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FreelanceWizard · **07-10-2014, 08:17 PM**

(07-10-2014, 08:01 PM)Aria Wrote: I'm kind of approaching this like I did with my Blood Elf priestess on WoW. Not everyone then could wield the Light with 100% accuracy and precision, and using the Light to heal everything could exhaust the healer enough that they aged quicker, or even died (much like Arcane from WoW as well). Then, the Light could actually further injure the person it's being used on because it could heal the body too fast.

Correct me if the dangers of healing in this game are different, as I'm still reading up on lore. I just assume that everything should be used in moderation and that it can always be used incorrectly.

I can maybe help with the metaphysics lore, though there's not that much to go on (and some, like arcanima, is rather vague). Magic in XIV isn't very much at all like magic in WoW. Metaphysically, you have three different basic approaches to channeling Aether into magic:

Conjury is the art of channeling elementally aspected Aether from the world around you.
Thaumaturgy is the art of channeling your internal Aether into elementally aspected magic.
Arcanima is the art of channeling Aether through symbology, geometry, and Aetheric crystals. While there's been no explicit statement to this effect, I surmise that it uses both internal and external Aether.

As Liadan noted, Selphie is an outlier in terms of what she does. A Conjurer suffers no risk to themselves (short of exhaustion, loss of focus, or however you RP running out of MP) through using their magic, as they're not using their own Aether to power their spells. However, learning Conjury requires an appreciation for and attunement to the elements (and Elementals). Thaumaturgy requires no such attunement, but it does require considerable reserves of personal Aether; those without such innate reserves can kill or seriously injure themselves by attempting to wield the art, which is why the Guild explicitly doesn't train a particular lalafell in the class quest line. Arcanima seems to be something you can learn if you have the innate talent and level of perseverance to obsessively study arcane geometries (thus the joke about arcanists being OCD mathematicians with magic squirrels Smile

).

Thaumaturges have no ability to heal with their own spells, and they're the only mages who potentially risk themselves through their use of their magic. Both of the healers (conjurers and arcanists) don't channel Aether in a way that could be potentially harmful to the user -- bearing in mind that Selphie is stated to be a strange, worrisome exception to the norm -- so screwing up a spell is more likely to have no effect or unintended effects (as the channeled Aether does something you didn't want) than harming the user.

I'm explicitly leaving out Succor (White Magic) in the discussion above because it's not especially well-defined, the lore on it between 1.0 and 2.0 is dramatically different, and I don't want to start a flame war about it. Smile

EDIT: And I'm excluding in my mention about the risks of Conjury anything about the ire of the elementals for similar reasons, though depending on who you ask, the misuse of Conjury may or may not have repercussions in that regard, especially in the Shroud.

Questions For White Mage/Conjurer Character

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