Macros Gimping Damage/healing

Maybe you're setting your /equip macro too late? I did that before, but with my Hospitaler Earring on my PLD cure macros.

Try whacking in your equip changes before the spellcast in your macro. If I put my AF helm in after I smacked meditate, I doubt I'd get the bonus. Kinda like how adding haste after you start casting won't speed up the cast, just the recast.

facing direction affects curing? first time i heard that.

I'll chime in as a 8+ year developer of MMO's, and why professional experience makes me extremely skeptical of crafting rumors.

In every MMO to date that I've worked on directly (3 of them), the players have managed to come up with guides, equations, and explanations for world behavior that is infinitely more complex than the actual algorithm. We've had enormous dev meetings and whole industry summits trying to explain this inevitable behavior. The root of this phenomenon lies in a few different areas.

The problem lies in the fact that MMO development is hard. There are no other kinds of games out there that have as many asynchronously interacting systems. Features are exponentially harder to implement in an MMO than in a single-player game. The teams are generally many times larger, and the implementation of proposed features is run through a much more strict filter about money investment to value-add tradeoffs. Otherwise, it's very easy to keep implementing features and additional complexity in the interests of game "depth," and then later realizing you've coded something so complex that you can't even get to release. I've seen dozens of MMO's get canceled after falling into this trap.

This is a fancy way of saying that there is no reason for FF to have any of these layers of complexity on its crafting system. In fact, it would have made horrific business sense for them to even consider it. The amount of players who gain value from the complexity is nowhere near the costs to implement in terms of design, coding, and QA manpower. Not to mention that once such an overly complex system is in place, the simple act of even adding a single item to the game (and testing all possible combinations of factors to make sure you're not introducing an exploit or economic problem) takes weeks of QA time, and SE has shown nothing to indicate that they're working under this amount of delay.

However, players in MMO's tend to become very possessive of their accomplishments and perceived knowledge about the game they play. Players are more inclined, by human nature, to believe that their actions and accomplishments in-game require substantially more knowledge, skill, and tenacity than they really do. Players don't like to believe in randomness, and they will, by nature attempt to minimize the perceived effect of randomness on their accomplishments as much as possible. Randomness, to some extent, trivializes their perceived influence on the game, reduces their perceived ownership/investment, and minimizes many of their perceived accomplishments. So they will instinctively look for patterns and explanations for events that do not rely on randomness.

Confirmation bias also plays a role. Humans beings of all sorts are more inclined to make mental note of, and remember, statistical trials that validated their hypothesis than those that went against it. For example, let's say someone sets up the right moon phase, direction, crystal type, and everything correctly. They get 8 HQ's in a row. Then they try again another day where the moon phase and direction are wrong. They get 8 HQ's in a row. Human nature tends to see the first scenario as "Ah hah, I knew it!" and the second one as "Wow, I musta just gotten really lucky." A week later while posting on a board, they will remember the first scenario and post about it, but the second scenario will slip their mind as unimportant, or a fluke of chance.

No MMO to date has implemented a crafting system nearly as complex as the players claim FF's is. By several orders of magnitude. And in my experience and professional opinion, such a system would never be approved by the game's Producers. There is no business reason to do so.

However, all MMO's to date have had player theories about game systems equally as complex as this one. In most cases, players actually do develop theories and equations that seem to pan out with example data. But always, always, these theories are exaggerating the number of variables and failing to realize that the same statistical results can be achieved with only 1-2 variables and a good random number generator instead.

@Nours, not sure about the day, but as i said, the day didn't change and the Cures were changing between the two numbers.

Darksday gives -10% potency to cures, it won't always kick in, but it has a chance to every time you cast Cure. Similar with lightsday, that gives +10% potency to cures (giving the chance to restore extra HP)