1454: Disciple of Magic

I’ve now spent a decent amount of time with all three of Final Fantasy XIV’s “Disciples of Magic” classes, and it’s abundantly and pleasingly clear that all three of them play markedly differently from one another. Which is great! In a game where you can switch your class pretty much whenever you want to, having something to distinguish between all of them is extremely important. And while they all follow the same basic “hotbar and cooldowns” procedure as one another, their application is very different.

Thaumaturgist, which later becomes Black Mage, is the class I’ve spent the longest with, and I also find it one of the most fun to play. The core of playing this class involves managing your pool of magic points carefully, but not in the same way as mages typically work in RPGs — no, here Black Mages don’t have a single stock of magic points and then they’re done; by alternating casting ice spells and fire spells, Black Mages have a potentially limitless stock of magic points. Casting ice spells provides you with the “Umbral Ice” buff, which causes your magic points to regenerate quickly but your damage to be less; casting fire spells first cancels out Umbral Ice and then provides you with the “Astral Fire” buff, which increases your damage and the MP cost of your fire spells, but prevents your MP from regenerating altogether. Consequently, your “rotation” — the set of skills you cycle around by default — tends to involve casting Fire spells until you’re low on MP, then casting Ice spells to regenerate, maybe throwing in a Thunder spell (which causes damage over time) while those precious MP are coming back.

Conjurer, which later becomes White Mage, meanwhile, is very different. For starters, it’s primarily a healing class rather than a damage dealer, though it does have a number of offensive spells that can be surprisingly effective. Unlike Black Mage, White Mage has no means of quickly regenerating magic points, but to make up for this, its spells are a fraction of the cost to cast. This means that playing a White Mage skilfully involves again managing your stock of magic points — but this time around, bearing in mind that you only get one barful of them for a single fight. As a result, you often need to weigh up what your priorities are — can you afford to throw in a few offensive spells to support your damage dealers? Should you use lots of smaller Cure spells or a more powerful, more expensive higher level spell? Getting better at playing White Mage involves quickly understanding the overall party situation — you spend most of your time looking at the party information box in the corner of the screen rather than what’s actually happening — and then responding to it appropriately. So far — up to level 30 — it’s been reasonably straightforward, but I’m intrigued to see how different it is in the harder dungeons.

Then finally there’s Arcanist, which I’ve just started playing, because I need to level it to 15 in order to turn Conjurer into White Mage. Arcanist is an interesting one because unlike the other classes in their current form, it can branch of in two different directions at high level — the healing-centric Scholar, or the more offensively-oriented Summoner. All have one thing in common, though; the ability to summon various creatures to support them in combat. As well as siccing your pet on enemies, you also have access to both offensive and defensive spells, including healing, buffs and debuffs. It looks like it has potential to be a complicated but rewarding class to play — and again, very distinct from what Black Mage and White Mage offer.

I haven’t really done that much with the melee-based Disciple of War classes as yet, but I have little doubt that they’ll be a similar way; I spent a bit of time with Pugilist (which later becomes Monk) in the beta test period, and this played a little like Thief/Rogue does in some other games — positioning becomes important, as you do better damage if you’re hitting the enemy in the back rather than taking them head-on. I haven’t tried Lancer/Dragoon at all yet, but I’m sure it’s in my future.

My priorities in the game are kitting out my Black Mage as well as possible — it’s the first class I levelled to 50, so it will probably always feel like my “main” — then get White Mage to 50, then experiment with Arcanist some more. I don’t know how confident I’ll be with high-level healing, but with supportive guildmates who have helped me through a lot of the game so far, I feel confident and safe giving it a go. But there’s a way to go before I have to worry about that; 20 whole levels, in fact, and while they should shoot by more quickly than they did for Black Mage — FFXIV’s “Armoury Bonus” system, whereby you gain more experience when you’re levelling a new class, sees to that — it’ll still be a while before endgame White Mage.

Listen to me. I had a feeling I was going to like Final Fantasy XIV when I first considered playing it, but I never thought I’d be as into it as I am. Great job, Square Enix.