Originally Posted by
Selindrile
At any given time, there was generally only ONE reason to invite a RDM, currently, that reason is Haste II, previously in the past it has been different things, mostly one at a time, whether it be Refresh or Gravity or Phalanx II or Dia III, this is not good design, these abilities do not generally work together to form an interesting whole, interesting choices at their core etc etc. Right now we invite Rdms because they have Haste II, and they can replace Sch's job of stunning reasonably well.
Sure Rdm can function as support in melee, heck, so can Whm, but it's way less efficient to do so, mostly because of the AoE moves of monsters slowing down your reaction time for your primary jobs, requiring healing and supporting yourself, etc putting such a job with a ton of support juggling into melee was never really thought out well design wise, which is the same trap that is the downfall of Dnc, despite them being much more interesting, design wise. It was already stated though that what is well thought out in the design realm doesn't always translate into ingame usefulness. Composure itself is a neat design choice, choosing between recast timers and lengthened buffs is actually a choice in the present day (primarily Haste II length VS Stun recast) but it wasn't really always.
Shaman was at some point in history a wonderfully successful support, Innervate added a lot to a party (much like Refresh), as later they were a Heroism whore, though that was much like Rdm, a one-trick pony, they could melee far more efficiently than other support mages, throw some heals and buff many jobs. I'm not sure their current state, admittedly, I haven't played WoW in some time, but they were very popular in a support role, and very "successful" by that standard. And in fairness Rdm has certainly had their ups and downs, even in recent history. In the Aby era they were a Phalanx source for cleaves, in VW era they were basically unused Chainspell Stun onry on a couple mobs, in early delve they were basically there to land blind on Kuku and dispel Kurma's Defense Boost before everyone had as much Macc, then they fell by the wayside until Haste II and Flurry came out. You can hardly call Rdm generically successful, and definitely not from a design perspective, they've had a lot of ups and downs, as have most jobs, but they definitely aren't a shining example of design.
Well designed jobs are one who display interactivity, dependancy, and synergy between's ones' abilities. "Well Balanced" and "Well Designed" are two different things, I never said anything about Rdm not being balanced with a melee job having anything to do with anything. Drg for example is a relatively weak overall job, but wyvern differences depending on subjob, spells from other jobs triggering a wyvern's abilities, wses removing debuffs, or being more offensive in nature with other subjobs and of course the wyvern levelling up, ability to grant your wyvern your buffs, these things are interesting, they were ultimately underpowered by and large, but that doesn't make them poorly designed, only poorly balanced.