(04-16-2015, 06:50 PM)Kyrrae Lminia Wrote: Well actually, conjury mechanically just requires aether. Same with thaumaturgy. However if you expend your own aether, you'll quickly wear yourself out, causing sickness and worst case scenario, death eventually. Conjurers learn to communicate with nature to draw aether from nature, whilst a thaumaturge pulls massive amounts of aether from the world around them to fuel their own spells. Both conjurers and thaumaturges require foci to cast complex spells however, which is why both use wands/staves (okay, blms use a cudgel type weapon, but it serves the same function). Devs have told us that cnj/thm whm/blm are two sides of the same coin.
Bolded the thing I'm mostly replying to here.
But this isn't quite right, and I'm only being a nitpicky butthead because I've built some stuff up for my silly nerd character around the distinction, as well as because I think it's neat to consider the differences in regards to cross-classing. Thaumaturge specifically uses their internal Aether, and draws from themselves. Not everyone can do it, as shown from the THM questlines, because they don't have the internal Aether reserves for it. Thus they might end up dying if they try.
Black Mages however, draw from the world around them. ... And actually destroy the world in the process. They literally suck up the energy of their immediate environment and repurpose it for their own casting. This was, if I recall, developed mostly because casters using their own Aether alone couldn't manage to pull enough from themselves to have the extreme power they desired, thus Shantotto, an 'extremely powerful sorceress' had developed (or brought back) the method of Black Magery, which uses the Aether from the world.
Conjurers can use internal Aether too, as you said, but yeah,
Main point is that Thaumaturgey and Black Magic aren't the same thing, and don't draw from the same places. Thaumaturgey is the self, and Black Magic is the world (possibly in addition to the self). But Conjury and Thaumaturgey have the potential to be drawn from the same place (being one's self), just... it's not actually recommended or the best idea.
I actually have a character who practices Thaumaturgey and Conjury, however, his Conjury is pretty terrible / lacking. It's not that he doesn't know the theories behind the spells, but it's heavily due to him using his own Aether to cast more than anything. Which isn't the way to go with Conjury. I've taken it that using certain spells (like Cure for instance) would take a heavy toll on someone not calling on nature to give them a hand, and even if he does pull a couple of 'wrong' spells off, he can't keep it up for very long.
