Cure Testing Adventure

About Me
I'll keep this intro short, I'm Furen and I play a WHM Tarutaru on Fenrir server. I started playing early Janurary 2005 as a WHM and never looked back. I started with a BLM sub and that was my only sub for a long time. Eventually (probably not too long after I got sea and my Korin Obi) I started getting interested in max cure. This pushed me to level my SMN sub for more mind (so sad I used that as the reason). Right when I was doing that, I got an Asklepios and I realized /SMN was never going to have the highest cure. I decided to finish it since I was working on it and then went on to level my NIN sub.


What got me going
Well before I ever leveled my SMN and NIN subs I was interested in cures and game mechanics. One day I came across this post. Basically people on the WHM forums were trying to determine a cure formula. Some people had come up with a formula which I was happy to see (I'm a sucker for info). Shortly after reading the post when fighting Kirin I was watching my cure V it was 841. I thought hmm 3*Mind/2 if I eat a Goblin Mushroom Pot (Mind + 10) my Cure V will go up at least 15 and even more with cure potency bonuses. Well lets just say I was severely disappointed. My Cure V climbed only to 849 this is when I realized there was a Cure V cap.

Over the next while I started testing things. One day I went out to Kuftal with Lilsha a DRK from my linkshell. Lilsha was skilling up while I stood there and cured V'd her. Cure V, change gear so Mind goes down by 1 and repeat. You can see my results of that testing on page 2 of the alla thread. Sadly my conclusions were not very good. My formula came wasn't quite right (predicted cures within about 2 of the final cure), and I made an incorrect assumption of the way rounding was done.

A part of me stopped cure V testing because I wanted to know how all the cures worked, not just cure V. I started seeing patterns and guessed at what the cure formulas for the other cures might be. At the time I was thinking that an increase of 16 on your base cure V was roughly equivalent to 8 Cure IV, 4 cure III, 2 cure II, 1 cure I (this is not true but reasonably close). Unfortunately without actually testing Cure I through V estimates would be as close as I ever got.

For whatever reason, I was either too busy or spending free time leveling subs, I stopped testing cures for the next while. Eventually after finishing my SMN and NIN subs I decided to level my RDM sub and that's when things really took off.


Leveling RDM the painful way
Well once I got to leveling my RDM I thought again about cure testing. This was a great chance to test all those low level cures with low stats. I setup a nice spreadsheet where I could enter my stats and it would compare the resultant recorded cure vs various formula estimates. This helped me narrow down the impact of the various stats and where the caps were.

Every time I leveled I would go through all possible gear combinations of Mind. I also used a Shell Shield and Tav Taco's o help modify my VIT. I also made sure that I never leveled when it was light/dark weather. I did this all solo (a couple duo's) because it wouldn't have worked at all in a party. This added up to a lot of recorded cures. Each level also meant I had a different Healing Skill. The information I gathered resulted in me getting a formula that worked in almost all cases. For some reason no matter how much I changed the Rate and Constant modifiers I just couldn't get all formula predicted values to match the recorded cure.

As I continued to progress the cure testing load become much worse, as I got more gear that broadened the range of my testing per level. Also I started to get new cure spells which cost more MP to cast and filled my HP more. That slowed down my testing a lot. It got so bad that sometimes I had to purposely take damage so I could finish my testing before I leveled. Ultimately I did way more testing then I needed to, but I was only going to level my RDM sub one time so I wanted to make sure I had as much info as possible. In the end I recorded 1000 different cure tests while leveling my RDM sub.

Eventually when testing through Cure 3 I noticed one very strange effect. After I leveled up and my Healing Skill went up by 3 all cures were still exactly the same. At the time I thought Skill's contribution was just Skill/5. That's when I realized it was being truncated (rounded down). Once I inputted that onto my spreadsheet formulas all my cures from 1-3 worked out. This made me happy, now I finally had a formula that worked for all cures and i just had to figure out caps/rate/const variables for all cures. I finished up my RDM sub and moved on to testing with my WHM.


Thank you for capped zones
The big problem in my cure testing is even naked my level 75 WHM stats are just too high to test some of the cure formula variables. Thankfully Pso'Xja has 3 capped zones for me to use (40/50/60). I bought lots of gear including mind down items and food so that I could test as broad a range as possible. Slowly over time I started getting a better understanding of the cure rate/const variables especially the values. All was going well until I had to test cure IV.

The problem with cure IV is that a WHM gets it at 41. I had to cap myself at 50, you get quite a bit of Mind/Vit/Skill in those 9 levels so I wasn't really testing lower stat cure IV's. So I had to bug Draez, a RDM, to come with me to Pso'Xja. This was important since RDM also has cure IV at cap 50 but with a reduced cure skill so they could test lower then I could. We brought stats as low as possible but as he cured the numbers that came out were very strange. First thing I noticed is the rate the cure changed as stats were modified was faster then anything I had seen before. Also, even with my new formula no matter how much I tried to adjust the rate/const modifiers the formula just didn't match the observed values. What confused me even more is that an increase of 1 VIT gave 2 more hp on Cure 4. Then a point of mind gave 1 more to cure. This was completely unexpected and different then before. At the time I didn't understand what was going on and decided to leave it until later (and I didn't want to waste any more of the Draez's time).


MNK1/WHM vs DRK75
Well around this time I was looking at my formula for cure 1. With a Constant modifier of -10 it was predicting negative cure 1's with very low stats. So I decided to drag a DRK (Tzu) along to Brenner. I took my MNK1/WHM (to minimize my stats even more and he took his DRK so he could absorb my stats. Yes I am aware ballista/brener is not the best place to test things, but I wanted to see what would happen. Well after the two absorb spells I had a wonderful Mind and Vit of 1. The formula with those stats expected a cure of -6. I never expected to cure negative (would have been funny though), but I wanted to know what it would do. The result was a disappointingly high cure of 10 (all cures have min caps, it is most obvious for any BLU if they get healing breeze early).


Time to level BLU
Well I wanted to be thorough and was always curious about WHM/BLU so I decided to level BLU sub. Since some of my focus was on cure testing I made absolutely sure I learned pollen at level 1. There was a lower level WHM farming in South Gustaberg so I asked him if I could party. This prevented me from gaining exp so I could fight bees normally and speed up the chance of them using pollen (and hey it gives me someone to chat with). Well lucky for me I learned it fast and I was off.

To help test low stat cures I tried going BLU/WAR (to avoid the healing skill). This gave me a cure of 14. Even after gaining levels and stat increases my cure remained at 14 making me think it was the min. I continued on leveling BLU and eventually it started to move up, just like cure 1 had, but always 4 more. I guessed that the 2nd cap would be at 34 and sure enough when I got there I saw the value stop increasing.

Everything was going well until I started testing Healing Breeze. Just like low stat cure IV, healing breeze just didn't follow the pattern most other cures had. The big difference between this and cure IV is I was more able to test the low stat values for breeze. It didn't take me long to see a weird jumping affect. On normal cures you get increase patterns similar to 0,1,0,1,0,1,0,1 as you increase Vit or 1,2,1,2,1,2,1,2,1,2 as you increased mind. The breeze pattern did have a pattern but it just had a strange skipping affect 0,1,0,2,0,1,0,2,0,1. When I first started seeing this I never realized until creating the webpages that it actually occurred on all cures just many of them already only increase on even values because of the rate modifier.

Since I had a better understanding of the formula structure and was just searching for the rate/const variables testing progressed much faster. I duo'd my BLU to 37 much much faster then it took to get my RDM to 37. After getting my BLU to 37 it was time to test higher level BLU cures.


I'm not a Tarutaru I'm a Mamool
Well I had done lots of testing of low/mid stat curing now it was time to test high stat curing. Being a Tarutaru my HP is not the best. With Cure V's filling my hp from almost empty to full testing with live monsters would have been a bit dangerous. Thankfully rather then having to drag along a Galka Monk for testing high stat cures there's the wonderful Mamool costume machines.

These wonderful contraptions turn you into a Mamool while at the same time giving you a fairly strong poison. This allowed me to safely take down my hp to almost any value desired then remove the costume and cure at whatever pace I wanted. I used this to test all cures at high stat values including all subable BLU cures.


I Need a BLU
This is the point in time where I had to look for a bug a BLU to test Magic Fruit. Thankfully my friend Juvian came along and we headed back to Mamook and the costume machine. Juvian also reminded that Exuviation was a BLU spell that cured. So off we went to test both of those. Since I really knew what I was looking for testing was very fast. My expectations of the Magic Fruit and Cure V relation were shown to be true. I expected that since the other 4 BLU spells had a equivalent Cure spell that Cure 2 would pair with Exuviation. Turned out like pollen that it paired with cure 1, but still was quite easy to figure out.


Putting it all together
With all the cures figured out it was time to put it all together here on these pages. These pages themselves have taken a lot more time then I expected, but I guess I have written a lot. As one last touch I wanted to add some extras to my page. I bugged people each time it was lights day for max cure test, eventually after a couple days I got some people to go along with it. Once that was done there was only one thing left and that was to test the Dia Wand. Nothing bugs me more then seeing "Enhances Cure Potency" on an item with no other details. Message board searches didn't really reveal much. FFXIclopedia (which I really do like) at first said 10% and then was changed eventually to 1%. Probably right but I had to make sure that there wasn't any hidden effects that people wouldn't bother to check for.

Took me a few tries to get people to come (people hate cure caps so much), but eventually I got a group together. We had 5 pop items (2 bow, 2 wand, 1 gorget). Having read about drop rates online I was quite worried that I'd have to go back and farm more pop items and get people to come again. Thankfully we went 4/5 (missing out on one bow). Was a nice run and we had fun. Disappointingly the bonus was indeed 1%, I tried various situations to see if there were any cases that it wasn't 1% but I could not.


Finally Done
Well and here we are, everything I could think of put together on these pages. The only thing I started to work on that I considered adding to this guide was Daywx trigger rate. My sample set was small and I really didn't want to spend hours curing myself in Temnos while people wondered if I was crazy. If your curious my low sample set gave me these rough numbers (20% for day effect triggering, and 35% for double weather), but these are probably not very accurate. I also thought about testing cure damage vs undead, but decided not to. Now that I'm done cure testing I might move on to some other testing. I have done slight amount of testing on Enfeebling and Bar spells but definitely not enough that I'd post my initial findings.

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