Final Fantasy 14 players are so sick of a particular healing spell that they have built a website to explain why it's not recommended: "I finally had enough"

Final Fantasy 14 has a solid job design for the endgame. Dawntrail had some bumps along the way, but for the time I've been playing, the class balance was more-or less decent, with only minor variances and snafus. Outside of the ending, however, the game is all over the place.

The AoE attacks are assigned to jobs at random. Some, like Dragoon, don't receive their proper kit until they reach level 50, and some, like Pictomancers, fall apart when compared to older content. One of these quirks is the existence of lower tier healing spells such as Benefic, and to the dismay of Reddit user BakaDango's Cure.

BakaDango writes: "Last evening, after a 30-plus minute Alexander [raid], I finally had enough of Cure 1 [White Mages]. I can now recognize the Cure 1 jingle a mile off and every time I hear that, I feel pain. Instead of trying to explain this repeatedly or convey this through macros, I decided to create this site."

As a FF14-player myself, I can tell you that they are right. They are absolutely right to have created this thing and distribute it, and Stopusingcure1.info has become one of my favorite FF14 websites. A disclaimer states that "This information is presented in good faith", before presenting several tabs answering frequently asked questions.

If you're not familiar with the quirks in FF14, I'll break it down for your benefit:

• At level 2, White Mages can access Cure (called Cure 1 to illustrate the concept).
• On level 30, they receive Cure 2.
• Cure can give you a "freecure" which will make your next casting of Cure 2, cost no MP. This is a trap.

The site states that Cure 1 has a slow speed, even though it is technically more cost-efficient. Cure 2 gives a heal of 800 potency for 1000 MP instead of a heal of 500 potency for 400 MP. The global cooldown (or GCD) is the life and death of FF14. It limits you to only one "on GCD" action every 2.5 second.

It's better to spend 2.5 seconds healing your tank, before using your GCD to deal damage, than to spend 5 seconds on healing. Cure 2 is faster than Cure 1, even if you need to spam heals. If you want to see the raw figures, here's some maths from BakaDango:

This is the same amount healing with 3 GCDs or 7.5 seconds to spare. While Cure 2 is more expensive, Lucid Dreaming and out-of combat MP regen will cover you for the most part.

It's hard for new White Mages to be blamed, however, as FF14 doesn't tell you anything about this. Someone who is only looking at their ability descriptions might think: Hey, Freecure sounds like a great thing to fish for. The word to describe this is "unintuitive". Cure 1 is a bit unintuitive. I wonder if it will be banished from the pit when Yoshi P and co. focus on job design for the Dawntrail expansion. Until then, there is Stopusingcure1.info.