 'healer crowd', anyone into their aesthetic, and whoever actually tried to do some metagaming and realized that it was stuffed full of good-looking cross-class skills.

Also, despite what the writer of that post was saying... wow those launch numbers are bleak.

[Shurrikhan]

I heard this from a friend, and with a bit of digging, found out their source: A long-defunct FF14 news site. To my knowledge, nobody actually performed any quantitative surveys after this; hell, ff14news itself just completely gave up and fell silent in December that year.

Their metric was basically 'how many people were logged in on this job' for a specific day very shortly after release. And in that case it completely tracks why Conjurer was the most popular (and it was not close): the meta hadn't firmed up yet, and CNJ was getting both the 'healer crowd', anyone into their aesthetic, and whoever actually tried to do some metagaming and realized that it was stuffed full of good-looking cross-class skills.

Also, despite what the writer of that post was saying... wow those launch numbers are bleak.

Yeah, there'd be only a handful of grind parties per zone back then. And uh... keep in mind that there was only a single zone each for all of Thanalan, all of Gridania, all of Coerthas (still larger than Central + Western combined), all of Limsa Lominsa, Mor Dhona (was the size of 3 ARR Mor Dhonas), etc. So... concurrent players... It felt like maybe 1000, on a good day?

But yeah, anyways, by the time I was playing, MRD, LNC, ARC typically felt like the most populace classes, with THM and maybe PGL not far behind. People had already noticed by then, though, that GLD was finnicky to get value out of, and that CNJ really only played with 3-4 attack spells at a time.

Granted, that's just my anecdotal evidence.

:: Quick note: Back then, I'm pretty sure we could actually start as whatever class we wanted from any city. The guilds would offer you a free level 1 weapon, but... you could just buy one, too, and skip going to the guild hall. They weren't required for progression.