Feels like there’s no way to avoid having White Mage permanently in the party
I’ve been toying for a long time with party design. I prefer spreading experience around the party so I like to rotate members or create two teams, but it always leads to the same troubles.
Specifically in my case, during the story I tend to enjoy split the group into two teams, with a White Mage in one and then either an item healer (e.g. Archer or Machinist) or Red Mage in the other team. It works for a while. But at a certain point in the game, usually around Balfonheim Port when Curaja becomes the key healing spell, things start to unravel and I feel forced to keep White Mage in the team at all times.
The game provides the firefly accessory to prevent White Mage from becoming over-levelled, which solves the EXP issue, but I find it pretty boring to not be able to ever comfortably swap out a character. You’re only build crafting with two jobs at a time if you can’t swap out your healer. I know they really wanted to have a distinct job system but I personally don’t like the idea of having one ever-present character in the team.
I’ve looked at various solutions to this and none have really hit the mark:
* Curaga: Past this point in the game, it doesn’t seem a strong enough spell to get a full heal back from being at sub-30% health. Even in a decoy setup. Plus it’s single target which can’t keep pace in tougher zones with AOE/groups. Am I wrong?
* X-Potion pheasant netsuke: Idea here is to support a strong shield user (like Foebreaker) set up as a decoy combined with some ability to signifcantly reduce incoming damage through protect, wither, negative status effects like slow/blind etc. and pair with ranged characters on the backline (e.g. team of Foebreaker, Archer, Black Mage). After this point in the game this setup starts to struggle against larger/tougher groups with AOE and some of the key tools for this idea (like Wither) aren’t even available until the very endgame. This is coupled with a horrible cooldown time after using items, which makes repeated healing difficult even on a single target.
* Monk/Knight Curaja: Very low power on single job. Usually heals about 30% of health at best. I do typically put these jobs on physically strong characters, but I doubt it’d be that much different on a magically-inclined character. It only works well if you combine the job with another that has very high magic power. But who wants their Knight or Monk doing mostly healing rather than damage…? Specific combinations like Monk/Black are also suboptimal because healers casting offensive spells usually results in death due to animation times.
* Renew: On Monk. Ignores magic stat! Comes too late. Plus very high MP cost.
* Dark absorb: Nice idea. Something like Machinist with Dark Shot or Darkga spell. But it comes too late. Plus not all jobs have a way to absorb dark. The shield I think is a treasure from Pharos.
* Reverse: The master strategy for end game accessible to any mage. This obviously works well for any single mage if they can siphon MP from the two allies. But it comes late, it doesn’t synergise with another mage in the party, the casting audio for green magic is annoying, and I prefer it as a boss fight strategy, not a roaming strategy.
I feel the game is missing the equivalent of a mega potion, which would make item healing more viable for roam / magic DPS parties.
If anyone has found a better way to solve this problem, I’d love to hear it.
Edit: For reference, I’ve 100% beat this game multiple times including back on PS2. I’ve beat the judges in trial mode. This isn’t a thread about difficulty or not having proper gear. It’s an open question about IZJS to find out what solutions other players have preferred to use.
Edit 2: A quick test at Stilshrine of Miriam shows that at level 28 Cura spells from Fran with mystic armour and 55 attack power does 800 healing on characters with 1700hp (6x HP lores = 780hp of that). So it heals for about half their total health. Cure does around 300 (so about 20% of their health.