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

[Dikatis]

I already know the Doylist reason is that the devs slimmed down the healer offensive tools in the name of balance.

But I was having a conversation with a bunch of other people who INSIST that the Sixth Umbral Calamity somehow discouraged the use of water magic by conjurers at Stillglade Fane. I know this is inherently false because water is a regular element used by conjurers (even if it's not reflected in the playable toolkit nearly as much).

But why don't conjurers regularly use water for offense? We have Water, Water III, and Water IV spells used by enemies, so why doesn't say, Kan-E or Raya-O use them?

[klykodesh]

Mostly that they were taken from Geomancer

[Shurrikhan]

Mostly that they were taken from Geomancer

Conjurer and Geomancers are the same archetype, just manifested in different cultures...

Both are shamanistic/druidic mediators of variably sentient elemental forces.

Originally, the game split casters into essentially two halves, the Priestly/Oracular/Divine with a focus on the rituals of man (Majutsu) and the Druidic/Shamanistic/Naturalistic with a focus on the innate channels of nature (Mahou). During that time, Conjurers had access to all of the natural elements (Wind, Earth, Water, Fire, Lightning and Ice), while Thaumaturges (at the time a support-capable caster, opposite Conjurer -- likewise a hybrid role, with no pure healers in the game) had access to Blood, Poison, Umbral and Astral.

As for why Conjurers had no Water spells for a time (until Aquaveil returned to replace Fluid Aura)... it's the same reason they don't have more than a single DoT: pruning/simplification.

Oh, that being said, all the basic CNJ heals are canonically water-affinitive.

[Cleretic]

They literally did used to have water-themed spells, I think the longest-standing one was Fluid Aura, it's just that they were gradually pruned off of the toolkit because they didn't really make gameplay sense. Back in 1.0 Conjurers had access to every single element because that was their 'thing', including Water (Thaumaturges instead got light and darkness magic), but come ARR they realized a heavy focus on elemental damage didn't really work for the game they were making. 'Conjurers don't use water magic because something something Sixth Calamity' is just pure headcanon, and it's not even headcanon that has a long memory for exactly that reason.

As for why no NPC conjurers use water spells in-game, outside of the mechanical reason? Well... they've mastered magically hucking rocks, controlling the wind and healing wounds; practically speaking, what is water magic going to do for them that they can't already cover?

[Dikatis]

As for why no NPC conjurers use water spells in-game, outside of the mechanical reason? Well... they've mastered magically hucking rocks, controlling the wind and healing wounds; practically speaking, what is water magic going to do for them that they can't already cover?

Water is the great eroder. If compressed and focused, it can cut through things with tremendous speed and power. Not to mention the displacement and area denial effects of triggering a flash flood on command with Water III. As shown by Leviathan, water can possess crushing force and be used as a powerful defensive tool, as his Veil of the Whorl can reflect cannonballs if his magic isn't disrupted by specialized tools. Even then, his head reflects arrows and guns while his tail reflects magic.

[Cleretic]

Water is the great eroder. If compressed and focused, it can cut through things with tremendous speed and power. Not to mention the displacement and area denial effects of triggering a flash flood on command with Water III. As shown by Leviathan, water can possess crushing force and be used as a powerful defensive tool, as his Veil of the Whorl can reflect cannonballs if his magic isn't disrupted by specialized tools. Even then, his head reflects arrows and guns while his tail reflects magic.

Well, a lot of that's either easily covered by what they can do (pretty sure a boulder can crush pretty hard), or of really specific need that's not really gonna come up in situations like short-warning combat (I don't think the cutting force of water is gonna do you a massive amount when a treant's bearing down on you). Water's defensive options are... honestly not something I completely buy on a physical level, but that's also literally what Aquaveil does (I don't play White Mage so I did forget that one, thanks Mikko). Aquaveil's really high-level, so maybe that's just really damn hard when you're not shortcutting the learning process with Blue Magic, and when they're literal healers it's probably just easier to patch things up afterwards if you can't get that right.

Despite not playing the job regularly, I have done its whole story fairly recently, and I can't think of a single situation where they were in a fight and water would've done more for them than just 'boulders and healing'. ...in fact, with a number of fights against animate trees and the like I can imagine water might've been a worse offensive option, if we assume that elemental weakensses and resistances still exist in-universe.

[Rongway]

'Conjurers don't use water magic because something something Sixth Calamity' is just pure headcanon

Not conjurers, but specifically the Amdapori white mages; and it's not that "they don't use water magic because the Sixth Calamity" but rather "the Sixth Calamity was a flood (of water) because they didn't use much water magic". You've got the cause-effect backwards.

We know from the Red Mage quests that what separates red magic from its white and black magic origins is that red magic uses just the caster's personal aether, which makes it more environmentally friendly than the white and black magicks of Amdapor and Mhach which used ambient aether. From the EEvol1 we also know that the white and black mages fought for so long that in the end there was so little of anything but water aether left in Eorzea that it brought on a Calamity of Water.

Three centuries of ceaseless assault on the land had taken its toll, the drain of energies used to propagate war sending the realm's elemental balance askew ... A Calamity was upon them, and soon the waters would rise to purge the land of those who had ravaged her so.

We are meant to infer from this that the black and white mages significantly drained the land of all the elements except water. Therefore, the Amdapori white mages didn't use anywhere near as much water magic as they did earth or wind.

[Shurrikhan]

I didn't play 1.0, but that'd actually be something of a problem I'd see with 1.0 Conjurer in a game with elemental weaknesses: they just had more game to play, because there was basically a system reserved for them.

Sadly, the game available to CNJs to play was akin to modern healers (ST direct, ST DoT, and AoE), but for each element. In practice, you might use 2-3 DoTs, but you'd fill with just the one ST or AoE skill, spamming it ceaselessly. It was not good.

If you wanted a real elemental system that doesn't just waste up to five-sixths of each toolkit, you'd need mobs to be able to hold granular affectable floating values besides just their HP. This would be things like Heat, Saturation, Hardness, and maybe even Polarity. Add time magic to that, and you'd also want Weight or even (Time) Dilation.

Between those, you could soak an enemy to shock it, granting it polarity in such a way as to, say, MRI the damn thing, find the cracks in its shell, hit there, saturate and heat further, shock again, purposely harden that angle with earth magic (Petra, not Stone -- Stone is physical damage, usually with low Pierce), then hit it with physical attacks timed together (especially, Blunt) to break the shell open there, then broil the thing in its shell.

:: (During all this, equal complexity would likely go into just keeping the mob in check and locked down so you could pull off this more macro-level stuff.)

[Cleretic]

Also the post-Amdapor White Mages mostly responded to 'we mage'd too much and then a flood happened' by restricting white magic as a whole. Remember that canonically speaking there's only about five of them, and the conjurers that work under them are working in a very restrained system with heavy oversight. They didn't crack down on specific elements, they cracked down on the whole thing.

Sadly, the game available to CNJs to play was akin to modern healers (ST direct, ST DoT, and AoE), but for each element. In practice, you might use 2-3 DoTs, but you'd fill with just the one ST or AoE skill, spamming it ceaselessly. It was not good.

If you wanted a real elemental system that doesn't just waste up to five-sixths of each toolkit, you'd need mobs to be able to hold granular affectable floating values besides just their HP. This would be things like Heat, Saturation, Hardness, and maybe even Polarity. Add time magic to that, and you'd also want Weight or even (Time) Dilation.

Yeah, I think something useful to remember with 1.0 is that the game wasn't very good, and all their original post-launch ideas got thrown out the window basically immediately, so not all of the things that you'd have thought would have mattered in theory mattered in practice.

Looking over at the actual spells they had and who could use them once learned (you can find them over here), I suspect the reason they were the most popular wasn't because people actually wanted to play them, and more because it was full of really desirable cross-class skills. If you wanted to heal, to cast spells faster, to take less damage, to use elemental spells (never mind if they were actually useful)? You had to level Conjurer. It's like how back when we had cross-class skills in the live game, every single caster had Black Mage leveled to at least the 30s because of Swiftcast.

[Kesey]

It's pretty clear to me that White Mages can't swim when they carry that heavy staff and excessively baggy robes.

/sarcasm