Final Fantasy 14 is a game with, for the most part, solid job design at endgame—Dawntrail's had some bumps in the road but, for the length I've played, class balance has typically been more-or-less decent with only some minor variance and snafus. Outside of the endgame, however, it's all over the shop.
Jobs are assigned AoE attacks at complete random, some like Dragoon don't get their proper kit until level 50—arguably 60—and newer jobs, like the Pictomancer, completely tear apart at the seams when level synced to older content. One such quirk is the existence of lower-tier healing spells like Benefic and, to the chagrin of Reddit user BakaDango, Cure.
"Last night, after a 30+ minute Alexander [raid]," BakaDango writes, "I finally have had enough of dealing with Cure 1 [White Mages]. At this point, I can recognize the Cure 1 jingle from a mile away and every time I hear it, I feel great pain. Rather than try to explain this over and over or convey this in a macro, I decided to make this site."
While this might seem petty on the face of it, as a FF14 player myself—they're right. They're absolutely correct to have made this thing and to be distributing it, and Stopusingcure1.info is now one of my favourite FF14 websites on the internet. "This information is presented with good intentions", a disclaimer reads, before providing several tabs addressing frequently asked questions.
In case you're unfamiliar with the quirks of FF14, let me break it down for you:
- White Mages get access to Cure (dubbed Cure 1 for illustrative purposes) at level 2.
- At level 30 they get Cure 2.
- When cast, Cure has a chance of giving you "freecure", which makes your next casting of Cure 2 cost no MP. This is a trap.
As the site outlines, while Cure 2 is technically less cost-efficient than Cure 1—giving a 800 potency heal for 1000 MP (instead of a 500 potency heal for 400 MP) the fact remains that Cure 1 is slow. FF14 lives and dies by something called the global cooldown (or GCD), which limits you to one "on-GCD" action every 2.5 seconds.
Essentially, it's always more worth it to spend 2.5 seconds pumping a Cure 2 into your tank before using your next GCD to deal some damage, than it is to spend 5 entire seconds on healing. Even if you do need to spam heals, Cure 2 will outpace Cure 1. Here's some actual maths courtesy of BakaDango, if you want to see the raw numbers:
That's the same amount of healing with 3 GCDs, or 7.5 seconds, to spare. While Cure 2 costs a bunch more mana, Lucid Dreaming (and out-of-combat MP regen) more than cover you for most purposes.
It's hard to blame new White Mages, though—FF14 basically never tells you this, and someone just going off their ability descriptions will very reasonably think: Hey, Freecure seems like a good thing to fish for. "Unintuitive" is the word. I wonder if, when Yoshi-P and co. turn their sights on job design in the expansion after Dawntrail, if Cure 1 will be banished to the pit where it belongs. Until then, Stopusingcure1.info is there.
